I've got a ton more footage that I'm editing and compressing that I'll be uploading over the weekend.
I'll also be creating MPEG versions of the footage I've already posted...
(The Eldred stuff goes up this weekend too!)
I'm hanging out in the Student Union here at San Francisco State University before speaking to the Broadcast Electronic Communications Arts (BECA) 200 class (as I do every fall).
I've connected to a wireless network simply titled "bogus."
Free, universal access rules!
Hey Florida! There is an alternative to four more years of this kind of thing!
Here's a NY Times article by Dana Canedy published August 16, 2002:
New Child Welfare Head in Florida Is Drawing Fire.
The latest controversy at the agency, the Florida Department of Children and Families, involves a 1989 religious essay which carries the name of Mr. Bush's appointee, Jerry Regier, on its cover. The essay, entitled "The Christian World View of The Family," supports spanking of children that may cause "temporary and superficial bruises and welts" and denounces abortion, parenting by gays and women in the work force.Women, the essay says, should work outside the home only if the family is in a financial crisis and should consider such employment as "bondage."
...The agency's previous director, Kathleen A. Kearney, resigned on Tuesday, after months of embarrassments, starting with the agency's admission in April that it had lost a child in its care, 4-year-old Rilya Wilson, without noticing for more than a year...
Child welfare advocates and Mr. Bush's political foes said the fact that the governor was caught off guard by Mr. Regier's association with the coalition proved that Mr. Bush had acted too hastily in replacing Ms. Kearney. After her resignation, agency critics urged Mr. Bush to convene a panel to conduct a national search for her replacement.
Instead, Mr. Bush, who is seeking re-election in November, announced Mr. Regier's appointment two days later, on Thursday. His critics now say he did not sufficiently review Ms. Kearney's successor and made the appointment for political expediency.
Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/17/national/17CHIL.html
The New York Times The New York Times National August 17, 2002
New Child Welfare Head in Florida Is Drawing Fire
By DANA CANEDY
MIAMI, Aug. 16 — Gov. Jeb Bush's appointee to head Florida's troubled child welfare agency is not even on the job yet and already the appointee, a former Oklahoma social services administrator and founder of a conservative Christian group, has come under fire.
The latest controversy at the agency, the Florida Department of Children and Families, involves a 1989 religious essay which carries the name of Mr. Bush's appointee, Jerry Regier, on its cover. The essay, entitled "The Christian World View of The Family," supports spanking of children that may cause "temporary and superficial bruises and welts" and denounces abortion, parenting by gays and women in the work force.
Women, the essay says, should work outside the home only if the family is in a financial crisis and should consider such employment as "bondage."
The essay has led to calls from Democrats for Mr. Bush to withdraw his appointment of Mr. Regier and has put the governor's office in the position of having to do damage control on a move that itself was supposed to control damage.
The agency's previous director, Kathleen A. Kearney, resigned on Tuesday, after months of embarrassments, starting with the agency's admission in April that it had lost a child in its care, 4-year-old Rilya Wilson, without noticing for more than a year.
Mr. Bush's office issued a statement on Mr. Regier's behalf today, in which Mr. Regier tried to distance himself from the essay and the group that published it, the Coalition on Revival of Fresno, Calif. While his name appears on the essay, excerpts of which were published today in The Miami Herald, Mr. Regier said he was not an author of it.
Mr. Regier is the founder of another conservative religious organization, the Family Research Council in Washington, but he said he was merely a co-chairman of the Coalition on Revival when it published the paper and had severed his association with the group years ago because of some of its extremist views.
Mr. Regier's name, though, still appears on the Revival Coalition's Web site as a member of the group's national steering committee.
"While not compromising my core principles, certainly, as it relates to this paper, there is much content and Biblical interpretation held by members of the Coalition on Revival with which I do not agree," Mr. Regier said in his statement. "In my 20 years of service in the area of children and families, I have never been soft on child abuse or wavered in the protection of children, so it is not my position that corporal punishment should result in welts or bruises."
Mr. Regier's statement made no mention of his views on abortion or parenting by gays, which has been a high-profile issue in Florida because of a state law prohibiting gay individuals and couples from adopting.
Of his views on working women, Mr. Regier said: "My own wife of 34 years is a registered nurse, and I am extremely supportive of her career. I support women in the work force as well as women holding an equal role in marriage."
Child welfare advocates and Mr. Bush's political foes said the fact that the governor was caught off guard by Mr. Regier's association with the coalition proved that Mr. Bush had acted too hastily in replacing Ms. Kearney. After her resignation, agency critics urged Mr. Bush to convene a panel to conduct a national search for her replacement.
Instead, Mr. Bush, who is seeking re-election in November, announced Mr. Regier's appointment two days later, on Thursday. His critics now say he did not sufficiently review Ms. Kearney's successor and made the appointment for political expediency. Mr. Regier served in the first federal Bush administration as head of the National Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
"I am stunned that the governor, after such scandal involving the last agency head, would not take more deliberate steps toward finding a more suitable replacement," said state Representative Frederica Wilson, a child welfare advocate and Miami Democrat in whose district Rilya was living when she vanished. "Appointing Regier has created another major problem for our state."
Mr. Bush's office said the governor had no knowledge of the essay before he named Mr. Regier, but declined to comment further. Mr. Regier did not return calls.
Representatives for the Coalition on Revival could not be reached. The group's Web site says its mission is to "help the Church rebuild civilization on the principles of the Bible so God's will may be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Mr. Bush's political adversaries wasted little time contending that he had put the fate of Florida's most vulnerable children in the hands of a right-wing extremist.
The state Democratic Party called on the governor to withdraw the appointment and begin a new search for a replacement for Ms. Kearney. Janet Reno, the former United States attorney general who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, questioned whether the controversy would render Mr. Regier ineffective in his new job.
"With all of the challenges facing DCF, one would think that the governor would pick someone who would not be a lightning rod for controversy or divert attention from the work that needs to be done," she said.
The controversy is not likely to be decisive in the governor's race, one expert on Florida politics said, but is another embarrassment for Mr. Bush and dashes any hopes he had of putting a positive spin on Ms. Kearney's exit.
"Any expectation that this will be a smooth appointment just went out the window," said Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida. "It leaves Floridians as frustrated as ever with DCF."
Michael Moore was great on the Donahue show!
I made a few VHS copies that I will keep as masters, in case anyone wants a copy of the show (now, or in the future). Just send me an email.
Journalist Cronkite warns against potential war
By Christopher Ferrell for the Bryan-Station College Eagle.
“The threat from the White House is to go in anyway,” Cronkite said. “Our only ally would probably be Great Britain. That is not good enough. I see the possibility if we do that of really setting forth World War III...”...Cronkite said he fears Americans are learning less and less about what their government is doing, and worse, they do not seem to care.
He cited recent presidential elections that have seen less than half of registered voters go to the polls. The result has been leaders who are chosen by about a quarter of the electorate.
“That means we don’t have a democracy,” he said. “We’ve got an oligarchy here, not a democracy. Our democracy is in some danger if we don’t concentrate on educating the populace.”
Here's the full text of the article (which I actually had trouble for downloading for almost 24 hours on 10/28-10/29/02) at:
http://www.theeagle.com/aandmnews/102802cronkite.htm
October 28, 2002
Journalist Cronkite warns against potential war
By CHRISTOPHER FERRELL
Eagle Staff Writer
Eagle photo/Dave McDermand
Walter Cronkite, whose career as a journalist spanned six decades, speaks at Rudder Auditorium on Sunday afternoon.
Walter Cronkite, the veteran newsman who covered almost every major world event that took place during his six-decade career, on Sunday warned that if the United States takes action against Iraq without support from the United Nations it could set the stage for World War III.
“The threat from the White House is to go in anyway,” Cronkite said. “Our only ally would probably be Great Britain. That is not good enough. I see the possibility if we do that of really setting forth World War III.”
Cronkite spoke at Texas A&M University’s Rudder Auditorium on Sunday afternoon as part of the Wiley Lecture Series. Donnis Baggett, editor and publisher of The Bryan-College Station Eagle, interviewed Cronkite, asking him about his views on issues including America’s war on terrorism, the U.S. economy and the perception of the media’s liberal bias.
Cronkite said he believes the best way to handle the situation with Iraq would be through a two-stage resolution adopted by the United Nations. It should first call for weapons inspections and then an invasion if inspectors are not allowed or they meet interference. Such a strategy could help the United States gain other allies, especially Russia and France, he said.
“The legitimacy of our actions would be endorsed through the United Nations,” Cronkite said.
If the United States goes in without worldwide support, however, other countries in the region such as Iran and Pakistan could retaliate against the U.S., Cronkite said. He said the threat of nuclear exchanges between India and Pakistan could be increased if a conflict arises.
Cronkite, who began anchoring the CBS Evening News in 1962, said the country is at a very critical point in its history. The only other decade that compares, he said, is the 1960s, which saw the beginning of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement come to the forefront and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers.
“That was a tough 10 years,” he said. “But this period, with the threat of war with Iraq on tap, economic difficulties and terrorism are something we must be terribly concerned about.”
Cronkite said he fears Americans are learning less and less about what their government is doing, and worse, they do not seem to care.
He cited recent presidential elections that have seen less than half of registered voters go to the polls. The result has been leaders who are chosen by about a quarter of the electorate.
“That means we don’t have a democracy,” he said. “We’ve got an oligarchy here, not a democracy. Our democracy is in some danger if we don’t concentrate on educating the populace.”
Educating Americans should rest with the media, he said. But more often than not, nightly newscasts and the networks’ magazine-style shows focus more on entertainment than hard news. Cronkite said this approach is the result of directives from the companies that own the networks to make things more “interesting.”
He said the ability to get the news, especially during times of war, also is becoming more difficult.
Since the Vietnam War, Cronkite said, the media has not been allowed to take its cameras, pencils and notepads into the field with the soldiers to give an accurate account of what is happening.
During World War II, reporters were in fox holes, and during the Vietnam War they were on the battlefields.
In many cases during WWII, the reports would have to go through intelligence officers all the way up the ladder to London, where top military censors decided if the information could be released. If security reasons prevented its release, the news was held until the threat passed. But information was not kept from the American public.
Cronkite said Americans may have thought they got the full story during Operation Desert Storm, but the media was denied much of the type of access it had been granted in the past.
“[In past conflicts], you wrote it to be the history,” he said. “We have no history now of the Persian Gulf War. We have only what the military reporters wrote and that’s what their bosses told them. That’s not good enough.”
Cronkite admitted that in some cases, such as the recent congressional report that outlined the country’s homeland security weaknesses, he wonders whether or not reporting all the facts is in the country’s best interest.
“It seems to me that as citizens, we should get this info so we can shout to Washington, ‘Let’s get this game going,’” he said. “But at the same time, there’s a terrorist cell sitting there saying, ‘That’s how we do it.’”
But for a country’s citizens to be truly free and the government to be held accountable, he said people must have a free press that gathers all the facts.
He said an example of the alternative would be a situation like what he witnessed after WWII, after the Nazi concentration camps were freed. The people who lived in nearby towns cried at the sights of the persecuted Jews and told reporters they had no idea of what was going on behind the walls of the camps.
Many were probably telling the truth, he said, but that did not make them any less responsible.
“They applauded as Hitler closed down the independent newspaper and television stations and only gave them his propaganda,” Cronkite said. “When they did not rise up and say, ‘Give us a free press,’ they became just as guilty.”
• Christopher Ferrell’s e-mail address is cferrell@ theeagle.com.
This time, courtesy of Jackspace Gallery:
Stop The War Against Iraq Rally - San Francisco, California - October 26th, 2002
(http://www.jackspace.com/gallery/20021026_sf_stop_iraq_war_rally)
I've loaded up some movies and pictures from the march on Saturday, including quicktime videos of Barbara Lee and Ron Kovic's speeches.
Janis Ian is getting some major ink in USA Today:
Music industry spins falsehood
Many artists now benefit greatly from the free-download systems the RIAA seeks to destroy. These musicians, especially those without a major-label contract, can reach millions of new listeners with a downloadable song, enticing music fans to buy a CD or come to a concert of an artist they would have otherwise missed.The RIAA and the entrenched music industry argue that free downloads are threats. The music industry had exactly the same response to the advent of reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidiscs, VCRs, music videos, MTV and a host of other products and services.
I am not advocating indiscriminate downloading without the artist's permission. Copyright protection is vital. But I do object to the industry spin that it is doing all this to protect artists. It is not protecting us; it is protecting itself.
I hope the court rejects the efforts of the music industry to assault the Internet and the music fans who use it. Speaking as an artist, I want us to work together -- industry leaders, musicians, songwriters and consumers -- to make technology work for all of us.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20021023/4557245s.htm
10/23/02
Page 13A
Music industry spins falsehood
By Janis Ian
The recording industry says downloading music from the Internet is ruining our business, destroying sales and costing artists such as me money.
Costing me money?
I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing: If a record executive says he will make me more money, I'd immediately protect my wallet.
Still, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is now in federal court trying to gain new powers to personally target Internet users in lawsuits for trading music files online. In a motion filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the RIAA is demanding that an Internet service provider, Verizon, turn over the name and contact information of one of its Internet subscribers who, the RIAA claims, might have unauthorized copies of songs on a home computer.
Attacking your own customers because they want to learn more about your products is a bizarre business strategy, one the music industry cannot afford to continue. Yet the RIAA effectively destroyed Napster on such grounds, and now it is using the same crazy logic to take on Internet service providers and even privacy rights.
The RIAA's claim that the industry and artists are hurt by free downloading is nonsense. Consider my experience: I'm a recording artist who has sold multiple platinum records since the 1960s. My site, janisian.com, began offering free downloads in July. About a thousand people per day have downloaded my music, most of them people who had never heard of me and never bought my CDs.
Welcome to 'Acousticville'
On the first day I posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales tripled, and they have stayed that way ever since. I'm not about to become a zillionaire as a result, but I am making more money. At a time when radio playlists are tighter and any kind of exposure is hard to come by, 365,000 copies of my work now will be heard. Even if only 3% of those people come to concerts or buy my CDs, I've gained about 10,000 new fans this year.
That's how artists become successful: exposure. Without exposure, no one comes to shows, and no one buys CDs. After 37 years as a recording artist, when people write to tell me that they came to my concert because they downloaded a song and got curious, I am thrilled.
Who's really hurt by free downloads? The executives at major labels who twiddled their thumbs for years while company after company begged them to set up ''micropayment'' protocols and to license material for Internet-download sales.
Listen up
Many artists now benefit greatly from the free-download systems the RIAA seeks to destroy. These musicians, especially those without a major-label contract, can reach millions of new listeners with a downloadable song, enticing music fans to buy a CD or come to a concert of an artist they would have otherwise missed.
The RIAA and the entrenched music industry argue that free downloads are threats. The music industry had exactly the same response to the advent of reel-to-reel home tape recorders, cassettes, DATs, minidiscs, VCRs, music videos, MTV and a host of other products and services.
I am not advocating indiscriminate downloading without the artist's permission. Copyright protection is vital. But I do object to the industry spin that it is doing all this to protect artists. It is not protecting us; it is protecting itself.
I hope the court rejects the efforts of the music industry to assault the Internet and the music fans who use it. Speaking as an artist, I want us to work together -- industry leaders, musicians, songwriters and consumers -- to make technology work for all of us.
Janis Ian's popular-music credits include 17 major-label albums, nine Grammy nominations and 37 years of experience in the music industry.
Michael Moore will be on the Donahue Show for a full hour this Monday night at 8pm on MSNBC!
Spread the word!
And if you have another second or two, please email "cable@msnbc.com" and "warn them to not pre-empt the show again." (Michael asks for this favor at the bottom right of his website.)
Here's what I just sent:
Dear MSNBC,I am a web journalist writing to let you know how much I am looking forward
to this Monday's Donahue show with guest Michael Moore.I sure hope the show does not get pre-empted again!
Thanks,
Lisa Rein
lisarein@finetuning.com
Here is Ron Kovic's speech from yesterday's Anti-War Rally in San Francisco
(as transcribed from my video footage, which I'll be posting Monday afternoon):
This is the most important moment in American History. You are a part of an extraordinary moment in the turning of the history of this country. You will take this government back on behalf of the people of the United States.Because we all know here, each and every one of us who have come to this place on this day know, that the truth is, this country, the power, this country belongs to the people of the United States. We are going to be represented, if we have to take democracy to the streets of every city and town across this country. They're going to listen to us!
This is your moment. You were born to be here at this moment. You were born to take this country back on behalf of the people, on behalf of democracy, to make this nation a true, authentic democracy: "Of the people, by the people and for the people."
And there's an old saying: "Move on over or we'll move on over you." And in the days, the difficult days, and it's going to be difficult, in the difficult days and weeks and months ahead, I encourage you to move with dignity. Move with the spirit of Martin Luther King. And as our numbers continue to grow and we begin to recognize that this is not only an anti-war movement more powerful than any anti-war movement in the history of this country, but that this is also becoming a powerful movement for peoples' democracy in this country. When we begin to realize...
And when the leaders in Washington that are perpetrating this terrible, terrible war. The leaders, the President, those in power right now, who have in fact made targets of terror of all of us because of their policy. They are the ones who have brought on 911. It is their violence that brought the violence to our nation, and it's their violence that we must stop and stop forever!
Never underestimate...Never underestimate who you are! Never underestimate the power of what you represent. Your beauty and your dignity. Your honesty and your integrity. You are going to change this nation. Think about it. This is your moment. Your destiny is to change this nation. Years from now many of you will be able to tell your children that we lived through an extraordinary turning point in American History. And we have the courage to step over that line with dignity, with non-violence and with great determination, and make this is a country that we can all love again and can all be proud of. Thank you so very much. Thank you!
Peace Now! Peace Now!
This is just the beginning! Thank you!
I think there were something more like 75,000 people here yesterday, than 5,000 like this article reports. But I'm happy to see coverage of the event at all in the popular press:
US peace marches draw thousands
Tens of thousands of people have marched in the US cities of Washington and San Francisco as part of a day of worldwide protests against a possible American-led war against Iraq.
If we launch a pre-emptive strike, we will lose all moral authority... we must have a higher order than a one-bullet diplomacyJesse Jackson
A number of other US cities saw demonstrations, while protest rallies also took place in Mexico, Japan, Spain, Germany, South Korea, Belgium and Australia.
In the US, the protests are being hailed as some of the largest in the country since US citizens took to the streets in the 1960s and 1970s to protest the Vietnam war.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2364151.stm
BBC News UK Edition
Sunday, 27 October, 2002, 01:27 GMT
US peace marches draw thousands
Protesters in Constitution Gardens, Washington DC holding banners
Thousands converged on Washington waving banners
Tens of thousands of people have marched in the US cities of Washington and San Francisco as part of a day of worldwide protests against a possible American-led war against Iraq.
"If we launch a pre-emptive strike, we will lose all moral authority... we must have a higher order than a one-bullet diplomacy." -- Jesse Jackson
A number of other US cities saw demonstrations, while protest rallies also took place in Mexico, Japan, Spain, Germany, South Korea, Belgium and Australia.
In the US, the protests are being hailed as some of the largest in the country since US citizens took to the streets in the 1960s and 1970s to protest the Vietnam war.
Waving banners and chanting slogans, the protesters called on the US president to abandon plans to topple the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and to spend the billions of dollars needed for a military campaign on social programmes instead.
The US Congress has granted George W Bush the power to wage war on Iraq - with or without the approval of the United Nations.
Celebrity appeal
The protests took place as US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the protracted negotiations at the UN over the adoption of a resolution on Iraq must move forward; the organisation was entering a key week and could not continue to hold a never-ending debate.
Peace march in 1969
Marchers were emulating the Vietnam protests
"It is time to bring the remaining issues to a head for resolution, if possible," he said.
"And if resolution is not possible, then let's come to that realisation and move forward."
The rally in Washington opened with speeches at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial from celebrities such as musician Patti Smith and actress Susan Sarandon.
Palestinian and Moslem groups also attended the march, along with veteran civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.
"If we launch a pre-emptive strike, we will lose all moral authority," he told the crowd.
"We must have a higher order than a one-bullet diplomacy." Jackson said.
Elsewhere, in San Francisco, around 5,000 people, including several Palestinian pressure groups, converged on City Hall to hear speeches.
Germany was the scene of some of Europe's largest protests, with more than 80 cities holding rallies.
The Federal Peace Committee, which helped organise the protests, told French news agency AFP that up to 10,000 people attended Berlin's rally.
Political manoeuvring
The marches come after an opinion poll conducted for the New York Times and CBS News earlier this month suggested that half of those questioned in the US were uneasy about the prospect of war with Iraq.
Berlin rally
Protesters marched in Berlin and other German cities
Supporters of the march also point to successful internet fund-raising and letter-signing efforts as signs of the support for their cause.
Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches and a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, said he remains optimistic that war can be avoided.
"I don't think that, just because the House and Senate voted, that the barn door is open and we're going to have war," he said.
The US is pressing the UN to accept its resolution on disarming Iraq.
But it is encountering resistance from Russia and France, who can both veto the resolution.
Mr Bush on Saturday reiterated his vow that the US would use force against Iraq if Saddam Hussein did not disarm, whether or not the UN supported such action.
"If the UN won't act, if Saddam Hussein won't disarm, we will lead a coalition to disarm him," he said.
Sorry for only getting the tail end of this! I'll have the video that goes with this up sometime tomorrow afternoon. Ron Kovic's speech is on the way...(yes, the whole thing :-)
Barbara Lee is really starting to shine as a leader in this movement.
I'm so happy to have been able to capture yesterday's experience for all the people across the country and around the world who couldn't be there to see for themselves.
...to re-dedicate ourselves to moving forward aggresively to making sure that this silent, they say minority, which it is a vocal majority, is being heard in Washington DC -- and that is you!
Keep the peace process moving forward! Keep it moving forward!And I just want to thank you for all of your support. I want you to know that your emails and your rallys and your marches and your voices are being heard very loudly in Washington DC. We're gonna stop this madness! We're gonna, yes, rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. We're gonna rid the entire world, including our own country, of weapons of mass destruction! That's what we're gonna do! That's what we must do! That's what we must do!
How can we tell our children that violence is not an option, when they see our government supporting first strikes! How do we explain that to young people? How do we tell them "no" to violence?
So let me conclude by just saying: Let today be the first day of taking back the White House in 2004! That's what we gotta do! Thank you!
Just got back from having a totally incredible experience at the Anti-War March today!
Barbara Lee and Ron Kovic (the Vietnam Veteran and war hero/anti-war hero of "Born on the 4th of July") both spoke at the rally. I'm in the process of transcribing their speeches now -- I filmed their speeches and shot a bunch of great footage.
I was able to grab some stills that will have to tide you over until I upload the movies:
My Pictures From the October 26, 2002 Anti-war March in San Francisco
I'll be there at Justin Herman Plaza with my video camera!
See you there!
STOP THE WAR AGAINST IRAQ BEFORE IT STARTS!
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26
NATIONAL MARCH ON WASHINGTON DC
Rally @ 11 am
Constitution Gardens adjacent to the
Vietnam Veterans War Memorial
21st St. & Constitution Ave. NW**March to the White House**
JOINT ACTION IN SAN FRANCISCO
11 am at Justin Herman Plaza
Here is the full text of the page in case the link goes bad:
http://www.internationalanswer.org/campaigns/o26/o26endorse.html
The Bush administration is rushing towards war. The time to act is now. The people of the United States can stop this madness.
World public opinion and almost every government opposes Bush's planned war of aggression. But it will take a mass peoples' movement--in the streets, workplaces, communities, campuses and high schools--to stop the coming war.
On Saturday, October 26, 2002 -- the first anniversary of the signing of the so-called Patriot Act -- anti-war, civil rights, labor, student and other forces are joining together to launch a massive international mobilization in opposition to a new war against the people of Iraq. Mass marches and rallies will be held in Washington DC and San Francisco in the U.S., and in many other countries.
As the Bush administration violates international law it has been systematically engaged in a campaign of division and repression in the United States including a wholesale assault on the Bill of Rights, institutionalization of racial profiling, and aggregation of near dictatorial powers to the Executive branch.
In articulating the so-called doctrine of preemptive war, the Bush administration is preparing to violate all existing international law and the UN charter which forbids countries to carry out war except in the case of self-defense. Preemption is merely a slogan to justify a foreign policy of armed aggression and military adventure.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company are planning to send tens of thousands of young GIs to kill and be killed in another war for Big Oil. Simultaneously, the Bush Administration is diverting billions of dollars to feed military conquest and away from jobs, education, healthcare, childcare and housing.
The so-called debate that is opening now to public view from within the political establishment presents a necessity for all anti-war forces to become a major factor in generating an authentic opposition to U.S. war plans in the Middle East. The October 26 National March in Washington DC and joint action in San Francisco come just one week before midterm Congressional elections.
There won't be a real national debate on a planned invasion of Iraq until the people are in the streets. We can't leave it to the military establishment to decide when and how they will go to war and to define the debate. We must tell Bush and his corporate and Big Oil patrons that we will not allow this to happen.
This war can be stopped. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and company can be stopped. But the essential element must be the mobilization of a massive new anti-war movement in the streets. We call for civilians and soldiers alike to exercise their political right to speak out against an illegal war. On October 26, there will be a National March in Washington DC, a West Coast march in San Francisco, and protests around the world.
ONLY THE PEOPLE CAN STOP THE WAR!
JOIN US ON OCTOBER 26, 2002!
How nice to see an article come clean with the real reason for all this fuss about Wardriving: to sell people an overpriced solution.
But to computer-security experts, "war-driving" has turned into a marketing opportunity. Past war drives embarrassed a number of companies, and in preparation for the big event this weekend, some of these experts have been pitching their services.This week, for example, International Business Machines Corp. has been urging sales representatives to warn corporate clients of the need to secure their wireless networks. The merchandising tie-in: Your network can be safeguarded by an IBM security service that goes for $15,000 to $30,000.
However, it was still rather sad to see the rest of the usual inaccurate bullshit about Wardriving that is always included in these articles.
Hackers target wireless networks
By William M. Bulkeley
Hopefully I'll have time to clarify this puppy in greater detail over the weekend -- it really, really needs to be done. While explaining this whole concept of taking connectivity without asking for it -- they're leaving out the payback:
free universal connectivity!
So yeah, some guy walking down the street can get his email with his PDA while he walks by my house FOR FREE! And I can do the same while I'm walking by his house. How cool is that!?
Or how'd you like to check your email/surf the web while you're waiting for the Bus (that's always late), or waiting for that band to come on, or waiting to hear about that one business deal while you're in the waiting room about to make another. All that kind of stuff can happen cheaply -- in a way that everyone can afford -- using community wireless networks.
And your schools and libraries all have connectivity because it's just there.
This universal connectivity is what this kind of paranoid propaganda is fighting against. They want us to have to pay somebody for it somewhere, every time we connect, every time we use a different device, everytime we access an application even.
If we work together, we can just pay what we're already paying for at home and have easy wireless connectivity away from home, when we often need it most for whatever device we have around at the time, wherever we happen to find ourselves.
If big business wants to provide a wireless network that's cheaper and easier to use, let it. It will have to charge reasonable prices however, if it has community networks competing with it.
We don't need a World Wide Wardriving day -- every day is World Wide Wardriving Day. We need a better word for it -- one without "war" in it.
Perhaps that was the first mistake.
Or perhaps a community-based movement has evolved since then --
a Peace Driving movement.
Perhaps I've said to much :-)
Here is the text of the article in case the link goes bye bye:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/824622.asp?cp1=1
Hackers target wireless networks
Worldwide 'war drive' set for Saturday
By William M. Bulkeley
Oct. 23 - Technology sophisticates who specialize in exposing corporate-security lapses will orchestrate a world-wide "war drive" to strut their stuff Saturday.
IN 25 LOCALES in seven countries from Alberta, Canada, to New Zealand, they plan office-building drive-bys armed with laptops, radio scanners and antennas, aiming to intercept signals from the ever-spreading wireless networks used to connect corporate computers with each other and the Internet.
For many of the hacker types who will participate, war driving is a benign electronic scavenger hunt meant to alert companies and others to unprotected wireless access points that can leave owners vulnerable to spying or sabotage.
MARKETING OPPORTUNITY
But to computer-security experts, "war-driving" has turned into a marketing opportunity. Past war drives embarrassed a number of companies, and in preparation for the big event this weekend, some of these experts have been pitching their services.
This week, for example, International Business Machines Corp. has been urging sales representatives to warn corporate clients of the need to secure their wireless networks. The merchandising tie-in: Your network can be safeguarded by an IBM security service that goes for $15,000 to $30,000.
In London, risk experts at the British affiliate of accountants KPMG LLP have developed a fake wireless network called a "honeypot" that was announced at a security conference in Paris last week. It's a countermeasure designed to attract and record unauthorized wireless-access efforts-in effect, alerting network owners that they are being homed in on by war drivers or other unauthorized people. The firm hopes that the honeypot will enable it to sell more of the security services it offers through its consulting arm. Among the services: a team of "tame hackers" who attempt, under contract with the owners, to break into financial-service-company networks to expose risks.
Another company tuned into war driving is Guardent Inc., a Waltham, Mass., computer-security firm that offers monthly assessments of its customers' networks to spot rogue access points. "We make sure people are aware" of the war drive because it shows the need for vulnerability analysis, says Jonas Hellgren, director of product management at Guardent. But he adds that focusing only on the event isn't as valuable as a continuing sales effort.
War driving bedevils security types partly because it is so cheap and easy to do. Drivers amble around with a directional antenna sometimes fashioned from a coffee or potato-chip can. Their software of choice, called NetStumbler, comes free on the Web and detects the low-level radio waves coming out of wireless-network access points.
War drivers say their goal is to publicize the need for network owners to change their passwords. But people with knowledge of the location of an unprotected wireless network can also use it for free Web surfing, or to send out e-mail messages or junk mail known as spam without disclosing their identities. With more sophisticated hacking, people could use the wireless gateway as an entry point to corporate networks, security experts say.
In a related activity, called "war-chalking," participants make chalk marks on sidewalks or building fronts to signal the availability of access points. One widely used symbol for an open access point looks like this: )(. Knowing such locations permits people with laptops to avoid paying for Internet access.
In its letter to customers, IBM notes that "war driving participants generally map unsecured access points as a hobby." But it warns "since your company has a great deal invested in intellectual capital, reputation, and stakeholder trust, it makes sense to take appropriate steps to avoid unnecessary exposure."
'MORE PARANOID'
War driving was christened two years ago by Peter Shipley, a Berkeley, Calif., data-security consultant, who named it with a nod to the "war-dialing" exploits of hackers who use phone lines in their efforts to penetrate corporate computer networks. Mr. Shipley, who isn't involved in the current war drives, says that in urban areas there are now so many wireless access points that mapping them is almost irrelevant. Still, he says, war driving has been making companies "more paranoid, which is what they should be."
War drivers generally need to be within 1,500 feet or less of an access point to detect it. NetStumbler is designed to pick up wireless access points in which the owner has failed to change the default Service Set Identifier that broadcasts its location for others on the network to find. According to various Web sites, popular home wireless networks made by Linksys Inc. use the default "linksys." For Cisco Systems Inc.'s more expensive corporate networks, the default password is "tsunami." Cisco declined to comment but said that extensive security capabilities are built into its wireless equipment.
John Girard, a security consultant with Gartner Group, Stamford, Conn., says war driving "is easy to do because people don't turn on security. They leave themselves exposed." But he says vendors are partly to blame. "The documentation people get is generally poor, and they're not motivated to figure it out."
According to the Web site worldwidewardrive.org, organizers with screen names such as Roamer, Big Ezy and Tapper are helping coordinate Saturday's drive. They either declined to comment or didn't return e-mails for this story.
This will be the second such organized effort, following one in August. War-drive Web sites feature maps showing unsecured access points, denoted by green circles along highways in such technology centers as Boston; the Silicon Valley and Orange County in California; and Barcelona, Spain. According to a table of statistics, nearly 30% of the access points found were using the default passwords.
Access Denied II
Hollywood wants to gain remote control over HDTV. Will it succeed?
By Stephen A. Booth
The content owners - read "Hollywood studios" - insist on stringent controls and are reluctant to let their most popular films be broadcast in high-definition without them. If the practice of making digital copies at home and then "sharing" them over the Internet caught on, the studios would stand to lose a lot of money on DVD and tape sales.On the other side, consumer-electronics manufacturers and consumer advocates contend that these kinds of controls would deny viewers the right to make fair-use copies of legally purchased content. The U.S. Supreme Court established that right with the landmark 1984 decision that prevented the studios from blocking sales of Sony's Betamax VCR. The court ruled that viewers can make video recordings of programs for personal use. Americans have become accustomed to time-shifting favorite TV programs, and we're not likely to give up that right without a fight just because we've arrived in the digital age.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/hot_topics/articledisplay.asp?ArticleID=151
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Access Denied II
Hollywood wants to gain remote control over HDTV. Will it succeed?
By Stephen A. Booth
Illustrations by Sandra Shap
You're all set to record a pay-per-view movie through the digital set-top box your cable provider installed just hours ago. But when you program it to record, your DVD recorder flashes a cryptic message indicating that the show can't be copied. Must be the usual screw-up by the cable company, you reason. No big deal: you'll just watch it live and call service in the morning. Then the program comes on, but the crisp, filmlike picture you've come to expect from high-definition TV just isn't there. It doesn't look much better than what you get on DVD. Come to think of it, the movie you recorded on DVD for the kids last week wouldn't run on the hand-me-down player in their bedroom. By now, your suspicions about the cable installation have spread to the store that delivered and set up your home theater.
Something is obviously wrong - but don't blame the hardware or the store that sold it to you. Welcome to "Access Denied II," the sequel to April's "Access Denied," which explored how the recording industry is trying to protect copyrighted music through draconian copy-prevention schemes built into CDs and CD recorders.
In this latest nightmare scenario, you can't record a movie or even see it at full resolution because the cable company is using the digital rights-management (DRM) system being demanded by the Hollywood studios. Since the digital age has made it so easy to dub a perfect copy of a movie and then endlessly clone it, copyright owners have been desperately looking for safeguards like these to protect their intellectual property. But just how much protection should be applied has become a major issue, with powerful and determined forces lined up on each side of the question.
The content owners - read "Hollywood studios" - insist on stringent controls and are reluctant to let their most popular films be broadcast in high-definition without them. If the practice of making digital copies at home and then "sharing" them over the Internet caught on, the studios would stand to lose a lot of money on DVD and tape sales.
On the other side, consumer-electronics manufacturers and consumer advocates contend that these kinds of controls would deny viewers the right to make fair-use copies of legally purchased content. The U.S. Supreme Court established that right with the landmark 1984 decision that prevented the studios from blocking sales of Sony's Betamax VCR. The court ruled that viewers can make video recordings of programs for personal use. Americans have become accustomed to time-shifting favorite TV programs, and we're not likely to give up that right without a fight just because we've arrived in the digital age.
The U.S. government also has a hand in this game, primarily because a lot of money is riding on it. The transition from analog to digital TV (DTV) is supposed to be completed by the end of 2006 so the analog frequencies can be auctioned off for other communications uses. The big bucks from that spectrum sale have already been earmarked to fund future Federal budgets.
So it's not too surprising that Congress has taken a keen interest in getting DTV up and running. The legislators reckon that more high-def programming will spur demand for digital TVs, which will in turn cause economies of scale to kick in, leading to lower prices. Congress has been pushing the studios and hardware manufacturers to reach an agreement that will satisfy Hollywood's desire for a secure way to deliver its content while preserving the viewer's right to display programs with unimpaired quality and to make copies for private use.
Waving the Broadcast Flag
If the scenario outlined at the beginning ever comes true, the losers will be the electronics industry, fair-use advocates, and - of course - the average viewer. In early June, the chairman of the House Commerce Committee, Billy Tauzin (R-LA), called upon the studios and the hardware manufacturers resolve their differences over DTV copy protection and issue a report by midsummer to guide legislators in reaching an agreement. Tauzin resorted to this approach after previous "carrot and stick" efforts failed to drive the warring parties to a voluntary agreement.
The "stick" was the proposed "Consumer Broadband and Digital TV Promotion Act of 2002" (S-2048), sponsored in March by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Fritz Hollings (D-SC). The act threatens to impose copy protection on DTV broadcasts if the two sides can't agree on a mutually acceptable system within a year of its passage. The responsibility for developing and imposing the rights-management and copy-protection standard for digital broadcasts and digital TVs, set-top boxes, and recorders would fall on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The "carrot" was the opportunity for the two camps to avoid government intervention and work out a deal on their own. Although the Hollings bill has little chance of passage this year, if ever - Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate committee with jurisdiction over copyright issues, has already proclaimed it dead - it prompted Hollywood and the consumer-electronics, computer, and cable-TV industries to establish a working group to settle the issue. Ceding to Hollywood's demands, the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) agreed on the implementation of a "broadcast flag" - a code-bit embedded in a digital broadcast that would instruct devices to either allow unrestricted copying (Copy Freely), permit a single copy to be made (Copy Once), or prevent copying altogether (Copy Never).
But that's about as far as it went. While the group agreed that there should be flags, there was no consensus on how the hardware would respond to them. And though the group's report reaffirmed the consumer's right to fair-use recording, it didn't specify which copy restrictions would be used for which kinds of programs.
