“People who love only once in their lives are. . . shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.”~ Oscar Wilde
I have an admission to make: I didn’t watch any of ESPN’s coverage of “The LeBron Decision.” I don’t remember what I was doing, but it probably involved something on the order of importance of putting clean newspaper in a bird cage or trying to identify navel lint or trimming my pet’s toenails. You know—big, important, relevant stuff.
That disclaimer aside, I find myself puzzled by the coverage LeBron’s decision has gotten after he made it. Luminaries from across the entertainment and sports spectrum, including the august Bryant Gumble, have jumped on the LeBron-is-a-schmuck bandwagon. (If you’re hoping to get a seat, I say move fast. Bob Ryan might save you one, if you ask nicely.) Charles Barkley has chimed in, as has Michael Jordan (MJ). Apparently LeBron embarrassed himself as he pandered to the excessive coverage. (Actually, maybe he did.) Gumble, speaking as part of the closing commentary of his HBO sports news magazine, accused LeBron, among other things, of being shallow and overly pre-occupied with winning. MJ, ostensibly commenting on the fact that LeBron has “teamed up” with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh versus staying in Cleveland, supposedly said, “I would never have called Magic [Johnson] or Larry [Bird].” Really?
By
Norman Horn
/ July 26, 2010 / 2 minutes of reading
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Intellectual property, especially copyright and patents, is purely fictitious, a construction of the State. Stephan Kinsella has definitively proved such in his paper Against Intellectual Property.
Nevertheless, the US government continues to prop up this inefficient and unethical practice. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, many lives have been ruined by the bad side of corps, full of lawyers hunting for cash. We all know of the old ladies and teenagers who receive verdicts requiring them to pay obscene amounts of money for such non-crimes.
Well, some new rules coming straight from the Library of Congress are sure to help alleviate a few of these problems. Essentially, the Librarian of Congress must evaluate exemptions to the DMCA every 3 years, i.e. you cannot be prosecuted, period, if you do these things. Previously, there had only been one exemption recognized. Now, there are SIX exemptions, and the first three are quite significant.
The basics of each exemption:
1) You can rip your own DVDs. You can remix scenes for noncommercial use. So all those Hitler-plus-caption remixes from the movie Downfall no longer can be taken down. Teachers who want to use a movie in a class can rip it. No one from the DMCA can touch you.
2) You can jailbreak your phone, nobody can prosecute you. Big swipe at Apple/AT&T.
3) You can use software to unlock your phone for use on a different network.
4) You can use software to crack game SecuROMs or other game DRM for the purpose of “investigation” or research. The language is very broad, since even curiosity can prompt “investigation.”
5) You can use cracks to bypass a hardware dongle. This is significant for people like me who use lab equipment or any variety of peripherals with stupid dongles.
6) You can crack DRM encrypted ebooks to use text-to-speech capabilities. Convenient.
These new rules surely do not go far enough, but thankfully things are not becoming more restrictive in this arena. But we need to continue pushing back, so keep spreading the word!
… Jon “Maddog” Hall wanted to try to preserve some deteriorating piano rolls, but discovered (much to his annoyance) that copyright may be getting in the way. He points out that many old player piano rolls are deteriorating, and the small group of remaining collectors are hoping to preserve the music by digitizing them. Easier said than done… turns out that Hall got confused about the difference between the copyright on the composition and the copyright on the performance, and his attempt to save a more modern recording of a public domain song — even though that piano roll was deteriorating — was not allowed. After contacting one company that still makes piano rolls, he was told that he was better off not preserving the rolls in his collection:
We ended up agreeing that if I made an mp3 recording of less than 30 seconds, off an old roll, from a company that was completely out of business, kept it completely for my own use and locked up so no one else could hear it, that I probably would not be sued. He also begged me not to use any of his company rolls in this task, as he really did not want to have to sue me. I thanked him for his time.
It only took 100 years, but it looks like copyright law in the US is finally doing what it originally intended to do: destroying piano rolls.
