02.28.06
Posted in Wall Street Journal Opinion at 12:06 pm by Clay
In this morning’s top opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, I came across this:
All of this has contributed to the trend of wealthy taxpayers disappearing from the state. State finance office data indicate that the number of Californians reporting million-dollar incomes fell to 25,000 in 2003 from 44,000 in 2000. That decline has cost the state $9 billion a year in uncollected tax revenues. The dot-com impolosion of 2000 and 2001 no doubt wiped out many paper millionaires, but migration out of the state to escape its hefty tax premium has also played a role. Republican Assemblyman Ray Haynes notes that the average high-income individual can buy a newly built house in neighboring Nevada and pay for it just from the money saved in a year of not paying California taxes.
So the WSJ takes a stat that almost certainly just shows the after effect of a market crash(for further data on this subject, look elsewhere in the paper where it points out that the amount of tech jobs in Silicon Valley was flat in 2005, which is significantly better than it had been for the previous four years.), claims that said stat has something to do with taxation, then procedes to offer an unsubstantiated anecdote from a self-interested politician to drive the point home.
Please stop abusing stats. You never know when it’ll make you look like you’ve lost your mind.
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02.16.06
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 6:49 pm by Clay
From the EFF:
RIAA Says Ripping CDs to Your iPod is NOT Fair Use
…as well as Arstechnica. Which says to me that using paid-for content the way I want to use it is pretty much inherently illegal. Unless, of course, I’m specifically and fully cleared by the content owner to do what I want in the way that I want.
No thanks, RIAA. I’m not going to buy your (DRM) C.R.A.P. unless I truly have no choice. With the explosion of podcasts and video blogs, as well as wonderful indie artists like The Alpha Conspiracy, I don’t think I have to.
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Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 6:36 pm by Clay
I came across an article at Variety.com through Slashdot, and in that article I found this interesting paragraph:
Some have reasoned that sales may have slowed recently because of a shortage of new titles in the last month and because users may be illegally copying films from DVDs onto a memory chip the PSPs can read.
The emphasis is mine.
I once attempted to put my copy of Spirited Away onto my Tapwave Zodiac, so that I could view it whenever and wherever I wanted to. Evidently some people think this is illegal. Why, exactly? I own a copy of the movie. I am not giving it to anyone else. I am not displaying it in two places at once. I am merely making it so that I don’t have to carry a DVD player around with me in order to watch my own movie.
And somehow this is illegal? There’s some reason why we’re legally required to buy every movie in multiple formats because Sony decided they wanted to sell UMDs? Or that we’re not allowed to watch Finding Nemo on the PSP unless Sony and Disney say it’s a good idea?
That’s silly. Ripping DVDs in order to watch them in a more convenient setting is the epitomy of fair use.
To be fair, though, it’s possible that ripping DVDs is illegal because most DVDs are encrypted with CSS, and that using DeCSS violates the DMCA, which has no fair use exemption. Some DVDs do not have CSS encryption, though, and thus would fall under fair use.
And, of course, I Am Not A Lawyer.
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Posted in Freedom of Speech at 6:14 pm by Clay
I’ve been mulling over the offensive-to-some-Muslims political cartoons. At some point I thought, “I can understand how these cartoons would be seen as highly offensive to people who believe that any image of their religious leader is a horrible sin. Perhaps newspapers are right to not publish such things, and perhaps I was wrong to post one of the images on Moderate Wacko.”
Now, having thought that, in no way have I wavered from my belief in press freedom. I believe that we need to allow all non-violent discussion to take place, because that’s the only way to arrive at the truth of things; if you take away debate, you might get things right, but there’s no “sifting and winnowing” of ideas.
That said, is it a good idea for a paper to print offensive images?
I thought about this for awhile longer, and realized that the question I really needed to ask was this: Is there a reasonable way to make a political cartoon that links being Muslim and being a terrorist? Well, instead of Mohammed, you could put in Osama bin Laden. But that doesn’t work; that’s linking Osama bin Laden with terrorism, and that would be like having a political cartoon linking Bush to the Republicans.