Now You See It, Now You Don't
That these digital rights-management and copy-protection rules are still being negotiated this late in the game is a frightening prospect to the million-or-so "early adopters" who own HDTV sets. But everything at the moment indicates that the negotiations won't render their TVs obsolete. Current sets use analog inputs to receive high-def content, but the copy-protection debate applies to digital-to-digital connections between digital TVs, set-top boxes, recorders, and PCs. Existing HDTVs wouldn't even see a broadcast flag.
"Current-generation digital TV products are not looking for the broadcast flag, so there would be no reason for them to respond to this information," said Dave Arland, spokesman for RCA parent Thomson Multimedia. "Obviously, there is great temptation to use this broadcast flag discussion to jam a bunch of other things down the pike. That's why we're working to insure that the delicate balance between content ownership rights and consumer expectations is kept intact." The broadcast flag could be used to trigger a digital rights-management system called Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP), which could execute copy-protection commands. "The broadcast flag has no impact on existing digital products, and in the future, if implemented, products with a digital IEEE 1394 [FireWire or i.Link] connector and DTCP will have no trouble [displaying the DTV signal]," said BPDG co-chair Robert Perry, whose company, Mitsubishi, has been pushing FireWire connections for digital TVs. "What the flag will affect is products with Internet-type connections, such as Ethernet. They won't be able to move that content."
Michael Ayers, president of the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator, which represents the developers of the DTCP rights-management scheme, agrees that the broadcast flag won't affect existing digital products. But he conceded that it could prevent any of the 30-million current DVD players from playing recordings made on future "compliant" DVD decks.
Given his company's stake in the DVD recorder market, it's not surprising that within days of the BPDG's report, Philips CEO Lawrence Blanford issued a tirade condemning its implications. The copy-protection technologies discussed in the report could allow content providers to "remotely disable large quantities of devices that are recording movies or other programs in consumers' homes," including new DVD recorders, he said. "Millions of consumers would have to replace their DVD players to watch digital TV programs that they have digitally recorded" - presumably because the players wouldn't have the circuitry to decode the encryption or authentication information on recorded discs. Perry of Mitsubishi was also concerned about backward compatibility of recordings made on future DVD recorders. But he took issue with Blanford's assertion that the installed base of players would have to be replaced, pointing out that today's DVD players would still be able to play prerecorded DVDs and recordings made on currently available machines.
The Conditional Future
Although the studios have pledged to respect the fair-use recording rights of viewers to time-shift programs, hardware manufacturers are wary of what kinds of copy restrictions the studios might place on such recordings. The two copy-protected digital connection standards currently being implemented in HDTVs, digital set-top boxes, and digital recorders certainly give Hollywood the means to restrict those rights. Here's a quick run-down of what they are and what they would do.
l DTCP The 5-Company (5C) Group of Hitachi, Intel, Matsushita (Panasonic), Sony, and Toshiba developed this system, which has been provisionally endorsed by the major Hollywood studios. Primarily, the DTCP system interprets the Copy Never flag to prevent recordings on removable media, such as tapes or discs, of some pay-per-view or video-on-demand programming. But you would still be able to make recordings on hard-disk digital video recorders such as ReplayTV or TiVo systems, within certain limits, such as how long you can pause a program before returning to watching it.
l HDMI The High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), which uses a single connection to transport high-def video and multichannel digital audio among devices, also satisfies Hollywood's copy-protection demands. HDMI is being developed by Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Silicon Image, Sony, Thomson, and Toshiba.
The new connector builds on the existing Digital Visual Interface (DVI) standard, which has already appeared in a number of HDTVs and high-def satellite receivers. DVI shuttles uncompressed digital signals among devices, and it can also include the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) system developed by JVC, which is called D-Theater in JVC's digital VHS recorders and on prerecorded D-VHS tapes. Because the signal is uncompressed with HDMI as well, there is no processing or degradation. This ensures that the content is sent from the source to the display with the highest possible resolution.
Quality aside, the size of the uncompressed HDMI digital signal would make it difficult to record and transmit it over the Internet - Hollywood likes that. It takes 24 hours to upload 30 minutes of uncompressed HDTV programming, even with a broadband connection, according to Thomson's Arland. But since compression methods and telecommunications technology are constantly evolving, the studios also want copy protection for uncompressed signals. JVC's HDCP provides that by encrypting the uncompressed content.
What Lies Ahead
The negotiations over the broadcast flag and other digital rights-management issues only concern over-the-air HDTV broadcasting. What the satellite and cable-TV companies decide to do is subject to different policy procedures - and debate.
The DirecTV and Dish Network satellite services already have pacts with the studios to protect their programming. Their digital signals are encrypted, and both services have long been able to use Macrovision copy protection to keep people from making VCR and DVD recordings using a satellite receiver's analog output.
The cable industry, feeling competitive pressure from the satellite services, wants to offer the studios similar protection for its premium programming. But cable wants to use "selectable output controls" that would give the cable operator the option of remotely manipulating the set-top box to block content to various devices or to pass only lower-quality signals, reducing high-definition picture resolution to DVD quality levels. This specter of Big Brother has raised the ire of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and other industry groups (for more on this, see "HDTV's Cable Conundrum" below). Both the CEA and the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) assert that selectable output controls on cable boxes could deny HDTV programming to some subscribers as well as limit the capability of devices like digital video recorders. At press time, the CEA and HRRC were preparing counterfilings with the FCC and other campaigns to block cable's actions.
Will HDTV be allowed to spread out to the masses, or will it be caught up in a tangle of copy-protection and digital rights-management issues? Both current HDTV owners and prospective buyers want to know the answer. Also, will viewers be allowed to freely record and time-shift programs in the new digital era? Everyone will be watching the deliberations for positive signs, but with the deadline to cease analog TV broadcasting just a few years away, let's hope they wrap things up soon.
Copy Protection Robs The Future
By Dan Bricklin.
I believe that copy protection will break the chain necessary to preserve creative works. It will make them readable for a limited period of time and not be able to be moved ahead as media deteriorates or technologies change. Only those works that are thought to be profitable at any given time will be preserved by their "owners" (if they are still in business). We know from history that what's popular at any given time is no certain indication of what will be valuable in the future. Without not-copy protected "originals", archivists, collectors, and preservers will be unable to maintain them the way they would if they weren't protected. (Many of these preservers ignore fashion as they do their job, because they see their role as preservers not filters.) We won't even be able to read media in obsolete formats, because the specifications of those formats will not be available. To create a "Rosetta Stone" of today's new formats will be asking to go to jail and having your work banned.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.bricklin.com/robfuture.htm
Dan Bricklin's Web Site: www.bricklin.com
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Copy Protection Robs The Future
Copy protection will break the chain of formal and informal archivists who are necessary to the long-term preservation of creative works.
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Introduction
The other day I wanted to listen to a song I remember from my youth. I took the old vinyl record out of its sleeve and put it on my aging turntable. I gently dropped the needle onto the appropriate track, and out came the music, but it was way too fast. It seems my turntable broke, and now plays everything at exactly 45 rpm instead of 33. Bummer! It was a slow song and I wanted it slow. Luckily, I found I had another copy of the same song that the record company that owned the rights to the song had released (the CD was "Greatest Folksingers of the 'Sixties"). Much nicer. Unfortunately, they had only included that one song -- I couldn't play any of the others I wanted from the original album. I'll have to try to fix my turntable.
This got me to thinking about preserving old works of composers, musicians, authors, and other creative individuals. How does that preserving come about and will today's works produced on digital media last into the future?
How are works preserved through the generations?
As human beings, we benefit greatly from the works of others. Artists, thinkers, scholars, and performers create works that we all enjoy, learn from, and are inspired by. Many works are timeless. Either standing alone or in the context of their time or other times, they are valuable periodically years after they are created. We often hear of authors, artists, or composers who only become popular or have their greatest impact after their death, sometimes many years later.
How are these works passed down through the generations? It usually isn't the direct result of the efforts of the original creator. Other people make it their job to preserve the works and pass them on. These jobs are either formal, like librarians and curators, or informal, like enthusiasts and hobbyists. There are additional other people who find interesting works and bring them to the attention of new generations. These may be scholars doing research, or a collector who develops a strong passion.
How are the actual works preserved? Sometimes just storing the work is sufficient, but in most cases a change in environment is needed. The artist's original location may be sold for another use. The work may be created in a material that is affected by air and water, and must be kept in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room. To preserve unique items, we often need to go to extremes, even to preserve them for just a few hundred years. According to a professional preserver, the Archivist of the United States, the US Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence are stored in an encasement "...made of pure titanium, high-strength glass, and specially treated aluminum to encapsulate these aging, fragile documents in argon, an inert gas, for their long-term preservation..."
For some works, it's enough to just preserve the words themselves. For these and others, copies are what we preserve, such as recordings of performances, or microfilm copies of newspapers. We produce the copies in more stable media, or ones that are easier from which to reproduce. (In a way, this is a form of "changing the environment".) The practice of constantly producing new copies before the old copies wear out has worked well. To increase the likelihood of long-term survival for a work, such as a religious text, producing many copies and keeping them in diverse places has also worked very well.
With ever changing technology, in order to preserve many works we will need to constantly move them ahead, copying them to each new media form before the previous one becomes obsolete. Also, as we create new media, we need to preserve the knowledge of the methods of converting from one media to another, so we can still access the old works that have not yet been moved ahead. This is crucial. Without this information, even preserved works could be unreadable.
The most famous example of that type of translation information was an inscribed slab of rock from 196 BC found in 1799. It contained a decree written in Greek that was also written in two forms of Egyptian. It's called the Rosetta Stone. It let scholars finally read ancient works in hieroglyphics that they had physical possession of but whose language had been a mystery for 1,400 years (despite being common for the 3,500 years before being superseded). Cuneiform, a form of writing used by many ancient civilizations, was similarly opaque to scholars until they found a text in multiple languages carved into a cliff -- the Behistun inscription.
Cuneiform writing that I photographed in 1966 at a NYC museum
A well known example of preserving a work for many years is the Dead Sea Scrolls. These 2000-year old scrolls contain copies of Biblical and other writings. Thanks to the unusual environmental conditions of where they were stored (Qumran), they survived relatively intact. They were mainly written in the same Hebrew letters used today. I was fortunate to visit some of these at an exhibit in the United States in the mid-1960's. I took pictures of some of those that I saw at the request of one of my teachers for his research. I found those old negatives a few days ago, and, though you can't read such tiny negatives with your naked eye, my made-in-2001 film scanner can read them 35 years later. Looking at those images, I can read them now (I know modern Hebrew) and found that I photographed what looks like a variant of Psalm 136:
Dead Sea Scroll, still readable 35 and 2000 years later. It starts: "...Key Tove, Key L'Olam Chasdoh -- ...for He is good, for His mercy endures forever."
This is an example of many types of preserving: Repeated copying of the Psalms for hundreds of years from their original authoring until the days of the people at Qumran, good preservation of their copy for 2000 years, independent preservation of the language, sharing of the work by the current preservers with the help of institutions like museums, having a copy made yet again for an enthusiast (by me for my teacher), preserving those copies (me and my parents who saved them at home for many years with my other negatives), today's film scanners being able to read the old film which was created before the idea of digital scanning, and finally, me being able to read it and then share yet another copy with you through the Internet. If you show it to someone who knows Hebrew, they should be able to read most of it. Quite a long, unbroken path. Let's hope we can continue to preserve things so well through so many steps.
Enter copy protection
There are things happening that make me worry that the future may not be bright for preserving many of the works we create today. For example: Companies are preparing to produce music CDs that cannot be copied into many other formats (something allowed by law as "fair use"). Most new eBooks are copy protected. A new bill may be heading to Congress that will require all digital devices to enforce copy protection schemes for copyrightable material. An existing law makes it a crime to tell people how to make copies of protected works.
I believe that copy protection will break the chain necessary to preserve creative works. It will make them readable for a limited period of time and not be able to be moved ahead as media deteriorates or technologies change. Only those works that are thought to be profitable at any given time will be preserved by their "owners" (if they are still in business). We know from history that what's popular at any given time is no certain indication of what will be valuable in the future. Without not-copy protected "originals", archivists, collectors, and preservers will be unable to maintain them the way they would if they weren't protected. (Many of these preservers ignore fashion as they do their job, because they see their role as preservers not filters.) We won't even be able to read media in obsolete formats, because the specifications of those formats will not be available. To create a "Rosetta Stone" of today's new formats will be asking to go to jail and having your work banned.
This is different than encryption or patent protection. With encryption, as long as the keys for reading survive, and a description of the method of decryption, you can recreate the unprotected original. It's even better -- you can prove authenticity. Patent protection just keeps you from creating and using your own unlicensed reader for a limited period of time. After that, the legal duty of the patent is to teach you how it works so you can make your own. For long-term preservation of works (as opposed to short-term quick advancement in some fields) patented techniques are good because they discourage secrets and eventually put things in the public domain.
Let me give you another personal example, this time about copy protection.
One of the most popular parts of this web site is a copy of the original IBM PC version of VisiCalc. Actually, that's not exactly true. It's not the same exact program you could buy. The original VisiCalc was only shipped on 5 1/4" copy protected diskettes. Part of the program checked that the diskette it was loaded from had the special copy protection modifications. Despite the fact that I have an old computer with a 5 1/4" diskette drive, I still couldn't make a copy that would run that I could distribute. I received permission from the current copyright holder to distribute the copies, but VisiCalc hadn't been produced for years and they lost track of any original masters they had owned. (Companies usually don't have reason to maintain and catalog old, non-profitable material for too long, especially through mergers and acquisitions.) Luckily for me, an employee of Software Arts, my company that created the original program, kept a "test" copy we had used internally that was created without the copy protection code. He was not one of the original authors, but is an informal "collector" of things. He ended up at Lotus, the next owners of the rights. He left Lotus years later, and gave me a copy he had moved ahead from system to system after that (he produced the copy for me on a Windows NT machine). Thanks to Lotus' permission (which I wouldn't need in the far future when the copyright expires), I was able to post a copy on the Web, and now many tens of thousands of people have their own copies. Thanks to those not-copy protected copies, and the documentation available about the original IBM PC, it is much more likely now that future generations will be able to learn about early PC programs by running VisiCalc. If only the original diskettes could be passed down, then after they deteriorated they would not be useable, and until then, only people with special obsolete equipment could run them.
The IBM PC VisiCalc diskette with "Copy Protected" warning
Conclusion
Copy protection, like poor environment and chemical instability before it for books and works of art, looks to be a major impediment to preserving our cultural heritage. Works that are copy protected are less likely to survive into the future. The formal and informal world of archivists and preservers will be unable to do their job of moving what they keep from one media to another newer one, nor will they be able to ensure survival and appreciation through wide dissemination, even when it is legal to do so.
If you are an artist or author who cares more than about the near-term value of your work, you should be worried and be careful about releasing your work only in copy protected form. Like the days when "art" was only accessible to the rich, two classes will probably develop: Copy protected and not copy protected, the "high art" and "folk art" of tomorrow.
Artists and authors need to create their works and still make a living. Copy protection is arising as a "simple fix" to preserve business models based upon the physical properties of old media and distribution. Our new media and distribution techniques need new business models (perhaps with different intermediate players) that don't shortchange the future. Trying to keep those old business models in place is as inappropriate as continuing to produce only 33 rpm vinyl records.
Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile
For Salon
Angered by a law that extends copyright terms for 20 years, a crusader named Brewster Kahle wants to use the Internet to make books available to everyone.
It's still four days until the big day at the Supreme Court. We still have books to make at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and schools in Baltimore and Washington. Many of us are exhausted from covering 2,000 miles in four days, but Brewster is even more invigorated than ever. He can't wait to stand beneath the stone-carved words "FREE FOR THE PEOPLE" that adorn the Carnegie and make books. The slogan, idealistic as it may be, fairly captures Brewster's wildest dreams for the Net. A massive library containing the full breadth of human knowledge and experience, freely and easily accessible to everyone on the planet. A library truly free to the people.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/10/09/bookmobile/index.html
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Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile
Angered by a law that extends copyright terms for 20 years, a crusader named Brewster Kahle wants to use the Internet to make books available to everyone.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Richard Koman
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Oct. 9, 2002 |
Sept. 30, Belle Haven School, East Palo Alto, Calif.
"Woohoo! We're making books!"
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The Internet Bookmobile has arrived at its first stop: the playground of Belle Haven School, a public K-8 school in this working-class community of Latino, black and Pacific Islander families. Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive and mastermind of the Bookmobile, is printing, binding and cutting books for a crowd of fourth-graders. After a girl works an oversized paper cutter to make the final cut that turns some computer printouts into a finished copy of "Alice in Wonderland," Kahle holds the finished product up. "That's it, we made a book," he says triumphantly.
The Internet Bookmobile is a van on a mission: to drive across the country, stopping at schools, museums and libraries, making books for kids and spreading the word about the digital library that is the Net. From East Palo Alto, Kahle and his entourage -- his son Caslon, friends Art Medlar and Michael Robbin, and me -- will hit a school in Salt Lake City, a bookmobile librarians conference in Columbus, Ohio, the International Inventors Museum in Akron, the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and another school in Baltimore.
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To finish the trip off, the Bookmobile will park in front of the Supreme Court on Oct. 9. Inside, the justices will be listening to arguments in the case of Eldred vs. Ashcroft, a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 1998 "Mickey Mouse" law that has extended copyright terms for an additional 20 years.
Technically called the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, the law is called "Mickey Mouse" because it went into effect just before the copyright to Mickey's first feature, "Steamboat Willie," expired. And it is the potentially dire consequences of endlessly extended copyright -- the possibility that creative works, like books, are prevented from ever going into the public domain -- that impelled the creation of the Internet Bookmobile.
Pointing at signage on the bookmobile -- a 1992 Ford Aerostar equipped with mobile satellite dish, duplexing color printer, desktop binding machine and paper cutter -- that says, "1,000,000 books inside (soon)," Kahle yells, "We want to have a million books for everyone to use. We can't build a library to hold a million books -- the building would be just too big! So we use the Internet. We download a book from the Internet. We print it out, put a binding around it, you get to pick the book you want. Today we have 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' And there's a really awesome book, my favorite book, 'The Wizard of Oz.' We got it from a used bookstore and scanned it. Now it's always on the Internet. The idea is to put books on the Internet. We can do this with these books because they're in something called the public domain. That means they're free! We think there should be lots of books in the public domain."
Kahle cooked up his mission of insta-book freedom just one month ago. Working with a few of the 6,000 texts on Project Gutenberg -- Michael Hart's 30-year-long effort to publish on the Net the public domain classics of Western literature -- Kahle, his wife Mary Austin, and employees of the Internet Archive formatted books such as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in Microsoft Word and designed covers for them, complete with the Internet Archive logo.
A $1,200 binding machine turns the printouts into finished books. "These don't look like books; they are books," a visitor to the Belle Haven event said. The books aren't perfect: There are a few typos, some bad line breaks, and straight quotes instead of curly quotes, but they still look remarkably good. With a MotoSAT dish on top of the van, Kahle was able to cram a remarkable message into the back seat of a 10-year-old minivan: The Internet can be a digital library filled with the full array of human knowledge. Technology allows us to bring this massive resource anywhere, not just for reading on screen, but for creating books themselves.
Yvonne Casias-Young, Belle Haven's principal, gets it. "Students who don't have access to libraries, who don't have transportation can now get access," she says. "As long as we have the Internet and a printer, we can create these books for students and the library. These books never have to be checked out ... we can always print out another copy if a kid wants it."
Tuesday, Oct. 1, Newman School, Salt Lake City
The bookmobile is a print-on-demand-mobile. It changes the notion that books are a limited resource. It changes the basic concept of what libraries do, as well as the idea that schools need large book budgets. In a print-on-demand world, where the cost of creating a book runs about $1 and the capital costs run under $10K, libraries don't lend books, they give them away. Schools aren't dependent on the textbook readers the state board of education buys at a cost of millions of dollars -- every district, every school, every teacher can create their own reader at minimal cost.
"Wouldn't that be amazing?" says Seth Marshall, community education manager for the Newman School. "This presentation needs to be made to administrators. Our library is limited in terms of the number of books we can offer students."
"This is the coolest thing ever," says Paul Black, a sixth-grade teacher at Newman. "Where I taught in Chicago, the school library has hardly any space, hardly any shelves, and what shelves they do have, have hardly any books. You walk in the library and there's no there there. Having something like this could completely change kids' lives. My last job was in an adolescent lockdown facility. The resources are just pitiful. This would be such a great thing for them."
Yes, the bookmobile is driving proof that universal access is possible today. But there is a problem. And its name is Mickey Mouse.
. Next page | Looking for a latter-day Carnegie
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Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile | 1, 2, 3
Oct. 1, 2002, Room 116, Motel 6, Rock Springs, Wyo.
Kahle has been trying to turn the Internet into a digital library since 1988, when he started work on WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers), a pre-Web system for searching through large collections of text. At WAIS, Kahle brought the New York Times, Dow Jones, and Encyclopćdia Britannica to the Net. After selling WAIS Inc. to AOL, he started Alexa Internet, which used a browser widget to collect user traffic patterns and recommend sites based on those patterns, and the Internet Archive, which aims to keep a copy of everything ever posted to the Web. (Alexa was sold to Amazon in 1999 while the Archive continued as a nonprofit.)
Since 1996, the Archive has been crawling the Web and collecting all of it. So far, Kahle has collected over 100 terabytes of Web. Earlier this year, Kahle traveled to Alexandria, Egypt, to present the Egyptian government with a copy of the Archive. "Mrs. Mubarak was grateful for the donation of 100 terabytes of Web, 3,000 hours of Egyptian and U.S. government television, 1,000 movies, and a book-scanning facility," Kahle says as we sip motel plastic cups of single malt scotch. "Then she said, 'But I love my books.' This woman has started more libraries than Carnegie. At that moment, I realized, if I wanted to build a digital library, the Web would not be enough. We need to do books. You can't build a library without books."
In fact, Kahle has been broadening the Archive's collections since early this year. Besides the Web, the Internet Archive hosts a collection of television coverage of Sept. 11, 1,200 ephemeral films from the Prelinger Archives, Project Gutenberg, etree.org's archives of live concert performances by the likes of Dave Matthews and String Cheese Incident, and an archive of more than 8,000 CD-ROMs donated by Macromedia.
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Why add all these other collections to the Internet Archive? Kahle says he was motivated by a paper prepared for the Library of Congress called "Why Archive the Web?" The paper found that the Internet is the "information resource of first resort" for millions of readers, Kahle says. "I found this exciting and frightening. A hundred million searches happen every day by tens of millions of users. But the Net doesn't have the best we have to offer."
Oct. 3, Urbana, Ill., home of Michael Hart
For hundreds of years, we have put the best of our culture in books. And while the authors of the Constitution offered "limited" protection to authors, they were clearly interested in enriching the public domain. The copyright term was originally set for 14 years, renewable for another 14 years, with the condition that the work be submitted to the Library of Congress. Congress has extended the copyright term 11 times in the past 40 years.
"Universal access to human knowledge is what we as a culture and as parents need to do, and we're screwing up. Ninety-eight percent of all books are inaccessible to my child for any amount of money," Kahle says, as we pull into Urbana, Ill. Ninety-eight percent of all books in copyright are "terminally" out of print, according to estimates by Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University and lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Eldred case. Universal access to human knowledge? The law is designed to prevent access to knowledge -- at least the human knowledge that no longer earns its keep in bookstores and movie theaters.
If the Supreme Court upholds Sonny Bono, it will leave the door open for Congress to perpetually extend copyright. If that happens, it is reasonable to assume that no more works will ever enter the public domain. Even if the court finds against the law, the decision wouldn't change the fundamental fact that new works automatically enter this super-lengthy copyright protection.
While the future of the public domain is on trial in Washington, digital librarians aren't exactly uploading works in the public domain at a blistering speed. There are around 20,000 books online for free downloading. The Library of Congress contains 26 million volumes. Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg over 30 years ago by keyboarding public-domain books by hand. Today he has over 100 volunteers around the world and 6,000 books online. He hopes to hit 10,000 books by the end of 2003.
Kahle wants to pay a surprise visit to Hart, the patron saint of online books, since Urbana is on the way to our next destination. When we arrive at his house, there is a car parked in the driveway but no other signs of life. A sign on the front door says "RING BELL LOUD. RING AGAIN. PAUSE. THEN RING AGAIN." Following these directions yields no response. Peering in through the front door window, Kahle utters a low, "Wow, this place is amazing."
Art Medlar calls Hart on his cell phone. "Michael Hart? We have a delivery for you."
"What is it?"
"It's a bookmobile."
"Oh cool, I'll be right there."
After posing for a few publicity shots at the wheel of the bookmobile, Hart reluctantly lets us into his house but forbids picture-taking. In his cave of a basement office, the green characters of a VT100 monitor glow out from a mountain of papers and books. On a shelf above his desk sit boxed sets of ancient WordPerfect manuals. Half a dozen or so clocks line his desk. Reaching for a magazine article to show Kahle, he upsets a precariously balanced monitor stand on which stacks of papers sit. "Uh, oh. This is a problem, this is a big problem!" He finally finds a copy of Windows for Dummies and props the shelf up before disaster strikes. Pointing to a mattress he keeps in the office, Hart explains that it's not uncommon for him to fall asleep at the keyboard, so the mattress saves him the trouble of negotiating his way to his bedroom in a stupor. "One day I got up before the sun came up. I came down here to work and by the time I went back upstairs it was night. I missed the entire day. So I have all these clocks to remind me to take a break."
Michael Hart is one of those people who straddle the line between visionary genius and obsessive nutcase. "You know that episode of "Star Trek," when they look in the computer to find some 20th century book that tells them what to expect when they go back in time," Hart says. "How do you think those books got in the computer? That's me."
"I have an ulterior motive in dropping by," Kahle announces. "I want to convince you to drive this buggy around the country next year."
"Oh, man, I am so busy. I can't do anything until 2004. I'm on the final leg of a 30-year marathon. I can't do anything until I get 10,000 books."
"If I get you your books, will you go?" Kahle prods.
"Yes, if you get me to 10,000 books, I'll drive your buggy to all 50 states. After that, I'll go to 50 countries!"
"Great. You'll get your books."
Mission accomplished, sort of, the bookmobile heads on to Columbus.
. Next page | On the road to Washington, book binder in hand
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Riding along with the Internet Bookmobile | 1, 2, 3
Oct. 4, 2002, Great American Bookmobile Convention, Columbus, Ohio
Raj Reddy -- "god of computer science" is how Kahle describes him -- has trained generations of technologists at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. He has laid down the gauntlet for "universal access to human knowledge" (the phrase is his). His vision is to put a million public-domain books online and he has received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the effort. As the bookmobile travels the U.S., a ship carrying a container filled with Reddy's books is headed for China for a mass scanning effort. Even when scanning by the containerful, a million is a lot of books.
To grow from 20,000 to 1 million, the Million Book Project needs to change from the obsession of a few gifted computer scientists to a widespread, decentralized movement. Kahle wants people to bring their personal documents -- grandfather's book, letters found in an attic -- to him. The digital library needs librarians. We found them at the Great American Bookmobile Conference.
"We don't even know what treasures are out there in books that are out of print and still under copyright. Every book has some value even if it's just to the author and his descendents. We need to open our libraries so kids can learn from the full breadth of our knowledge," Kahle says.
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Michael Hart's line -- "The Internet brings the history of the world to your town and the history of your town to the world" -- strikes a chord with the librarians. One attendee of the conference is a clerk with a rural Pennsylvania library that prides itself on its genealogy collections. "People come from all over the world to research their ancestry," she says. "We're looking for a system to digitize our books. Some of them are quite rare, all of them are getting dog-eared. This answers everything we've been looking for."
Since Kahle is volunteering unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, "we can scan all this stuff, put it on the Web, and people can view it without having to travel to us. Then if they want to see the originals, they can still come to the library."
Oct. 5, 2002, Pittsburgh
It's still four days until the big day at the Supreme Court. We still have books to make at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh and schools in Baltimore and Washington. Many of us are exhausted from covering 2,000 miles in four days, but Brewster is even more invigorated than ever. He can't wait to stand beneath the stone-carved words "FREE FOR THE PEOPLE" that adorn the Carnegie and make books. The slogan, idealistic as it may be, fairly captures Brewster's wildest dreams for the Net. A massive library containing the full breadth of human knowledge and experience, freely and easily accessible to everyone on the planet. A library truly free to the people.
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The Ring was a good scare too, but you have to let it be a horror movie a couple times (re: lack of character development).
There was more than one unexpected jumping out of skin type scene and it didn't have dumb ending (two more positives in a horror flick).
Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile
One of the government's main arguments in Eldred--since they couldn't argue that extending copyrights retroactively stimulates creativity--was that work is more likely to be disseminated if a publisher or a studio has a commercial interest in distributing it. This is false in theory: How many people have seen "Steamboat Willie," Mickey Mouse's first film, which would have gone into the public domain if Sonny Bono hadn't intervened? How many would see it if it were freely available to be digitized and downloaded from Kazaa?
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Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile
by Richard Koman
10/18/2002
"Forget Mickey Mouse," Lawrence Lessig told an admiring crowd at a reception after the Supreme Court arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft. "The real opportunity is what Brewster is working on, what Eldred is working on. The opportunity is to take material and give it back to our culture."
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"Eldred," of course, is Eric Eldred, publisher of Eldritch Press and lead plaintiff in the case. "Brewster" is Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, and inventor of the Internet Bookmobile, a high-tech version of those buses with bookshelves that used to come visit your school in the second grade.
From September 30 until the big day on October 9, I traveled across the country with Brewster, his eight-year-old son Caslon and two other friends from San Francisco. Loaded in the back of the Bookmobile were an HP duplexing color printer, a couple of laptops, a desktop binding machine, and a paper cutter. On top was a MotoSat dish with Internet connection. We drove from San Francisco to Washington, D.C.--stopping at schools in East Palo Alto, California, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, and Washington; the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh; and the Great American Bookmobile Conference in Columbus, Ohio--taking ASCII text versions of public domain works available online and turning them into books. When the Bookmobile shows up at a school, kids get to operate the paper cutter to make books, each classroom gets a few books to keep, and everyone gets a lesson in the applications of the public domain.
While it wasn't always clear to the public what we were up to exactly--were we selling books? selling the equipment?--eventually the point crystallized: the Bookmobile is a demo of a public domain application. It addresses the basic question: What good is the public domain?
Related Article:
Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote from OSCON 2002 -- In his keynote address to a packed house at OSCON 2002, Lawrence Lessig challenges the open source audience to get more involved in the political process. Read the complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002.
Unlimited Possibilities
One of the government's main arguments in Eldred--since they couldn't argue that extending copyrights retroactively stimulates creativity--was that work is more likely to be disseminated if a publisher or a studio has a commercial interest in distributing it. This is false in theory: How many people have seen "Steamboat Willie," Mickey Mouse's first film, which would have gone into the public domain if Sonny Bono hadn't intervened? How many would see it if it were freely available to be digitized and downloaded from Kazaa?
But the Bookmobile shows that the proposition is false. In fact, the Bookmobile's message, in essence, is that these are books we can put in the hands of children, through schools, and we can do it at a very low cost. (The material cost for a black and white book with color cover is $1.) We can create large-print versions of these books and put them in the hands of senior citizens, and we can deliver them to their homes or to retirement centers. We can transform libraries into public-domain printing plants. And we can enable commercial publishers to create new products that attract new customers, both young and old.
Two things are required for these possibilities to be realized:
*
A rich public domain. Either the 1998 law must be overturned, or Congress must be convinced to repeal the law on its own. Failing a full-scale repeal, the retroactive clause (the part that extends Mickey Mouse's copyright, as opposed to the copyright on works not yet created) must be removed. This is not only because the current law outrageously denies hundreds of thousands of works to the public, but also because failure to overturn means that Congress is free to extend copyrights whenever it wants, and the words of the Constitution's framers--"limited terms"--are directly contradicted.
*
Putting the public domain online. Everything in the public domain must go on the Net. All of it. This is the single biggest action individuals can take. Find public domain materials, get them scanned and upload them to the Archive Web site. The Internet Archive is offering unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth for this purpose.
Who Gets It?
It's not at all clear that the Supreme Court will overturn. The case is "in trouble," Charles Nesson of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at U.C. Berkeley opined at a post-hearing reception on Capitol Hill. The trouble largely stems from the question of the massive rewrite of the Copyright Act in 1976, which extended copyright terms to lifetime of the author plus 50 years. How can the 1998 law be unconstitutional but the 1976 law just fine? Speaking at the reception, sponsored by Public Knowledge, Lessig based his hopes on faith that the Court would be as "creative" in its logic here as they have been in the past.
Still, Lessig is confident about the case. "I am obviously extremely happy with where we are," he writes in his Weblog. "The Court is struggling with the right issue; they are motivated to get the right answer; they have a clear and simple way to give the right answer; the government has made it very hard to accept its answer. It is always hard to get the Court to strike a law of Congress, but this law is so universally flawed, and the case against it is so universally strong, that I continue to be confident that the Court could choose to strike the law."
Whatever happens in the case, Lessig claimed victory for the cause, since "four years ago people told me I was insane to bring this case, not because it was without merits but because no one got it--not the press, not the public, certainly not the politicians." What happened in the Supreme Court argument, Lessig said, was that the Court showed they "got it." As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "It is hard to understand how, if the overall purpose of the Copyright Clause is to encourage creative work, how some retroactive extension could possibly do that. One wonders what was in the minds of Congress."
The public gets it, too. As we traveled the country and talked to people about the public domain, no one--not one single person--disagreed with this premise that more, not fewer, books should be in the public domain, and sooner rather than later. Not one single person in Utah or Ohio, Washington or California, said, "You're wrong--it's important for artists to enrich their heirs for another 20 years." No one said, "I think publishers and studios should be able to make money forever on their creations." No one said, "I couldn't care less if thousands of works are kept out of students' hands, so long as Disney gets to keep control of its movies forever."
Even the press gets it. After the argument, The New York Times editorialized: "The purpose of the 1998 Congressional extension was not protecting artists, but enriching media companies that hold property rights in their creations, virtually in perpetuity. The founders did not envision copyright being put to this use, and the Supreme Court should not allow it." A Washington Post editorial doubted the Court could overturn the law with legitimacy, but agreed that the law is atrocious policy: "At some point, serial and retroactive extensions of "limited times" render copyright protection unlimited. And it seems wrong for Congress to be able to circumvent what would clearly be unconstitutional--granting indefinite copyright protection--by simply extending protection incrementally every few years."
Regardless of the Court's decision, or public or press opinion on the matter, there still exists a public domain and it is effectively available to the public only to the degree that it is online. As Brewster says: "Never mind about the stuff that's still under copyright. If we can't get the public domain online, we don't deserve to get the other stuff." The Bookmobile was Brewster's attempt to show some of the public domain is online and to demonstrate an application of what can be done with it. But it is only a demo. The real payoff comes when mature institutions in critical positions take the public domain and run with it. Let's look at libraries, schools, and the commercial sector. In conclusion, we'll talk about what the government's responsibility is here.
Pages: 1, 2
Lessons from the Internet Bookmobile
Pages: 1, 2
Libraries
The bookmobile metaphor is designed to address the library world. To librarians, it says, you can do better. At the bookmobile conference in Columbus, vendors showed off $300,000 bookmobiles with fine oak bookshelves, computer stations, even mobile satellite dishes. Parked far from these budget-breakers, the Internet Bookmobile costs $15,000 tops, plus the cost of a minivan (the Aerostar was bought from a used car lot for under $4,000). To librarians, the Internet Bookmobile says, with a rich public domain, the Net, and inexpensive desktop equipment, you can wildly improve the quality of the services you offer. You can change libraries from expensive buildings with huge storage and retrieval costs, to a place where books are stored online and printed as desired. Libraries can become a place where books are custom-made.
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Even more radically, the Bookmobile says, why should libraries buy copies of public-domain works from publishers when they should be freely available online, and paperback copies can be created for $1. In point of fact, why should libraries lend public domain works at all, when they can just give them away?
Beyond all this, librarians can use the Net as a storage facility for special collections, which are not necessarily in book form. A librarian I met in Columbus, for example, explained that her library in rural Pennsylvania is well known for its genealogy collection, with patrons from around the world coming to research their families. A few days before we talked, someone had come in with several boxes of Grange records found in an attic. With such a collection digitized and online, the library improves preservation, increases access, decreases storage and maintenance costs, and frees librarians from spending time retrieving papers.
Even so, not all librarians are embracing the Internet wholeheartedly. The Library of Congress has received $100 million for digital preservation but few works have been digitized. And Michael Hart, creator of Project Gutenberg, tells a story about a meeting he had scheduled with a local librarian to give him a CD of Gutenberg texts. The librarian wasn't available so his assistant met Hart. When Michael told her, "I'm just dropping these books off for him," and handed her the CD, "She went completely ashen. Her eyes had the look of a deer caught in headlights. That's a look I had never seen before and I've never seen since."
Libraries have the budgets and they have the mission to support the digital future, but do they have the will?
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Schools
The opportunities at schools are huge. Schools are strapped by budget constraints and dependent on school districts and state boards to provide one-size-fits-all texts. Public schools could benefit immensely from being able to create books for their students.
Consider what happens when Digital Village put laptops in the hands of fourth to eighth graders at the Belle Haven School in East Palo Alto, California. According to the Digital Village project coordinator, computers in the homes result in increased parent-child interaction, increased focus in the classroom, more time spent reading (on screen), increased computer literacy among parents, and a sense among children of their place in larger world, as opposed to their local community.
