Still going after all these years.
Esta: Vote.
“If you don’t vote you’re a heinous wreck of a human being, and small children will point at you with horror and run away screaming.
Plus you won’t have the right to complain, and we all know that that’s no fun.
So vote.
Don’t make me tell you again.”
During my blogout yesterday, Larry Lessig argued his case against the Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998 in front of the Supreme Court. The case meaning what it does to the Net, there was a ton of coverage of various depth out there. My favorites include
Lots of interesting quotes abound, both from the actual arguments and from the commentary. For starters, Sandra Day O’Connor sums up the issues with the case when she says, “I can find a lot of fault with what Congress did…This flies directly in the face of what the framers of the Constitution had in mind, but is it unconstitutional?” (from the AP coverage).
Kwin seems to have the best summary of the entire arguments of both sides. He writes:
“Lessig has framed a very conservative argument. … Congress has retrospectively extended copyright — ie, granted term extension to existing (as opposed to new) works — numerous times. Doing so violates both of the constitutional limits on Congress’s copyright-granting powers.
“In addition, Lessig advances a second, separate argument that
extending the terms of existing copyright violates Freedom of Speech
protections under Article I, because the ‘restrictions on speech’ greatly outweigh any plausible societal ‘benefits.’ As I understand it, this test of restrictions/benefits is termed the ‘intermediate’
test under First Amendment law, and is the general test applied to
content-neutral regulation of speech.”
Kwin goes on to state that the Supremes challenged the first point mostly on what it would do to previous copyright term extensions (such as the 1976 extension), but essentially drilled the second point out of existence. This is going to disappoint a lot of the Internet folks who wanted a broader ruling about free speech from this case.
Kwin also writes,
“The one non-obvious tack Olson’s argument took was to continually emphasize that the ‘promot[ing] progress’ language wasn’t intended to apply just to authorship, but also to distribution. Making things widely available required that publishers have a strong economic interest in the copyright system. By implication, the 1998 law was intended to promote progress by strengthening publishers’ interest.”
This is an interesting argument and one that I didn’t see coming: argue that publishers really are adding value and as such are entitled to the same considerations as content creators. Justice Breyer aggressively questioned the economic rationale behind this point and asked whether the damage done directly and indirectly (by letting works fall out of circulation because finding the copyright holders would be too difficult) exceeded the “benefits” of the law.
It’s all fascinating. The fact that the Supremes implicitly acknowledged the real economic harm done by copyright extension and that the current practice of extending copyright without limits may violate the Constitution is encouraging. But I’ll leave it to Greg to do the legal handicapping.
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Greg points to the Al Gore speech and points out some interesting parallels between now and 1991, when the campaign was under way and Gore was part of a team hammering Senior about the economy.
Because of Greg’s link, I finally went back and read Gore’s speech. And I have to say, I’m actually pretty impressed. The speech echoes my thoughts of the past six months:
At this fateful juncture in our history it is vital that we see clearly who are our enemies, and that we deal with them. It is also important, however, that in the process we preserve not only ourselves as individuals, but our nature as a people dedicated to the rule of law …
What this doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.
Follow up to my previous article: Greg reports that the Senate is sitting on Bush’s proposal to fight forest fires by giving the logging companies authority to clear old growth forests and immunity from enforcement suits under the National Environmental Policy Act. Tom Daschle has forced a “supermajority” vote to pass the bill, meaning that it won’t go anywhere for a while, if ever.
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…members of the Alabama GOP accused the Democratic governor there of wrangling an endorsement from Charlton Heston by taking advantage of his recent announcement that he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know. According to the record, he was endorsed because of a strong pro-gun and pro-conservation record, Heston’s two hot buttons. The NRA is required by its charter, apparently, to give any candidate an endorsement who gets an A on their annual scorecard.
I don’t know if Heston was “grossly manipulated” by the Democrats, but I do think that State GOP Chairman Marty Connors (“a gross manipulation of Mr. Heston”) and Republican candidate Bob Riley’s campaign spokesman David Azbell (“you have got to wonder if people are acting in Mr. Heston’s best interests”) have together done more to destroy Heston’s political capital than his disease has.
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Greg has a good list of links going as well, including music and poetry as well as last year’s on the spot thoughts from our New York friend the Tin Man.
Doc Searls has a linkroll of today’s 9/11 related writings. I’m included, but my site has been down most of the afternoon so I’ll be surprised if anyone comes. Anyway, hi to all visitors from Doc and look below for the meat.