Intellectual property legislation is outright theft. A judge could one day order a famine by declaring certain farming methods and genetic patterns to be “owned” by someone else (probably some corporatist entity backed by the full “faith and credit” of the US–that is, anything from machine guns to nukes.) Great!
NYTimes.com has an article about, the Obama election notwithstanding, Americans’ hysterical reactions to racial issues. There have been many articles and blog postings lately about whether or not this is “post-racial America.” I think the furor over Shirley Sherrod’s speech is a clear indication that race is as much a current issue as ever. This really should come as no surprise. Race has always been a government issue in the USA. From the state-sponsored slave trade through to affirmative action, in America, race and the state have always been intimately intertwined. Considering this, it is hardly a surprise that people “never get past it.” You might as well say “why haven’t we gotten past war?”
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify statists and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you statists do not. You move to an area and you tax and regulate until every natural resource is ruined and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Statists beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. (Apologies to Agent Smith.)
His political positions and personal life are even less coordinated than he is.
In the former Soviet Union, which is a workable model for forecasting where the United States is headed, there were de facto two sets of rules: one set for the proletariat and another for the Politburo. Nothing exceptional about that, of course, as the political class always enjoys privileges which the masses do not — it’s been that way since, well, the inception of government. The Romans even had an adage to describe this inequality before the law: quod licet jovi non licet bovi (What is permitted for the gods is not permitted for the cattle). Lovely, huh?
Sen. John Kerry, who has repeatedly voted to raise taxes while in Congress, dodged a whopping six-figure state tax bill on his new multimillion-dollar yacht by mooring her in Newport, R.I. Isabel – Kerry’s luxe, 76-foot New Zealand-built Friendship sloop with an Edwardian-style, glossy varnished teak interior, two VIP main cabins and a pilothouse fitted with a wet bar and cold wine storage – was designed by Rhode Island boat designer Ted Fontaine.
But instead of berthing the vessel in Nantucket, where the senator summers with the missus, Teresa Heinz, Isabel’s hailing port is listed as “Newport” on her stern. Could the reason be that the Ocean State repealed its Boat Sales and Use Tax back in 1993, making the tiny state to the south a haven – like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Nassau – for tax-skirting luxury yacht owners? Cash-strapped Massachusetts still collects a 6.25 percent sales tax and an annual excise tax on yachts. Sources say Isabel sold for something in the neighborhood of $7 million, meaning Kerry saved approximately $437,500 in sales tax and an annual excise tax of about $70,000.
The senior senator’s chief of staff David Wade denied the old salt was berthing his boat out of state to avoid ponying up to the commonwealth. “The boat was designed by and purchased from a company in Rhode Island, and it’s based in Newport at the Newport Shipyard for long-term maintenance, upkeep and charter purposes, not tax reasons,” Wade told the Track. And state Department of Revenue spokesguy Bob Bliss confirmed the senator “is under no obligation to pay the commonwealth sales tax.”
Well, since he’s not docking the yacht in Rhode Island to avoid the taxes, why doesn’t he go ahead and pay Massachusetts what he’d have to if he were docking it there? David Wade is 12 times more likely to drown in his bowl of Cheerios at breakfast tomorrow than Kerry is of paying Mass. for that yacht.
Which brings us back to the double standard which is omnipresent with these guys. Public schools are good enough for your kids, but their kids attend the finest private schools in the country. You can get by using a small, energy efficient house with minimal air conditioning, but they’re gonna go ahead and own 3 or 4 or 5 energy-guzzling mansions. Feel free to get yourself a Smart Car or avail yourself of “public transportation”, but they’re gonna fly around in private jets or sail their massive yachts. Do you live in an exclusive, gated neighborhood or compound with private security? They do — and they have servants’ quarters, too. And most importantly, you pay the oppressive tax rates they burden you with, but they always find a loophole for themselves, like the yacht fiasco cited here or the Kennedy family trusts. Typical plutocrat behavior. Quod licet jovi non livet bovi.
The pertinence of the quote I launched this post with is via the observation that Kerry and his ilk have so ruined Massachusetts that he opts to maintain (some of) his significant assets outside of that state. I hope Rhode Islanders are paying attention. Here comes the virus.