What impact would putting books as well as computers into students' homes have? One can imagine increased literacy for both kids and adults (adults in inner-city Baltimore read at the fifth-grade level), more parent-child interaction as kids and parents read to each other, and of course, more success in schools as kids more willingly read their own books rather than assigned textbooks or library books they must return--if they can even find books they want to read in the under-financed schools and public libraries (a teacher in Salt Lake who previously worked in poor Chicago neighborhoods told me the public libraries' shelves there were simply bare; the high school we visited in Washington D.C. didn't even have a library).
Technology is cool, but books are not, right? Yet, when the Bookmobile pulled into the school playground, all the kids wanted books, wanted the low-tech thrill of pulling a paper cutter blade, and were thrilled by the simple activity of folding a piece of paper into a little eight-fold booklet. They were thrilled to have the same books that were no doubt gathering dust in the school library.
Schools can implement this technology for a small upfront investment and incidental costs. And the process of creating books can itself be turned into an educational experience for older children. Schools--especially underfunded inner-city schools--are miserably failing our children. They are growing up illiterate, unaware of their potential and their possibilities. Actively exploiting the public domain in the ways the Bookmobile suggests can radically change this.
Commercial
A few presses, such as Dover Books (the clip-art publisher) and Modern Library, have for many years made strong publishing businesses from the public domain. (O'Reilly's signature book covers of animal woodcuts originally came from Dover Books.) But what commercial opportunities does the Bookmobile concept present?
How about packaging the equipment Brewster culled together into a print-on-demand solution? Consider the words of one participant on the Archive's forums: "I would put out the money in a heartbeat, but don't really have a lot of time to spend learning how to set this all up. I live in a small town in Tennessee, and think it would be a wonderful community service."
Imagine not only schools and libraries buying such a solution but also Kinko's and Barnes & Noble. A few people we talked to were so turned on by the idea of creating their own books, they were talking about buying their own printer/binder/cutter setups. Imagine being able to go into Kinko's to print and bind your book, or finding an old gem in a bookstore and scanning, printing, and binding it as a gift for friends. Imagine B&N turning its own imprint of the classics into a print-on-demand service.
Strange to think about, when the debate is often positioned as Silicon Valley versus Hollywood, but Hollywood can be one of the greatest promoters of the public domain by turning public-domain properties into valuable commercial properties. Since The Secret Garden enter the public domain in 1986, more than a dozen properties have been created, including TV movies, books, audio books, and plays, according to Arizona State law professor Dennis Karjala.
Government
Obviously, government is part of the problem, since it was Congress that passed the 1998 law that locked so many works out of the public domain. But there are many aspects of government. The National Science Foundation has given Carnegie Mellon $500,000 for its Million Book Project. They could give many more grants, not only for the MBP, but also to library science programs, to the study of improvements in OCR technology, and so forth.
The Library of Congress can put the digitizing of public-domain works on the fast track.
The Education Department and state Boards of Education can buy the Bookmobile's print-on-demand system and place it in schools, much as what happened with putting the Internet in the schools.
The Archive is donating unlimited storage space for the digital public-domain library. Surely the government can at least match that commitment.
I'm sure other government employees and those who follow government closer than I do can think of additional government programs that could help speed up the digitization of the public domain.
Conclusion
As I've said here, the Bookmobile is a demo of a public domain application. Traveling "on the bus" has brought to my mind a few ideas for other demonstrable applications. It has also made clear that it is critical to get from "demo" to "shipping product." We should turn not only minivans but also schools, libraries, homes, print shops, and bookstores into book publishing and book scanning operations. In this way the value of the public domain becomes tangible and improved. The more that people actually use public domain works, the more likely they are to contribute to it, and to fight for it.
Richard Koman is a freelance writer and editor. He is a regular contributor to New Architect magazine and the O'Reilly Network.
Whack back on Nov. 5
By Stephen Goldstein for the Florida Sun-Sentinel
Here's the text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/sfl-sgcol16oct16.story
Columnist Stephen Goldstein Stephen Goldstein
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Whack back on Nov. 5
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Bushwhacked-Floridians are worse off than we were four years ago. Thanks to Jeb Bush's voodoo economics, smoke-and-mirrors education reforms, environmental poison pills and right-wing pandering, the state is in shambles. Florida needs regime change. Here are 24 reasons to vote the governor out of office on Nov. 5.
1. Jeb has turned the $3 billion surplus he inherited from Lawton Chiles into a deficit of between $1.4 billion and $4 billion.
2. The governor has engineered multibillion-dollar tax giveaways for corporations and the wealthiest Floridians.
3. Florida's pension fund lost $355 million on its Enron investments, buying shares in the company when everyone was selling.
4. The average wage in Florida has dropped to just 87 percent of the national norm.
5. Florida is one of only 12 states in which median household income declined in 2001.
6. The governor promised to eliminate the backlog of 11,000 seniors on the waiting list for services through the Department of Elder Affairs. Today, the list has swelled to over 14,000.
7. Health insurance costs are spiraling out-of-control.
8. Jeb's prescription drug plan covers only 68,000 seniors, barely 2.5 percent of the state's older population.
9. In spite of Bushian buzzwords about improving education (FCAT, A+ Plan, vouchers and charter schools), Florida's high-school graduation rate has slipped from 44th to the worst in America.
10. SAT scores have dropped from 40th to 47th; ACT scores, from 35th to 38th.
11. Pre-Jeb, Florida was 29th nationally in spending per pupil; in 2001, it fell to 40th.
12. The governor's alleged $3 billion increase in education funding is a figment of his imagination. Factor in inflation and student growth, and the money allocated per student has risen less than one-quarter of one percent.
13. Class size in Florida schools, among the worst in the nation, dropped from 42nd in 1998 to 44th in 2001.
14. Research cited by the U.S. Department of Education concludes that reducing class size to below 20 students leads to higher achievement, but the governor says he has "devious plans" to flout the constitutional amendment reducing class size if it passes Nov. 5 and he is re-elected.
15. Florida's teacher salaries have dropped from 28th to 31st in the nation.
16. A national study of higher education gave Florida a D- because of relatively high college costs and a D+ because comparatively few state residents go to college.
17. The governor has grabbed the power to appoint everyone on the state's 26 judicial nominating commissions, so he can stack the courts with right-wing judges opposed to abortion and likely to push a conservative agenda.
18. Candidate Bush promised to fix Florida's foster-care system in six months; Gov. Bush let the Department of Children & Families become a national scandal.
19. On the environment, Jeb talks the conservation talk, but doesn't walk the walk. In public, he says the right things; behind the scenes, he pushes developers' agendas.
20. The governor has appointed anti-environmentalists to water management districts, the Environmental Regulatory Commission and judgeships.
21. Ignoring the objections of more than 100 environmental and citizens' groups, Jeb signed a law which funds the state's portion of Everglades restoration, but includes a "poison pill" that restricts Floridians' ability to challenge developers who submit anti-environmental permit requests.
22. Violent crime in the state increased at six times the national average from 2001 to 2002.
23. For the first time since 1996, overall crime incidence in Florida increased.
24. The governor claims his 10-20-Life law has led to a decrease in gun crime, but the firearm crime rate was on the decline before 10-20-Life and actually increased in 2001 -- for the first time since 1997.
In 1998, candidate Jeb asked you to give him four years, so he could create a better Florida. Many of you kept your end of the bargain; he didn't. "Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me." -- the truth of the adage should not be lost on voters.
Stop the bushwhacking: Whack Bush out of office on Nov. 5.
Stephen L. Goldstein's commentaries are broadcast on "South Florida Today" on WXEL-Ch. 42. E-mail him at trendsman@aol.com.
Michael Moore has created another masterpiece and accomplished a number of excellent goals in the process (like getting K-Mart to stop selling gun ammunition).
Bowling for Columbine is funny. Timely, and well worth the cash.
Go see it quick before it leaves town!
Here's an interview with Michael Moore about the film.
Here's another review from Common Dreams:
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Here's the full text of the links I cite in case they go bad:
http://www.abc.net.au/arts/film/stories/s654932.htm
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Craig Baldwin: Raider of the Lost Reel
5 December 2001
FAKING IT: THE MOCKUMENTARY
4 January 2002
Mike Moore reflects
Mike Moore laughs
Mike Moore making his point
Film : Feature graphic
Mike Moore Speaks:
Bowling for Columbine
Mike Moore at Cannes Film Festival 2002
Mike Moore at the Cannes
Film Festival 2002
On the morning of Tuesday 20 April 1999 in the middle-class town of Littleton, Colorado, USA, Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17) began a rampage through the corridors of Columbine High School that ultimately ended their own lives and those of thirteen others; twenty-five more were injured.
Homemade bombs and explosive devices were found planted around the building and several survivors later reported that Harris and Klebold were smiling and laughing as they shot their fellow students.
This outrage shook the whole country and inspired Moore to make Bowling for Columbine to explore issues of gun control, racism and the politics of fear in America.
Bowling for Columbine became the first documentary to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival official selection for fifty-five years. It competed for the prestigious Palm D’Or with traditional feature films such as, The Pianist (Roman Polanski), All or Nothing (Mike Leigh), Kedma (Amos Gitai) and more than a dozen others.
Bowling for Columbine was awarded a newly created special award and many critics hailed the feature length documentary as a sign of the rebirth of the form.
Much sought after by the press and fans in Cannes, Moore conducted dozens of press conferences. In this fascinating session before a crowded room of international press and American film students he discusses his fears, obsessions, movie making techniques and some of the incidents that took place during the making of Bowling for Columbine.
Question and answer session discussing Bowling for Columbine, at the American pavilion, Cannes Film Festival, May 22, 2002,
Moderator: Elvis Mitchell, film critic of the New York Times.
Elvis Mitchell:
Your style is a mixture of journalism and entertainment. The style is forceful but not hectoring. In Bowling for Columbine you discuss not just gun control but also racism and the media created culture of fear.
Mike Moore:
I thought it would be interesting to take a journey through this culture of fear. Most journalism does the who, what, when, where and how questions. But very few people in the media ask why does this happen? Why do we have 250 million guns in our homes especially when there’s been a huge decrease in crime?
Elvis Mitchell:
A lot of your movie style is about serendipity too.
Mike Moore on Moments of Serendipity
Video of Mike Moore - "Moments of Serpendipity" (29 secs, 1.4 Mb Real Media File)
Mike Moore:
We stopped in for gas at a gas station and, if you’ve seen the movie, there’s a kid who wishes he was number one on the bomb suspect list but was bummed out because he was number two suspect after Columbine in the local school in Michigan.
We found him because he saw the camera equipment in the car and one of our film producers told him what we were doing and the kid says, ’Oh, I went to school here with Eric Harris one of the kids who did the killings here at Columbine – we were in the same class together.’
And it’s like (for me), ’Don’t say anymore’. Because if you say it and he has to say it a second time, it’ll sound like he repeated it.
So then we got the camera gear out, and that’s even before we knew about him being on the bomb list. He told us this incredible story about making bombs and napalm and being number two on the bomb list. And so many of those things we find out are in those moments of serendipity.
I don’t start with a rigid script. I don’t have a thesis that I have to shoehorn every interview into and I love being surprised and my own thinking being proved wrong.
I ring the bell at the gate and out of the box comes the voice of Moses. I’m thinking, ‘Holy shit, I don’t deserve this kind of good luck.
You know, finding Heston, we tried for two years to get him. We’re on the way to the airport in LA and someone in the van says, ’Lets get a Star Map and see if we can find Heston’.
Mike Moore speaking about Finding Heston
Video of Mike Moore - "Out of the box comes the voice of Moses" (40 secs, 1.9 Mb Real Media File)
I said, ‘Those things are no good, those things are bogus’.
But they started up like kids, ‘Na, I wanna a starmap, let’s get a starmap’.
And I say, ‘Yeah, ok’. So we stop and when we get one I say, ’Look at this. See what I’m tellin’ ya. Here’s the home of Andre Agassi and Brooke Shieilds - there is no home of Andre Agassi and Brooke Sheilds’.
‘Na, but there’s Heston. Lets go see if it’s real.’
So we drive up the road. I didn’t expect it to be his house. When you see the movie you’ll notice we didn’t even bother to wipe off the bird dirt from the wind shield. The guys are shooting it from in the van as we’re driving. So I ring the bell at the gate and out of the box comes the voice of Moses. I’m thinkin’, ‘Holy shit I don’t deserve this kind of good luck. I can’t believe I wasn’t going to get the star map and get up here’.
[ Editor’s note. Heston politely agreed to a television interview for the next day where upon Moore asked detailed questions about the nature of the National Rifle Association.]
Historians will write about us in the same way we now read of the Greeks and the Romans - as warrior cultures hell bent on killing people.
Audience member:
I grew up near Littleton (where the massacre took place) and I thought you handled the subject very sensitively. What attracted you to the story?
Mike Moore:
Remember there was a spate of these suburban school massacres. I was just intrigued that they were all occurring in these white, middle class communities. I guess that was one of the first things I thought about and I quickly came to the conclusion that we don’t know why, and probably no one will ever really know why these two kids did this.
It became a less important question to ask why they did it than to take a look at the fabric of the society we live in and the culture they lived in. Not just in Littleton but in any small town. You could’ve thrown a dart at any town on the map in America and done a tour similar to the one I did in Denver of the military installations, of the nuclear missles, the military culture that we live in.
Historians will write about us in the same way we now read of the Greeks and the Romans - as warrior cultures hell bent on killing people. We think of ourselves as more civilised but trust me, in 500 years from now that’s how historians and anthropologists will describe us - as a very strange group.
Thanks for liking the film. I’m very concerned about how people will take this in Denver and Littleton I wouldn’t want anyone to feel anymore pain than they already feel. The worst school massacre did not happen in Columbine it happened in Bath, Michigan in 1927. The school board treasurer put dynamite in the basement of the school and killed 44 children. We’ve always had crazy people. What you’ve got to try to do is make sure that when they snap, they don’t have easy access to assault weapons.
… every bad thing that has happened to me in my life, every piece of harm, has been from white people.
Elvis Mitchell:
Fear is one of the main themes.
Mike Moore:
I wanted to ask, ‘What are we afraid of?’. I wanted to do a word association with white people. Instead of words, I’d do pictures and so I’d go to the white suburbs and say, ‘You’ve got these burglar alarms, locks and these guns. Who are you afraid of? What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of someone who’s going to hurt you?”.
‘Is it a woman?’. So right away,’No’. Nobody believes a woman is going to mug them, break into their homes, kill them, rape them. It’s never a woman. You can eliminate 53% of the population right there.
‘So it’s a man, isn’t it?’. Then, let me ask you this: ’Is it little freckle faced Jimmy here, or is it Hakim?’. And a number of them were quite honest and those who weren’t honest would give, ’Well, I’m afraid of both of them’.
‘Come on’, I’d say. ‘Sweet little Jimmy here, that’s not who’s in your head. Why is Hakim, or Jose in your head? Who’s done this to you? Is it your personal experience?’
I write about it in my book - every bad thing that has happened to me in my life, every piece of harm, has been from white people. I have never had a black car salesman rip me off. I have never had a black landlord hold back my security deposit. I have never had a black teacher hold back giving me a grade I deserved.
I go back to when I was a kid. I’m thinking, ‘Jeez, every single thing has had a white face on it. Why would I be afraid of anybody black?’. And yet white people, - that would be most of you in here - if I could ask you honestly, or attach a heart monitor as you walk through any major city in America – the difference between three black teenagers walking towards you and three white one’s - I guarantee your heart is going to beat a little faster when it’s the black kids. And I’ll even admit that, and I believe I don’t have a racist bone in my body. So how has it embedded itself in my physiology? It’s so ingrained, so beaten into us from such an early age. How do we escape this?
Elvis Mitchell:
Did you ever think of using a clip from ‘Birth of a Nation’ (1916 film which portrays blacks as rapists and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes) because that really is where the stigma began being attached to black people. That is the beginning of it.
Mike Moore:
That’s right, and people say, ’But Mike, that was a long time ago. Why are you talking about it now?’ But as I pointed out in my book, my grandfather was born three years after the civil war (1865) so it’s not that long ago.
This (racism) is a horrible, immoral, vicious legacy [and] we still live with the results of it until this day. We have not addressed it. We refuse to bring it up. I’m bringing it up because I want us to deal with it. I want to deal with it personally and I don’t mean dealing with it in the namby pamby liberal way of patronising it. I’m saying, ‘Let’s just cut the bullshit, white man, and resolve this’.
Mike Moore ponders
Elvis Mitchell:
But one of the guys who was one of America’s biggest liberals, who marched with Martin Luther King in the ‘60’s, is in your film, [Charlton Heston] who is now one of the biggest representatives of the other side.
Mike Moore:
Right, Charlton Heston. He was a liberal democrat in the 1960’s. He was there marching with [Martin Luther] King. Before I got into the main discussion you see in the film I was talking to him about movies and politics and asked, ’Where did you make the change from Liberal Democrat to Conservative Republican?’
He said, ’Well, I was in Northern California in 1964 and I was making a film, Major Dundee. I was driving down the road and there was a Barry Goldwater for President billboard and it said, ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right’. I looked at the billboard and it was almost a vision and suddenly in my heart I knew he was right - and at that moment I made the switch’.
I show a fifty year period from 1953 to now of US intervention worldwide - and it’s a pretty ugly story.
Mike Moore:
When we first went to Littleton I did not know that the number one employer of the parents of the Columbine massacre kids was Lockheed Martin – the number one weapons manufacturer in the United States. I was shocked that we didn’t know this – not that it means anything specifically. I’m not saying that because your parents build MX missles your kids are going to kill a lot of kids at school. I’m not making that connection. I’m just saying military culture is woven into the fabric of American society in ways that we don’t even think about.
So I’m talking to a spokesman from Lockheed - they actually let me in the factory - and I said, ‘Do you think anyone makes the connection here (between building weapons and using them)?’.
He said, ’No, these weapons we’re building, they’re for defence and as Americans we don’t just go and drop bombs on people or fire weapons at them (like the kids did at Columbine)’. We cut that into the film before September 11th.
What a horrible day that was (9/11). We live in New York but we were in Los Angeles … and we got a hire car and drove across America by the Southern route. But instead of hearing the bloodthirsty cries for revenge which I thought we’d hear in Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri, what we heard in the diners, in the motels and on the talk back radio was a lot of questions: ’Why?’ ‘Who did this?’ ‘Why do they hate us?’.
There was an innocence about the way the question was posed and after we got back home I thought; we should put the why in here. So I show [in the film] a fifty year period from 1953 to now of US intervention worldwide - and it’s a pretty ugly story.
Mike Moore telling his story
I took that sequence out and then put it back in because I was thinking, ’This is too harsh, this is really a bucket of cold water in people’s face’. But I want to make the type of film that doesn’t preach to the converted. I want people to be able to listen to me. I don’t want them to go, ’What’s wrong with this guy? Doesn’t he like this country?’ Because I love this country. I want it to get better. So in the end I decided to keep it in - it’s got to be said and I know it’s pretty confronting.
Elvis Mitchell:
You showed the aftermath of September 11th; people buying gas masks and buying guns. Were you concerned about using that as one of the motifs of the picture?
Mike Moore:
Here’s why this should be in the movie. Because of the way fear works, the best way to convince people to be afraid is to show them enough truth, enough that is real so that they will be afraid.
I’m a non-violent person so I’m not going to revolt or rebel with weapons or violence so my sense of humour, my desire to ridicule those in power is very strong and I want to encourage other people to use it.
Audience member:
You have a lot of humour in your work. Why?
Mike Moore:
I think that humour can be the most devastating of weapons, and ridicule is probably the worst. To ridicule those in power. For example: on our TV show (The Awful Truth) there was a guy [and] his HMO (personal medical insurance) wouldn’t cover his operation - so he was going to die. So we went and conducted the guy’s funeral on the lawn of the headquarters of his HMO. It so ridiculed and shamed them that three days later they paid for the guy’s operation and he lived.
And I know some people don’t like that and don’t like the method but when you come from where we come from, what are our tools? I’m a non-violent person so I’m not going to revolt or rebel with weapons or violence so my sense of humour or my desire to ridicule those in power is very strong and I want to encourage other people to use it. Because it’s an effective weapon to make things better.
Elvis Mitchell:
Tell me why you joined the National Rifle Association
Mike Moore:
I got an automatic junior membership in Boy Scouts. But of course back then the NRA did gun safety classes. It was a sports organisation, not a front for a right wing agenda. I then rejoined after Columbine with the intention of finding out all I could.
One of the stunts we pulled was with K-Mart where the kids bought the bullets for Columbine. I go to the K-Mart headquarters in Troy, Michigan to ask K-Mart to stop selling bullets for handguns and assault weapons. We went there one day and we went back the second day with press and a bunch of bullets that a kid had bought the night before at K-Mart. Within hours they came down. We could see the guy when we got there. He had the look on his face like he knew it was over. Within an hour they announced they were going to stop selling bullets in all 2300 stores. And you can see the look on my face because I’m used to being tossed out of these places - getting the short shrift. All I could think of was to shake hands and say thanks.
… and the longer we go without saying what needs to be said the more they continue to shred the constitution, take away our civil liberties and move the country to the right.
Mike Moore laughs
Audience member:
When you enter these adversarial situations do you ever feel uncomfortable and nervous or do you always feel excited?
Mike Moore:
I am actually very nervous. My stomach is in a hundred knots when I walk into these places. It may look like something else on camera but I’m very nervous. I go to the bathroom first. I’m an introverted person who likes to keep to himself and is nervous around people. I had two dates in High School I was always waiting for someone to ask me out.
Elvis Mitchell:
Where does this confrontational performance style come from?
Mike Moore:
I didn’t make Roger and Me until I was 35. I just get to the point where if nobody is going to do it then I just gotta go do it. There’s this nagging thing that I think, ’God’, I’ve been feeling this about 9/11. Where’s the movie on this? The real one?’.
I’ve been playing with this animated feature I’ve been doing for fun but then it’s, ’Ah, shit. I have to make this (9/11) film’ … because I don’t think it’s going to get made and the longer we go without saying what needs to be said the more they continue to shred the constitution, take away our civil liberties and move the country to the right.
It’s vital. Otherwise nobody will try and ask the question, ’Why do they hate us?’. I just think we’ve been lied to so much.
Journalism works like an assembly line worker building a car. There’s a certain way of doing things and if I do it the same way each time I actually get a pay check at the end of the week. And unfortunately that’s the level of journalism in the States.
Audience member:
Is there a right wing conspiracy in the media?
Mike Moore:
I’ve never suggested a conspiracy. It’s not a conspriacy when Time and Newsweek end up with the same covers week after week. I think that we’re all in a general mind set in the news media. Journalism works like an assembly line worker building a car. There’s a certain way of doing things and if I do it the same way each time I actually get a pay check at the end of the week. And unfortunately that’s the level of journalism in the States.
But I’m concerned about the creation of fear –the idea of the malevolent, ’other’. After about two days in the Middle East you notice how similar everyone is and and you really don’t know if that person is Jewish or Arab … or whether the food is Arab food or Israeli food or the music.
One thing that strikes me is how this concept of fear has been used not just in America but around the world through the ages - where this person is different, is your enemy - when in fact this person is you. It’s so crazy, and the way that those with power, money and greed as their motives manipulate this [fear] to create a world of haves and have nots. I think that ultimately is what is underneath all of this.
Bowling for Columbine will screen in Australian cinemas later this year.
Reporter/Video: John Doggett Williams
****
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1019-06.htm
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Published on Saturday, October 19, 2002 by CommonDreams.org
Bowling for Baghdad
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Last week, your nation's capital was a bit more surreal than usual.
First and foremost, there is the sniper.
And just when the sniper arrives in the neighborhood, here comes Michael Moore with his much awaited critique of violence in America -- Bowling for Columbine.
We have three words of advice: go see it.
In one scene, Moore, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, goes to door to door in Toronto, Canada, doesn't knock, and just walks in.
Apparently, in Canada, many people don't lock their doors.
This in a country, Canada, where there are 7 million guns for a population of 33 million.
But in Canada there are fewer than 400 gun deaths a year.
In the United States, we hit 400 in two weeks -- that's 11,000 gun deaths a year.
In the U.S., eight children under the age of 18 are killed by guns in America every day.
Moore raises a disturbing question: if it's just the guns, stupid, then how come Canadians are not slaughtering themselves the way we are slaughtering ourselves?
This question takes Moore to Littleton, Colorado, the site of the Columbine massacre, home to the war machine Lockheed Martin, the war machine that sponsors the news on National Public Radio.
There he interviews a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin, who tells Moore that the weapons the company builds there are used by the United States for defensive purposes.
Moore then cues up the war footage and runs through the history of U.S. aggression throughout the world -- from Central American, to the Middle East, to Southeast Asia.
This juxtaposition of government and corporate violence with grainy film from the Columbine school's security camera capturing young children massacring young children drives home Moore's larger point -- that the violence and duplicity in our society starts at the top.
Which brings us back to our nation's capital, where both parties' leadership, in part at the urging of the military-industrial-complex, gave the green light last week for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq.
We attended a press conference held by House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Missouri), the day after Gephardt went to the White House, stood by Bush, and gave the green light for war.
We had with us an editorial from that morning's St. Louis Post Dispatch titled "Gephardt Caves." Our sentiment exactly.
In it, Gephardt's hometown paper said that the reason he sided with Bush was because he wanted to be Speaker of the House, and then President. (This pattern, by the way, followed for other Democratic presidential hopefuls -- Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota), Hillary Clinton (D-New York), John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut), Diane Feinstein (D-California), John Edwards (D-North Carolina) -- all of whom voted with Bush on the war.)
All said it was not about politics -- not when young (American) lives are at stake.
But the Post-Dispatch called Gephardt on it.
Gephardt "protests too much when he says he is rising above politics."
"He wants to be speaker of the House -- or president," the Post Dispatch wrote. "He can't achieve either goal taking an unpopular stand against a war against Saddam."
We asked Gephardt whether he wanted be speaker or President.
"That's irrelevant," he shot back.
Not.
We then went over to the White House, where Ari Fleischer was conducting one of his press briefings.
We wanted to know about a two-sentence letter from Theodore Sorensen, the former legal advisor to President John F. Kennedy, that was published in the New York Times.
Sorensen wrote this:
"President Bush has not yet openly reprimanded his press secretary, Ari Fleischer, for suggesting that 'a bullet' is the cheapest way of accomplishing his goal of regime change in Iraq. Is it possible that the United States now endorses for other countries a policy of presidential assassination, the very epitome of terrorism, after our own tragic experience with that despicable act?"
So, Ari, did the President reprimand you?
Ari says: "As far as that is concerned, on the policy, as you know -- I think you were here when I said on the record that that is not -- and people heard it the day I said it -- that is not a statement of administration policy."
But did the President reprimand you for saying that?
Ari says: "I think I have made the views clear of where the White House is on this."
Not.
We then head back over to the Congress, where the war-mongerer Senator Lieberman was releasing a Senate Governmental Affairs report on why Enron happened.
The conclusion: "All the public and private agencies that were supposed to exercise oversight and protect investors failed miserably."
The report was especially critical of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for failing to review any of Enron's annual reports after its 1997 filing. Before going over to the Lieberman briefing, we rang up former SEC chair Arthur Levitt.
We asked Levitt what we should ask Lieberman.
"Ask him -- where was Lieberman?" Levitt told us. "He was busy tying up the SEC in knots over auditors' independence, over the budget, and over options accounting."
We put this to Lieberman.
Lieberman gets testy and shoots back:
"Well, I hope he didn't say that, and if he did, it is grossly unfair and inaccurate."
Actually, quite fair and accurate.
Michael Moore is a political agitator.
Go to see his movie -- and take as many friends and family members with you as possible.
Gephardt, Lieberman and Bush are political leaders.
Listen to them, and you can only get angry -- and then organize to kick these guys out of office.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999; http://www.corporatepredators.org).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
###
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Here's a good site if you're interested in which Senators and Representatives voted "No" on the Iraq Resolution (like I am):
Here's the full text of the page in case the link goes bad:
http://www.clw.org/control/iraqvote.html
Roll Call Vote on Iraq Resolution
Elections
110 Maryland Ave. NE
Washington, DC 20002
(202) 543-4100
clw@clw.org
October 11, 2002
Senate Roll Call
The 77-23 roll call by which the Senate voted Friday, October 11 to authorize President Bush to use military force, if necessary, to disarm Iraq.
On this vote, a "yes" vote was a vote to pass the resolution and a "no" vote was a vote to defeat it.
Voting "yes" were 29 Democrats and 48 Republicans.
Voting "no" were 21 Democrats, one Republican and one independent.
Democrats Yes:
Baucus, Mont. Bayh, Ind. Biden, Del.
Breaux, La. Cantwell, Wash. Carnahan, Mo.
Carper, Del. Cleland, Ga. Clinton, N.Y.
Daschle, S.D. Dodd, Conn. Dorgan, N.D.
Edwards, N.C. Feinstein, Calif. Harkin, Iowa
Hollings, S.C. Johnson, S.D. Kerry, Mass.
Kohl, Wis. Landrieu, La. Lieberman, Conn.
Lincoln, Ark. Miller, Ga. Nelson, Fla.
Nelson, Neb. Reid, Nev. Rockefeller, W.Va.
Schumer, N.Y. Torricelli, N.J.
Democrats No:
Akaka, Hawaii Bingaman, N.M. Boxer, Calif
Byrd, W.Va. Conrad, N.D. Corzine, N.J.
Dayton, Minn. Durbin, Ill. Feingold, Wis
Graham, Fla. Inouye, Hawaii Kennedy, Mass.
Leahy, Vt. Levin, Mich. Mikulski, Md.
Murray, Wash. Reed, R.I. Sarbanes, Md.
Stabenow, Mich. Wellstone, Minn. Wyden, Ore.
Republicans Yes:
Allard, Colo. Allen, Va. Bennett, Utah
Bond, Mo. Brownback, Kan. Bunning, Ky.
Burns, Mont. Campbell, Colo. Cochran, Miss.
Collins, Maine Craig, Idaho Crapo, Idaho
DeWine, Ohio Domenici, N.M. Ensign, Nev.
Enzi, Wyo. Fitzgerald, Ill. Frist, Tenn.
Gramm, Texas Grassley, Iowa Gregg, N.H.
Hagel, Neb. Hatch, Utah Helms, N.C.
Hutchinson, Ark. Hutchison, Texas Inhofe, Okla.
Kyl, Ariz. Lott, Miss. Lugar, Ind.
McCain, Ariz. McConnell, Ky. Murkowski, Alaska
Nickles, Okla. Roberts, Kan. Santorum, Pa.
Sessions, Ala. Shelby, Ala. Smith, N.H.
Smith, Ore. Snowe, Maine Specter, Pa.
Stevens, Alaska Thomas, Wyo. Thompson, Tenn.
Thurmond, S.C. Voinovich, Ohio Warner, Va.
Republicans No: Chafee, R.I.;
Others No: Jeffords, Vt.
House Vote
FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 455
(Republicans in roman; Democrats in italic; Independents underlined)
H J RES 114 YEA-AND-NAY 10-OCT-2002 3:05 PM
QUESTION: On Passage
BILL TITLE: To Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq
YEAS NAYS PRES NV
REPUBLICAN 215 6 2
DEMOCRATIC 81 126 1
INDEPENDENT 1
TOTALS 296 133 3
--- YEAS 296 ---
Ackerman Goode Oxley
Aderholt Goodlatte Pascrell
Akin Gordon Pence
Andrews Goss Peterson (MN)
Armey Graham Peterson (PA)
Bachus Granger Petri
Baker Graves Phelps
Ballenger Green (TX) Pickering
Barcia Green (WI) Pitts
Barr Greenwood Platts
Bartlett Grucci Pombo
Barton Gutknecht Pomeroy
Bass Hall (TX) Portman
Bentsen Hansen Pryce (OH)
Bereuter Harman Putnam
Berkley Hart Quinn
Berman Hastert Radanovich
Berry Hastings (WA) Ramstad
Biggert Hayes Regula
Bilirakis Hayworth Rehberg
Bishop Hefley Reynolds
Blagojevich Herger Riley
Blunt Hill Roemer
Boehlert Hilleary Rogers (KY)
Boehner Hobson Rogers (MI)
Bonilla Hoeffel Rohrabacher
Bono Hoekstra Ros-Lehtinen
Boozman Holden Ross
Borski Horn Rothman
Boswell Hoyer Royce
Boucher Hulshof Ryan (WI)
Boyd Hunter Ryun (KS)
Brady (TX) Hyde Sandlin
Brown (SC) Isakson Saxton
Bryant Israel Schaffer
Burr Issa Schiff
Burton Istook Schrock
Buyer Jefferson Sensenbrenner
Callahan Jenkins Sessions
Calvert John Shadegg
Camp Johnson (CT) Shaw
Cannon Johnson (IL) Shays
Cantor Johnson, Sam Sherman
Capito Jones (NC) Sherwood
Carson (OK) Kanjorski Shimkus
Castle Keller Shows
Chabot Kelly Shuster
Chambliss Kennedy (MN) Simmons
Clement Kennedy (RI) Simpson
Coble Kerns Skeen
Collins Kind (WI) Skelton
Combest King (NY) Smith (MI)
Cooksey Kingston Smith (NJ)
Cox Kirk Smith (TX)
Cramer Knollenberg Smith (WA)
Crane Kolbe Souder
Crenshaw LaHood Spratt
Crowley Lampson Stearns
Cubin Lantos Stenholm
Culberson Latham Sullivan
Cunningham LaTourette Sununu
Davis (FL) Lewis (CA) Sweeney
Davis, Jo Ann Lewis (KY) Tancredo
Davis, Tom Linder Tanner
Deal LoBiondo Tauscher
DeLay Lowey Tauzin
DeMint Lucas (KY) Taylor (MS)
Deutsch Lucas (OK) Taylor (NC)
Diaz-Balart Luther Terry
Dicks Lynch Thomas
Dooley Maloney (NY) Thornberry
Doolittle Manzullo Thune
Dreier Markey Thurman
Dunn Mascara Tiahrt
Edwards Matheson Tiberi
Ehlers McCarthy (NY) Toomey
Ehrlich McCrery Turner
Emerson McHugh Upton
Engel McInnis Vitter
English McIntyre Walden
Etheridge McKeon Walsh
Everett McNulty Wamp
Ferguson Meehan Watkins (OK)
Flake Mica Watts (OK)
Fletcher Miller, Dan Waxman
Foley Miller, Gary Weiner
Forbes Miller, Jeff Weldon (FL)
Ford Moore Weldon (PA)
Fossella Moran (KS) Weller
Frelinghuysen Murtha Wexler
Frost Myrick Whitfield
Gallegly Nethercutt Wicker
Ganske Ney Wilson (NM)
Gekas Northup Wilson (SC)
Gephardt Norwood Wolf
Gibbons Nussle Wynn
Gilchrest Osborne Young (AK)
Gillmor Ose Young (FL)
Gilman Otter
--- NAYS 133 ---
Abercrombie Hinchey Oberstar
Allen Hinojosa Obey
Baca Holt Olver
Baird Honda Owens
Baldacci Hooley Pallone
Baldwin Hostettler Pastor
Barrett Houghton Paul
Becerra Inslee Payne
Blumenauer Jackson (IL) Pelosi
Bonior Jackson-Lee (TX) Price (NC)
Brady (PA) Johnson, E. B. Rahall
Brown (FL) Jones (OH) Rangel
Brown (OH) Kaptur Reyes
Capps Kildee Rivers
Capuano Kilpatrick Rodriguez
Cardin Kleczka Roybal-Allard
Carson (IN) Kucinich Rush
Clay LaFalce Sabo
Clayton Langevin Sanchez
Clyburn Larsen (WA) Sanders
Condit Larson (CT) Sawyer
Conyers Leach Schakowsky
Costello Lee Scott
Coyne Levin Serrano
Cummings Lewis (GA) Slaughter
Davis (CA) Lipinski Snyder
Davis (IL) Lofgren Solis
DeFazio Maloney (CT) Stark
DeGette Matsui Strickland
Delahunt McCarthy (MO) Stupak
DeLauro McCollum Thompson (CA)
Dingell McDermott Thompson (MS)
Doggett McGovern Tierney
Doyle McKinney Towns
Duncan Meek (FL) Udall (CO)
Eshoo Meeks (NY) Udall (NM)
Evans Menendez Velazquez
Farr Millender-McDonald Visclosky
Fattah Miller, George Waters
Filner Mollohan Watson (CA)
Frank Moran (VA) Watt (NC)
Gonzalez Morella Woolsey
Gutierrez Nadler Wu
Hastings (FL) Napolitano
Hilliard Neal
--- NOT VOTING 3 ---
Ortiz Roukema Stump
The contents of this page may be reproduced in whole or in part without further permission with proper credit given.
The 'Marybeth' that I'm singing to in my James and Marybeth song is finally getting some media attention.
See why what she thinks is so important guys?
I wonder if she's heard my song...
She Holds the Cards in Copyright Fight
By for the LA Times
Peters believes that many "fair-use" practices consumers take for granted, such as taping a TV program or copying a magazine article, need to be reevaluated in the digital age because the economic harm to copyright owners is far greater. For instance, she agrees with court rulings that Napster-style song swapping over the Internet is illegal."Some of the activities you tolerate in a non-digital world are because of the inefficiency of making the copy, how the copy is degraded, and the difficulty in sending copies to someone beyond yourself," Peters said. "All of those things go away in a digital environment."