I just finished singing in the Bellevue Rolling Requiem. What a difference from a year ago. Then I had just finished writing a weblog update and had gone into the library to study. Starting up my web browser to download some course notes, I hit the message on Yahoo (images weren’t loading) that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I went looking for more information and found it at Scripting News. Shellshocked, I left the library and walked into the lobby of E-52, Sloan’s main building, where I joined a gathering crowd of students, faculty, administration staff, and others watching the coverage. I saw the videos, and I saw the second tower go down on live TV as I watched. After a while I walked next door to the E-51 lobby, worried about my friend Kate’s fiancé Oli who worked in the financial district. I ran into my finance professor, who was just coming out of class and had no idea what was happening. I told him that both towers had come down and the Pentagon had been hit. “Oh my God,” he said, as if he had been slapped. I found Kate. At the time she hadn’t heard from Oli (he was fine). We just sat and watched and listened.
Today singing the Requiem I really didn’t think about any of that, just the time I used to spend, lonely from the isolation of my fourth year studies, hanging out in Doug’s dorm with the man now known as Tin Man and some Glee Club friends. Many hands of spades were played, much laughter was had. And I couldn’t believe that this life, and so many others, had been taken.
The Mozart Requiem differs from all other Requiem masses in one of two ways. Later Requiems such as Gabriel Fauré’s close on a note of hope. Earlier Requiems may close on a note of fear, prayer or penitence. Mozart’s Requiem closes on the same theme with which it began, having briefly gone through a dancelike Hosanna to return to the cosmic awe of the request to support the deceased in their new home beyond our knowledge: “Grant them rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.” It is pleading, angry, demanding.
And it’s not Mozart’s, not really. Mozart died while writing the Requiem (legend has it, after singing through the first bars of the “Lacrymosa”) and his pupil Süssmayer completed the mass by taking parts the master had already written together with new material to finish the sequence. The end result is we end the mass without closure, with our anger and confusion and grief still intact. Which is how I feel today, one year after 3,025 lives (what a ridiculously precise number) were taken from us. My only consolation is that I’ve spent so much of the last year thinking about the war, the erosion of our rights and liberties, the madness of unilateral war, and the insanity of suicidal terrorism, only to find today a way to give voice to my grief for those who died without other thoughts and voices drowning out the message.
It is hard to believe that it has been a year. When the clock radio went off this morning, I sat bolt upright, listening to see if anything had happened.
In an hour I’ll be “on stage” at Bellevue Square warming up for the Rolling Requiem. I dedicate today to Doug Ketcham, my friend from University of Virginia, who was at Cantor Fitzgerald and who was killed a year ago.
I guess it’s true: those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
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BBC: Stiffing: Deceived and confused. The BBC elucidates the American “folksy idiom” behind President Bush’s recent utterance, and can’t resist pointing out that stiff “already has a number of slang definitions. The word can be used to mean a corpse, an erection, a dull person and to describe a strong alcoholic drink.” I will leave out the obvious, though salicious, comment about which of these applies to the warbloggers and their baying for Saddam’s blood.
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President Bush has asked that the US remember September 11 as Patriot Day in memory of those killed in the terrorist attack in 2001. Sounds good, but I wonder what Massachussetts will do.
I had almost forgotten when I saw this come up recently in the press that the day had been designated as Patriot Day last December. I’ll be observing the day by singing the Mozart Requiem with the Cascadian Chorale.
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Washington Post: Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft. In an almost unprecedented decision, the court that oversees the Justice Department’s requests for wiretaps and search warrants refused to give the Justice Department broad powers because they’ve done such a bad job providing evidence to date. Apparently this is the first time the FISA court has ever unanimously voted to release an opinion.
According to the article, the court “alleges that Justice Department and FBI officials supplied erroneous information to the court in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps.” As a result, the court felt that giving Justice carte blanche under Ashcroft’s proposed new procedures would “would have given prosecutors too much control over counterintelligence investigations and would have effectively allowed the government to misuse intelligence information for criminal cases.”
When even your rubberstamp court of record is telling you they don’t trust you with extended powers, your brain, if you were Attorney General, might dig up something long forgotten from your civics classes. Something about checks and balances, perhaps, or limits of government power. Probably not anything about the Bill of Rights, but hey, we can always hope.
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NYT: Bush, Citing Fires, Will Seek to Ease Laws on Logging. Um, excuse me? How did this get pitched—no, how did anyone say this with a straight face? “OK, we appear to have a fire fighting problem. Might as well cut all the trees down.”
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Greg points to the primary results in Georgia. Of particular note: “Cynthia McKinney, a 10-year incumbent, lost her primary by 16 points.” My question to Greg: Now that she’s out of the picture, what are you going to do next? (Other than play Soup Dragons–oh, and I suppose Jesus Jones, if you must, though I ceased being a fan about 10 years ago.)
Seriously, there are a couple of worthy candidates in need of serious campaign savvy, including Tara Sue Grubb, who’s running against the infamous Rep. Howard Coble (of Berman and Coble) for a House seat and may be the first candidate to run her own blog (Sheila Lennon’s coverage of Tara Sue is good). I’d love to see you working with her.
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