I’ve thought about this for awhile, and have yet to come up with any symbol of Islam that would get the same point across. If anyone can think of something, do say something.
So, having arrived at that conclusion, I also had to conclude that newspapers who believe unfettered debate is more important than protecting people from being offended should be reprinting these sorts of offensive comics, because otherwise the debate gets shut down.
One last thing I feel the need to address: Yes, we need political cartoons that link Islam and terrorism. Why? Because Osama bin Laden, the Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and so many others have already done so. The existence of so many organizations that are supported by such a broad range of people means that there’s something about the religion itself that is connected to terrorism.
Does this mean that all Muslims support terrorism? Of course not; if it had been possible, it would have been reasonable to have a political cartoon during the Crusades that had Jesus in a suit of armor with a few children impaled on his sword. Few people would argue that even most Christians of today would support a Crusades-like action, and I imagine a few hundred years from now Islam will look awfully different.
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02.06.06
Posted in Freedom of Speech at 11:37 pm by Clay
I’ve been reading more about the offensive reaction to the Danish political cartoons, and came across an article titled Rage over cartoon goes beyond politics at Newsday. At the end of the article was this:
To Westerners who wonder why Muslim sensitivities should trump their free speech traditions, Muslims respond with accusations of hypocrisy.
“I’m a very strong advocate of freedoms, but this is a deliberate provocation hiding behind the issue of free speech,” said Muslim commentator Muq.tedar Khan, a political science professor at the University of Delaware.
Khan said he rejects the claims of editors of the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, which first published the cartoons last September, that they sought to test free speech, suggesting that the paper is allied with anti-immigration groups.
“The West likes to frame this as a free speech issue, but there are many categories of restricted speech: for instance, eight countries in Europe ban speech denying the Holocaust. You can call our prophet a terrorist, but you cannot question the Holocaust?”
Likewise, in this country, Khan said, hate speech directed at blacks, homosexuals and Jews is condemned, if not legally prohibited. “We will protect people on the basis of race on the basis of sexual preference. It’s only with Muslims that it’s no holds barred.”
And, of course, he’s absolutely correct: His reason why this type of freedom of speech should not be allowed is exactly as lame and anti-freedom-of-speech as hate crimes legislation is in the US.
The thing is, you can’t honestly be pro-freedom-of-speech unless there’s something out there that you really think is so awful that no one should read or listen to it, and you strongly oppose anyone who attempts to make that sort of speech illegal.
So he’s right, there’s plenty of hypocrisy about freedom-of-speech out there, but that doesn’t make his desire to stop such speech any less frightening or wrong.
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02.05.06
Posted in Freedom of Speech at 4:03 pm by Clay
At the risk of intentionally ticking off any Muslim readers I might have, there’s evidently been quite a controversy about some political cartoons, including this one:
Now, first off, let me say that I strongly believe in freedom of speech. In both directions. I believe that it is every muslim’s right to say that I’m going straight to hell for reposting a cartoon like this. I also believe it’s their right to go ahead and boycott any publication that disrespects their religion by being so blasphemous.
That said, they should not have the right to get a government to shut down any publication printing such things, and they should not be calling for violence(in a fire-in-a-crowded-theater sense) against the sinners.
Now, in a blatant attempt to make this post more offensive, why do we need cartoons like this? Because Islam is a big factor in producing a lot of terrorists. And, to be fair, Christianity is a big factor in producing Pat “Sharon-deserved-it” Robertson and Fred “Thank-God-for-IEDs” Phelps.
And, if you are Muslim or Christian(or Atheist, Jewish, pro-choice, pro-life, etc.) you have to defend your group, saying why it really shouldn’t include those people(or why those people are right). You shouldn’t get a free pass by being able to shut the discussion off, just as I shouldn’t get a free pass on being for the freedom of speech of NAMBLA(And I don’t mean Marlon Brando Look-Alikes.) and the KKK(Were oppressive white people really unable to spell back when the KKK was formed?). Muslims have to answer why exactly the Palestinians voted for an organization that, as a platform, calls for ethnic cleansing.
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