As Congress has deferred some of the stickiest questions to the Copyright Office, Peters finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to set many of the ground rules for the digital age and, in some ways, pick the winners.
...Peters says she strives to be fair and consider all viewpoints but is limited by statutes set by Congress.Some would like to see Peters become more active in negotiating a truce in the copyright battle. But she said that is not her role, unless Congress asks.
"We've offered on more than one occasion to take on an assignment from Congress to try to get the parties together to see if they could come up with some guidelines for uses under the fair-use doctrine," Peters said. "Nobody took us up on it."
Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-copy19oct19,0,5760167.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dbusiness%2Dmanual
She Holds the Cards in Copyright Fight
* An official in an obscure agency will help define 'fair use' in the digital age.
Los Angeles Times - latimes.com
By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- The Library of Congress, home to about 18 million books, many dating back to the mid-19th century, might be the last place you'd expect to find somebody at the center of one of the hottest debates of the digital era.
But Marybeth Peters, who for 38 years has labored away in the U.S. Copyright Office, an obscure arm of the library, is serving as referee in the battle between entertainment firms that are trying to control the copying and piracy of their content, and technology companies and consumers eager to explore new conveniences offered by the Internet.
On Sunday, Internet radio stations were scheduled to start paying music royalties to record labels, threatening an untold number of small Webcasters that couldn't afford the controversial fee imposed by the Library of Congress. Record companies Friday agreed to defer most of the royalties they're owed, temporarily defusing that issue.
But Internet radio is just one of many areas of debate in which Copyright Register Peters and her office will play a big role. As the federal government's top expert on copyright law, she will have a significant influence on how people can download music, tape TV programs and copy or sell e-books.
Her agency recently declared that consumers -- who are free to sell books and CDs that they have legally acquired -- should have no such rights when it comes to e-books or digital music.
And the Copyright Office has denied virtually every request by librarians, educators and consumers seeking exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law makes it a crime to bypass copy-protection devices in CDs, DVDs and other digital products, even to make a legally permissible copy.
Peters believes that many "fair-use" practices consumers take for granted, such as taping a TV program or copying a magazine article, need to be reevaluated in the digital age because the economic harm to copyright owners is far greater. For instance, she agrees with court rulings that Napster-style song swapping over the Internet is illegal.
"Some of the activities you tolerate in a non-digital world are because of the inefficiency of making the copy, how the copy is degraded, and the difficulty in sending copies to someone beyond yourself," Peters said. "All of those things go away in a digital environment."
As Congress has deferred some of the stickiest questions to the Copyright Office, Peters finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to set many of the ground rules for the digital age and, in some ways, pick the winners.
"They are more at the center of controversies over money than ever before," said Ralph Oman, former head of the Copyright Office.
Peters and her staff are housed in a dimly lighted building originally designed to hold stacks of books. Old-fashioned shelves of card catalog trays, holding the listings of millions of books in the Library of Congress, fill the rooms.
The Copyright Office was founded in 1870 to expedite the restocking of the Library of Congress after most of its books were burned in the War of 1812. Each year, the office registers about half a million new books, plays, poems, motion pictures, photographs, sculptures and software.
Peters, 63, a former high school teacher who started as a music examiner at the Copyright Office, worked her way up after attending George Washington University Law School at night. She concedes that the Copyright Office is struggling to keep pace with the new rule-making duties.
"Congress keeps giving us things to do, and some of them have taken over our lives," Peters said.
In the mid-1990s -- against the wishes of many in Peters' office, she said -- Congress gave the agency responsibility for resolving disputes over royalties and compulsory licenses, such as how much satellite TV providers must pay broadcasters or how much Web radio stations should pay music companies.
In 1998, lawmakers surprised the Copyright Office by giving it regulatory authority every three years to make exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention law for those who can show they are being unfairly harmed.
Peters was amazed by the public reaction to her agency's new job. In 2000, protesters picketed outside the Library of Congress to push for broader exemptions to the DMCA.
The Copyright Office is now dealing with the next anti-circumvention proceeding, which is expected to be especially contentious. The proceeding is likely be completed by next year.
Some worry that the Copyright Office is too closely aligned with the interests of copyright owners. "The Copyright Office has acted like the tool of large business concerns for a couple of decades now," said William Goldsmith, owner of a Web-based radio station in Paradise, Calif.
The royalty fees, he says, would force him to pay $5,000 a month in royalties, though he collects only $4,000 in revenue.
Many also point to a "revolving door" between the Copyright Office and the entertainment industry.
Breaking with tradition, Peters hired several advisors from the copyright industry. Two came from a New York law firm that represented movie studios and publishers, including Steven Spielberg, Doubleday and adult magazine publisher Larry Flynt.
Peters denies any bias on her staff, noting the difficulties in finding qualified experts on a government salary -- which tops out at about $138,000.
"It used to be that people worked here their whole life, people like me," she said. "I don't think that's healthy."
But Peters concedes that she tends to side most often with creators and copyright owners.
"My heart is more with the individual author," she said. "If you look away from the person who really is the genius, the spark, then I think you lose sight about what copyright is all about."
Such views have sparked criticism from librarians, digital rights groups and academics who say the Copyright Office has lost sight of the consumer and is too preoccupied with the commercial values of corporate copyright owners.
Though Peters' support for the rights of creators sometimes aligns her with entertainment and media giants, she points to numerous battles she waged against industry interests.
She sided with freelance writers against the New York Times in a Supreme Court battle over reproduction rights of articles loaded into electronic databases.
She opposed music companies that wanted to levy royalties twice on streaming or downloading music, arguing that charging for the temporary copies made during the process amounted to double-dipping.
But critics say her recent decisions and recommendations on digital issues threaten to restrict consumers and make it easier for entertainment companies to charge for activities that are currently free, such as taping a song or movie for personal use.
Peters says she strives to be fair and consider all viewpoints but is limited by statutes set by Congress.
Some would like to see Peters become more active in negotiating a truce in the copyright battle. But she said that is not her role, unless Congress asks.
"We've offered on more than one occasion to take on an assignment from Congress to try to get the parties together to see if they could come up with some guidelines for uses under the fair-use doctrine," Peters said. "Nobody took us up on it."
The Institute for Public Accuracy's
Detailed Analysis of October 7 Speech by Bush on Iraq
Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.accuracy.org/bush/
Detailed Analysis of October 7 Speech by Bush on Iraq
Thank you for that very gracious and warm Cincinnati welcome. I'm honored to be here tonight. I appreciate you all coming.
Tonight I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace and America's determination to lead the world in confronting that threat.
The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions, its history of aggression and its drive toward an arsenal of terror.
Chris Toensing, editor of Middle East Report: "This might indicate that Iraq is actively threatening the peace in the region. There is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq is doing so, or has any intention of doing so. Other powers are actively disrupting the peace in the region: Israel is trying to crush Palestinian resistance to occupation with brute force, and the U.S. and Britain have bombed Iraq 46 times in 2002 when their aircraft are ‘targeted’ by Iraqi air defense systems in the bilaterally enforced no-fly zones. Most of our ‘friends’ in the region -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan -- have strongly urged us not to go to war, and to tone down the war rhetoric. Aren't they better positioned than we are to judge what threatens their safety?"
Eleven years ago, as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons and to stop all support for terrorist groups.
Rahul Mahajan, author of The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism: "Resolution 687 also speaks of 'establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction' -- which also means Israel's 200-plus nuclear weapons as well as Syria's and Egypt's apparent chemical weapons capabilities, and any nuclear capability the U.S. has placed in the region."
The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons.
As'ad Abukhalil, author of Bin Laden, Islam & America's New 'War on Terrorism' and associate professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus: "The president fails to credit Reagan's and his father's administrations --prominent members of which included Rumsfeld and Cheney-- for their help in the construction of Saddam's arsenal, especially in the area of germ warfare."
Toensing: "After being presented with evidence that Iraq had used chemical weapons to attack the Kurds in 1987-88, the Reagan administration blocked a Senate resolution imposing sanctions on Iraq, and continued to pursue good relations with the regime."
James Jennings, president of Conscience International, a humanitarian aid organization that has worked in Iraq since 1991: "The evidence that Iraq gassed its own people is also not about a current event, but one that happened fourteen years ago. If that did not constitute a good enough reason for going to war with Iraq in 1988 (which the U.S. did not even contemplate at the time), it certainly is not a good enough reason now."
It is seeking nuclear weapons.
Susan Wright, co-author of Biological Warfare and Disarmament: New Problems/New Perspectives: "How does Bush know this? It's as if the inspections have already been conducted and we know the outcome. We’re expected to accept the administration’s word for this without seeing any evidence. We have no way of judging the accuracy of these claims and the only way to do so is to hold inspections. The only country in the region that is known to possess a nuclear arsenal is Israel." [The Administration says that it does not know if Israel has nuclear weapons: www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0521-06.htm]
Mahajan: "There’s no evidence that Iraq has gotten anywhere with seeking nuclear weapons. The pitiful status of evidence in this regards is shown by claims in e.g. Blair’s dossier that Iraq is seeking uranium from Africa, year and country unspecified. South Africa is, of course, the only country in the continent that has potentially the capacity for enrichment of uranium to bomb quality, and claims not to have supplied Iraq with uranium. Unenriched uranium does Iraq little good, since enrichment facilities are large, require huge investment, and cannot easily be hidden."
It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practices terror against its own people.
The entire world has witnessed Iraq's 11-year history of defiance, deception, and bad faith.
We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September 11, 2001, America felt its vulnerability -- even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source, that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.
Members of the Congress of both political parties, and members of the United Nations Security Council, agree that Saddam Hussein is a threat to peace and must disarm. We agree that the Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons, and diseases, and gases, and atomic weapons.
Toensing: "Only two members of the U.N. Security Council would appear to agree with the idea that Iraq threatens, or will threaten, 'America and the world' with Weapons of Mass Destruction, making the next sentence disingenuous at best."
Since we all agree on this goal, the issue is: How can we best achieve it?
Many Americans have raised legitimate questions: About the nature of the threat. About the urgency of action -- and why be concerned now? About the link between Iraq developing weapons of terror, and the wider war on terror.
These are all issues we have discussed broadly and fully within my administration. And tonight, I want to share those discussions with you.
Toensing: "Bush may have shared the discussion, but he did not share the evidence, saying, like the British dossier and CIA reports, that intelligence has established the threat. But Americans apparently will not be seeing it."
First, some ask why Iraq is different from other countries or regimes that also have terrible weapons. While there are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone -- because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place.
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant, who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people. This same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility towards the United States.
Stephen Zunes, author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism and associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco: "The hostility toward the United States is a direct consequence of U.S. hostility toward Iraq. Iraq was quite unhostile to the United States when it was receiving support from the United States during the 1980s. The answer is certainly not to appease Iraq's tyrannical regime, as was done in the past. However, to imply this hostility is unrelated to the U.S. destruction of much of Iraq's civilian infrastructure and other actions during the Gulf War which went far beyond what was necessary to rid Iraqi forces from Kuwait and the U.S.-led sanctions and its impact upon the civilian population is very misleading."
AbuKhalil: "If Bush wants to punish nations that 'tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning' then he would have to punish Israel for an occupation of Palestinian lands that lasted far longer than the now famous (yet brief) Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Of course, Iraq did attack Iran and Kuwait, and Israel in the span of 30 years has attacked Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, not to mention Palestine, and not to mention a civilian Libyan airliner that was downed by Israeli forces in 1973."
By its past and present actions, by its technological capabilities, by the merciless nature of its regime, Iraq is unique.
As a former chief weapons inspector for the U.N. has said, "The fundamental problem with Iraq remains the nature of the regime itself: Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction."
Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time. If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?
Zunes: "He was far more dangerous in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting him. It will take many years, assuming military sanctions continue in effect, before he comes close to the strength he was then. If U.N. inspectors are allowed to return, it would be impossible -- even if they don't find 100 percent of everything -- to get much stronger than he is today."
In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount.
Zunes: "If this is really a concern, then why did the United States supply Iraq with the seed stock of anthrax spores back in the 1980s?" [William Blum, "Anthrax for Export: U.S. Companies Sold Iraq the Ingredients for a Witch's Brew," The Progressive, April 1998, p. 18]
This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.
Zunes: "This is like saying that a man is capable of making millions of women pregnant. It's a matter of delivery systems, of which there is no proof that Iraq currently has."
We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX nerve gas. Saddam Hussein also has experience in using chemical weapons. He has ordered chemical attacks on Iran, and on more than forty villages in his own country. These actions killed or injured at least 20,000 people, more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September 11.
Mahajan: "All of this was done with the full support, approval, and connivance of the U.S. government. U.S.-supplied 'agricultural credits' helped fund the sustained counterinsurgency campaign in northern Iraq; the United States supplied military intelligence to Iraq for use against Iran even when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons in the war; and the United States ran diplomatic interference for Iraq at the U.N."
Toensing: "The U.S. restored diplomatic relations with Iraq in 1984, while it was in the midst of fighting the first of these wars of aggression, because the U.S. wanted to contain the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The U.S. and Britain tilted toward Iraq throughout the war, and U.S. allies in the region, chief among them Saudi Arabia, bankrolled the Iraqi war effort. The U.S. was still trying to become closer to Iraq when it invaded Kuwait."
Zunes: "He attacked Iranian troops because he knew Iran had no allies that would defend it. And we now know that officials from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assisted Iraq in targeting Iranian forces in the full knowledge that they were using chemical weapons. Saddam used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians because he knew they couldn't fight back. And the U.S. helped cover up the Halabja massacre and other assaults by falsely claiming the Iranians were responsible. In other words, Saddam is a coward. He will use WMDs when he knows he won't have to suffer the consequences, especially when the world's most powerful country is supporting him."
And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it has used to produce chemical and biological weapons.
Toensing: "That it 'has used.' The last time Bush made a big deal of this, he claimed that Iraq was again using the facilities in this way, an assertion which the IAEA promptly rebutted as unverifiable. It still is unverifiable."
Every chemical and biological weapon that Iraq has or makes is a direct violation of the truce that ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Mahajan: "There are no credible allegations that Iraq produced chemical or biological agents while inspectors were in the country, until December 1998. The reason we don't know whether they are producing those agents or not since then is that inspectors were withdrawn at the U.S. behest preparatory to the Desert Fox bombing campaign."
Yet Saddam Hussein has chosen to build and keep these weapons, despite international sanctions, U.N. demands, and isolation from the civilized world.
[The U.S. has maintained for years that it would continue the sanctions regardless of Iraq's behavior regarding weapons, see "Autopsy of a Disaster: The U.S. Sanctions Policy on Iraq -- Myth: The Sanctions Will be Lifted When Iraq Complies with the U.N. Inspections": www.accuracy.org/iraq]
Zunes: "Again, the U.S. has yet to produce evidence that Iraq is building such weapons. Also, U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 calls for Iraqi disarmament as part of a region-wide disarmament effort which the United States has refused to enforce or even support."
Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles -- far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other nations -- in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work.
Toensing: "This is a neat rhetorical trick. Bush knows that Turkey and Saudi Arabia themselves do not feel under threat from Iraq's WMD, so he doesn't claim that. Rather, it's the threat to U.S.servicemen and oil company employees based in those countries which should concern us. The questions left unasked are why Iraq would attack Americans, knowing the massive response that would incur, and of course why so many American troops 'live and work' in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. They're partly there in forward deployment against Iraq."
Zunes: "According to UNSCOM, 817 of Iraq's 819 Soviet-build ballistic missiles have been accounted for and destroyed. They may possess up to a couple of dozen home-made versions, but none of these have been tested and it is questionable whether they have any functional launchers."
We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States.
Toensing: "Other intelligence experts have disputed that UAVs are a threat, because the agents they released might disperse to basically harmless levels by the time they reached the ground if the UAV was trying to cover such a broad area."
Mahajan: "The claim that these UAVs have ranges that would enable attacking the United States, and that they could reach it undetected, is a startlingly new one, and entirely untenable. No one has ever produced evidence of Iraqi capability or intent to target the United States directly."
And, of course, sophisticated delivery systems are not required for a chemical or biological attack -- all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it.
Mahajan: "Bioterrorist attacks and delivery of biological agents aren’t that easy -- the very limited effects of the anthrax attacks showed that. In fact, the loss of life in the anthrax attacks occurred mostly among the postal workers who were not issued antibiotics, and not among the congressional staff who were. As for chemical attacks with 'a small container and one terrorist,' they would be severely limited in effect."
And that is the source of our urgent concern about Saddam Hussein's links to international terrorist groups.
Over the years, Iraq has provided safe haven to terrorists such as Abu Nidal, whose terror organization carried out more than ninety terrorist attacks in twenty countries that killed or injured nearly 900 people, including 12 Americans.
Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights: "Although U.S.intelligence agencies have not found a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, Bush mentions one, but no evidence is shown. Likewise he tries to frighten Americans by talking about the crimes of Abu Nidal, but Abu Nidal is dead. Again it is an attempt to create fear by association with something from the past, not evidence of a current threat."
Iraq has also provided safe haven to Abu Abbas, who was responsible for seizing the Achille Lauro and killing an American passenger. And we know that Iraq is continuing to finance terror, and gives assistance to groups that use terrorism to undermine Middle East peace.
Toensing: " Yes, but neither of these groups is ideologically anti-American. Their attacks are aimed at Israel and Israeli interests, including the killing of Leon Klinghoffer and other Americans. This is a crucial piece of context."
We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq.
These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We have learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb making, poisons, and deadly gases.
Jennings: "The claim that al-Qaeda is in Iraq is disingenuous, if not an outright lie. Yes, the U.S.has known for some time that up to 400 al-Qaeda-type Muslim extremists, the Ansar al-Islam, formerly 'Jund al-Islam,' a splinter of the Iranian-backed Islamic Unity Movement of Kurdistan, were operating inside the Kurdish security zone set up under U.S. protection in the North of Iraq. For some reason this was kept quiet and has not been much reported in the mainstream media. Finally last Spring the Kurds themselves attacked and killed most of the terrorists in their territory, sending the rest fleeing for their lives across the border into Iran. Since this area was under U.S. protection, and not under Saddam Hussein's rule, it's pretty hard to claim that al-Qaeda operates in Iraq."
Mahajan: "Al-Qaeda has carried out no chemical or biological attacks. The anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001 were almost certainly from a U.S. government employee. It’s hard to know what, if anything, to make of claims that one “senior al Qaeda leader” got medical treatment in Baghdad. Giving medical treatment, even to criminals, is not illegal, and with so little evidence given to us, there’s no reason to suppose this isn’t another story like the one about a meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague (now discredited)."
And we know that after September 11, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliances with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.
Mahajan: "Biological or chemical weapons would undoubtedly leave fingerprints, just as the anthrax attacks in the fall did. Even if Iraq couldn't be conclusively shown to be the source of such materials, the U.S. government would assume Iraq was the source. Iraq has been under the gun ever since the Gulf War, and can't possibly assume that it could get away with such an attack. Moreover, Saddam has traditionally seen WMD as his ace in the hole, protecting him from defeat. Paranoid dictators do not give control of something they see as the foundation of their security into the hands of networks, like al-Qaeda, which they can't control."
Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.
When I spoke to the Congress more than a year ago, I said that those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction. And he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he will use them, or provide them to a terror network.
Terror cells, and outlaw regimes building weapons of mass destruction, are different faces of the same evil. Our security requires that we confront both. And the United States military is capable of confronting both.
Many people have asked how close Saddam Hussein is to developing a nuclear weapon. We don't know exactly, and that is the problem. Before the Gulf War, the best intelligence indicated that Iraq was eight to 10 years away from developing a nuclear weapon; after the war, international inspectors learned that the regime had been much closer. The regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.
The inspectors discovered that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a workable nuclear weapon, and was pursuing several different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb.
Toensing: "Yes, inspectors learned all of this -- the inspections worked."
Before being barred from Iraq in 1998, the International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related facilities, including three uranium-enrichment sites.
Robert Jensen, author of Writing Dissent and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin: "Bush at least acknowledged that we know little about Saddam's nuclear capability, but he lied about why. Bush claimed that Iraq barred the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1998. In fact, the inspectors, along with those from the U.N. Special Commission, were withdrawn by their agencies -- not expelled by Iraq -- in December 1998 when it became clear the Clinton administration was going to bomb Iraq (as it did) and the safety of the inspectors couldn't be guaranteed. The inspectors also spied for the United States, in violation of their mandate."
That same year, information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected, revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue. The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahedeen" -- his nuclear holy warriors.
Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past.
Toensing: "As Lincoln Chafee said on NPR, if these satellite photos exist, then surely the public has a right to see them. Surely mere photos would not compromise sources and methods." [In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the U.S. government claimed that Iraqi troops were threatening Saudi Arabia; this turned out to be false.]
Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
Mahajan: "The aluminum tubes can also be used in conventional artillery, which Iraq is allowed to have. In the past, when Iraq tried to build such centrifuges, they used steel tubes. This is an incredibly weak indicator."
If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly-enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.
Toensing: "Both the CIA report and the British dossier say that this is very unlikely as long as Iraq remains under sanctions."
Mahajan: "This means only that it has the technological know-how to create the high-explosive 'lenses' necessary to set off the appropriate nuclear chain reaction. As long as it retains its scientists, this will remain the case."
And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.
Mahajan: "Again, such an act is not at all consonant with the history or the mindset of Saddam Hussein. One organization hosted by the Iraqi government, which is classified as terrorist by the State Department, is the Iranian Mujahedin-I-Khalq, whose activities are directed against the current government of Iran. They have never had access to any nonconventional resources from the Government of Iraq. Saddam Hussein sees the radical Islamist terrorist networks like al-Qaeda as a huge potential threat to his own rule, something that concerns him far more than any unrealistic ideas of revenge against the United States. Anything that could allow al-Qaeda (which, in its turn, is likely more concerned with replacing regimes in the Middle East with new radical Islamist regimes) to blackmail him would be the last thing he would give them."
Some citizens wonder: After 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now?
There is a reason. We have experienced the horror of September 11. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people.Our enemies would be no less willing -- in fact they would be eager -- to use a biological, or chemical, or a nuclear weapon.
Mahajan: "Invoking September 11 without showing any kind of link between the government of Iraq and those attacks is just transparent manipulation. What he really means is that after September 11 he thinks he can get away with such a policy."
Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
As President Kennedy said in October of 1962: "Neither the United States of America nor the world community of nations can tolerate deliberate deception and offensive threats on the part of any nation, large or small. We no longer live in a world," he said, "where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation's security to constitute maximum peril."
Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation: "The hypocrisy in this speech -- and in the Bush Administration’s overall national security strategy -- is monumental. If having weapons of mass destruction and a history of using them is a criteria, then surely the United States must pose the greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed. While Bush warns that 'we cannot wait for the final proof.... the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,' his September 2002 National Security Strategy states that 'America will act against...emerging threats before they are fully formed....by acting preemptively.' And his top-secret Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the New York Times earlier this year, reveals that 'U.S. nuclear forces will continue to provide assurance.... in the event of surprising military developments....Current examples of immediate contingencies include an Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbors....' It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to predict that if Iraq is attacked by the U.S. it might launch whatever it has at Israel -- itself a nuclear power. Further, while the U.S. is massively expanding its biological weapons research capabilities for example by upgrading its bioresearch facilities at the Livermore and Los Alamos Nuclear weapons labs to aerosolize live anthrax and genetically modify bioorganisms it is blocking a protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow international inspectors into U.S. facilities. The Bush Administration’s unilateral headlong rush to war threatens to unleash unprecedented regional instability and potentially catastrophic loss of life. It’s hard to image a more self-destructive course of action."
Understanding the threats of our time, knowing the designs and deceptions of the Iraqi regime, we have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring.
Some believe we can address this danger by simply resuming the old approach to inspections, and applying diplomatic and economic pressure. Yet this is precisely what the world has tried to do since 1991.
The U.N. inspections program was met with systematic deception. The Iraqi regime bugged hotel rooms and offices of inspectors to find where they were going next. They forged documents, destroyed evidence, and developed mobile weapons facilities to keep a step ahead of inspectors.
Eight so-called presidential palaces were declared off-limits to unfettered inspections. These sites actually encompass 12 square miles, with hundreds of structures, both above and below the ground, where sensitive materials could be hidden.
[In fact, there were inspections of these "presidential palaces."]
Zunes: "These are not off-limits. They are open to unfettered inspections as long as an Iraqi official is accompanying the inspectors. Such a proviso is quite legal under U.N. Security Council resolutions authorizing the creation of UNMOVIC, resolutions that were supported by the United States."
The world has also tried economic sanctions and watched Iraq use billions of dollars in illegal oil revenues to fund more weapons purchases, rather than providing for the needs of the Iraqi people.
Toensing: "Yes, and all the while, the U.S.and Britain were undermining the logic of sanctions and inspections by speaking of regime change, giving the regime no incentive to cooperate."
Mahajan: "The government-instituted food ration program in Iraq has been widely praised, characterized as 'second to none' by Tun Myat, current U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq. Money that comes in under the Oil for Food program cannot, despite constant allegations, be used for weapons purchases -- all proceeds from such sales are deposited to an escrow account in New York which is controlled by the U.N. Sanctions Committee. The government of Iraq cannot touch any of this money."
The world has tried limited military strikes to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities ... only to see them openly rebuilt, while the regime again denies they even exist.
Mahajan: "For 'world' here, read 'United States and its lieutenant, the United Kingdom.' Those military strikes were a blatant violation of international law, done without Security Council authorization."
The world has tried no-fly zones to keep Saddam from terrorizing his own people ... and in the last year alone, the Iraqi military has fired upon American and British pilots more than 750 times.
Toensing: "Another remarkable rhetorical trick. The no-fly zones did not protect the Kurds from Iraqi incursions in 1995-96, nor have they protected the Shia or the marsh Arabs from ground-based repression throughout the decade. But rather than mention these somewhat significant failures, Bush concentrates on Iraqi air defenses, which have yet to come close to actually hitting a U.S.or U.K. jet. As with the Saudi-Turkish point above, it appears that US-U.K. attempts to protect the peoples of the region are to be counted as failures because the U.S.and U.K. are in danger."
Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law and author of The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence: "It is the U.S. government that is violating the United Nations Charter ... by using military force to allegedly 'police' these illegal 'no-fly' zones that have never been authorized by the U.N. Security Council or by the U.S. Congress, in violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution as well. Iraq is simply exercising its legitimate right of self-defense under U.N. Charter article 51. The Bush administration has deliberately put U.S. pilots in harm's way in order to concoct a pretext for a catastrophic war of aggression against Iraq. The best way for the American people to protect the lives of our military personnel in the Persian Gulf is to bring them all home."
Mahajan: "Again, the no-fly zones don’t involve the 'world,' but are a naked projection of American and British power (France, the third partner in the no-fly zones, withdrew in 1996), unsanctioned by the Security Council."
After 11 years during which we have tried containment, sanctions, inspections, even selected military action, the end result is that Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons, and is increasing his capabilities to make more. And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.
Clearly, to actually work, any new inspections, sanctions, or enforcement mechanisms will have to be very different. America wants the U.N. to be an effective organization that helps to keep the peace. That is why we are urging the Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough, immediate requirements.
AbuKhalil: "Bush also fails to mention American violations of the sanctions regime, by using the inspectors to spy on Iraq, and to obtain information unrelated to the U.N. mandate."
Among those requirements, the Iraqi regime must reveal and destroy, under U.N. supervision, all existing weapons of mass destruction. To ensure that we learn the truth, the regime must allow witnesses to its illegal activities to be interviewed outside of the country.
And these witnesses must be free to bring their families with them, so they are all beyond the reach of Saddam Hussein's terror and murder.
And inspectors must have access to any site, at any time, without pre-clearance, without delay, without exceptions.
Susan Wright: "[The evidence] suggests that the United States and the United Kingdom intend to set such tough conditions for further arms inspections in Iraq that they would create a double bind. If Iraq rejects the conditions, then war with the United States will follow. If Iraq attempts to comply and an ambiguity triggers action by the security forces of one of the permanent members of the Security Council, which according to this draft, might accompany an inspection team, war could follow anyway. Other members of the Security Council should reject such traps. It is also essential to avoid a situation in which the inspection force is effectively hijacked by the United States and used for espionage, as was the case with the U.N. Special Commission in the 1990s."
The time for denying, deceiving, and delaying has come to an end. Saddam Hussein must disarm himself -- or, for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.
Many nations are joining us in insisting that Saddam Hussein's regime be held accountable. They are committed to defending the international security that protects the lives of both our citizens and theirs.
AbuKhalil: "When Bush speaks about 'many nations' supporting the U.S., he certainly means Israel and U.K., although public opinion in U.K. is running solidly against Bush's war."
And that is why America is challenging all nations to take the resolutions of the U.N. Security Council seriously.
Zunes: "There are well over 90 U.N. Security Council resolutions that are currently being violated by countries other than Iraq. The vast majority of these resolutions are being violated by allies of the United States that receive U.S. military, economic and diplomatic support. Indeed, the U.S. has effectively blocked the U.N. Security Council from enforcing these resolutions against its allies."
Those resolutions are very clear. In addition to declaring and destroying all of its weapons of mass destruction, Iraq must end its support for terrorism. It must cease the persecution of its civilian population. It must stop all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. And it must release or account for all Gulf War personnel, including an American pilot, whose fate is still unknown.
Zunes: "Most of these do not fall under Chapter VII, which allows for the UNSC to authorize the use of force."
AbuKhalil: "And Bush's sudden concern for U.N. resolutions should not lead one to believe that he will next move to implement all U.N. resolutions -- including those against U.S. allies".
By taking these steps, and only by taking these steps, the Iraqi regime has an opportunity to avoid conflict. These steps would also change the nature of the Iraqi regime itself.
America hopes the regime will make that choice.
Unfortunately, at least so far, we have little reason to expect it. This is why two administrations -- mine and President Clinton's -- have stated that regime change in Iraq is the only certain means of removing a great danger to our nation.
I hope this will not require military action, but it may. And military conflict could be difficult. An Iraqi regime faced with its own demise may attempt cruel and desperate measures. If Saddam Hussein orders such measures, his generals would be well advised to refuse those orders. If they do not refuse, they must understand that all war criminals will be pursued and punished.
If we have to act, we will take every precaution that is possible. We will plan carefully, we will act with the full power of the United States military, we will act with allies at our side, and we will prevail.
There is no easy or risk-free course of action. Some have argued we should wait -- and that is an option. In my view, it is the riskiest of all options -- because the longer we wait, the stronger and bolder Saddam Hussein will become. We could wait and hope that Saddam does not give weapons to terrorists, or develop a nuclear weapon to blackmail the world. But I am convinced that is a hope against all evidence.
As Americans, we want peace -- we work and sacrifice for peace -- and there can be no peace if our security depends on the will and whims of a ruthless and aggressive dictator. I am not willing to stake one American life on trusting Saddam Hussein.
Mahajan: "Throughout all of this, there has never been any credible evidence introduced to indicate that Hussein has any policy of trying to target Americans. His depredations have almost always been distinguished by actions against people that the Western powers don’t care about."
Failure to act would embolden other tyrants; allow terrorists access to new weapons and new resources; and make blackmail a permanent feature of world events.
The United Nations would betray the purpose of its founding, and prove irrelevant to the problems of our time. And through its inaction, the United States would resign itself to a future of fear.
That is not the America I know. That is not the America I serve. We refuse to live in fear. This nation -- in world war and in Cold War -- has never permitted the brutal and lawless to set history's course.
Zunes: "Then why did the United States support Indonesian dictator Suharto for over three decades, as he oversaw the massacre of over a half million of his own people, invaded the tiny nation or East Timor, resulting in the deaths of an additional 200,000? How about brutal and lawless governments in Turkey, Morocco and Israel that have invaded neighboring countries at the cost of thousands of civilian lives? How about Pinochet and other Latin American tyrants supported by the U.S.?"
Now, as before, we will secure our nation, protect our freedom, and help others to find freedom of their own. Some worry that a change of leadership in Iraq could create instability and make the situation worse. The situation could hardly get worse, for world security, and for the people of Iraq.
The lives of Iraqi citizens would improve dramatically if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power, just as the lives of Afghanistan's citizens improved after the Taliban.
Toensing: "Given what is known about the return of warlordism and chaos to Afghanistan -- not to mention the fiction that Afghan women have all thrown away their burqas -- this is a debatable proposition, and indicative of the administration's lack of interest in rebuilding Afghanistan. Why would Iraq be any different?"
Mahajan: "On every test of justice and of pragmatism, the war on Afghanistan fails. Worse, every one of these aspects, from an increased threat of terrorism to large numbers of civilian deaths to installation of a U.S.-controlled puppet regime is due to play out again in the war on Iraq. In fact, though it has been little noted, the sanctions regime has made Iraqis dependent on centralized, government-distributed food to survive and relief agencies have already expressed their concerns about the potential for a humanitarian crisis once war starts."
The dictator of Iraq is a student of Stalin, using murder as a tool of terror and control within his own cabinet, and within his own army, and even within his own family.
On Saddam Hussein's orders, opponents have been decapitated, wives and mothers of political opponents have been systematically raped as a method of intimidation, and political prisoners have been forced to watch their own children being tortured.
Jensen: "All of that and more was going on while Iraq was a 'valued ally' of the United States -- hence the hypocrisy of the next few sentences."
America believes that all people are entitled to hope and human rights -- to the non-negotiable demands of human dignity.
People everywhere prefer freedom to slavery; prosperity to squalor; self-government to the rule of terror and torture.
America is a friend to the people of Iraq.
Anthony Arnove, editor of the book Iraq Under Siege: "But the people of Iraq have good reason to feel otherwise. As Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times noted in his October 4 report from Baghdad, 'while ordinary Iraqis were very friendly toward me, they were enraged at the U.S. after 11 years of economic sanctions.... Worse, U.S. bombing of water treatment plants, difficulties importing purification chemicals like chlorine (which can be used for weapons), and shortages of medicines led to a more than doubling of infant mortality, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.' Another war on Iraq -- this time, a 'pre-emptive' attack aimed at 'regime change' -- will lead to more civilian casualties and damage to Iraq's infrastructure. And Iraqis are right to worry that the regime Washington installs, in violation of their right to self-determination, will be one that serves U.S. interests, not their own. We should recall the impact of the last war. In the words of Gulf War veteran Anthony Swofford, a former Marine corporal, writing in the New York Times, October 2, 'From the ground, I witnessed the savage results of American air superiority: tanks and troop carriers turned upside down and ripped inside out; rotten, burned, half-buried bodies littering the desert like the detritus of years -- not weeks -- of combat.' We should be skeptical of Bush's stated concern for the Iraqi people. His real interests in this war are not the Iraq people, or defending Americans from attack, but expanding U.S.hegemony in the Middle East."
Our demands are directed only at the regime that enslaves them and threatens us. When these demands are met, the first and greatest benefit will come to Iraqi men, women, and children. The oppression of Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomans, Shi'a, Sunnis and others will be lifted. The long captivity of Iraq will end, and an era of new hope will begin.
Jennings: "The president has repeatedly claimed, 'We have no quarrel with the Iraqi people.' In his speech to the nation on Oct. 7, he said, 'America is a friend of the people of Iraq.' Try telling that to a friend of mine in Baghdad who walked out of his house following a U.S.bomb attack to find his neighbor's head rolling down the street; or to a taxi driver I met whose four year old child shook uncontrollably for three days following Clinton s 1998 'Monicagate' bombing diversion. Try telling it to the mother of Omran ibn Jwair, whom I met in the village of Toq al-Ghazzalat after a U.S.missile killed her 13 year old son while he was tending sheep in the field. Try telling it to the hundreds of mothers I have seen crying over their dying babies in Iraqi hospitals, and to the hundreds of thousands of parents who have actually lost their infant children due to the cruel U.S.blockade, euphemistically called 'sanctions.' Are the Iraqi people supposed to rejoice now that a new war is being forced upon them by their so-called 'friends?' It is understandable that people are frightened following the disastrous attacks of September 11. But fear is not a good reason to stop thinking. In fact, when we are in danger is when clear thinking is needed most of all."
Iraq is a land rich in culture, resources, and talent. Freed from the weight of oppression, Iraq's people will be able to share in the progress and prosperity of our time. If military action is necessary, the United States and our allies will help the Iraqi people rebuild their economy, and create the institutions of liberty in a unified Iraq at peace with its neighbors.
Later this week the United States Congress will vote on this matter. I have asked Congress to authorize the use of America's military, if it proves necessary, to enforce U.N. Security Council demands.
John Berg, director of graduate studies of the government department at Suffolk University: "Our Constitution makes it clear that Congress, not the President, is to 'declare war' -- that is, make the decision that war is necessary in a given situation. For Congress to delegate this determination to the President would be an abdication of its Constitutional responsibility."
Zunes: "According to the articles 41 and 42 of the United Nations charter, this can only be done if the U.N. Security Council finds the violator in material breach of the resolution, determines all non-military means of enforcement have been exhausted, and specifically authorizes the use of force. Otherwise, it will be illegal. Members of Congress would therefore be obliged to vote against it since -- according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution -- international treaties such as the U.N. Charter are the supreme law of the land. Furthermore, if the United States can invade Iraq for its violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions, then Britain could invade Morocco, France could invade Turkey, Russia could invade Israel, etc."
Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable. The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something. Congress will also be sending a message to the dictator in Iraq: that his only choice is full compliance -- and the time remaining for that choice is limited.
