RIAA and BSA's Lawyers Taking Top Justice Posts 377
An anonymous reader writes "Following the appointment of RIAA's champion Donald Verrilli as associate deputy attorney general, here's a complete roundup of all the RIAA and BSA-linked lawyers comfortably seated at top posts at the Department of Justice by the new government. Not strange, since US VP Joe Biden is well known for pushing the copyright warmongers' agenda in Washington. Just in case you don't know, Verrilli is the nice man who sued the pants off Jammie Thomas."
Re:Sweep away imperialist barbarism (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes and make all media belong to the glorious state!!!
And make it high treason to use any state owned media unless you get permission from the commissar and pay a usage fee to the state.
YAY!!!!! Where do I sign up!!!
Re:change (Score:3, Interesting)
"despite everything the world continues to turn in its old corrupt way. And the same idea may now be crossing the minds of those who believed that electing Democrats into power would mean cleaner government, world peace and a high moral tone only to realize that maybe Washington is like a softdrink machine which dispenses orange bug juice no matter what buttons you push."
-- Richard Fernandez [pajamasmedia.com]
Re:With two lawyers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
Only they are to blame (Score:2, Interesting)
People can dress it up all they want to, but when you pick up a gun and follow orders it doesn't absolve you of responsibility for what you do. I know the majority of the people in the world just plain worship violentism, but that doesn't change a thing. There is no glory in fighting and killing is wrong, period.
And even the law isn't so blind as to be able to be otherwise. Invading Iraq was immoral and illegal and ALL of the people who participated in it, from top to bottom, committed a crime. Pure and simple.
Some things may be understandable, even forgivable, but that does NOT make them right.
As a Brit... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm currently more interested in this as a real test of the Obama administration's sincerity:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7870049.stm [bbc.co.uk]
If Obama can't come forward and say to us "Yes, your courts can now open that evidence" then it is evidence of one important fact. Obama is a fraud.
He cannot possibly on one hand talk of bringing those guilty of torture to justice and then prevent us doing so on the other.
I think that it's actually our government that's playing up here because they do not want it coming out in the open that our security services were equally guilty of assisting in torture, but all Obama needs to do to make that clear is come forward. By the sounds of it our foreign secretary hasn't even approached the Obama administration yet and if that's true then it's a local issue, if that's not true then the world has bigger problems.
If he can't then yeah, I think he's a fraud and yeah, I think these RIAA appointments possibly are more than just a case of hiring experienced lawyers (i.e. did they work for the RIAA because they believed the cause, or for the money?).
I truly hope it's not too much to ask to at last have an important world leader that can walk the walk not just talk the talk.
See the forest, not the trees (Score:5, Interesting)
When grasping the fact that the copyright barons are taking over the Justice Dept, remember that there is fundamental shift happening in the media industry.
The media industry is basically a 20th-century phenomenon. The technology of the 20th-century created a structure where the best musicians of the world sold their musical in the format of fixed recordings through a centralized company. The recordings are the product. Under this structure, the musicians (and actors) become stars or mini-deities.
The main idea here is that the recordings (of music or filmed performance) are the product that is sold on concept of a fixed price regardless of the 'artist' or the quality of the performance. The unnoticed aspect of this model is that there is NO interactivity between the recordings and the people who buy the recordings.
The 21st-century entertainment media model is one of increasing interactivity between the recording and the person buying the recording. Starting with crude television-based video games in the 1980s, there has been a strong increase in the amount of interaction between the person 'consuming' the entertainment product and the entertainment product itself. The RIAA/MPAA can't reproduce this interactivity, neither can the companies who create fixed product (audio CDs, films). But this interactivity is becoming the key aspect of the entertainment experience that people (especially young people in their teens and twenties) are willing to pay for.
The more that the RIAA/MPAA are successful at forcing people away from obtaining low-cost fixed recordings, the more that they drive their core consumer base into interactive entertainment products that they don't control. They don't seem to realize this, primarily because the RIAA/MPAA companies are stuck in the 20th-century. The Slashdaughters generally grasp this concept, but they are mostly young and technologically oriented. They are the demographic most likely to copy RIAA/MPAA product, this is true, but they are also the first people to move beyond RIAA/MPAA product to meet their entertainment needs.