Members of Congress are nearing an historic vote, and I am confident they will fully consider the facts and their duties.
The attacks of September 11 showed our country that vast oceans no longer protect us from danger. Before that tragic date, we had only hints of al Qaeda's plans and designs.
Today in Iraq, we see a threat whose outlines are far more clearly defined -- and whose consequences could be far more deadly. Saddam Hussein's actions have put us on notice -- and there is no refuge from our responsibilities.
We did not ask for this present challenge, but we accept it. Like other generations of Americans, we will meet the responsibility of defending human liberty against violence and aggression. By our resolve, we will give strength to others. By our courage, we will give hope to others. By our actions, we will secure the peace, and lead the world to a better day.
Phyllis Bennis, author of the just-released book Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11 Crisis and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies: "President Bush's speech ignored Congress, and instead was aimed at U.S. public opinion (where his support is dwindling) and international allies in the U.N. (where the U.S. is significantly isolated). It was designed to divert attention from the real reasons for this coming war: oil and empire. It is a war designed to rewrite the political map of the Middle East, and is not dependent on the particular threat posed by a particular dictator. The crimes of the Iraqi regime are serious and longstanding -- back to the days of massive U.S. economic and military support, and U.S. provision of the biological seed stock for the anthrax and other germs President Bush warned us about. But launching a massive bombing campaign against Baghdad, a city of more than 5 million inhabitants-- grandmothers, kindergarten classes, teenagers -- will not secure human rights for those living and dying under those bombs."
Thank you, and good night.
Aaron has made a transcript of the Eldred argument available:
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/eldredTranscript
I'm late for a meeting just now, but I wanted to get this out there!
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/eldredTranscript
ERIC ELDRED, ET AL., Petitioners
v.
JOHN D. ASHCROFT, ATTORNEY GENERAL
No. 01-618
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
2002 U.S. TRANS LEXIS 47
October 9, 2002, Wednesday, Washington, D.C.
NOTICE: [*1] Transcribed by Alderson Reporting Company, Inc., 1111 14th Street, N.W., Suite 400, Washington D.C. 20005-5603, Telephone Number: 202-289-2260
The above-entitled matter came on for oral argument before the Supreme Court of the United States at 10:03 a.m.
APPEARANCES: LAWRENCE LESSIG, ESQ., Stanford, California; on behalf of the Petitioners.
THEODORE B. OLSON, ESQ., Solicitor General, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.; on behalf of the Respondent.
OPINION: PROCEEDINGS
(10:03 a.m.)
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: We'll hear argument now in Number 01-618, Eric Eldred v. John D. Ashcroft.
Mr. Lessig.
ORAL ARGUMENT OF LAWRENCE LESSIG
ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS
MR. LESSIG: Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the Court:
Petitioners are before you this morning challenging Congress's 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the term of subsisting and future copyrights by 20 years. Petitioners submit such a blanket extension of existing terms exceeds Congress's power under the Copyright Clause and it violates the First Amendment.
Now, the Government has responded to petitioners' argument in a way that betrays a simple but fundamental confusion. The Government [*2] has argued as if petitioners had advanced a general theory of the Copyright Clause, or a general constraint under which Congress must operate. That is a mistake. This case is about limits to an enumerated power. It's not about general power of Congress to exercise its copyright authority. Petitioners have advanced a particular interpretation of the only express limits in the Copyright Clause designed to give those limits meaning.
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Mr. Lessig, I'll tell you what bothers me about your position, and that is that Congress has extended the term so often through the years, and if you are right, don't we run the risk of upsetting previous extensions of time? I mean, this seems to be a practice that began with the very first act.
MR. LESSIG: Justice, we do not believe that the very first act extended terms at all. Speaking technically, which for a lawyer means speaking accurately, the 1790 act did not extend a Federal term. The 1790 act granted a term for works that already existed in precisely the pattern that the English parliament had done in the Statute of Anne in 1710, and that the English parliament did with monopolies, general monopolies in the statute of --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: But [*3] there have been a number of extensions since.
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Even if you can get over the first hurdle.
MR. LESSIG: That's right. That's the important hurdle, and we'd like to jump that first, but the other ones, Justice, you're right, in 1831 and in 1909 Congress extended terms in a way that is inconsistent with the strongest form of the test that we have advanced. Those extensions, however, were never challenged in any court and certainly not considered by this Court.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Well, doesn't that itself mean something, Mr. Lessig? The fact that they were never challenged, perhaps most people, and perhaps everybody felt there was no basis for challenging them.
MR. LESSIG: Well, Mr. Chief Justice, it's absolutely true that this case is here because of a fundamentally important changed circumstance that makes the Framers' limitations on the Copyright Clause much more significant. This is the first time I can remember where this Court has been pointed to changed circumstances as a reason to reaffirm the Framers' values, because for most of this period, Mr. Chief Justice, the only people who were regulated by copyright law under the Copyright Act would have been [*4] commercial publishers, primarily, and now for the first time the scope of this exclusive right has expanded because of the changed technology of the Internet to reach an extraordinarily broad range of creativity that never would have been imagined before.
Now, it's not the case that the earlier extensions were not questioned on constitutional grounds. In fact, Melville Nimmer, in the consideration of the 1976 act, suggested they were plainly under --
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Well, I'm talking about court challenges, not academic challenges.
MR. LESSIG: That's right, there is no court challenge.
JUSTICE SOUTER: Mr. Lessig, your theory, as I understand it, regardless of changed circumstances or not, your basic theory, which on your argument would have been appropriate at any time historically, is that there has at least got to be the possibility of a kind of a causal connection between the extension and the promotion or inducement for the creation of some subsequent work, but why is that any more plausible a reading of the Promotion Clause than simply a reading that says the Promotion Clause requires that there be a general scheme in place, which overall tends to promote or induce, and part of one aspect [*5] of that scheme can be that the -- that at the discretion of Congress the period of protection is extended from time to time?
Why do you require -- why do you say the clause has got to be read by this kind of specific causation theory as opposed to a kind of systemic theory of promotion?
MR. LESSIG: Justice Souter, the reason is exactly related to the point I began with, that this is a case about limits and not about discretion. If it's not the case that this Court --
JUSTICE SOUTER: No, but that's -- I mean, that's the issue in the alternative reading.
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
JUSTICE SOUTER: And why is it a limit case, rather than a discretion within a general scheme kind --
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
JUSTICE SOUTER: -- of clause?
MR. LESSIG: Because if this Court does not adopt a reading of the form we've offered, then there is no limit to the ability of Congress to extend subsisting terms.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Do you say the same thing for scope? This case is about duration, but Congress from time to time -- in fact, you mentioned --
MR. LESSIG: Yes.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: -- the expanded applications of copyright, and Congress itself extends the scope from time to time.
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: [*6] Would you make, as far as, say, translation rights that didn't exist before, the same argument?
MR. LESSIG: I --
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Why -- or -- and if you wouldn't, why not?
MR. LESSIG: I -- no, Justice Ginsburg, we would not, and the reason is again related to the method we have adopted to interpret "limited Times." We have not said that "promote the progress of science" is a general and independent constraint on the Copyright Clause authority. We've said it must be looked to to interpret the scope of "limited Times," and unless retrospective extensions are forbidden, it will eviscerate the meaning of "limited Times." That does not occur in the context of the scope of exclusive right, nor in the context of the power to secure. If that's --
JUSTICE BREYER: Could we then go back to Justice O'Connor's question? To make that very specific, if we agree with you, does that mean that we would, in principle, have to hold the 1976 extension unconstitutional? I mean, in 1976, Congress extended the term from 28 years. renewable once, to life of the author plus 50 years. Now they're extending it life of the author plus 70. If the latter is unconstitutional on your theory, how could the former not be? And [*7] if the former is, the chaos that would ensue would be horrendous.
MR. LESSIG: Justice Breyer, under our theory as we've advanced it, you're right; the 1976 act would be unconstitutional. Whether this Court would apply such a holding in this case to that act is a question that would have to be resolved under the retrospective --
JUSTICE BREYER: Maybe we ought to find another theory, then. Is there any --
(Laughter.)
MR. LESSIG: Justice, the theory, which would advance the aim of limiting times in a way that is enforceable, is only applicable in the case that we brought before you here to the '98 act, and would not necessarily be applicable under the '76 act for the reasons the Government has offered. We would not advance this argument, but the Government has offered an argument in a parallel case that suggests a distinction between the '76 act and this case. That's not been briefed here. It's been grounded in their claim that the treaty power creates some special power. We wouldn't advance that claim, but the point is there are a number of issues that the '76 act --
JUSTICE BREYER(?): In essence, you think it's at least arguable that the '76 act had various positive aspects to it in terms of [*8] the purpose of the Copyright Clause that this act lacks?
MR. LESSIG: That's certainly true, and we also believe that, for the reasons averted to by amicus AOL in this case and the reasons you've just suggested, the disruption in that context under the retrospectivity cases Ryder and Reynoldsville Casket Company would be sufficient to fit it within the, quote, "severe disruption exception" to the retrospectivity.
JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, I suppose implicit in the argument that the '76 act, too, should have been declared void, and that we might leave it alone because of the disruption, is that for all these years the act has impeded progress in science and the useful arts. I just don't see any empirical evidence for that.
MR. LESSIG: Justice, we are not making an empirical claim at all. Nothing in our Copyright Clause claim hangs upon the empirical assertion about impeding progress. Our only argument is, this is a structural limit necessary to assure that what would be an effectively perpetual term not be permitted under the copyright laws.
JUSTICE KENNEDY: Well, perhaps I misunderstood. I thought the whole thrust of your argument was that there is a great First Amendment force here that's being [*9] silenced, that's being thwarted.
MR. LESSIG: Well, the thrust certainly --
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I thought that's the whole underpinning of your case.
MR. LESSIG: It's certainly the case that we are asserting, in light of the changed circumstances, that the opportunity to build upon works within the public domain is a fundamental First Amendment interest, and that the First Amendment values, the vital speech interest at stake of this case, is that the public domain be permitted as a source for cultivating work about our culture without unnecessary legal restriction.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Well, but you want more than that. You want the right to copy verbatim other people's books, don't you?
MR. LESSIG: We want the right to copy verbatim works that should be in the public domain and would be in the public domain but for a statute that cannot be justified under ordinary First Amendment analysis or under a proper reading of the limits built into the Copyright Clause.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Lessig, on your First Amendment argument I don't see where the retroactivity-prospectivity comes in, because -- I follow your argument under the Copyright Clause, but if you're saying that the time is too long, the public domain [*10] should get this stuff sooner rather than later, would you explain to me how your prospectivity-retrospective line fits into your First Amendment claim?
MR. LESSIG: Justice, we've argued that it would be inappropriate in this case for the Court to consider the prospective line until they decide whether the case, whether the prospective and retrospective is severable, and we submit it's an easy case to show that it's not.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: On the First Amendment --
MR. LESSIG: Yes.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: -- argument you're making that as, I take it, an argument independent of, it doesn't hang on your Copyright Clause argument.
MR. LESSIG: That's right. I --
JUSTICE GINSBURG: And so let's just take -- let's say that was your only argument in this case. How does that tie into a retrospective-prospective distinction?
MR. LESSIG: Well, the strongest First Amendment argument is about the retrospective extension, because of a fundamental change that occurs when Congress extends subsisting copyrights, rather than when Congress legislates prospectively.
When Congress legislates prospectively, it has no way to know who's going to benefit from its extension. It is simply evaluating what the term should be prospectively [*11] in a way that we presume this Court should presume is legitimate under the First Amendment. When it legislates retrospectively, it is, in effect, looking at particular authors and estates of authors who are before Congress asking for this extension, and it's choosing between these particular authors and the public at large.
Now, it may be that in exercising that choice in this case, Congress made an objective valuation of who would be in the best position to advance the interests of promoting the progress of science, or any --
JUSTICE GINSBURG: But you -- under your intermediate scrutiny test we would not be hypothesizing what might have been in Congress's mind. Your First Amendment test is a stringent one. You have to have an important purpose, and the means that you use is necessarily tied to that purpose. If you take that position, I don't see how you make the retroactive-prospective line work.
MR. LESSIG: Well, the line comes from deciding what the First Amendment interest is, and if this Court heed the First Amendment interest off of this difference between selecting who gets the benefit of 20 years of extension and just simply legislating in a general way prospectively, then this [*12] Court could hold, with respect to the prospective, that it's not even necessary to raise the intermediate scrutiny in that context, but again, for Ashwander reasons we don't think that this Court should address the prospective aspect of the CTEA even under the First Amendment.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Even though Congress's pattern has been to treat all authors equally? I mean, the reason that it's been prospective and retrospective is that people should be, people who hold copyrights should be subject to the same regime and not have some people who got their copyrights the week before the law passed treated differently than people who got it the week after.
MR. LESSIG: Well, Justice, that certainly is the reason the Government offers for this pattern. It, of course, doesn't explain actually what Congress has done and, even in this case, when a work has passed into the public domain, then there is precisely the same week before/week after problem that you advert to, that extension does not extend to all subsisting works, it only extends to all subsisting copyrights. So that line is already drawn in the practice that Congress has adopted, but our point is, the only way to assure --
JUSTICE GINSBURG: But [*13] Congress has -- or, you're not disputing that Congress has always made these extensions, both retroactive and prospective?
MR. LESSIG: Well, in 1831 it did not. In 1831 it granted the benefit of its extension to a subset of all subsisting copyright holders.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Let's stick with 1976.
MR. LESSIG: In 1976 --
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Because that was what you said -- that's -- the pattern under the CTEA is identical to the one in the '76 act.
MR. LESSIG: That's absolutely right, yes. So they have extended it to both. But our argument is, unless this Court draws a line about this extension, then for the reasons Judge Sentelle suggested below, there will be no limit to Congress's ability to --
QUESTION: Judge Sentelle did not deal with the First Amendment, as far as I --
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
QUESTION: -- recall.
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
QUESTION: And so I'm asking you -- perhaps I'm missing it. I haven't seen where you get the prospective-retrospective in connection with your First Amendment. It seems that you're just saying there that 70 years is an unreasonable -- is not necessary.
MR. LESSIG: Yes.
QUESTION: And it doesn't serve an important purpose.
MR. LESSIG: Yes. Precisely [*14] -- actually, we're not saying anything
about the 70 years in this case even under the First Amendment, because we believe it's unseverable, but --
QUESTION: But I thought you were saying that if you accept the Copyright Clause argument, then you have a way, in effect, of devaluing the Government's claim of its important interest and important objective when you get to the First Amendment intermediate scrutiny analysis. Whereas if you don't accept the Copyright Clause claim, then, in order to make the First Amendment analysis we've simply got to say, well, gee, is the promotion of useful art and so on more important than the public domain, and can we say that that allows a distinction between 50 years and 70 years?
We're pretty much at sea, so I thought your Copyright Clause argument was necessary to give us some handle with which to deal with the First Amendment.
MR. LESSIG: Our Copyright Clause argument is certainly a way of framing why extensions of subsisting terms cannot be seen to promote the First Amendment interest of speech at all.
QUESTION: Okay. Let's assume we don't -- for the sake of argument here, let's assume we don't accept the Copyright Clause argument. Do you have [*15] an independent First Amendment argument in your brief?
MR. LESSIG: Yes, of course we do.
QUESTION: Okay, and it is -- tell me in a sentence or two what it is. I mean, at that point I'm where Justice Ginsburg is.
MR. LESSIG: Yes. The First Amendment argument we've argued in our brief is with respect to the retrospective extension, and the First Amendment argument is, that needs to --
QUESTION: No, but that's the Copyright Clause argument, and it seems to me you're saying, okay, we then apply that in First Amendment analysis, which allows us to make a coherent intermediate scrutiny argument.
If we don't accept the Copyright Clause retrospectivity argument --
MR. LESSIG: Yes.
QUESTION: -- then what is your First Amendment argument?
MR. LESSIG: That's right, I'm sorry, Justice. What I'm saying is not that it' s the retrospectivity that makes the First Amendment argument troubling -- I mean, that drives our First Amendment argument. All I'm saying is, we have addressed the retrospective portion of CTEA, and so I'm saying in the retrospective portion of CTEA you would apply ordinary, intermediate First Amendment review, and we would ask --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, this Court really has not [*16] -- if you say that the Copyright Clause is not violated, I don't think there are examples where this Court has then resorted to First Amendment analysis to invalidate the same act.
MR. LESSIG: Well --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: I mean, this would be quite a new proposition.
MR. LESSIG: Well, Justice O'Connor, the First Amendment is always an independent limitation on what otherwise would be legitimate exercises of congressional authority, so this --
QUESTION: Yes, but the Framers seem to have adopted these two things at the same time --
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
QUESTION: -- in effect.
MR. LESSIG: That's right, and if --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: And I think there are not examples that I can think of where we have said, well, we'll analyze it under the Copyright Clause, but if that fails we'll turn to the First Amendment.
MR. LESSIG: Justice, that's right. If only we had the Framers' copyright before us, because of course, again remember,the exclusive right the Framers spoke of was the right to print and publish. It didn't include the derivative rights, it didn't include the display rights, and it certainly --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Right. It has expanded very much, and they also envisioned a very short term, and I can [*17] find a lot of fault with what Congress did here --
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: -- because it does take a lot of things out of the public domain that one would think that someone in Congress would want to think hard about.
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: But having done that, it's very difficult to find the basis in the Constitution for saying it isn't a limited term. It's longer than one might think desirable --
MR. LESSIG: Right.
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: -- but is it not limited?
MR. LESSIG: Well, if it is limited, then there is no limit to the ability of Congress to extend subsisting terms, and that fundamentally destroys the objective that the --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Rule against perpetuities might jump in there at some point.
(Laughter.)
MR. LESSIG: Right, and we submit the Framers had something very different in mind than the rule against perpetuities. The point is, if this is permitted, then there is no limit to the ability to extend terms, and that is precisely contrary to what the Framers had in mind when they worried about this problem originally.
What was the problem they were solving? It was, as this Court stated in Graham --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, I could agree with you, in terms [*18] of policy, that this flies directly in the face of what the Framers had in mind, absolutely. But does it violate the Constitution?
MR. LESSIG: Well, if it flies in the face of what the Framers had in mind, then the question is, is there a way of interpreting their words that gives effect to what they had in mind, and the answer is yes.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Well, you know, certainly what is happening in the country today in the way of congressional -- under the Commerce Clause is totally different than what the Framers had in mind, but we've never felt that that was the criterion. What the Framers thought of, there weren't steamboats, there weren't railroads.
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: We've said there was a general grant, and that Congress was free to run with it in many respects.
MR. LESSIG: In many respects, Mr. Chief Justice, but, as this Court has also said, there are limits to what Congress can do under the Commerce Clause.
QUESTION: But isn't --
JUSTICE STEVENS: Can I ask you about one of the limits, just focusing on the Copyright Clause and the progress of science and useful arts? In your view, does that -- is that limited to encouraging creativity by authors and inventors, or [*19] does it also include the distribution of materials that might not otherwise be distributed, like old films and so forth?
MR. LESSIG: We're happy to adopt a broader interpretation of what promote the progress is about, within the general framework that the Framers established in light of the English practice, which was a quid pro quo. The ability to facilitate distribution --
JUSTICE STEVENS: So that if the quid pro quo is that we can facilitate distribution of some old film by an additional monopoly grant, you'd think that's permissible?
MR. LESSIG: So long as the grant is conditioned upon the distribution. So long as the grant --
JUSTICE BREYER: In other words you could have -- right now, if Congress decides to have a law, and this law is going to give copyrights in 1) the Bible, 2) Shakespeare, 3) Ben Jonson, and the reason they do it is that they think that that would lead publishers to produce those and distribute them, and they're right, they will, okay? In your view, that's perfectly constitutional?
MR. LESSIG: No, that's the view of the Government's, Justice Breyer. My view is --
JUSTICE BREYER: Well, I thought that was the question you were getting, and I thought you were saying -- I must [*20] have misunderstood. I thought you were saying that was constitutional.
MR. LESSIG: No. What we were saying is, if Congress wants to permit restoration of films, for example, an issue that's been well briefed here, Congress can say, if you restore the film, then the restoration gets a copyright so long as it satisfies originality as outlined in Feist, and it gets a copyright for a period of time. But this Court's opinion in Graham and in Feist made clear that it could not extend copyrights to works in the public domain. The Government doesn't concede that, but we stand on that as a way of understanding why this Court --
JUSTICE BREYER: So your answer to Justice Stevens is no, they cannot give a copyright purely for purposes of dissemination to publishers, is that right?
MR. LESSIG: No.
QUESTION: Oh, all right.
MR. LESSIG: They cannot give a copyright purely for purposes of distribution to publishers.
(Laughter.)
MR. LESSIG: They would need to satisfy all of the implied limitations that this Court has expressed in the context of this, the most carefully limited clause in Article I, section 8. It is one of the --
JUSTICE GINSBURG: Mr. Lessig, the clause says, Congress shall, and suppose Congress [*21] decides in this expanded world of ours that it's going to make certain changes and demand other changes from our treaty partners. Suppose it says, well, the Germans led the fight for 70 years in the European Union, we'll go with that, but we're going to insist that they have a more expansive notion of, say, a fair use. Now, why couldn't that fit within the promotion of knowledge?
MR. LESSIG: Justice Ginsburg, we have no quarrel with the objective of harmonization fitting within the "promote the progress of science" understanding, subject to constitutional limitations.
If France adopted a rule that said you couldn't grant copyrights to hate speech, we could not harmonize with that rule consistent with our First Amendment and similarly, as Mary Beth Peters testified before Congress, ours is the only Constitution that has an express limitation on terms. That's got to mean something, and if it means that we are limited in our ability to agree with the Europeans as they continually expand the term in light of their own vision of what copyright is about, then that's the meaning of a constitutional restriction.
This Court's interpretation of "limited Times" could, of course, eviscerate [*22] that term of any meaning, but under the principle of enumeration as this Court has articulated it, this Court should interpret that clause in a way that gives its terms effect in a simple way. Just as a limited addition print is not a limited -- is not limited if each time a customer comes in a new print is printed, so, too, a limited term is not limited if each time copyright holders come to Congress they can extend the term.
JUSTICE SOUTER: Well, but the difference -- the reason that analogy doesn't cut it for me is that the limited edition print depends basically on an implied understanding between the person who makes the print and the person who buys it, and the understanding is, you won't go beyond 100, or whatever number you write.
We're not engaged in a contractual analysis under the Copyright Clause between the writer and the -- and somebody representing the public domain.
MR. LESSIG: That's right.
JUSTICE SOUTER: The analogy doesn't seem to work.
MR. LESSIG: That's right. All that I'm suggesting is, here is a plain meaning of the term that gives effect to the constitutional limit in a way that assures that, in fact, the limit is respected, contrary to the Government's argument, [*23] which, in effect, permits Congress the power perpetually to extend terms.
If I may reserve the remainder of my time.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST(?): Very well, Mr. Lessig.
General Olson, we'll hear from you.
ORAL ARGUMENT OF THEODORE B. OLSON
ON BEHALF OF THE RESPONDENT
GENERAL OLSON: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court:
The questions today, especially the initial questions, suggest one of the many insurmountable obstacles to petitioners' petition in, position in this case. That is that the first Congress explicitly gave copyright protection to the authors of any books already printed as well as explicitly the owners of existing copyrights. Thereafter, in 1831, 1909, 1976, and 1998, and in numerous private copyright bills and temporary extensions of the copyright law and in repeated patent law revisions, Congress extended the terms of Federal copyright and patent protection of subsisting works.
As this Court explained 100 and some years ago in its Burrows-Giles opinion, such constructions are accorded very great weight and, as that Court went on to say, when consistent and unchallenged for over a century are almost conclusive that consistent construction by Congress of its authority under [*24] the Copyright and Patent Clause now has lasted from the 105th -- from the first through the 105th Congress. It has been sustained by Justices of this Court and early decisions of this Court. It is consistent with what the law of England was from the Statute of Anne --
JUSTICE STEVENS: Yes, but take one of the early extensions, just extending a -- an already granted patent to an inventor for an extra 10 years. How can that be squared with the language of the provision? Maybe Congress did it, but maybe it acted improperly when it did it.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, the Congress --
JUSTICE STEVENS: And that's our question, really.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, that -- it seems to me that there may be -- this is -- the clause itself is a very, very broad grant. It says the --
JUSTICE STEVENS: Do you view it as entirely a grant, or do you think it also contains limitations?
GENERAL OLSON: Well, I think that to the extent that there may be limitations, Justice Stevens, they are -- require considerable deference by this Court to the judgment of Congress --
JUSTICE STEVENS: Well, I understand that, but do you -- I'd be interested in knowing, do you think it does contain limitations?
GENERAL OLSON: It contains -- the clause itself [*25] contains limitations, limited times, authors, exclusive rights and things of that nature. I don't think -- and the petitioners expressly disclaim the assertion that there are any substantive limitations in the "Promote the-Progress" Clause.
What the Framers were saying is, we want to give Congress the authority to promote the progress of useful arts and sciences, and --
JUSTICE STEVENS: How did the example we just talked about, a patentee giving an extra 10 years on his -- how does that promote the progress of science?
GENERAL OLSON: Well, it may provide additional incentives for the patentee to exploit and promote and disseminate that particular work. With respect to creative works like works of art, books and that sort of thing, it may provide many ways --
JUSTICE STEVENS: I'm just concentrating on our patentee, and I'm wondering how that fits into the notion that there was a bargain in effect between the inventor and the Government that at a certain period of time it would become part of the public domain. It seems to me it's inconsistent with that.
GENERAL OLSON: It isn't inconsistent, I submit, Justice Stevens, for the Congress to exercise its juris -- its responsibility under this broad [*26] grant of power to determine that there could be many ways in which the holder of an existing right may benefit the public by continuing to have that right for an additional period of time, the same reason that Congress -- same reasons that Congress had when it created the right in the first place. It's not just the --
QUESTION: No, the reason for the right in the first place was to encourage invention.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, but I -- we submit that specifically with respect to the Copyright Clause, but I think it applies to the patent portion of the clause at all, it isn't just the invention, it isn't just the writing of the work -- and this relates to the questions that were asked of my colleague a moment ago. It includes the dissemination of the work, not necessarily --
QUESTION: Dissemination alone?
GENERAL OLSON: Not necessarily the dissemination alone --
JUSTICE BREYER: Well, no, not -- don't say not necessarily. I'm -- for purposes of my thinking about it, I'd like to know, imagine we have just dissemination.
GENERAL OLSON: That something is already in the public domain.
JUSTICE BREYER: That's correct. The only justification for the extension, there is no other, is dissemination of [*27] a work that is already in existence.
GENERAL OLSON: I would not want to rule that out, Justice Breyer, for the very reason --
JUSTICE BREYER: Well, I want to say, do you think yes or no?
GENERAL OLSON: Well, I think that it could very well be yes, for the reason that in the 1790 statute the Congress specifically was aware of -- that there were State copyright laws which didn't last as long as the Federal statute. Several of the States hadn't finished enacting those copyright laws, and a couple of States hadn't enacted them at all.
JUSTICE BREYER: So in your opinion, in my example, if you recall it --
GENERAL OLSON: It's --
JUSTICE BREYER: -- your answer would be, if Congress tomorrow wants to give a copyright to a publisher solely for the purpose of reproducing and disseminating Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, it can do it?
GENERAL OLSON: It may --
JUSTICE BREYER: I hate to say may --
GENERAL OLSON: Well --
JUSTICE BREYER: -- because that really -- that's an important question.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, because I don't think that a per -- I don't think there is a per se rule that should apply here because this is a grant of Congress, to Congress to exercise its judgment as to what may be beneficial. There may be [*28] other constitutional provisions that come into play, or there may be --
JUSTICE BREYER: All right, let me explain to you why it's important to me. I have a list. This is an economic statute. The harms that seem to be caused by it, the extension, I've listed as follows, approximate numbers, made up, but magnitude correct.
The existing copyright holders who survive, their copyright survives 70 years, who have already been paid, on the numbers that were given, about $ 24 billion or more, will receive an extra $ 6 billion. That, I take it, is a harm. Their works have already been created.
Harm number 2. The fact that people, for the 99 percent of the copyrights that have no commercial value after 70 years, have to find the copyright holder to put them in databases. The cost of that, on my numbers in here, made up, at least a billion dollars, or they can't find the people at all and get permission, an innumerable cost, un -- valuable cost to people who want to use it. Those are costs.
On the plus side I see uniformity, dissemination, and -- now, you tell me.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, I also see compliance with international competitive markets and the laws that are being adopted, and the incentives [*29] --
JUSTICE BREYER: Uniformity. That's uniformity.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, that's not just uniformity. It's providing incentive to people to publish here, as opposed to publish in Europe, where longer terms might be available. There is an incentive to distribute existing works that may be necessary. It's the consistency that Congress is promoting by saying to individuals, as they might have said when they enacted the Copyright Clause in the first place, we will not only give you 14 years, but if we change our mind tomorrow, and think that a better, a longer period is necessary, we're -- this is consistency, but it's also a matter of fairness, and it's --
JUSTICE BREYER: Why -- on the last point, it's -- I've counted that as zero. The reason I've counted it as zero is it seems to me that the added value, incentive value to produce between life plus 50, or life plus 70, is zero. It's carried out, as the economists do, to three decimal points, divide by 100 for the probability of your ever having such a work, and you get virtually zero, no difference between this and a perpetual copyright.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, I think that that's a very good illustration of why the authority is granted to Congress, [*30] because if you are an 80-year-old writer, that may make a considerable difference in terms of what you decide to do.
JUSTICE BREYER: How could it?
GENERAL OLSON: It may -- because you may -- if you have no incentive, if you
know that this is going to go into the public domain sooner rather than later, it may affect your judgment with respect to --
JUSTICE BREYER: In -- I --
GENERAL OLSON: It might also affect whether the publisher -- what the publisher pays for your prospective work, Justice Breyer. We -- the Copyright Clause incentive provides incentives not just for -- not just to the creators, but to the disseminators, the publishers, the broadcasters, the film companies.
JUSTICE BREYER: So you think, say, Verdi, Othello, Verdi, Othello, 80 years old, the prospect of an extra 20 years way down the pike would have made a difference?
GENERAL OLSON: Well, I think again that illustrates why the authority is vested in Congress to make these judgments rather than in courts to make these judgments, because we're not talking about the effect on an individual author, or an individual creator. What the Framers of the Constitution were concerned about is a gross judgment with respect to what might generally [*31] provide incentives to the population --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: But it is hard to understand how, if the overall purpose of the Copyright Clause is to encourage creative work, how some retroactive extension could possibly do that. I -- one wonders what was in the minds of the Congress, even if somehow they didn't violate the clause. But if we affirm here, is there any limiting principle out there that would ever kick in?
GENERAL OLSON: Well, that's a -- that is a difficult question to say whether there is any limiting principle when such a broad grant of power, authority is given to Congress and has been exercised so repeatedly that --
JUSTICE O'CONNOR: Well, if it's a limited term, as the Constitution says, is there indeed any limit out there?
GENERAL OLSON: What I submit -- well, first of all, even the petitioners acknowledge that, as far as prospective limits are concerned, that isn't a judgment that this Court is being made to ask and, in fact, the petitioners acknowledge that it isn't a judgment that this Court should make, so the only point that the petitioners --
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Well, if Congress says we're going to grant this copyright indefinitely, forever --
GENERAL OLSON: That would seem -- [*32]
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: -- that violates the limited term, does it not?
GENERAL OLSON: I acknowledge that. And anything that --
JUSTICE KENNEDY: In Victorian England you could buy a box seat for 900 years. There was serene complacency about their culture, and God bless them, but --
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: -- I really think this is an important question and, as Justice O'Connor points out, if we have to ask what's the most plausible explanation for this rule, to reward existing vested interest or to stimulate new works, it seems to me that it's probably the former.
GENERAL OLSON: Well --
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I mean, we know that.
GENERAL OLSON: It is -- well, it -- let me say with respond -- in response to both of those questions, an unlimited time would violate the Copyright Clause. Something that was the functional equivalent of an unlimited time would violate the Copyright Clause, but the Framers specifically did not put in numbers. They had the opportunity to do that. Thomas Jefferson suggested that a number should be put in. We submit that it would be -- even -- since the petitioners don't suggest that it's an appropriate function of this Court, certainly in this case, to pick a number, 133 years or something [*33] of that nature, but it is quite clear that Congress from the Statute of Anne, 1710, we have 300 years of history, of Congress thinking that it continues to benefit the process, not just of the productivity, of the creation of the work itself, but the dissemination of it to provide --
JUSTICE SCALIA: General Olson, you say that the functional equivalent of an unlimited time would be a violation, but that's precisely the argument that's being made by petitioners here, that a limited time which is extendable is the functionable, functional equivalent of an unlimited time, a limited time that 10 years from now can be extended, and then extended again, and extended again. Why -- their argument is precisely that, a limited time doesn't mean anything unless it means, once you have established the limit for works that have been created under that limit, that's the end.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, the Framers had an opportunity to say immutable, unalterable, unamendable. They didn't use that. They used the phrase, limited term, which means then, meant then and means now, a certain specified --
QUESTION: Okay, assuming --
GENERAL OLSON: -- number of years under the statute.
JUSTICE SOUTER: With the exception [*34] of a limitation which illustrates the distinction between forever on the one hand and a definite number on the other, is there any limitation in the clause? Does the promotion, does the preambular recitation of promotion as such place a limit on it?
GENERAL OLSON: I submit, Justice Souter, that there's no per se limitation, that if there is, as Justice Scalia suggested, for -- if it is true that Congress, having specified 14 years or 28 years, decides that doesn't work very well because of the economies of other countries, the parade of constraints on artists in other countries, the reasons that we want things to be preserved or distributed, it should be 2 more years, or 5 more years later --
JUSTICE STEVENS: Yes, but that argument would apply to new copyrights, but to extension of already existing copyrights your argument doesn't apply.
GENERAL OLSON: It does apply, Justice Stevens, because --
QUESTION: The work has already been created.
GENERAL OLSON: The work has already been created, but the artists that are creating works day in and day out take into consideration the fact that Congress has decided, there's an ease of administration --
QUESTION: But for them, they get the benefit [*35] of the longer term if you don't apply it to an existing copyright. I mean, if you say you need 70 years because of changes in the economy to encourage works, you grant 70 for the future, but why does that, making that apply to somebody who created his work 20 years ago and has already provided what he, the quid pro quo, why do you need it for him?
GENERAL OLSON: We're not just -- because we're not just talking about the author. If we -- we're talking about --
QUESTION: The Constitution refers to the authors and the inventors, doesn't it? They're certainly the prime actors in this scene, aren't they?
GENERAL OLSON: Yes, but all of the history of the development of these clauses suggests that -- and this Court has indicated in its decisions with respect to copyright, that the Framers were concerned and the Congress is legitimately concerned not just in providing the spark of creativity, but to make sure that that's distributed widely and available, and there may be many reasons why -- we're -- we --
QUESTION: And that it gets into the public domain at the expiration of the term. That was an important part of the bargain.
GENERAL OLSON: Yes, and what -- but the definition of the [*36] term was a responsibility vested in Congress, because it has the power -- the legislative history of the 1998 act itself suggests what was going on here and suggests why the Framers gave this authority to Congress. There were numerous hearings, there were testimony by the folks that represent the same position as petitioners here as to why this shouldn't be done, why it should be done.
Congress weighed -- as this Court, the phrase that this Court used, I think it was in the Feist case, the delicate balance that was so difficult for Congress to --
QUESTION: How --
QUESTION: Okay, but you --
JUSTICE BREYER: -- what weighs in that balance, because to go back for one second, in practical, economic terms I gather the difference between a copyright that lasts for 100 years, lasts for 1,000 years, lasts forever, is probably something less than 1,000 -- on $ 1,000 a penny. I mean, it's a penny on 1,000, or probably a lot less than that, frankly. So I can not only not imagine a person whose decision to write would be governed by such a thing, I cannot imagine a European who would come to America to copyright his work for such a reason. Indeed, I wonder why that European wouldn't come anyway, [*37] even if the term were 10 years, because if he doesn't come, he's not going to get protection.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, the --
JUSTICE BREYER: I mean, who are these people that are going to be moved by that incentive?
GENERAL OLSON: The -- as we described in our brief, in pages 34 through 36, I believe it is in our brief, that the concerns about the limitation on exploitation and the limitation of a copyright period in Europe is based upon the country of origin of the work and the shortest time available. So that there may be differences, and we describe that, but that illustrates, Justice Breyer, the difference between 1 cents and 10 cents and $ 100 with respect to this particular author who's this particular age, or a particular author like Melville, whose works weren't -- weren't -- didn't -- or Schubert, whose works weren't properly appreciated or exploitable until many years after their death.
All of these variations are quintessentially legislative judgments. It would be very difficult for the Framers to have eschewed deciding 14 years was a constitutional limitation, and for this Court to say 99 years is, and again, even the petitioners aren't asking the Court to make that judgment. [*38] The petitioners are only saying that there shall be a per se rule that the word "limited Times" means unchangeable times.
JUSTICE GINSBURG: But there has to be a limit, as you acknowledge. Perpetual copyright is not permitted. Who is the judge of -- within that line? Who is the judge of when it becomes unlimited? Is there, in other words, judicial review and, if there is, what standard will this Court apply to determine whether something short of perpetual is still unlimited?
GENERAL OLSON: Well, the issue before this Court, I hasten to say, as I said before, is only whether, once the Congress makes that judgment, it can ever change it retrospectively. The issue before this Court is not whether, in the future, a certain length of time would be appropriate. That -- but the answer to that, Justice Ginsburg, I submit, is found in the Necessary and Proper Clause, and this Court's interpretation of the Necessary and Proper Clause as to the extent that this Court would find or not find that the judgment made by Congress with respect to the implementation of this very broad power is convenient or useful in terms of the achievement of the goals.
JUSTICE SOUTER: Okay, and is your argument that we should [*39] so find and hold against their retrospective argument, because there is some, at least plausible basis to say that there can be a causal connection between the retrospective extension and some benefit that can be traced to those particular works through the retrospective extension, like dissemination? Is that your argument?
GENERAL OLSON: That is among our arguments, Justice Souter.
QUESTION: Is it also your argument that even if you cannot trace that kind, or at least plausibly argue that there could be that kind of a causal benefit, that it would still be constitutional, because you should judge the extension simply as contributing to a general system, one feature of which is that from time to time there may be retrospective extensions, and so long as that general system induces the creation of works, or the dissemination of works, or the preservation of works, so long as the general system works, there is no review, no limitation on the tinkering that can be done, even retrospectively? Is that also your argument?
GENERAL OLSON: I think that's a fair statement of an argument that we have made and articulated in the brief --
QUESTION: Okay.
GENERAL OLSON: -- that unless there [*40] is a -- the Court is -- because the circumstances change, that we are living in an era now where piracy is a significant problem, there's question of administrative ease, of administering a system where copyrights may be different for one set of authors, or different for another set of authors, there's changes that are taking place internationally, so that what we're saying is that not only could this Court conceive of reasons why Congress thought it was accomplishing the objectives of this clause, but that there are numerous objectives that are entirely legitimate in --
QUESTION: Do you also argue that the Necessary and Proper Clause alone will justify the retroactive extension simply as a matter of equity?
GENERAL OLSON: Yes.
JUSTICE SCALIA: That is, that the Copyright Clause justifies the extension for works not yet created, but it would be enormously inequitable to have other authors who put in the same amount of work get a lesser protection, so the Necessary and Proper Clause now allows you to do the retrospective?
GENERAL OLSON: Yes, Justice Scalia, and the examples that are --
QUESTION: Can I ask you, why is it enormously inequitable if they get exactly what they were entitled [*41] to at the time they made the work?
GENERAL OLSON: The implicit promise that --
JUSTICE STEVENS: I mean, they have some right to expect that they will be -- you know, an additional grant, later on?
GENERAL OLSON: I think that's not an unreasonable expectation at all, Justice Stevens, because that was the premise of the --
QUESTION: That is the way it's always been done. There hasn't been any copyright extension that hasn't applied to subsisting work.
GENERAL OLSON: That's --
QUESTION: But there was one -- Justice Breyer brought up Ben Jonson, so -- this case doesn't involve works that are already in the public domain.
GENERAL OLSON: That is correct.
QUESTION: This is subsisting copyrights.
GENERAL OLSON: That is correct.
QUESTION: So --
QUESTION: But why wouldn't it?
QUESTION: Why? Why not?
JUSTICE SOUTER: Why wouldn't it? If the equity argument under the Necessary and Proper Clause justifies extension of the copyright for those whose copyright will expire tomorrow if it's not extended, in order to put them on parity with those getting copyrights for new works, why doesn't it apply to the copyright, the holder of the copyright that expired yesterday?
GENERAL OLSON: You could arguably [*42] -- you could conceivably make that argument, Justice Souter, but there is a bright line there. Something that has already gone into the public domain, which other individuals or companies or entities may then have acquired an interest in, or rights to, or be involved in disseminating --
QUESTION: And if you don't --
GENERAL OLSON: This is a rational --
QUESTION: If you don't throw out a line there, then Ben Jonson certainly gets recopyrighted.
QUESTION: Well, the difficulty --
QUESTION: If we're just looking for a bright line, the line that they suggest between unexpired patents and copyrights and brand new ones is also just as bright.
GENERAL OLSON: Oh, I concede that it's a bright line, but it's a bright line
that would have --
QUESTION: Except Congress chose this one and didn't choose the other one. That's --
GENERAL OLSON: Congress --
QUESTION: Basically you're saying the presumption ought to be in the congressional judgment about how to draw the line as well as in how long a line to draw.
GENERAL OLSON: I agree, and this Court has -- we're not just talking about the judgment of the Congress of the -- the 105th Congress in 1998. This is the way the Statute of Anne was [*43] written. This is the way the State copyright laws were written when this country became a Nation. This is the way the 1790 copyright statute, the number of --
QUESTION: Well, of course, the original statute was replacing a bunch of State statutes or State rules, partly common law, partly statutory, that -- they had kind of a mixed up legal situation, and there was an interest in having one uniform rule for the first time around.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, there was an interest in having a uniform rule, and that's precisely why the Framers created the Copyright Clause in the Constitution, but there was copyright protection in some States, there wasn't copyright protection in other States, and what we know from the decision of this Court in the Wheaton decision is that there was not a common law copyright in existence. This Court explicitly held that.
Now, the petitioners make this quid pro quo argument that somehow implicitly the initial 1790 copyright statute was saying to people, you get a copyright if you exchange whatever existing rights you have. That simply does not make any sense. There is no language, and it's a relatively late-discovered argument, because it sees its full -- [*44]
QUESTION: I want you to finish that, but I want you to go back to the -- I have one question on the equity principle. Are you -- I want you to finish.
GENERAL OLSON: I wasn't finished, but I'm happy to come back.
QUESTION: Go ahead. No, no, you finish first.
GENERAL OLSON: Well, I was going to say there's no language whatsoever of preemption, abandonment, abrogation, or exchange in the 1790 copyright, but compare -- Copyright Act. But compare that to the 1793 Patent Act under the same clause, where there is that exchange there.
The other thing, as this Court has said, there is no implied abrogation of common law rights which would be a doctrine which would be inconsistent with what the petitioner is arguing. Now --
JUSTICE BREYER: Why -- I mean, I think you have a point on this equity principle. I wonder, is there any review there? That is, suppose you have a statute, as this one arguably is, where 99.9 percent, many billions of dollars of benefits, are going to the existing holders of copyright on grounds of equity, and the effect of the statute in eliciting new works is near zero. I mean, that would seem -- where this equity idea is the camel and the production idea is the gnat, [*45] and is there any -- can we say something like that, or does Congress have total leeway in respect to --
GENERAL OLSON: Well, it --
JUSTICE BREYER: -- who they want to give the money to, basically?
GENERAL OLSON: Justice Breyer, it's conceivable that the Court might do that if that situation was present, but it's not remotely the situation here. We have the adoption of copyright terms which are consistent, generally speaking, with copyright terms which exist in the European Union, our principal competitor, and in connection with international treaties.
We have a copyright term that's consistent with the concept of the creator plus the creator's first generation heirs. We have a copyright term, remember, which supersedes the earlier copyright provisions that were added to the period between creation and publication, so that the limited number of years in the first, the 1790 and the 1831 statute were the number of years plus the relatively unlimited period of time between creation and publication, so we don't have anything remotely like that in this situation.
We have a process which, as you suggested, or one of the questions suggested, is -- may not have been the policy that you as a [*46] Member of Congress would have supported. You might have made the balance, that delicate balance that this Court has referred to, in another way, but that is something that Congress, through its ability to gather facts and make balances, is quintessentially capable of doing, and that is where the Framers vested the responsibility, and what this statute does is to favor, if at all, the creator with respect to the utilization of these rights, as opposed to the person who wishes to copy the creator. That's an entirely rational distinction for Congress to make.
Thank you.
QUESTION: Thank you, General Olson.
Mr. Lessig, you have 3 minutes remaining.
REBUTTAL ARGUMENT OF LAWRENCE LESSIG
ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS
MR. LESSIG: General Olson has been perfectly clear in setting out the structure of the Government's argument. It is that there is no effective limit on Congress's power under the Copyright Clause. Now, were this the first time this Court had considered Congress's copyright authority, that might be a plausible argument, but the very first time this Court ever struck down a law of Congress as exceeding Article I, section 8 power was in the context of the Copyright Clause. [*47]
We have 125 years of history of this Court making sure that the limits, both express and implied, in the Copyright Clause, have some meaning. The Feist opinion very clearly sets out the implied limits, a per se limit for originality, for the reasons Justice Breyer was trying to get me to say. The Harper as well as Graham set out very clear limits on the context of the ability to extend works in the public domain. Those limits make no sense under the reasoning the Government has offered. The Government's reasoning would make all of those opinions irrelevant and wrong.
Now, we offer a simple way to make this clear, express limit make sense, and that is precisely the understanding we suggest that existed in 1790. The only precedents that existed in 1790 were precedents of setting a term, and then when parliament was asked in 1735, '37, and '39 to extend it, they rejected it, and as amicus historians said, they rejected it because, as a pamphleteer described it, that would be effectively a perpetual term.
Now, this delicate balance that the Government invokes, Justice Breyer, let me give you the numbers. The delicate balance is that, under the most reasonable assumptions of copyright [*48] royalty income and under our interest rate of 7 percent, as the amicus economists note at page 6, note 6 of their brief, the current term gives authors 99.8 percent of the value of a perpetual term.
Now, that might be a delicate balance, that they give the author 99.8 percent and the public .2 percent, but in my mind, that's delicate in a very different sense of that term.
Thank you very much.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST: Thank you, Mr. Lessig.
The case is submitted.
(Whereupon, at 11:01 a.m., the case in the above-entitled matter was submitted.)
Ernest Miller and Raul Ruiz from Yale's Lawmeme Blog were there all night with us in front of the Supreme Court last Tuesday night.
(Good thing I had extra blankets!)
They have posted recently regarding the event:
Lawmeme: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I
Justice Breyer was particularly hard on the government's position. He brought in a number of economic arguments. Basically, he made the point that the expected value of the extended copyright was so small as to be virtually zero. He also asked whether the government could recopyright Ben Johnson. The government did not say "no." Justice Stevens appeared skeptical of the government's arguments. The government made much of the inequities of not providing retroactive and prospective extension together. Scalia questioned whether the inequities argument could be turned around. J. Breyer, in essence, answered "yes" by claiming that existing copyright owners get all the benefit and, inequitably, prospective copyright owners get very little benefit.Although four justices were not satisfied with the government's arguments on retrospective copyright extensions, it is far from clear or even likely that Eldred will get the 5 votes necessary to overturn the statute. However, hope springs eternal.
Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
Lawmeme: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I
http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=392
Features: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I
Posted by Raul Ruiz on Wednesday, October 09 @ 11:18:34 EDT
Your humble reporters (Ernest Miller and Raul Ruiz) have just exited from the Supreme Court after hearing oral arguments in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft. We are providing you this first report from memory as members of the public are not permitted to take notes in the Supreme Court.
As representative for petioner, Larry Lessig spoke first. His first questions from Justice O'Connor regarded whether or not all copyright laws passed by Congress included retrospective extension. Prof. Lessig distinguished the first copyright law of 1790 from subsequent laws and characterized the first law as not truly a retrospective extension. There was a great deal of concern whether or not accepting Eldred's position would lead to the court having to invalidate many previous laws, in particular the copyright act of 1976. Justice Breyer gave Prof. Lessig an out by asking whether or not the court could refuse to invalidate the copyright act of 1976 due to the chaos it would create. More to come.. batteries
UPDATE 1335 EDT
UPDATE 1350 EDT
UPDATE 1355 EDT
Chief Justice Rehnquist also seemed skeptical of changing a pattern in lawmaking with such a long pedigree. Justice Breyer raised an analogy he would repeat with the Solicitor General. He asked whether under Eldred's argument it would be permissible to recopyright the bible, Ben Johnson, or Shakespeare. Justice Ginsberg was very tough on Eldred's First Amendment arguments. She couldn not see why the First Amendment arguments were different for prospective and retrospective copyright. She seemed to think this was a bad thing.
Justices Scalia and Thomas asked no questions of Lessig. Scalia possibly because Lessig had been his clerk. Thomas because he seldom asks questions anyway.
The most disturbing thing about the Solicitor General's argument was that no questions were asked regarding the First Amendment issues. Conclusion: Eldred loses the First Amendment issues completely.
Justice Breyer was particularly hard on the government's position. He brought in a number of economic arguments. Basically, he made the point that the expected value of the extended copyright was so small as to be virtually zero. He also asked whether the government could recopyright Ben Johnson. The government did not say "no." Justice Stevens appeared skeptical of the government's arguments. The government made much of the inequities of not providing retroactive and prospective extension together. Scalia questioned whether the inequities argument could be turned around. J. Breyer, in essence, answered "yes" by claiming that existing copyright owners get all the benefit and, inequitably, prospective copyright owners get very little benefit.
Although four justices were not satisfied with the government's arguments on retrospective copyright extensions, it is far from clear or even likely that Eldred will get the 5 votes necessary to overturn the statute. However, hope springs eternal.
It would appear that Jack Valenti, who also attended the oral argument, has a number of reasons to justify the smile he wore as he entered the courtroom.
UPDATE 1335 EDT
We just want to emphasize that this is our impression of the oral argument. We were not permitted to take notes and are working from memory. Press accounts will certainly provide more information. Also, the fine art of "Justice Counting" is not something in which we are experts. Look for more subtle analysis on how Justices are likely to vote from various Professors and the usual suspects.
One point we didn't initially mention is that the issue that had intrigued a number of legal commentators is whether or not the court was interested in extending the precedent set in Lopez, which for the first time in many years constrained Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce. Some have thought that this issue would be raised by analogy from the commerce clause to the copyright clause. The Chief Justice is the only one who raised the issue in a single question to Prof. Lessig. The question was oblique, and only implied the question, but Prof. Lessig recognized it and provided the appropriate answer, which seemed to please the Chief Justice. It was not raised by any other justice, nor was the Solicitor General provided a similar question.
The New York Times has an AP wirestory (High Court Debates Copyright Case).
PS. This blogging brought to you via 802.11b equipped PDA (please excuse typos, etc.) and warchalked wireless access point, somewhere in the vicinity of the Supreme Court building (thanks warchalkers!)
UPDATE 1350 EDT
Only 25 members of the general public were permitted to watch the oral arguments. Anyone who lined up after three AM, did not get in (thankfully, it didn't rain).
Doc Searls has a second hand report that is more optimistic (I Blew It). We believe the "I blew it" refers to not getting into see the oral argument.
UPDATE 1355 EDT
Well, we are heading back to New Haven from Washington, D.C. We will be back online and following the coverage later this evening. Thanks for stopping by.
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1976 law is a different case (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 12:18:29 EDT
The Justices are silly if they think that striking down the 1998 extension automatically invalidates the 1976 extension. The two laws are distinguishable, first of all by the copyright term itself: 95 years is longer than 75 years. Monopolies, James Madison noted (quotation here for the time being) are objectionable in proportion to their scope and duration. (He was talking about banks at the time, but the general principle applies more widely. That's what general principles do.) So a law that creates a 95 year term can be treated differently from a law that creates a 75 year term, because it imposes heavier burdens on the public.
Then there is the matter of termination rights. The 1976 law allowed the authors' heirs to file to recapture the additional 19 years. The 1998 law allows the heirs of some authors to file to recapture the additional 20 years, but forbids others from doing so. Leaving aside the question of whether authors' grandnephews can constitutionally stand for authors at all, how can this partial impliementation of termination rights satisfy the requirement that Congress create rights "for authors" ?
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Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 1)
by mattperkins on Wednesday, October 09 @ 13:15:22 EDT
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This post is the first detailed account of today's argument that I have found. Thank you. My addiction to Eldred news has been, for the moment, fed. :)
--matt
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Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 1)
by filter_editor on Wednesday, October 09 @ 13:27:17 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wentworth.html
Bravo, guys!
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Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 1)
by DerekSlater on Wednesday, October 09 @ 13:36:17 EDT
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This does not sound good. While my Eldred fixation has been temporarily sated, I feel compelled to read all the other blogs, praying that someone will post something confident, something screaming WE'RE GOING TO WIN!
Waiting months for the decision will not make it any easier...
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Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 1)
by juanfe on Wednesday, October 09 @ 13:50:39 EDT
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Just got back home from The Hallowed Halls of Justice--let us not say anything about the high barrier of entry it is to actually see the Court in session!
I think that a crucial points of Lessig's argument which got lost in the discussion of retrospective extension (and which he made much more clearly during the post-argument press recap) is that copyright law now affects many more people and much more broadly than it would have in 1976 because of Internet-based publish-at-will. Basically, the inability to establish a firm limit to how far Congress can continue sliding the protection blanket can have a limiting effect on everyday people's sharing of cultural capital without being potentially liable for violations of really old copyrights.
Still, I think that Lessig had a difficult time making his "stifling of speech" argument because it seemed, from the questions presented by the Justices, that they were still conceptualizing publication (of derivative or new works that incorporate others' materials) as something done only by a relative few rather than the many.
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Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 13:53:25 EDT
He asked whether under Eldred's argument it would be permissible to recopyright the bible, Ben Johnson, or Shakespeare.
Should that be "the government's argument". Under Eldred's the answer is "NO!".
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Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 1)
by vample on Wednesday, October 09 @ 15:24:54 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.vamp.org/
"Only 25 members of the general public were permitted to watch the oral arguments. Anyone who lined up after three AM, did not get in"
Actually slightly more than this got in, I'd guess about 40-45, including those that probably arrived around 5am. I was 29th in line, arrived around 4:30 am and was able to get in, despite the large number of those with reservations or other special connections. I think the confusion arose because after letting in about 40-45 people from the general public, they split the group between the first 25 and the rest, but all of the latter group was let in before arguments began.
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* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Friday, October 11 @ 15:45:18 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Friday, October 11 @ 17:25:36 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Sunday, October 13 @ 15:14:05 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, October 15 @ 14:16:40 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Monday, October 14 @ 02:18:48 EDT
Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 15:27:21 EDT
You are correct about the title of I Blew It. It's particularly bitter as I'd abandoned trying for press credentials on the theory that I'd be able to get in as a member of the public with my good memory. The lawyers for the government I overheard discussing the case are not expecting an easy time back in lower court, and they are expecting to go there--take it for what it's worth.
[ Reply to This ]
Lopez? (Score: 1)
by MurphysLaw on Wednesday, October 09 @ 15:27:23 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://
Could someone expand on what C.J. Renquist was getting at by referencing Lopez?
[ Reply to This ]
* Re: Lopez? by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 15:48:55 EDT
* Re: Lopez? by 188 on Wednesday, October 09 @ 16:23:37 EDT
* Re: Lopez? by 188 on Wednesday, October 09 @ 16:25:42 EDT
Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 15:38:13 EDT
Life imitates art: In The Ballad of Dennis Karjala the "movie barons" are made to say "we hate the public domain". Now an apologist for the CTEA all but admits it. He seems to want to abolish the public domain except in the case of works that their authors voluntarily contribute to it.
[ Reply to This ]
Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 15:47:29 EDT
Wouldn't the distinction between the 1976 law and the current law be that no (or almost no) copyrights have expired since the 1976 law, and that therefore the retrospection has effectively extended copyrights which pre-existed the 1976 law indefinitely (i.e., it made sure that nearly all existing copyrights would continue for as long as it has been since the last time the law was changed, setting a legislative example for future extensions)?
Not well expressed, but you see my point.
[ Reply to This ]
Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 16:25:33 EDT
Pardon for not looking around before posting, but does anyone know if Oyez is going to post the audio from this, and if so when? -- and in the alternative, where a transcript might be available?
[ Reply to This ]
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 18:46:14 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 23:46:40 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Thursday, October 10 @ 18:18:31 EDT
* Transcripts will be freely available in a couple of weeks :-/ by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Thursday, October 10 @ 14:15:41 EDT
Difference with 1976 (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 16:46:10 EDT
The biggest difference I see between this law and 1976 (and all previous laws) is that 1976 was the first year that all works were copyrighted upon creation. So although there was incentive created to publish and copyright works which were unpublished after the 1976 law, there was no such incentive following the 1998 law, because everything was already copyrighted, regardless of whether it was published.
[ Reply to This ]
Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, October 09 @ 18:39:47 EDT
Why would the S.C. remand this case to a lower court?
How would that be beneficial in anyway to Lessig?
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No note-taking please, This is the Supreme Court (Score: 1)
by Tim_Langeman on Thursday, October 10 @ 00:15:57 EDT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.openpolitics.com/tim/
Can anyone explain to me why the policy against note-taking isn't a common-sense infringement of the first amendment?
It may not be a law written by Congress but knowing that people on the Court are willing to tolerate this sort of policy doesn't make me optimistic about the Court's ability to see the link between IP and freedom of expression.
[ Reply to This ]
* Re: No note-taking please, This is the Supreme Court by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Thursday, October 10 @ 09:26:10 EDT
* Re: No note-taking please, This is the Supreme Court by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Thursday, October 10 @ 10:27:54 EDT
* Re: No note-taking please, This is the Supreme Court by Tim_Langeman on Thursday, October 10 @ 20:01:00 EDT
* Re: No note-taking please, This is the Supreme Court by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Friday, October 11 @ 09:39:07 EDT
* Good news: Transcripts will be posted after all by Tim_Langeman on Friday, October 11 @ 18:21:46 EDT
* Re: No note-taking please, This is the Supreme Court by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Thursday, October 10 @ 16:32:38 EDT
Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I (Score: 2, Informative)
by MCSquared on Friday, October 11 @ 14:18:50 EDT
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If you have not been to the Supreme Court, you really must go. This was my first visit, and it was pretty amazing. The architecture is very impressive. The fact that simply waiting on line for a few hours will grant anyone entrance to the heart of one of the three branches of government is important. The fact that Supreme Court hearings are not simulcast on television or over the Internet is disappointing, though. The fact that the Court decided to hear the Eldred case on the third day of the session made waiting outside for over 4 hours bearable.
For those who are curious, I got there with some friends just before 5am. At 7:30am, police officers handed out numbered tickets to approximately the first 100 people in line. The highest number in my group of friends was 44, and we were told that the first 50 people would definitely be able to hear the entire argument. After we received our numbers, we were free to leave the area to get food and use the bathroom, as long as we were back in line by 8:20am. At about 9am, the first 50 people were allowed into the building. Once inside, we went thru a metal detector, had to place all personal belongings into lockers or leave at the coat-check, and then waited in a second line for a second set of metal detectors. After everyone with reserve tickets was seated, they ushered the general admission people thru the second set of metal detectors and into the courtroom.
I was seated one row in from the back wall, all the way to the right side and behind a large column. From where I was sitting, I had to squint and look for lips moving to figure out which Justice was talking. When we got there, the Court was approving some judge appointments. After just a few minutes, they were finished and the oral arguments for Eldred v. Ashcroft began.
Seated in the row in front of me was a man who was fascinated by some cracks in the marble column next to him (the same marble column that was obstructing my view of the left side of the bench). I had seen this guy waiting on line in front of me, and I was surprised by the fact that this man who had waited so long for his seat in the courtroom seemed more fascinated by the marble column than the hearing. I honestly did not see him look up even once. As I watched him look at the cracks, I thought about the cracked column symbolizing the cracks forming in the American copyright system. I thought of the mailman character in the Keenan Ivory Wayans film “Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” who simply shows up and yells “Message” when there is a real social comment being made in an otherwise funny film. Then I thought about how such a film (even just the title) would probably be impossible to release in today’s litigious environment. Yes, dear reader, one tends to free-associate a lot when one has had only 3 hours of sleep.
My impression of the argument itself is hazier still. Lessig went first, and I thought he got a good drumming from the Justices. But then Solicitor General Olson made his argument, and I thought he received a worse beating. Because of the difficulties hearing, seeing, and staying awake, I honestly wasn’t able to follow Lessig’s arguments. I was awed that the facts surrounding the Statute of Anne were cited and precedent in 2002. I thought we learned history just for the sake of knowledge. I would never have guessed that events of almost 300 years ago would be as relevant as they seemed in that courtroom Wednesday.
I was a bit more awake for General Olson’s argument, and I followed it well enough to disagree with most of it. Olson stressed the idea that retroactive copyright extensions are necessary to incentivize publishers to continue publishing old works. This idea seemed just silly to me, so I took the opportunity to ask Professor Lessig about its history when he spoke on the Georgetown campus last night. He explained that it was a response to the claims that there were a large number of movies that were literally disintegrati
Read the rest of this comment...
[ Reply to This ]
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Friday, October 11 @ 15:54:54 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Friday, October 11 @ 17:31:21 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Sunday, October 13 @ 15:16:07 EDT
* Re: Live From Eldred v. Ashcroft - I by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Monday, October 14 @ 02:22:27 EDT
Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die
of movie editing and metadata research and ready to take a peek at what's been cooking the last two days in the outside world...
I'll finally writing up my little account of the Supremes experience and am also compressing an extremely rough cut of all of my usable video footage as we speak (as I write...as you read...whatever...right now! this instant!)
Don't worry -- we're only talking about 12 minutes or so of footage...
Pressplay adds BMG songs
As reprinted in the 10/15/02 San Francisco Chronicle from the NY Times
Pressplay, an online music service that offers consumers the ability to listen to and download more than 100,000 songs for a monthly fee, said Monday that it had added tens of thousands of tracks distributed by BMG to its catalog. The Pressplay service already includes songs from the two major labels that own it, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, as well as EMI. Pressplay is expected to announce a deal with Warner Music Group shortly, a move that would make it the only service to offer the ability to download music from all five major labels.
Talkative Bush takes press corps by surprise Drops by for an extended Q&A session
By Laurence McQuillan for USA Today
''It's the new me,'' he joked. ''I'm answering all kinds of questions.''Regular White House correspondents were caught off guard when Bush strolled over to them on the South Lawn as they waited to watch him depart for a quick trip to Michigan. (He was scheduled to give a speech, then make a campaign appearance for Thaddeus McCotter, a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives from suburban Detroit.)
Bush typically speaks with reporters a couple of times a week, and they rarely get in more than two to four questions.
But on this occasion, Bush answered about 15 questions. After a series of terrorist attacks abroad, he was eager to talk. ''I've constantly told the American people that the struggle against terror is going to be a long and difficult struggle; that we're dealing with cold-blooded killers; that the enemy does not value innocent life like we do; and that we must continue to pursue the enemy before they hurt us again.'' He said he suspected the al-Qaeda network was behind the recent attacks.
Here is the entire text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20021015/4534340s.htm
Talkative Bush takes press corps by surprise Drops by for an extended Q&A session
By Laurence McQuillan
USA TODAY
WATERFORD, Mich. -- President Bush surprised some members of the White House press corps Monday morning. He answered their questions -- lots of them.
Even Bush acknowledged that it was a remarkable moment.
''It's the new me,'' he joked. ''I'm answering all kinds of questions.''
Regular White House correspondents were caught off guard when Bush strolled over to them on the South Lawn as they waited to watch him depart for a quick trip to Michigan. (He was scheduled to give a speech, then make a campaign appearance for Thaddeus McCotter, a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives from suburban Detroit.)
Bush typically speaks with reporters a couple of times a week, and they rarely get in more than two to four questions.
But on this occasion, Bush answered about 15 questions. After a series of terrorist attacks abroad, he was eager to talk. ''I've constantly told the American people that the struggle against terror is going to be a long and difficult struggle; that we're dealing with cold-blooded killers; that the enemy does not value innocent life like we do; and that we must continue to pursue the enemy before they hurt us again.'' He said he suspected the al-Qaeda network was behind the recent attacks.
He soon boarded his helicopter for the short flight to Andrews Air Force Base. There, as he started up the steps to Air Force One, he turned and addressed the ''pool'' -- the dozen or so reporters and news crew members who were taking their turn on the president's jet while the rest of the traveling press corps took a different plane.
He shook his head and grinned. ''You missed the news conference,'' he teased them.
Bush's extended exchange with the reporters who dog him daily came on the same day that The New York Times carried a story in which White House correspondents complained that the president and his staff are unusually tight-lipped. The reporters say the public has a right to know how and why Bush makes important decisions, particularly as the nation fights a war on terrorism.
Bush has had more than three dozen news conferences, loosely defined, since he took office. By the Times' reporting, that's roughly half the number held by his father and by President Clinton at this point in their presidencies. He has had a half-dozen more formally defined news conferences in the East Room of the White House.
Reporters complain that when Bush does speak with them, it's usually in a small group rather than at a formal news conference where a broader range of subjects could be covered. The White House says that reporters have plenty of access to Bush and that spokesman Ari Fleischer's daily briefings fill in the gaps.
By the end of Tuesday's conversation on South Lawn, reporters and Bush were bantering.
''Does this constitute a press conference?'' somebody asked.
''Absolutely,'' the president replied. ''The difference between this news conference and the one in the East Room is you didn't get to put makeup on.''
Then he added, still grinning, ''That was an unnecessary cheap shot. I apologize.''
Nonprofit organization to oversee dot-orgs
As reprinted in the 10/15/02 San Francisco Chronicle from the NY Times.
The group that oversees the Internet's address system has selected The Internet Society as the future operator of the .org domain. The Internet Society was chosen out of 11 bids to take over responsibility for .org addresses from VeriSign Inc., which agreed to relinquish .org at the end of 2002 as part of an agreement allowing the company to continue managing the lucrative .com domain.
The Internet Society, a nonprofit organization involved in developing technology standards for the Internet, has established a separate nonprofit organization, the Public Interest Registry, to serve as the .org operator beginning Jan. 1, 2003.
I'm trying to get all of the Eldred Camping Stories in one place, so if you were there that night (and especially if I videotaped you!) please oh please email me with a link to it. Thanks!
Seth Schoen has written up his account of our little adventure.
Lisa Rein and a big group of us had planned to meet at the Supreme Court and camp out on the steps of the Court overnight in order to be certain of hearing the Eldred argument. (Amy Harmon recently called Lessig a "rock star" -- I guess it's really true.) We had a list of cell phone numbers and a specific plan and schedule to try to make sure that our group of about ten very dedicated people would definitely manage to hear the oral argument in the morning. We'd already heard that lines would form early and grow quickly.Lisa, who really seems good at organizing things, had managed to go to an Army surplus store earlier in the day and buy a huge number of cheap, warm blankets, as well as making some tea. By the time Aaron Swartz and I got to the Court, shortly before midnight, Lisa had already been there for hours.
Indeed, by the time we got there, the group had already ordered pizza, and was having a late-night dinner. (The Supreme Court Police Department night shift told them where to call to get pizza delivered until 1:00a -- I guess it ought to come as no surprise that the SCPD would know that sort of thing.) It was strange to see a little camp with blankets, sleeping bags, clothing, backpacks, and pizza assembled with the Court (or the Capitol, if you looked from the other direction) as a backdrop. I briefly hung my suit from a tree.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-10-13.html
Sunday, October 13, 2002
In the Supreme Court of the United States
I arrived in D.C. with Cindy on Tuesday evening and went to a party in honor of the petitioners, organized by EPIC's Marc Rotenberg, whom I'd never met before and unfortunately met only briefly at the party.
At that event, I met Eric Eldred for the first time, and talked to him about bookdealers, the publishing industry, electronic texts, DRM, and the prospects for being proactive in supporting the public domain and the public's rights in copyright. I wanted to get Eldred to autograph a copy of The Scarlet Letter, but I didn't manage to buy one in time. (I don't think Brewster Kahle's Bookmobile, which was there at the party, had a properly typeset edition of that work available for printing, although I'm fairly sure we could have printed a plain ASCII e-text of it.)
As I said, Brewster Kahle was there with his Bookmobile, looking none the worse for wear after driving all the way across the United States. Brewster and his friends printed up books, mainly classics of children's literature, for the partygoers, and the Bookmobile drove off to the Supreme Court later in the evening.
I also met for the first time two people I know on-line, and with whom it so happened that I'd been in an e-mail exchange (about CSS encryption) the night before: Ernest Miller of LawMeme, and Aaron Swartz of Creative Commons. Aaron was in town for the Eldred argument as a special guest of Larry Lessig, who recently called him "a favorite boy genius". Ernie drove down from Yale, where he's invited me to appear as a panelist at a one-day Yale Law School conference on blogging next month.
I also got to meet some of the EPIC staff, and James Boyle, who'd just received $1,000,000 from an anonymous donor for research on the public domain in copyright.
Lisa Rein and a big group of us had planned to meet at the Supreme Court and camp out on the steps of the Court overnight in order to be certain of hearing the Eldred argument. (Amy Harmon recently called Lessig a "rock star" -- I guess it's really true.) We had a list of cell phone numbers and a specific plan and schedule to try to make sure that our group of about ten very dedicated people would definitely manage to hear the oral argument in the morning. We'd already heard that lines would form early and grow quickly.
Lisa, who really seems good at organizing things, had managed to go to an Army surplus store earlier in the day and buy a huge number of cheap, warm blankets, as well as making some tea. By the time Aaron Swartz and I got to the Court, shortly before midnight, Lisa had already been there for hours.
Indeed, by the time we got there, the group had already ordered pizza, and was having a late-night dinner. (The Supreme Court Police Department night shift told them where to call to get pizza delivered until 1:00a -- I guess it ought to come as no surprise that the SCPD would know that sort of thing.) It was strange to see a little camp with blankets, sleeping bags, clothing, backpacks, and pizza assembled with the Court (or the Capitol, if you looked from the other direction) as a backdrop. I briefly hung my suit from a tree.
I hadn't eaten anything since morning, so I advocated a second pizza order, and so we had the unusual experience of calling up a pizza parlor and ordering four large pizzas and asking for delivery to the United States Supreme Court. (And we meant it, and they did deliver the pizzas there, and we ate them.)
Ernest Miller had come by and gotten in line with us (or "became the line with us"), with a LawMeme t-shirt and a big LawMeme banner, with the motto "Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur" ("Human laws are born, live, and die"). I suspect the focus on this particular occasion may have been on "moriuntur".
The reverse of the banner, and the reverse of the t-shirt, quoted the Copyright Clause, which I think you would definitely have been considered lame if you hadn't already memorized.
At about midnight, a group of about eight law students from Virginia showed up. People trickled into line gradually after that. After looking around the Court, we sat down to play a round or two of Set. Next, after dropping my suitcase and suit off in Lisa's hotel room a few blocks away, Aaron and I went off for a while to use some wireless net access he'd discovered on a corner. We must have been a funny sight, standing together on a residential street corner after 1:00 in the morning, intently working on a couple of laptops. (Aaron's laptop backlight was also dead, so, when his laptop's display became too hard to read, he started up a VNC server on the laptop, I started a VNC client, and we used the wireless network to allow him to use my laptop as an interface into his laptop so he could run software there. However, in order to make the wireless reception work right, I had to walk about thirty feet away and hold his laptop up in the air!)
We returned to the camp site to find the line incrementally longer, but we were able to reclaim our positions in front with Lisa's group. A few of us who were unaccountably not tired then went off for a late-night walk around the Capitol, which gave me a better understanding of the geography of the whole thing (especially how the House and Senate office buildings are located with respect to the Capitol building itself). When we finally got back, I fell asleep listening to the other campers recounting practically the entire procedural history of a number of recent copyright-related court cases.
I only got about two hours' sleep. It wasn't quite light out when I woke up, a bit after 5:00, but the line already contained at least 50 people, which was the largest number we'd been told were likely to gain admission. We started to pack up our stuff and form a more formal line, and suddenly a large number of police cars converged on an intersection about a block down the street. The SCPD came out and told us all to move the entire line around the corner, which we did, and then about ten minutes later we were told to move back to the original position. The police wouldn't explain why we'd been asked to move. (There was a rumor about a bomb threat or something, but it was never officially confirmed.)
Some time after 7:00, the SCPD came around to hand out cards with numbers indicating our relative positions within the line. I was number 6; I had been in line for over eight hours at that point, with only minor interruptions. (Lisa and I did have to run back from the hotel room she was renting a few blocks away; we'd stepped out of line for a few minutes to go back to her room and change out of our line-standing clothes and into our court clothes.)
As I remember it, the first six cards were assigned in this order:
1. Jace
2. Lodrina
3. Macki
4. Lisa
5. Kevin Burton
6. Seth
All these people were members of our group.
Number 6 is a very, very good line position to have. As it turned out, about 200 members of the general public turned out to try to hear Eldred. How many do you suppose were admitted?
The public was given lowest priority, behind all journalists, all members of the Bar of the Supreme Court, all candidates and sponsors for motions of admission to the Bar of the Supreme Court, and all guests of parties, counsel, or Justices and officers of the Court. (That was a lot of people. The Supreme Court can hold hundreds of spectators in its gallery, and it was almost completely packed by the time the public began to be admitted at all.)
At 9:00, the great golden doors of the Court slid open (not "swung open"; they're sliding doors), and the line curved around the corner. That was the last I saw of it, but I maintain that there must have been about 200 people who came by hoping to hear the argument.
The first fifty people in line were permitted to enter the Court's antechamber, where we were subject to two searches, but we kept watching as more and more people streamed into the courtroom ahead of us -- from the higher-priority groups I mentioned above.
Something like twenty-five members of the public were eventually admitted to the argument. Since the original line positions were scrupulously observed, I was the sixth.
Just as you've heard, they actually do say "Oyez, oyez!"; they actually do say "God save the United States of America and this honorable Court"; they actually do say "Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court" at the start of the argument. It was a real thrill to hear Lessig begin with "Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court".
Maybe some year it will be "Madam Chief Justice, and may it please the Court".