As the economic structure of the 20th-century fades, then so will the influence (and bullying ability) of the global media companies. As long as the RIAA/MPAA lawyers don't understand or control the emerging fields of interactive entertainment, it doesn't matter if the control the US Justice Department. They will remain 20th-century wolves chasing 20th-century sheep.
Re:Change you can believe in (Score:5, Interesting)
It depends. There's good reason to be able to do some back-of-the-envelope tests of your theories - first order approximations to see if your idea makes sense. You won't be able to do that if you can't do basic arithmetic in your brain. Maybe at some point we'll be able to tie computers directly into our brains so that just thinking an equation provides us with the solution, but until that happens somebody who can do the math in his brain will have an edge. Indeed, unless you always whip out the calculator at the cash register, it could mean you're also an easier mark to rip off.
I'm reminded of a couple of chapters in Vernor Vinge's The Peace War where Wil Wachendon enters a chess tournament where he plays unassisted against computer-assisted chess players. He gets his butt whipped by the computer-assisted players. That changes his attitude regarding using computer assist to solve problems. However I think the reverse would be true as well, the computer-assisted players who had never learned to play without the help of a computer would also be at a disadvantage because some of the pattern recognition abilities required for chess would never have developed as strongly. Sure it's fiction, but good SF writers put some pretty strong reality checks on their fiction
Similarly, while you can use Mathematica to do analytical solving of integration problems or differential equations, if you haven't done some of it by hand then you won't have as good an intuitive feel for what the equations that you are manipulating actually mean. That could seriously limit your ability to make new discoveries. But yeah if your ambition is to work on a road crew, you probably won't need to know all of your times tables up to 12x12 by heart.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a bad move IMHO (Score:3, Interesting)
I should not have to pay for a digital copy of Jimi hendrix' work. The man is dead and has been for decades. It should be in the public domain as the Founding Fathers wished and as is written in the US Constitution.
While I agreed with everything else you said, I don't think this argument is correct.
Copyright should be based on a fixed duration, such as 25 years, perhaps with a registration or notice requirement for it to take effect, and perhaps with a low-cost renewal option (for perhaps another 25 years).
Copyright should not be based on the author's life, because that A) drastically lowers the value of late-life art compared to early-life art, and B) makes it economically viable to murder artists whose works you would like to misappropriate.
We can solve this problem with significantly shorter fixed durations, requirements that works must contain a copyright notice to have initial coverage, and a fee to extend copyright to weed out the thousands of copyrighted works that lose all value after a very short time (while making it possible for works that still have value to keep making value for their owners for a slightly longer time).
Re:Change you can believe in (Score:4, Interesting)
Under a first order approximation the earth is flat. There's no relativity or quantum mechanics.
Using a computer does not preclude understanding basic mathematics. However, *NOT* using a computer will make it impossible to have an understanding of a growing part of mathematics.
Try to get an understanding of non-linear dynamics without a computer. Chaotic systems. Not to mention that computers are being used in mathematical proofs of theorems. The four-color map was proved over 30 years ago, with computers, and still today no one has found a way to prove it by hand.
I don't mean that paper and pencil should be abolished, and doing math in the head is still an essential ability in everyday life. But computers are also essential, there can be no teaching of science and mathematics without computers.
Re:change (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, *I* could see it coming, and all I did was read part of one of Obama's books, and become aware of his political history (I didn't see any of his speeches/debates). That made him clear enough to me that none of his actions as President has surprised me in the least, and I expect there will be a lot more rude "surprises" in store for those who believed that "change" meant "change as WE want it".
Re:Change you can believe in (Score:2, Interesting)
And just a note for all of the non-civil engineers out there; knowing "nothing but" Newtonian mechanics doesn't mean simple, back of the hand calculations. A (good) civil engineer needs to know the math that applies to many different subfields. For example, take the Zipingpu Dam [wired.com], just knowing how to build that dam doesn't mean anything if you're building it over a weak spot on the earth's crust.
Similarly, just building a skyscraper doesn't mean just knowing how high you can build it before it falls down. It also means knowing how to model the effects of air flow around the building, the effects on/by the type of material used, etc. Anyone remember Gertie? [wikipedia.org]
For more, feel free to see Wikipedia's article on civil engineering [wikipedia.org].