I have no notes from the argument, because note-taking is banned completely for everyone but credentialled journalists (who sit in a special walled-off section, perhaps so their note-taking won't give anyone else any ideas) and members of the Supreme Court Bar (who have to swear a loyalty oath, as I observed some new admittees doing immediately before the oral argument). Since I have no notes, I'm just going to discuss a few points based on my personal recollection. You can probably get a better story if you read the accounts by journalists who were taking notes on paper. For the most part, I don't even remember which Justice asked which question.
So this is going to be rough and perhaps somewhat scattered. If anybody has specific questions which might help me clarify or make better sense out of what I experienced, please ask, and I'll try to answer them here.
The argument felt extremely short for all of us who'd been following the case. Cindy and I read over 160 pages of briefs while we were on the plane, so we were thoroughly familiar with the basic lines of argument which were before the Court. You can get those briefs from the Eldred v. Ashcroft site.
The Justices gave both sides a hard time. This seems like a key point to me. At the outset, when Lessig was being asked tough questions, it seemed natural to say that they disfavored his argument. But Olson received his share of tough questions, too. (And I remember attending an oral argument in DVD CCA v. Bunner before a California appeals court which asked really difficult questions of Bunner's attorney and then ended up ruling in favor of Bunner. So it's never wise to say that one side is definitely going to win just because the other side was thrown a series of challenging questions.)
Lessig was very composed, and I say that you'd never have believed that it was the second time in his life he'd appeared before a court, unless you already knew that. Even so, I kept thinking that he seemed right at home (which could make sense, since he was formerly a clerk to Justice Scalia). The Solicitor General did seem more experienced at Supreme Court argument, but by no means astonishingly or overwhelmingly so. Lessig's answers to the Court's questions were generally more direct and more confident; the Solicitor General's answers were typically more evasive and uncertain, which managed to irritate one Justice so much that he said something like "I didn't ask you 'probably', I asked you 'yes' or 'no', counselor!".
A clear conclusion: Many of the Justices believed that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was a bad idea. Several of them had strong and open criticism for it -- I emember something like "obviously diametrically opposed to the policy goals the Framers had in mind" or "obviously diametrically opposed to the Framers' vision of what copyright would accomplish" or something like that. Also something like "terrible policy" and (relying upon the economists' brief) something like "this Act costs the public billions of dollars, and the benefits are zero, to three decimal places". All the Justices who expressed any opinion at all were of the opinion that the CTEA was a bad law and that Congress had chosen poorly in enacting it. However, as many people (including the Justices in question themselves) pointed out, "a bad law" doesn't mean "an unconstitutional law", and the Court is reluctant to overturn a law merely because it believes Congress erred in enacting it.
There as skepticism about Lessig's claim that the 1998 act can be distinguished from the 1976 act and (less relevantly) from earlier "retrospective" copyright extensions. The Justices were not eager to believe that the 1976 act was unconstitutional, and Lessig argued that they didn't have to hold both unconstitutional in order to hold the CTEA unconstitutional. But they seemed to have a hard time distinguishing the two.
The film preservation issue was not discussed in detail. At one point, Lessig got confused because one of the Justices (Scalia?) started to ask a question about the effect of copyright extension on film preservation, and Lessig thought the Justice was saying that copyright extension harms preservation, where the Justice was actually asking about how copyright extension aids preservation. Amici urging affirmance and amici urging reversal each made independent arguments about preservation, coming to vastly different conclusions. Eldred's supporters, for their part, argued that allowing copyrights to expire would facilitate preservation, especially by non-profit organizations.
The MPAA argued in an amicus brief that extending copyrights would create a new financial incentive for preservation which wouldn't exist otherwise. (I already had a Valenti quotation on my wall: "I'm not saying the public domain is bad. But how does it benefit the consumer? If a film is in the public domain, who takes care of it? Who refurbishes it if the print goes bad? What incentive does anyone have to keep the movie alive and vibrant?")
I think both sides are right about this. If you extend copyrights, you favor preserving works with known commercial value (and a known copyright holder), by giving copyright holders a new incentive to engage in preservation work. If you allow copyrights to expire, you favor preserving works without known commercial value, or without a known copyright holder, by removing from non-copyright holders a significant disincentive to engage in preservation work.
Lessig has elsewhere suggested bringing back copyright renewal requirements. (That proposal was not at issue in the argument and it wasn't mentioned at all in his brief or before the Court. I should emphasize that this discussion was not at all part of the oral argument or even part of the Eldred case at all.) I think that such a requirement would narrow the gap on the issue of preservation. Commercially valuable works would be preserved because they could remain under copyright for long terms and continue to be exploited commercially by some copyright holder. Other works would be preserved because their copyrights would lapse, clearing the way for non-profit and other preservationists to do their work. As elsewhere argued, only around 2% of works have an ongoing commercial significance after the term prescribed by the 1976 act, so that 98% of works would presumably enter the public domain by the end of that period if there were a renewal requirement. This seems economically efficient, and, more important, especially beneficial to cultural continuity.
Requirements like deposit and renewal -- scuttled under Berne -- seem to me to have been in the public interest, and, equally importantly, to have made clear that the public interest was an essential, not incidental, part of copyright. They helped guarantee that works would enter the public domain quickly if copyright holders were no longer making money from them, and they helped guarantee that a good copy of a work would be available to the public whenever a copyright expired. Both of these are important; neither is the law today. I see those changes as an erosion of the belief that copyright law is exclusively or essentially about protecting authors' interests (since deposit and renewal were certainly inconvenient for authors and publishers). So I think they ought to be reversed.
Amy, infra, believes that frequent renewal requirements (and, I think, deposit requirements) would help the public domain but hurt copyleft, partly because free software changes so quickly (some projects have multiple releases every week!). If there were once again aggressive deposit and renewal requirements, it might be burdensome for free software developers to keep up; in that case, it would be difficult for them to hold onto current copyrights, which would make it difficult for copyleft licenses to be enforced. I think Amy has a point, and I don't know how to deal with it.
Renewal requirements might also help get orphaned software projects into the public domain quickly, while they're still useful. It continues to be incredibly wasteful that so much proprietary software is constantly being discontinued; I've written about that in the past. Useful code can simply disappear and never be seen again.
Back to the oral argument: it seemed that Lessig made a strategic decision not to challenge the holding of Schnapper v. Foley, which the majority below interpreted as precluding an application of "to promote the progress" as a substantive restriction on the power of Congress. It seems to me that reading "to promote the progress" as a restriction would be helpful to Eldred, and I don't understand the decision not to argue that point -- though I'm sure it was taken for a good reason.
Part of the petitioners' claim is that "99% of works" (elsewhere "98% of works") "have no commercial value". That didn't seem to be disputed at argument. I think this tends to substantiate the idea that there's a lot of collateral damage being done by copyright extension. There are 1% or 2% of works which are being sold and whose copyright holders get a benefit, and 98% or 99% of works for which the extension just creates trouble.
Famous people who were in the courtroom included (aside from the Justices, Lessig, and Solicitor General Olson) Alan Greenspan, Kenneth Starr, Jack Valenti (MPAA president), James Rogan (director of the Patent and Trademark Office), Eben Moglen (FSF General Counsel, legal scholar, and author), Rep. Mary Bono (sponsor of the CTEA), Rep. Zoe Lofgren, and very likely several other Members of Congress. (Sen. Orrin Hatch was amicus curiae and might have attended, but I don't know anyone who saw him.)
Mary Bono shook hands with Eric Eldred after the end of the argument.
There were also a lot of reporters I'd heard of sitting over in the press section.
Public Knowledge threw a party afterward. (Declan has a couple of pictures from that party; see the links below to Declan's work.) It was attended by many IP law professors (including those from Harvard's Berkman Center who'd worked on the case), many amici curiae who'd urged reversal, many different non-profit groups, many industry associations (an unusual, and, I thought, very productive connection), and many journalists.
I met Danny Weitzner, now of W3C, and Prof. Nesson, and several other people. I was really surprised that so many people kept asking me how the argument had gone. I didn't understand why they wanted my opinion; then I realized that almost none of them had actually made it into the Court.
It seemed odd to me that many of these people hadn't gotten into the oral argument, but it might have had something to do with the fact that they weren't all willing to sleep on the sidewalk under a blanket.
The whole experience was a rare thrill for which I'm grateful to many people, not least Lessig and the petitioners and amici. I hope Lessig manages to relax. When we saw him the following day, he was already back in front of a law school class, lecturing on copyrights; he told us that he'd re-argued the entire case (in his mind) several times that morning.
Several of us worried about the lawyer equivalent of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Here's a little bit of coverage from after the fact: Lessig himself, Aaron Swartz, Ernest Miller (and his part II), Lisa Rein (and her part II), and Copyfight (passim).
However, what you should really look at is a series of collections of Declan's photographs from the event. Jace Cooke, of our group, is prominently featured. You can also see Lodrina and Macki from our group there, and other people you might recognize, or scenes you might find interesting. (See Declan's Lessig collection, Eldred collection, and Bookmobile collection.)
There's tons of other coverage out there.
Before the Federal Communications Commission
We had meetings on Thursday and Friday with advisors in the staff of Commissioners Martin, Copps, and Powell. On Friday, we also had a meeting with staff members from the Media Bureau and some of their colleagues in other Bureaus.
We tried to make the case to them that the broadcast flag mandate was unwarranted and a counterproductive idea. I think the staff members had varying degrees of receptiveness to this general message, but it was useful to have met them, and it was a valuable experience for us at least as much as for them. (While sitting in the FCC's cafeteria, I thought "You feel more experienced. Welcome to experience level 5.")
I believe we're going to be doing a couple of ex parte notices for these meetings, so you may soon be able to search public records on-line for a list of our meetings and a copy of an outline of our arguments. The FCC has rules designed to let everyone interested in an issue know (in many cases) what kinds of non-public contacts have taken place concerning that issue between advocates of a particular position and FCC staff, and roughly what kinds of arguments were presented.
I couldn't overstate how grateful I was to have Cindy with me for all of our presentations.
Library of Congress
Aaron and I paid a brief visit to the Library of Congress, the world's largest library. On display were incredibly rare things such as Edison's lab notebook (with its original handwritten account of the "Mr. Watson, come here" incident), and the items Abraham Lincoln was carrying in his pockets when he was assassinated (including two pairs of Lincoln's eyeglasses). We went up to the gallery and looked out on the main reading room. I felt that it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and I was briefly practically overcome with emotion.
Part of that emotion and that sense of beauty came from the reading room's form and majesty, and part of it from the reading room's function. I remembered a dispute in The Name of the Rose about what a library's function is; because of the setting of that book, the dispute was case in abstract theological terms (whether, if I remember the issue correctly, libraries fight the Devil or aid the Devil).
When I looked out on the reading room, I thought "Here they are fighting the Devil".
Elsewhere at the Library of Congress, I tracked down a particular corner or alcove of which Sumana gave me a picture from her own trip to D.C. (its inscription says "Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words", which made me think of Bernstein and the other code-is-speech cases).
The biggest disappointment for me on that visit was that the Library's stacks are entirely closed to the public. (The reading rooms are closed to the public, too, but you can get in by becoming a registered researcher. But registering as a researcher can't get you access to the stacks; only getting a job with the Library of Congress can do that.)
Washington
I stayed in Washington with a woman I'll call Amy who works for a non-profit organization there. Visiting her was a tremendous amount of fun, and I'm very grateful for her hospitality.
Amy and I found that we had a lot of things to talk about, and so we started to make a list of topics, lest we should forget any. We never made it through the list. I still have it, and it seems to contain more than fifty outstanding conversation topics. I hope we have a chance to catch up on them.
Amy is studying Perl; I wanted to suggest that she learn Python, but she has some sensible practical reasons to learn Perl. Since she's already a C programmer, I don't think Perl ought to hold any great terrors for her (so long as it's possible to conceive of Perl failing to hold great terrors).
I think we did great honor to Eric Eldred and to the advancement of learning -- or, if you like, the promotion of science and useful arts. And I had an enjoyable and memorable visit.
I also spent some time with Mike Godwin. Some people I know may be vaguely surprised at the thought that Godwin is an actual person -- they may remember him best for "Godwin's Law" -- but indeed he is a real live lawyer, and one who's making useful contributions to our efforts. (Maybe I should say: "Godwin is not just a law but a lawyer".)
I was in Washington as the recent sniper attacks were going on, and it felt as though practically nothing else received news coverage during the week. I believe there were two or three new sniper attacks while I was there, all in the suburbs of Washington; many public events, especially those involving children, were being cancelled. All the parents I spoke to were extremely concerned about their kids, and typically weren't letting them go outside alone or walk anywhere alone.
Saturday
I went down to Claremont to see Don Marti and Tabinda Khan get married. The wedding was very elegant, with a nice delegation of Bay Area Linux activists, and many other communities represented. It was the first time I'd ever seen a Muslim wedding ceremony, and also the first time I heard a recitation of part of the Koran.
Both Tabinda and Don looked very good and very well. I also briefly had a chance to meet their families and to enjoy some excellent food.
Sunday
Riana came back to town with some friends from Walla Walla, and we went to the pirate store and then to hear the performance of Koyaanisqatsi at the Symphony Hall. (Philip Glass and his colleagues performed the music live as the film was shown on a screen without sound.) We also had some very nice meals. We saw Danny and Quinn briefly after the concert; Riana was wearing her NTK "iMachavellian" shirt, so she was very easily recognizable as an NTK fan.
Prev: October 7, 2002 /
Larry clears things up a bit about how things went last week at the Eldred argument.
I am obviously extremely happy with where we are. The Court is struggling with the right issue; they are motivated to get the right answer; they have a clear and simple way to give the right answer; the government has made it very hard to accept its answer. It is always hard to get the Court to strike a law of Congress, but this law is so universally flawed, and the case against it is so universally strong, that I continue to be confident that the Court could choose to strike the law.I am obviously also unhappy with those "swings-and-a-miss" that happened in the argument. As I said before the argument, if we win it will be because 4 years of activism by many many people have changed the public's view about the importance of these issues. But as someone who believes this the rare case where the law, properly and carefully read, yields one right answer, there is no way I will ever be able to escape the thought that if we lose, it is because I am not the advocate that some could have been. It is the particular hell for lawyers that after an argument, we live in the purgatory of constantly reliving the argument. Every night since Wednesday I have awoken in the middle of the night, to spend the rest of the night reanswering Justice Ginsburg, or asking Chief Justice Rehnquist just how he could distingiush Commerce from Copyright. The kind words of so many notwithstanding, I know and have always known I am not Larry Tribe, or Kathleen Sullivan. And if, after getting this so close to the right result, I have lost this by not being them, then I am not quite sure how I will live with that fact.
Here's the full text of the link in case the link goes bad:
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2002_10.shtml#000531
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from the front line
So there's an extraordinary (and extraordinarily interesting) range of reporting about the argument before the Court. As I was on the front line, let me add a bit more. My hope in doing this is to put this in a bit of context, and to highlight at least what we should be looking for. (EV predicts a 6-3 victory, which is significant, because he and I have a bet, and he took the other side.)
Aaron reports Brewster's statement to him that "it was a dance for which I don't know the steps." That's close. I think the better analogy for someone viewing an oral argument for the first time is the first time you see a cricket match. There are some moves you are certain you know are bad (a swing and a miss); but there's lots that plays into something you can't quite get till you know the context of the game. Here, then, the context of the game, as well as the moves from last Wednesday.
the aim
Our aim from the start was to get this Court to view this case in the same frame that they viewed another important line of cases limiting Congress's power -- the commerce clause. In those cases, the Court has said, ours is a constitution of enumerated powers (i.e., the only powers congress has are the powers the constitution gives it); it follows that Congress's power must therefore be interpreted in a way that is limited; in the context of the Commerce Power, the government had argued for a standard (Congress can regulate anything that "affects" interstate commerce) that essentially meant it had no limit; therefore, in a line of cases beginning with Lopez, the Court said we need a different interpretation of "commerce" that actually recognizes limits. Limits, not control of Congress's discretion. Congress has discretion within the limits set by the constitution; but it has no discretion over what, or where, the limits sit.
We want the Court to think in the same way about the Copyright Clause. As Judge Sentelle argued in dissent in the Court of Appeals, the Copyright Clause too is an enumerated power. It too therefore must have limits. But under the government's interpretation of that clause, "limited times" has no limits. Under its interpretation, Congress has a perpetual power to extend subsisting terms. Thus, under the Lopez-line of reasoning, that interpretation must be wrong. Instead, we wanted the court to adopt one of the plain meanings of the term "limited" (limited as in limited edition print) that would also produce an effective limit on Congress's power (that it could not extend existing terms) and would also achieve the ends that the framers sought to achieve (no continuing incentive of Congress to reward, as the Supreme Court said in Graham, "court favorites," but instead to create an incentive for "new" creativity only).
Now that strategy was controversial from the start, especially because some of our natural allies (Stevens, Souter, Breyer) were so strongly opposed to the Lopez line of cases. But our call early on in this case was that they could be brought around to see that even if they oppose the results in Lopez, there was no reason to oppose the same reasoning in this case. Indeed, they could use this case to show why they were right in Lopez: They could argue that unlike the Copyright Clause, the Commerce Clause has no express limitation built into it; unlike the Copyright Clause, the limit the Court has found is wholly implied; thus, they could say, it is not appropriate to imply limits where not expressed. But, they could also say, where a limit is plainly express (as it is in the copyright clause, which is one of only six clauses in Article I, sec. 8 (the part of the constitution with the core grants of power to Congress) that expressly limits a grant of power (the others are clauses 1, 12, 15, 16, 17)), then it is appropriate for the Court to find a way to enforce those limits. In other words, they could write, "for the reasons given in Lopez, you were wrong in Lopez, but it would be right to limit Congress here."
the fear
The greatest fear we had about this strategy (beyond the backfiring point) was that it all presupposed that the Court got it. It presupposed that the Court understood the problem with extensions of existing terms; that it understood the harm that would do to the internet, and the ability of people to build on the internet; that it saw the law as useless. And before the argument we struggled over and over again with how best to focus the Court on the costs, if in fact they didn't get it.
the argument
(1) The most important first indication that was absolutely clear from the argument is that our fear was misplaced. The Court clearly got it. Though the other side had written literally 300 pages trying to show all the good CTEA did (and pronounce it like it is a disease -- sateeeya), the Court hadn't bought any of it. Congress was not acting to promote progress, it was acting to reward "court favorites." The only question the Court was struggling with is whether it has the power to do anything about it.
Now pause for a second to think about how important and good this struggle is. First: It is a rare but valuable exercise for any branch of government to worry about the scope of its own power. And the greatest virtue the Court exercises is the virtue of self-restraint. This is a reason to respect the Court, not criticize it (though how they exercise their restraint, or where, can be criticized, as I suggest below). But the general idea that it will restrain itself, despite believing a law is stupid, is a feature, not a bug in our constitutional tradition.
And second: that they are struggling with this question of restraint means they clearly get the problem. They are motivated to do the right thing; they are resisting the right thing for the right reasons. Both sides are good.
(2) Though it took some hammering, they clearly understood by the end of my argument the dynamic of the argument that we were making. I said, over and over again, that we were advancing an interpretation of "limited times" that had the virtue of actually imposing limits, because otherwise the clause would have no limits. The aim, and I think effect, was to repeat this idea so many times that they had in their heads a simple picture: There was a way to read "limited" so that Congress would not have unlimited power.
Thus, for example, when I said that limited should be read like "limited edition print," Justice Souter interrupted to say that this was a different kind of case (not a contract, etc.), and I said, yes, but we are simply showing you that there is a plain meaning of the term "limited" that actually produces a limit. He's a very careful justice; he got the point, as did the court by the end. That's not to say he bought it, but he clearly gets the dynamic of the argument: if you believe you must impose a limit on Congress's power, here's a way to impose that limit.
(3) The government then helped us immensely by simply confirming what we had said: under their theory of the case, there was no constitutional limit on Congress's power to extend terms; it was always a matter of Congress's discretion. Congress could perpetually extend existing terms; it could even extend a copyright to works within the public domain.
The Court clearly did not like this answer. They had bought the idea that the Constitution intended there to be a limit; the government's interpretation meant that this was a limit that was solely a matter of legislative grace. (Compare: "Under our written Constitution the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.") They were not comfortable with the idea that they would simply say that though the constitution expressly limits Congress's power, it is Congress that gets to say what that limit is.
(4) This gave me the opening I wanted in the rebuttal to say: On the government's view, the Copyright Clause means Congress has total discretion; but that is plainly inconsistent with 125 years of Supreme Court authority. The very first time the Supreme Court ever struck down a law of Congress because it exceeded a particular grant of power in Article I, sec. 8, was in 1879 in a Copyright Clause Case. Since that time, the Court has repeatedly and unanimously imposed limits on Congress's power in the name of Copyright Clause. All of those limits so far have been implied limits. The Court has held that of all the "authors" and "writings" that might be granted copyright, only those that are "original" are allowed copyright; and it has held that of all the inventions or writings that can get patent or copyright protection, only works that are not in the public domain can get the benefit of the copyright and patent clause protection. Both of these limits are implied. Yet here, with the only express limit on Congress's Copyright Clause power, the government was arguing that in effect, the limit was limitless. This, I argued, is fundamentally inconsistent with this 125 year history, and shows the government must be wrong in its view.
(5) Finally, the government's repeated invocation of the "delicate balance" that Congress has struck became too much to ignore by the end. My final point before the Court is ultimately the most compelling politically, though not directly relevant to the constitutional argument: Under the current term of 95 years, under the most conservative assumptions about royalty income and interest rates, the current term gives authors 99.8% of the value of a perpetual term. Put differently, the current "delicate balance" between author and the public is 99.8% to the author, .2% to the public. (Check out footnote 6, page 6 of the economists' brief if you want to do the numbers.)
after thoughts and advice on interpretation (read: clues on the game)
Lots of people have made tons of noise about what the court asked questions about and what it did not ask questions about. In my experience, this is not an indicator of anything. One hour is an extraordinarily small amount of time to consider the issues in this case. They ask question about things that need to be discussed. They let go things that they get from the briefs. When I clerked, oral argument was irrelevant to 90% of the cases; that is because they do their work based on the writing, and unlike most branches of government, they actually do their work.
That said, there was lots I was unhappy we didn't get more of a chance to discuss. Here's an enumeration of what's open and what we've got to win.
(1) 1790 Act: We lose if they are not careful about the interpretation of the 1790 Act. We need the originalists; we therefore need to defeat the government's claim that "CTEA = the 1790 Act." The arguments here are not even close if you pay attention to the history. It is simply and absolutely false to say that the 1790 Act "undoubtedly extended existing terms" as the government says. The 1790 Act (1) did not extend any term (since there was no federal term before 1790); (2) it did not, on balance, effectively extend existing terms (because the law at the time included both state common law and statutory law granting copyrights, and while it may have extended the term of the works protected by the state statutes, it shortened the term of works protected under the common law); and finally (3) even for works protected under the state statute, 3 states expressly stated they didn't mean their statute to displace the common law. Thus, it is more likely the 1790 Act shortened, not lengthened, terms.
That conclusion is supported by the numbers reported by William Maher. He actually counted the number of copyrights granted to works published before 1790. Of the 21,000 works published between 1790 and 1800, we have record of just 699 copyrights. Of the 699 copyrights, only 12 are for works published before 1790. Of the 12, 5 are for works protected by state statute. The remaining 7 were presumptively protected by the common law. Thus, of the records we have, the majority of terms were plainly shortened, rather than lengthened. And the clearest reading of what the framers thought they were doing was simply moving to a new federal regime, and ending the continuing effect of the old state regime.
We need to win this point. Of all the arguments in this case, it is the only one that I am 100% certain of (the rest I'm at 99.8%). But it wasn't discussed much, which creates lots of anxiety.
(2) The Lopez-Eldred link: The other point that seemed lost on the Chief Justice was that this was a Lopez case -- or more importantly, it was a Lopez-plus case. If the Commerce Clause must be interpreted to imply limits, then the Copyright Clause must be interpreted to give effect to express limits. There is no principled way to distinguish them, except to say that between the two, it is the Copyright Clause that more clearly demands judicial enforcement of its limits. Yet the Chief Justice (author of Lopez and this line of authority) didn't seem to recognize the link. If it is not made, then again, we lose. Yet of all the parts of this that will be hardest to accept, it would be a decision that is inconsistent in just this way that would be worst. What possible reason of principle could there be for restricting Congress when it comes to federalism interests, but not when it comes to the public domain, except the ugly reasons? For someone who must teach constitutional law every year, this is the part I fear most.
(3) Which Bright Line: Justices Souter and Scalia were trying to figure out which bright line made most sense: that Congress can't restore copyright to works in the public domain, or that Congress can't extend the term of existing copyrights. The obvious question which no one asked is: Why do we expect works will be allowed to pass into the public domain again? Look at the pattern:
The effect of term extension is to toll (stop) the passing of works into the public domain. In the first 100 years of the republic, the public domain was tolled like this for only 14 years (14%). In the next 50 years, the public domain was tolled for 14 years again (28%). But when CTEA expires, the public domain will have been tolled for 39 out of 55 years, or 70% of the time since 1962. If the Supreme Court says ok to this, then why would anyone expect 70% won't become 100%? The line that says Congress can't restore copyrights to works in the public domain may be bright, but it is in a very dim world indeed.
final thoughts
I am obviously extremely happy with where we are. The Court is struggling with the right issue; they are motivated to get the right answer; they have a clear and simple way to give the right answer; the government has made it very hard to accept its answer. It is always hard to get the Court to strike a law of Congress, but this law is so universally flawed, and the case against it is so universally strong, that I continue to be confident that the Court could choose to strike the law.
I am obviously also unhappy with those "swings-and-a-miss" that happened in the argument. As I said before the argument, if we win it will be because 4 years of activism by many many people have changed the public's view about the importance of these issues. But as someone who believes this the rare case where the law, properly and carefully read, yields one right answer, there is no way I will ever be able to escape the thought that if we lose, it is because I am not the advocate that some could have been. It is the particular hell for lawyers that after an argument, we live in the purgatory of constantly reliving the argument. Every night since Wednesday I have awoken in the middle of the night, to spend the rest of the night reanswering Justice Ginsburg, or asking Chief Justice Rehnquist just how he could distingiush Commerce from Copyright. The kind words of so many notwithstanding, I know and have always known I am not Larry Tribe, or Kathleen Sullivan. And if, after getting this so close to the right result, I have lost this by not being them, then I am not quite sure how I will live with that fact.
So please, no more of the bullshit about "rockstars" or "visionary." I've lived this struggle every moment of the last 4 years; it will take a long time for me to escape it, especially if we don't prevail. I want to turn my head elsewhere, and my heart elsewhere too. So I apologize if I don't follow up on this, or the arguments this might begin. Please, in the spirit of the best of this sphere, carry these argument along, and correct the many mistakes I have made. But I need a night when the limits of this lawyer don't keep this lawyer awake.
I am grateful to an extraordinary number of people, most importantly, Eric Eldred, but also the hundreds who have worked on this case, the people, like Lisa, who slept out at the court to watch this argument, and Brewster who drove across the country to teach the lessons -- too many to count. If we have won, it is your work that has made this happen. That the press chooses to focus differently does not change that fact. At least this space can speak the truth about this fact.
Peace, quiet, and may terms be limited.
posted on [ Oct 13 02 at 4:51 AM ] to [ eldred.cc ] [ 9 Comments ]
keeping focus
Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft. In the past weeks, and especially the past week, I've received an extraordinary amount of mail, ranging from wishes of good luck, to demands that I "win." And as well has the press been extraordinary. (Check out Google's cool new service for a list. Even Declan is reporting the story, if only to report that the Ayn Rand Institute has pronounced me a Marxist (along with Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, James Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly I assume.)).
When we brought this case 4 years ago, there were many allies who said that there was no way we could win. The reason they were right four years ago is that the world did not yet see how important these issues are, and just what's at stake. In four years, that has changed. Not because we brought this case, or because of anything I've done in this case, but because of an extraordinary number of people who have been pushing to make this issue understandable.
It is extremely hard to win a case like this. I have given it everything I have, and I believe we are right, and have a good shot in showing it. But the important lesson from the attention this case is getting now is this: There is an extraordinary passion and energy out there for the ideals that Eric Eldred and others represent, and that if we do something to push these ideas, we can have an effect.
Thank you for the extraordinary outpouring of support. But please, regardless of what happens here, let us not lose the momentum. Freeing culture is what our framers did; we can do it again, regardless of what 5 justices on the Supreme Court say.
posted on [ Oct 9 02 at 5:09 AM ] to [ eldred.cc ] [ 18 Comments ]
Text of my peace site as of today:
Last Updated: October 11, 2002 - 1:46pm PST
Bad news guys. The House and the Senate both approved Bush's Resolution yesterday.
Although there were some minor amendments made to it, it basically did exactly what we didn't want: give Bush the power to do what the hell he wants in Iraq. (Where that may lead to exactly, no one really knows...)
Some Senators and Representatives did stand up for peace and vote "NO". Here's a link with some voting record numbers from a letter I received from Ryan Junell.
But I'll be posting more here later tonight and over the course of the weekend.
I want to thank everyone that faxed letters and made phone calls. Your voices were heard and I think it made a difference.
So let's keep up the good work guys.
Next time, there will be even more of us, and or voice will be heard even louder!
Talk soon!
Have a great weekend everybody!
Ryan Junell has given me permission to reprint a very thoughtful email he sent me earlier today.
I think it comes down to POWER and energy and fuel for our lifestyles.
I think if we want things to change we need to consider alternative, independent, sustainable fuel resources. we also need to tune into government and policy. and most importantly - we must REGISTER TO VOTE and ACTUALLY
SHOW UP TO VOTE. there's a statewide election coming up on november
5th along with a few dozen local propositions. voting is EASY and
IMPORTANT. here's the sf url for local stuff. there's a link at the
bottom where you can register to vote online. do it.
http://www.ci.sf.ca.us/election
From: ryan junell
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 12:15:29 -0700
To: xxxx
Subject: who votes
AN ORIGINAL EMAIL WRITTEN BY RYAN JUNELL (and not a forward, whoa!)
---
in a democrat controlled senate (50 dems/49 reps/1 ind)
and a republican controlled house (208 dems/223 reps/1 ind/3 vacancies)
nancy listened and voted "no" to bush war-powers.
barbara listened and voted "no" to bush war-powers.
diane feinstein did NOT listen and voted "yes" to bush war-powers.
and together, the house and senate passed the resolution granting
bush powers to wage war on iraq, enabling a preemptive attack without
approval from the united nations and/or the security council.
---
MOST house and senate democrats voted FOR war with iraq. middle
america doesn't seem to mind war so much. but our california democrat
senator voted FOR bush and war with iraq.
call feinstein's office and tell her how you feel about her vote.
read her press release on the issue on her website and see WHY she
voted the way she did. her office received THOUSANDS of responses
about the issue which she chose to ignore when casting her vote
this morning. she sits on the senate "intelligence" committee, but
that doesn't necessarily signify any sort of meaningful intelligence.
http://www.senate.gov/~feinstein/Releases02/r-iraq10.htm
---
my understanding of all of this is that we as americans are complicit
in a lifestyle and civilization that requires our dependence on finite
resources (OIL and GAS), both foreign and domestic. our values of
consumption and depletion know no bounds. we as a nation continue to
morally and ethically CHALLENGE OURSELVES in this world to preserve
our unsustainable, dependent civilization. I think it comes down to
POWER and energy and fuel for our lifestyles. I think if we want
things to change we need to consider alternative, independent,
sustainable fuel resources. we also need to tune into government and
policy. and most importantly - we must REGISTER TO VOTE and ACTUALLY
SHOW UP TO VOTE. there's a statewide election coming up on november
5th along with a few dozen local propositions. voting is EASY and
IMPORTANT. here's the sf url for local stuff. there's a link at the
bottom where you can register to vote online. do it.
http://www.ci.sf.ca.us/election
oh well,
ryan junell
Senator Barbara Boxer (dem)
DC Phone: 202-224-3553
Local Phone: 415-403-0100
Senator Dianne Feinstein (dem)
DC Phone: 202-224-3841
Local Phone: 619-231-9712
Representative Nancy Pelosi (dem)
DC Phone: 202-225-4965
Local Phone: 415-556-4862
I've written up some Notes on how the Ticket Line works at the Supreme Court based on what I've learned from my Eldred experience.
This batch seems to have taken the form of a "Guide to Obtaining Public Seats at the Supreme Court."
Soon I'll get around to writing up what I actually saw in there -- I'm still on the road and just wanted to make sure to get another batch of notes up today.
I will still be compiling these together into a comprehensive document when I'm done.
Thanks!
10/10/02 - 3:00 pm -- Notes on how the Ticket Line works at the Supreme Court
Note: The information in this guide was compiled from numerous knowledgeable sources. But the final conclusions I draw are my own (alas, detailed instructions for getting in aren't available anywhere else on the web that I could find). If you know anything below to be incorrect, please contact me so I can amend this post. Thanks!
Guide to Obtaining Public Seats at the Supreme Court
I have learned a lot about how tickets/guest lists work at the Supreme Court over these last few days. It is my hope that more of you will venture out to Washington DC to see the Supreme Court for yourselves. Hopefully, this guide will make it easier for you to plan your trip.
As confirmed by several of the Supreme Courts Federal Police Officers, every morning, between 3-5 am, people start lining up along the sidewalk beneath the steps of the Supreme Court (on the right side of the building if you're facing it).
Around 6-7 am, the line is moved to the "plaza" area, which is the stone plateau in-between the flights of stairs in the front.
Then, around 7-7:30 priority tickets are handled out to the members of the line.
Once you have a number you can leave and come back around 8:20, when they reform the line before the start letting people in around 9:15.
There are no substitutions. If you get caught selling or giving someone else your number, they'll take it away from you (them).
There are five sets of onlookers at a Supreme Court hearing:
1) People with actual tickets and/or on lists (guests of either side of a case)
2) Press
3) Members of the Supreme Court Bar
4) VIPs (People that can pop in at the last minute and bump members of the general public)
5) General Public
As you may have guessed, the top four categories take precedence over the fifth.
The VIP section was the group we hadn't counted on. We were expecting 60 seats to be available, and then some of the law students further down the line told us about the VIP section (important/connected people that can just sort of show up at a moment's notice if they feel like it, and get in).
Even if you have a priority ticket, there's no guarantee that you're getting in -- due to the fact that VIPs can bump you right up to the last second.
Even if they let you in to the courthouse, search you, and let you get into line right in front of the entrance, due to the VIP-ers, there's no guarantee that you will get in. In our case, 75 priority tickets were handed out, but only 50 people were let inside, and ultimately, only 25 of us actually got in.
There must have been more than 35 of them that day, because only 25 of us were eventually let in.
There are a ton of 25 cent lockers in side for jackets, cell phones, cameras, and anything you have with you. Said another way: you are not allowed to bring anything in with you. No purses. No coats. Nothing but the clothes on your body (and only a few layers of them).
Unfortunately for me, my wool blazer counted as a coat to Security, so I had to place it in a locker and was a bit chilly during the proceedings. It's pretty brisk in that stone building, so if you are sensitive to cold, like me, I'd plan on wearing a sweater in case your blazer gets classified as a "coat."
After giving you a minute or two to put your stuff away and go to the bathroom, the line reforms by the entrance in the ticketed order.
We stood there for half hour while all of the other groups of people were let in. We saw Lawrence Lessig go through the second security check, followed by none other than Ken Starr, who apparently set off the metal detectors and had to be personally checked with a hand held device before going in. (We all really enjoyed watching this happen.)
Next, the press was let in and we saw Declan, Steven Levy, and other familiar faces go in.
Then we waited while what seemed like a million military personnel going through (turns out they were a bunch of Supreme Court Bar prospects being sworn in that morning).
Finally, they said "Okay. You can go in."
The court room is awe-inspiring to say the least. The pews were already filled up and we were led to some chairs that had been placed in rows in the available space on either side of them.
We saw the press behind a set of wooden doors on the left side of the court room. There were some press people on the other side of the pillars too, right next to us, but I didn't notice them. (Steven Levy said he was so close he could have shot a spit ball at me.)
I was more concerned with how some of us had been stuck behind pillars, and if anything could be done. We all noticed that there seemed to be room for each of us to move our chairs to the left or right a little to see better, but doing so would definitely make too much noise. We all seemed to start moving our chairs and then realize the noise that ensued and stop dead in our tracks.
Then a miracle happened: everyone stood up for the Justices to walk in, causing just enough noise for us all to move our chairs accordingly!
More to come...
Look up your Rep's fax and phone numbers here.
John Perry Barlow sent this out today...
If you have opened this e-mail today, Thursday, October 10, stop
reading it right now.Drop your mouse and grab your phone.
Call the offices of your senators and representatives and tell them how you feel about their willingness to give "President" Bush blanket authorization to make war whenever and however he feels like it, renewable indefinitely. They may vote to do so as early as this evening.
He also cited this really cool quote from Mark Twain:
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
-- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1916, Ch.9
(Thanks, Cory)
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?r107:6:./temp/~r107TB8tOV::
oct 4 byrd
Begin forwarded message:
From: John Perry Barlow barlow@eff.org
Date: Thu Oct 10, 2002 12:17:18 PM US/Pacific
To: John Perry Barlow barlow@eff.org
Subject: (SPAM?) [E-S] BarlowFriendz 8.6: Please, Folks, Call The
Capital Today!
^
(o)
/_ _\
--------- B a R L o W F R i e N D Z
-----
A continuing series of occasional outbursts to about 1052 of my
dearest friends. Please let me know if you wish to be removed from
this list. But you'll miss some great parties if you do...
Also, if this broadcast feels as spammish to you as it obviously is, I
hope you remember that individual responses generally elicit personal
replies. And whether or not I have time to write back, I always read
your replies with careful delight.
------------------------------ ------------------- --------
CALL YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES. NOW.
If you have opened this e-mail today, Thursday, October 10, stop
reading it right now.
Drop your mouse and grab your phone.
Call the offices of your senators and representatives and tell them
how you feel about their willingness to give "President" Bush blanket
authorization to make war whenever and however he feels like it,
renewable indefinitely. They may vote to do so as early as this
evening.
This is nuts, folks. Good Ol' Dubya has the brains of a cocker
spaniel, but unlike a cocker spaniel, he has nuclear weapons. Not to
mention the masculine insecurities of a Houston frat jock working on
his second six pack. Not to mention the conscience-anaesthetizing
belief that God is on his side.
Worse, he has in the background some very bright people whose almost
autistic capacity for compassion would make Stalin look like the Dalai
Lama.
It was Stalin who said, "The death of one person is a tragedy. The
death of a million people is a statistic." Dick Cheney, whom I've know
quite well since 1976, is perfectly capable of thinking something like
that. It's no small wonder that he has a heart condition. For years,
his heart has been crying out for the attention of the HAL 9000 in his
head.
Dick wants to impose the Pax Americana upon the world. By force. He
wants to disarm Irag for the same reasons that Caeser wanted to disarm
Gaul. The reason he isn't, like George Bush I, concerned about what
sort of government would replace Saddam's is because *we* would govern
Iraq for the indefinite future. As we now govern Afghanistan and will,
according to his plan, come to govern the entire oil-producing portion
of the Islamic world.
But Rome ruled by fear, not moral example. They crucified a lot more
people than Jesus Christ. They had no more interest in the well-being
of their subjects than do the architects of Pax Americana, which was
first designed by Cheney and Wolfowitz at the end of Bush I.
This concept was buffed up and re-codified in September 2000. It took
the form of a document called "Rebuilding America's Defenses, which
was released then by an outfit called The Project for the New American
Century. You may find this document at
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf.
After you've called DC, I strongly recommend that you read it. Like
all great authoritarian literature, it produces in the reader a
perfect combination of boredom and terror.
One of its authors, Yale's Donald Kagen, gave us a foretasted flavor
of our Imperial ruling style when he said recently, "People worry a
lot about how the Arab street is going to react [to the invasion of
Iraq]. Well, I see that the Arab street has gotten very, very quiet
since we started blowing things up."
This is not the quiet of tranquillity. This is the smoldering quiet of
rage.
We have the military force to blow a lot of things up. But if that is
how the Pax is to be maintained, it will be a pox on America's soul.
For most of our history, we have led by moral rather than military
force. Are we ready to forsake that tradition?
Besides, I believe the strategy of coerced Islamic pacification will
backfire hideously. Those quiet Arab streets will produce a virulent
bloom of young men who have nothing to lose and Paradise to gain.
As we learned on September 11, it doesn't take a nation state to
threaten us, nor does it take a nation state to create genuine weapons
of mass destruction. A pencil sized stick of Cesium 137, which can be
easily acquired at any food irradiation facility, could, with 10
pounds of dynamite wrapped around it, deliver a lethal dose of
radiation to everyone in Lower Manhattan.
Modern technology greatly favors the underdog. As a purely practical
matter - never mind the moral questions - do we want to be the
perpetual Overdog in a world like that?
Pax Americana may slouch out of the Capital tonight and head off to
Baghdad to be born. If it is, we will make America safe for SUV's. And
almost nothing else.
Call your senators and representative. Now.
We contained the Soviet Union for 57 years. We've contained Iraq for
11 years. However dishonest or barbaric or conniving Saddam's
government, they have provided us with precisely zero identifiable
threat since 1991. We can go on containing them for a long time. With
proper intelligence - which may be hard for us to muster - we could
probably neutralize them as well and do so without "collateral damage"
(our pleasant phrase for killing innocent bystanders).
But, as a nation, we no longer seem to think there are Moslem
innocents. We are systematically dehumanizing them. I beg you not to
do this. Do not turn the Islamic world into statistics instead of
human beings like yourselves. Following one of my previous missives on
this subject, I received some astonishingly bigoted replies. One
former BarlowFriend said, essentially, "kill them all, let Allah sort
'em out."
I make faint defense for either the cultural or political practices of
the Middle East. I've spent time there. It's pretty awful, at least by
my standards. Egypt is a place so broken that it makes Mexico look
like France. But the people, even the ones who hated everything I
stood for, were incredibly sweet to me.
However bad their governments may be, however narrowing their
ideology, each of them is, like you, another mask that God wears. They
laugh, they love, they toss their babies in the air with as much
affection as you toss yours.
There are many babies in Iraq who will likely soon be tossed into mass
graves, assuming there's a recognizable body to toss. There are many
adults in Iraq who have done nothing to you who will die horrible
deaths simply because their leader, whom they hate as much as we do,
just might possibly someday become able to do something bad to us.
These are real human beings. Very few of them mean you any harm. Even
their leader, who probably does mean you harm, is smart enough to know
better than to inflict it.
Imagine them, not as millions, but one person at a time. Grace them
with actual faces. Look into their deep, dark eyes. Are you still
ready to kill them? Do you have reason enough?
Call your senators and representatives. Now.
It's probably too late. Even Tom Daschle has caved. But if we lose
today, we can begin to organize the long struggle that will be
necessary to save America and the world from Pax Americana. And you
might as well begin your new career as a political activist with a
phone call today. You'd do well to get into the habit.
With bleak heart,
Barlow
P.S. Please scroll down to my current .sig quote. It's timely.
--
*************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Call me anywhere, anytime: 800/654-4322
Fax me anywhere, anytime: 603/215-1529
Current Cell Phone: 646/286-8176 (GSM)
Alternative (Inactive) Cell Phone: 917/863-2037 (AT&T)
**************************************************************
Barlow in Meatspace Now: New York City! (Until 10/12) 212/965-1991
(Provisional) Trajectory from Here: Salt Lake City (10/12-15) -
Steamboat Springs, CO (10/15-16) - Pinedale, Wyoming (10/17-20) -
Eugene, OR (10/21-22) - Down the West Coast (10/22-24) - San
Francisco (10/24-28) - LA (10/28-31) - Las Vegas (11/1-2) - Salt
Lake City (11/3) - New York City (11/4-5) - London (11/6-9) -
Pinehurst, NC (11/9-12) - New York City...
**************************************************************
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the
nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those
conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and
refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by
convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the
better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
-- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1916, Ch.9
I've been catching up on what's been going on with the Iraq situation this week via the congressional record. He said a bunch of things yesterday and I haven't read them all yet, but you can get to them all yourself by going to Thomas.gov and then clicking on "Text Search" and then typing in "Iraq" and selecting "Senator Byrd" and then "Search."
For yesterday's comments from him, you can just click on this.
Here's the full text of http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?r107:4:./temp/~r107TB8tOV:e202447:
in case the link goes bad:
AUTHORIZATION OF THE USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES AGAINST IRAQ--Continued -- (Senate - October 09, 2002)
Mr. McCAIN. Finally, could I ask Senator Byrd's predilections on this issue?
[Page: S10186] GPO's PDF
Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I thank the distinguished Senator from Arizona for his question. I say to the Senator, he has amendments, and he has already submitted his amendments. I would like to have a chance to vote on these amendments before the cloture vote. I hope we will get the cloture vote delayed at least a few hours tomorrow until Senators, such as Mr. Levin, who have amendments will have a fair shot at explaining their amendments and have a vote on them before cloture. I do not know whether the Senate will be disposed to do that or not.
Let me see if I can answer the distinguished Senator from Arizona. I have another amendment I would like to get voted on, too. I would like to offer it to the amendment that is pending. I say to the distinguished Senator from Arizona--and he is a very distinguished Senator--the other amendment would be to provide a sunset provision.
So if the Senate is going to waive its constitutional powers to the extent that I think would be required if the Lieberman amendment were to be agreed upon, I would like at least for the Senate to have a sunset provision so there would be a time limit when the Lieberman amendment would run its course. If the Congress wanted to renew that, Congress could do it, of course, but at least my amendment would say 12 months, and the President could extend that for 12 months.
That is a rough explanation of my amendment. So that would be 12 months for the President under my amendment, providing for the President on his own to extend that for an additional 12 months, but at the end of that time it is over unless the Congress renews or extends it. I would like to have that amendment also voted upon.
I am very willing to enter into some kind of an agreement, say, to vote up or down on both amendments. There would be a vote on the Lieberman amendment and then a vote on cloture tomorrow at some point.
Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, we have been endeavoring to accommodate the pending amendment with the time agreement such that it could be brought up as soon as possible.
The Senator from West Virginia and I have had no discussion about a second amendment, and I urge that we allow the Senator from Tennessee to speak, and in the interim let's gather and see whether or not we can reconcile honest differences and motives.
Mr. REID. If I could just suggest one thing, maybe we could have all of this taken care of by not having a cloture vote. Cloture is going to be invoked by a large margin. Maybe we would not need a cloture vote.
Mr. WARNER. There are Senators on this side who wish to leave intact this present procedure, which is working well. It has produced 13 amendments, 7 of which have been ruled germane thus far by the Parliamentarian. This debate is well underway, well structured, and can proceed.
At the moment, we have a pending amendment, and I urge that we allow the Senator from Tennessee----
Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent that the 15 minutes allocated to the Senator from Tennessee be given in its entirety. We have taken most of that time. Then during that time, we will confer as to how we can proceed.
Mr. WARNER. I thank the Senator.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. DAYTON). The Senator from Tennessee has the floor.
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, the Members of this body will soon vote on authorizing the President to use the military might of this Nation against Saddam Hussein. This decision has weighed heavily on me, as it has on us all. No one takes lightly the prospect of young Americans risking their lives on the battlefield of war, but we and they swear an oath to defend our rights and freedoms against all enemies. And so our duty we must now do.
Saddam Hussein is a direct and deadly threat to the American people and to the people of the world. He holds the power to murder not just hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, but millions. He defies all international efforts to restrain that power and keep world peace, and he disdains the value of human life, even the lives of his own people. This is an evil, lawless, and murderous man.
The resolution before the Senate is carefully constructed to encourage the widest possible international support for unified action against Saddam Hussein. The nations of the world need to show him they will no longer tolerate his arrogant contempt for United Nations resolutions, requiring him to give up his weapons of mass destruction and cease the gross human rights violations he has committed on his own people. I support the President's intensive efforts to build such a coalition, and I pray for his success.
No one wants to avoid a war more than I do. I am a physician. I have devoted my life to a profession that is centered on saving lives. Only when we have exhausted all reasonable efforts at keeping peace should we consider waging war. The President shares a firm commitment to this principle. I consider this resolution a strong statement of support for peace and, if the Nation must, for war as well. For if the safety of our people, the security of our Nation, and the stability of the world remain so threatened, we must risk war for peace. To do anything less would leave a grave and growing danger looming over the lives of millions.
This evening I will talk about Saddam Hussein's past, his present, and what I consider his greatest danger, a robust biological weapons program. More than chemical and nuclear weapons, Saddam's biological weapons pose a unique and immediate threat. Unlike other conventional weapons, they are easily made. They can be readily concealed and are beyond the reach of inspectors and can readily be delivered across borders and, yes, even across oceans. In the hands of a madman, biological weapons literally threaten us all.
I refer to the words on this chart concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, excerpts from an October 2002 unclassified CIA report, which reads:
Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW--
Biological weapon--
agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives, including potentially against the U.S. homeland.
Indeed, these biological weapons literally threaten us all--``potentially against the U.S. homeland.''
Saddam Hussein has pursued the most deadly weapons known to man, with brutal determination. His arsenal has included tens of thousands of tons of chemical agents and biological agents. He has come within months of acquiring nuclear weapons, and he has developed many means, both in number and type, to deliver his desired destruction.
History shows that dictators do not amass such weapons without the intent to use them. Indeed, Saddam Hussein has accumulated chemical weapons and used them to attack his neighbors and even murder his own people. During the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein inflicted 20,000 casualties by striking with chemicals--mustard gas, sarin, and tabun. He also used mustard and nerve agents to murder as many as 5,000 Iraqi Kurds and inflict the misery of chemical warfare on another 10,000.
I show this chart briefly to demonstrate the impact of these chemicals. Saddam Hussein used the chemicals on his own people. We can see the effects of this tragedy among the victims, who are women and children in this picture.
Saddam Hussein was fully prepared to use biological weapons during the gulf war. In 1995, Iraq admitted it had produced 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 8,500 liters of anthrax, and 2,200 liters of aflatoxin. That is enough botulinum toxin--remember, that is the most potent poison known to man--to kill every man, woman and child on Earth.
Iraq also admitted it had loaded thousands of liters of agents into bombs, into munitions, into dozens of warheads and aircraft spray tanks, just as American and allied forces prepared to liberate Kuwait. Before the gulf war, intelligence experts believed Saddam Hussein was at least 8 to 10 years from having a nuclear weapon. That estimate was way off. Iraq had already assembled many of the pieces needed to build a nuclear weapon. What it lacked was fissile material that makes up the explosive core of a nuclear device. If Saddam Hussein had been able to obtain that material, either by making it or buying it, he would likely have had a nuclear bomb by no later than 1993.
[Page: S10187] GPO's PDF
Indeed, Iraq has gone to great lengths to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Its efforts to hide the weapons have been equally ambitious. Saddam Hussein has defied the international community almost from the moment he came to power in 1979. His rule has been a constant threat to peace among the Iraqi people, in the Middle East, and throughout the world.
Saddam Hussein has twice invaded sovereign nations. In 1980, he launched the Iran-Iraq war solely for territorial gain. Eight years, one million casualties and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the war ended with Iraq gaining nothing. In 1990, Saddam Hussein started the gulf war by invading Kuwait. His objective? Seize control of his neighbor's oil fields. We expelled him. As we did, he fired dozens of Scud missiles into Israel and into Saudi Arabia and the waters off Qatar.
Iraq has shown as much contempt for the international community as it has shown aggression toward its neighbors. Since 1990, Iraq has violated 16 United Nations Security Council resolutions. Inspectors charged with enforcing those resolutions have been deceived, they have been obstructed, they have been intimidated by Saddam Hussein and his henchmen.
Saddam Hussein has funneled as much as $9 billion from the United Nations Oil-for-Food program into his weapons of mass destruction program and other illegal activities, starving his people and strangling the economy.
To Saddam Hussein international treaties are worth less than the paper on which they are written. Iraq is the only nation publicly cited for violating the Geneva Convention ban on using chemical weapons. Its biological weapons program has directly violated the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. And Iraq has utterly ignored the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has been signed by 187 countries since its inception in 1968.
Saddam Hussein said in a recent speech, ``The present of any nation or people cannot be isolated from its past .....'' Indeed. What Saddam has done in the past is reckless, lawless and appalling. But what he is doing now should frighten us all and compel the world to action. Not only does he continue to develop and produce weapons of mass destruction, but he's more likely to use them than ever before. I am particularly concerned about the unique and immediate threat Saddam's biological weapons program presents.
Iraq has lethal and incapacitating biological weapons agents potentially to use against the United States homeland.
Iraq likely produced two to four times more biological agents than it publicly admitted in 1995. United Nations inspection teams could not account for biological culture growth media that would have easily tripled Saddam's stocks of anthrax--a bacteria that can be rapidly and easily produced as a weapon of mass destruction. Mr. President, 30,000 munitions designed solely for chemical and biological agents were also unaccounted for. Missing biological agents, missing biological munitions and Iraq's pattern of deception lead to only one conclusion: Saddam Hussein today retains a large arsenal of deadly living microorganisms available as weapons of mass destruction.
That arsenal likely contains stocks of live viruses and bacteria produced not only before the Gulf War, but also after, especially since weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998. Saddam has expanded so-called ``dual-use'' facilities--laboratories, research centers and manufacturing plants that have civilian or commercial uses, but are likely used to build his arsenal of microbiological terror, as well.
Iraq has rebuilt known biological weapons facilities that were destroyed during the Gulf War, by our military, or after, by weapons inspectors. Also, Saddam retains the equipment and, even more crucial, the human expertise to continue building his biological weapons capability. Unlike nuclear weapons, which take years and massive resources to make, biological weapons are inexpensive, can be made easily, within weeks, in a small room, with minimal equipment and manpower. That is what makes biological weapons so unique and capable of causing such death and destruction.
To that end, our intelligence community believes Iraq has built mobile germ warfare production laboratories. Iraq has learned a lot about weapons inspections since the Gulf War. Saddam hid his biological weapons program from inspectors for 4 years. Mobile biological labs are the ideal weapon of deception. They can be quickly moved in inconspicuous trailers and hidden in very small spaces, including, for example, in a single room in one of Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces. Such laboratories would be almost invisible to the outside world.
There is also evidence that Iraq may be developing and producing a new generation of more virulent biological agents. Defectors allege that Iraq is developing an agent called ``Blue Nile''--which may be a code name for the ebola virus. Ebola is a deadly virus for which there is no treatment and there is no vaccine. And many experts believe Saddam Hussein may have stocks of the smallpox virus. One of the last naturally occurring smallpox outbreaks occurred on Iraqi soil in the early 1970s, which is precisely when Iraq launched its weapons of mass destruction program.
Though U.S. defenses against smallpox are now much stronger, a 2001 study by Johns Hopkins University found that a smallpox attack launched at three locations in the United States could kill in a worst case scenario one million and infect another two million Americans within two months.
Saddam has invested not only in developing and producing new viruses and bacteria, but also new means to deliver those agents. Iraq has experimented with a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles as part of its longstanding weapons of mass destruction program. But intelligence experts believe Iraq has vastly improved its designs and now has a drone aircraft that can carry and spray up to 80 gallons of anthrax. Such an airplane would be the most effective way to deliver biological weapons over a vast area and would represent a dire threat to the Iraqi people, its neighbors and the international community.
The danger of germ weapons is not merely that Saddam Hussein has them, but that he would use them . . . even against the United States. Biological agents are ideal terrorist weapons. Unlikely other weapons of mass destruction, one cannot hear them or taste them or smell them. They can be invisible to the human eye.
They can be transported long distances without detection in, for example, a terrorist's pocket. They can take hours and even days to take effect, allowing a terrorist to be long gone--to escape.
Thus, Saddam's robust biological weapons program, combined with the support of terrorism, is a deadly force capable of exceeding the death and destruction of even a nuclear bomb.
Saddam does support terrorism. Iraq harbors several terrorist groups that have targeted and murdered American citizens. The Iraqi regime has been in contact with al-Qaida for at least a decade and, as recently as this year, allowed a senior leader to receive medical treatment in Baghdad.
I am hopeful that inspectors will return to Iraq with totally unfettered access to all suspected biological weapons sites. But, remember, such a site can be an 8-by-12-foot room deep in the basement of a huge Presidential palace.
I am hopeful that Saddam Hussein will disarm and destroy his ability to develop and produce such weapons in the future. But I am not optimistic. Saddam Hussein knows his chemical and biological stocks are the source of his power at home and in his region and can be a tool of blackmail. Weapons of mass destruction are as much a part of Saddam Hussein as freedom and democracy are of America.
The test of our resolve in the war on terror was Afghanistan. There we fought the terrorist group and its supporting regimes that murdered more than 3,000 of our own citizens. We were attacked, and, as any capable nation would do, we responded.
Now we face a second test. Saddam Hussein has not yet struck, and we hope he doesn't. We hope he disarms his weapons of mass destruction and chooses peace over war. It is his choice. But should he force us to war, we will fight for a noble and a just cause--to prevent a future and far worse attack than that of September 11, 2001. America will be victorious in this next phase of the war on terror, for the worst of a
[Page: S10188] GPO's PDF
dictator cannot defeat the will of a free people.
Saddam Hussein will fight to preserve his grip on power and protect weapons that murder millions. But if we must fight, we will do so for love of country, for respect of humanity, and for the rights and freedoms that all people deserve to enjoy, including the Iraqi people.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico, under the previous order, is to be recognized.
The Chair wants to say that it is his view that the subject matter is of enormous gravity, and the subject matter and statement of the Senator is most compelling. So anyone who does not share that view will leave the Chamber. And that will be pursued by those officers. And the Sergeants at Arms in the galleries are requested to ensure the gallery follows the same.
The Chair recognizes the Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. DOMENICI. Mr. President, before I proceed, I would like to congratulate the distinguished Senator from Tennessee. When he writes his name uses the title ``Senator'' followed by ``M.D.'' I think you will always be a doctor even if you are not always a Senator. I am happy to know you in both capacities--as a member of the medical profession--and among our ranks as senators. We in the Senate are very fortunate that a few years ago at the peak of your profession you decided to come here, and your people there in Tennessee sent you. I have been here 30 years--roughly five times, I think, that you have been here. I have gotten to know you very well. I consider you among one of my very best friends--not only here but in the world. I am very proud of what you had to say here tonight.
I am not going to speak about the technical matters. If anybody wants proof about the quantity and the tremendous damage that the weapons which Saddam probably possesses can cause humankind, they can read Senator BILL FRIST's statement just ahead of mine.
Here's a video file of it, but it requires Windows Media Player, so I can't watch it on my Mac.
Anyone want to convert it to a more usable format please, so more of us could enjoy it? Thanks ahead of time!
A number of people have sent me
(It's still a pain in the ass to have to use a format that requires its own player.)
This is a very interesting article because it explores the political solution to Copyright extension that will have to be pursued if we lose with the Supremes.
By Steven Levy (with John Horn, Eleanor Clift, and Brad Stone):
Lessig worries about letting his supporters down. "If I thought that this was a case where it's hard to know what the right answer was, I'd feel less pressure," he says. Lessig knows that Eldred v. Ashcroft is the best chance to turn the tide in Silicon Valley's war against Hollywood-a conflict where Hollywood has won every round so far. If he fails in court, the fight "would have to shift to the political arena," he says. "And there, we're outgunned."
Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/817175.asp?cp1=1
Oct 14
Glitterati vs. Geeks
Two heavyweights, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, take the fight over content to the Supremes
By Steven Levy
NEWSWEEK
Oct. 14 issue - Larry Lessig admits it: he's nervous. Who wouldn't be? This week the brainy Stanford law professor makes his first appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court-barely a decade after clerking for Justice Antonin Scalia-to argue a case that could redirect millions of dollars, rejigger the entertainment menu of the entire nation and liberate Mickey Mouse.
IN ITS NARROWEST context, Eldred v. Ashcroft deals with the seemingly arcane issue of the length of copyrights for books, films and music. But it's actually a high-noon showdown between two great industries at odds in the age of the Internet. In one corner there are the big studios and record labels, intent on protecting their property and their turf; their success in winning congressional goodies has been more reliable than a Hollywood happy ending. In the other stand the forces of high-tech innovation, who until recently wore their distrust of government like a badge of pride. Now the techie crowd understands that if Big Media gets the government to help lock up its content, consumers will have less reason to buy new computers and software.
Lessig, 41, is firmly in the Silicon Valley camp, not so he can help boost chip sales but to prevent what he sees as an intellectual-property train wreck. Though a fervent adherent of geek values, Lessig doesn't buy the canard that the Internet is impervious to corporate or governmental attempts to stem that glorious (and sometimes shady) flow of information. In two books ("Code" and "The Future of Ideas") and countless speeches, Lessig has made the case that Hollywood, while whining about digital piracy, has used the courts and Congress to increase its grip on its properties-even to the point where "fair use" of legally obtained copyrighted material is under siege.
EXTENDING CONTROL
Now Lessig has his chance to shift the momentum by overturning the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The most recent of 11 extensions of copyright terms, it stretches exclusive control of a work from 50 to 70 years after the creator's death (thus assuring that the estate of the bill's namesake, the late pop singer turned legislator, will garner royalties on "I Got You Babe" until 2068). Commercial works like films get a straight 95 years. Because the bill lengthened the term of "Steamboat Willie," Walt Disney's first cartoon featuring the company mascot, it was nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act. But it also denies free access to every film made in the 1930s and early '40s, as well as innumerable books and songs.
To Lessig and his legal team, this perverts the original intent of America's Founding Fathers. The Constitution specifies that "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," Congress should secure "for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The payoff for creating something isn't permanent possession of the words or images, but temporary control of what will eventually enter the public domain. Lessig charges that by making the term extensions retroactive, the Bono Act grants an unnecessary windfall to copyright holders of songs and films made long ago. And he fears that subsequent bills-probably keyed to the next times Disney would lose its grip on Mickey-will keep extending the terms so that copyright is perpetual.
The lead plaintiff is Eric Eldred, a 59-year-old computer administrator who put up a Web site where people can download versions of books whose copyrights have expired. Before the Bono Act, Eldred had planned to post Robert Frost's early poems. Now not only will these not enter the public domain, but also for the next 20 years nothing will be added. And if the term was extended again, nothing might ever fall out of copyright. We'd have the greatest way to distribute free information and no new free information to distribute. Is this what the Founders meant by "limited"?
MEET THE SUPREMES
So far, Lessig has lost at every level-"if a limited time is extended for a limited time then it remains a limited time," wrote the district court-but surprisingly got his case to the Supremes. Now, backed by amicus briefs from everyone from Intel to the Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, he's in a must-win venue.
The backdrop of the Eldred case is a concentrated effort by Hollywood to blunt the impact of the Internet. There's a sense of deja vu to this. Television was supposed to be the death of movies. And in 1982, the film industry's silver-tongued lobbyist Jack Valenti testified that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." (Video sales are now the studios' biggest moneymaker.) Naturally, Hollywood regards the computer/Internet combo as scarier than "Nightmare on Elm Street."
Silicon Valley-ites, accustomed to flying by the pants-seat, urge La-La Land to cool it. "We love disruptive technologies," says Intel's Donald Whiteside. "At first they're threatening, but if you embrace them, they provide opportunities." And, to be fair, Hollywood execs say they are excited by the Internet's promise, and they will adjust their business models to take advantage of the medium. "We don't want to inhibit the computer or stop new devices, just protect our movies," says Valenti. Talks between the two sides are ongoing. But studio heads will withhold the embraces, thank you, until they can be assured that new laws lock down content. In the meantime they obsess about the "thieves" who download free stuff over the Internet. And accuse Silicon Valley of pandering to crooks. "There are supposed to be business ethics in this country," says Peter Chernin, CEO of Fox. "I'm not sure big, important companies should be encouraging the theft of anything, copyright included."
Hollywood has brilliantly leveraged its Beltway know-how-and its clear lead in campaign contributions-to get congressional response. "They've done a great job of setting up laws which really hammer anyone who wants to be innovative," complains Michael Robertson, who was CEO of MP3.com.
NO BACKUPS
Techies particularly loathe certain provisions of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It outlaws attempts to break any form of copy protection on electronic media. But copy-protection schemes not only stop illegal copying, but legal uses of a product, like making a backup, playing a song or movie on your computer or grabbing a single frame of a movie and putting it on a Web site. Critics call the DMCA a tool that denies the public those forms of fair use.
For instance, as Lessig likes to point out, commercial e-books come with a checklist of permissions that were unheard of in the creaky days of pulp and ink. Depending on the book, you may not be able to lend it to a friend, print out a page, copy and paste a passage into a term paper or even read the book aloud. None of these would violate the copyright, but anyone who hacks the e-book's software to perform these legal acts violates the law.
Such laws offer studios and record labels ammunition in the courts. No one was really shocked that the music industry sued Napster out of existence. But the Valley is outraged that under the DMCA, a Russian company, Elcomsoft, is facing criminal charges for selling a few copies of a program to make legal backups of e-books. And the makers of innovative digital video recorders have had to face a series of legal challenges from Hollywood interests. "They can wrap it in the rhetoric of protecting copyright," says Greg Ballard, interim CEO of SonicBlue (which makes the Replay DVR), "but at the end of day they are trying to exert as much control over the marketplace as possible."
Meanwhile, Hollywood has a new set of laws to push through. Sen. Fritz Hollings's Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act mandates hardware-based copy protection in every computer, DVD player, radio and telephone. Silicon Valley hates the idea. "Anything like that is going to be harder to use and more expensive," says Gateway's Brad Williams.
FRUSTRATED FILE-SWAPPERS
Then there's the Peer to Peer Piracy Prevention Act introduced by Rep. Howard Berman of Los Angeles. Berman has described it as authorizing copyright holders to "use reasonable, limited self-help measures" to frustrate Internet file-swappers, and his staffers bristle at charges that it would allow studios and labels to hack into people's computers in dragnets for the latest Eminem tune or "Spider-Man" bootleg. But if the copyright holders' schemes are so benign, why do they need a law to be indemnified before employing these measures?
The Valley is trying hard to play catch-up. Just last week two tech-friendly representatives introduced bills that would roll back restrictive parts of the DMCA. "If the rights of consumers are not protected in a copyright-product scheme, that scheme is doomed to failure," says Zoe Lofgren, whose district includes Silicon Valley. And the geeks themselves are starting to organize. DigitalConsumer.org is barely six months old but already has almost 50,000 members; the organization urges them to fax legislators before key votes. (E-mail doesn't seem to make an impact on Congress critters.) The group's head, former Excite cofounder Joe Kraus, has a long-term plan that he hopes will lead to passage of a Digital Bill of Rights.
This week, though, the action is in the Supreme Court. Since the issues in the case don't break down into liberal or conservative, legal handicappers are at a loss to predict the outcome. But everyone expects a vivid session as the justices grill Lessig and, representing Congress and its Hollywood backers, Solicitor General Ted Olsen. Outside, there will be wireheads wearing T shirts emblazoned with Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which contains the copyright clause.
Lessig worries about letting his supporters down. "If I thought that this was a case where it's hard to know what the right answer was, I'd feel less pressure," he says. Lessig knows that Eldred v. Ashcroft is the best chance to turn the tide in Silicon Valley's war against Hollywood-a conflict where Hollywood has won every round so far. If he fails in court, the fight "would have to shift to the political arena," he says. "And there, we're outgunned."
With John Horn in Los Angeles, Eleanor Clift in Washington and Brad Stone in Silicon Valley
Aaron Swartz has written up his Eldred experience.
They dropped us off in front of the Supreme Court, where Lisa Rein and others set up camp. "We're an emerging society!" Lisa said, jumping up and down. Seth put down his bags and hung his suit on a tree. Lisa asked us all who we were and why we came and videotaped our answers. We talked, ate pizza (we asked them to deliver it to the Supreme Court (1 First Street), which they did) and played Set long into the night.
Here's the full text of Aaron's article in case the link ever goes bad:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000650
Mr. Swartz Goes to Washington
as seen on Aaron Swartz: The Weblog
« Trip Notes | Main
Mr. Swartz Goes to Washington
In which I see the Bookmobile, go to the Superparty, wait in line until 2AM, almost miss getting to the court, attend the case, go to the luncheon afterwards, visit the Library of Congress, play Set and head back home.
Bookmobile
"You want to make a book?" he asked. His head craned towards you, a curly mop of orange hair atop it and eyes with love and dedication burning like a fire behind them. He was scary and yet inviting at the same time. He was Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, the man who masterminded the Internet Archive Bookmobile.
The bookmobile itself wasn't too exciting: a Ford van, with lettering that announced "make your own book FREE!". On top was a large satellite dish, inside were a high-speed color duplex printer and a bunch of laptops and on a table behind were an industrial-strength paper chopper and a low-key bookbinder.
It was clearly far more than the equipment that made Brewster gus wife Mary, his son Calson, friends Art Medlar and Michael Robbin, as well as writer Richard Koman travel across the country from San Francisco to here in D.C.--surving, according to Brewster, "hurricane-speed winds and a tornado" along the way.
Unlike most Bookmobiles (of which they saw many at a Bookmobile conference on their trip), this one didn't contain any physical books. Instead, it connects to the Internet Archive's servers in the Presidio to download them. Then the high-speed printer prints out the pages. The chopper cuts them in half so you can fold them together to make a normal-sized book, and the binding machine heats up the glue-smeared cover to hold it all together. The whole process takes about fifteen minutes for a book (but they run many books in parallel so they can go much faster), and for the materials cost of a dollar, you have your own book. Brewster, of course, will give it to you for free if you help make it.
It's because of the public domain that they can do this. Brewster talks about how he sat down with book industry executives. He points out that they have thousands of out-of-print books, which they aren't selling and are making no money off of. He pulls out his checkbook. "How much do I have to pay to be able to make these books and give them to children?" he asks. They refuse, they will not let him make their books for any price.
So instead, Brewster turned to the public domain. He used the hard work of Project Gutenberg, whose volunteers sit and type in the full contents of public domain books by hand. And his friend Raj Reddy has organized the Million Book Project, which sends books to India to be scanned in and then puts the full-color high-quality images on the Web. And Brewster himself bought a high-end color book scanner and spent hours in San Francisco turning pages to scan The Wizard of Oz. Now the bookmobile prints the pictures of the pages in full color, duplicating that one book many times over.
During its drive across the country, the Bookmobile stopped at poor inner-city schools that can't afford a large library, or even a small one. He explains to the librarians how they can make their own bookmobile, and have a library of a million books--far more than they would ever normally be able to fit or afford.
Everywhere he went, he found the kids loved it. They would stay after making books, helping the other kids with getting the cover just right. "There's just something about making your own book," Brewster says. They would clutch and carefully protect them--these books that they had worked so hard to make. It changed the way they felt about books. "There were a couple of kids at every stop...I just don't think their lives are going to be the same now."
"People have a hard time understanding the public domain," Brewster says. "It's an abstract concept; it's hard to grasp. The bookmobile changes that." He picks up one of the books he's made. "This is the public domain! The public domain means giving books to children. You want to extend copyright? You want to steal books from children? No one wants to steal books from children."
One kid they met was a poet who wondered if he could use the Bookmobile to print his own books. "These kids have no distribution mechanism," Brewster pointed out. "No one else is going to print their books." Some Amish he met asked if he could print old important Amish texts. No publisher was willing to do the work to make the books for such a small community, but it was easy for the Bookmobile to.
Superparty
Inside the party, I felt more out-of-place. There was no one I recognized and no nametags. Luckily for me, Seth Schoen and other EFFers showed up. Then some of my Creative Commons co-horts like Ben Adida (who is building our website) and Glenn Brown (whose our executive director) stopped by. Ben and Glenn kept introducing me to people in ways that made my face blush in 20 different colors.Later, when people recognized me and introduced themselves, each time their comments got exaggerated. "Ah, I heard you're working for the Creative Commons." "Oh, I heard you help develop the Creative Commons website." "You're the guy that runs the super-coder Creative Commons website!" "Hey, it's the kid that runs the Creative Commons."
Seth Schoen looks like his pictures and speaks like he writes. He has perfect diction and sentence structure and speaks with a rigorous logical thought. He is very kind.
When I stepped back outside into the dark night to get some air, I began watching the rhythmic processes of the Bookmobile. Then I felt a hand pinch my shoulder. I jumped around, it was Larry. "How's it going?" he asked nonchalantly as he made his way inside. Once inside, he gave a short speech.
I've received a lot of letters since I started this case. Everything from "Good luck! I hope you win." to "We need some sort of victory. You better win this one, dammit." Let's not get our hopes up too high. This is a crazy case, we've got a slim chance of winning. I put everything I can into this case, I've tried my best, but we've got to understand that this movement we've created is far more important than what five smelly old guys in Washington think.
Four years ago, when we filed this case, people laughed us out of their office. "You want to take away people's property?" they exclaimed. No one understood what the public domain was, the media thought we wanted to get rid of copyright. That's not the case now. Every article understands the issues, people know what the public domain is. That's an important victory.
Even more important is that we have a group like this. We've got a team of people here fighting for our freedom. Whatever happens tomorrow, whatever the court decides, let's not lose this, let's not stop the momentum. There are many battles to fight, and we need to keep going.
(Needless to say, Larry said it far more eloquently.)
After some applause, Larry was dragged off by the group, told to go get some sleep before his case tomorrow. As the night wore on, we popped champaign bottles for the new Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain and toasted EPIC, whose founders were hosting the party.
The Line
When it was getting late, Seth Schoen, Cindy Cohn, someone else whose name I can't remember (sorry!) and I hopped into a cab. Seth, who hadn't been to Washinton since he was 8, kept looking at all the famous landmarks and saying "Wow!". When he passed SunTrust Bank, he broke into laughter. "SunTrust Bank!" he said. Everyone looked puzzled. "No, SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin co.." (The case over Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone.) The lawyers got it. "Seth, I think you've got law on the brain. You're going to go crazy," Cindy said.
They dropped us off in front of the Supreme Court, where Lisa Rein and others set up camp. "We're an emerging society!" Lisa said, jumping up and down. Seth put down his bags and hung his suit on a tree. Lisa asked us all who we were and why we came and videotaped our answers. We talked, ate pizza (we asked them to deliver it to the Supreme Court (1 First Street), which they did) and playes Set long into the night.
Eventually, around 2AM, I went back to the B&B I was staying at to get some sleep. I set the alarm clock for 6:30AM ("That should give me plenty of time," I thought), plugged my laptop in, and went to sleep.
The Court
Ring ring. "Hello?" I answered sleepily. It was Brewster (he's up early, I thought), he wanted to know how to get his ticket to the Supreme Court. I gave him the info I had. After I hung up, I looked at the clock on my phone. It was already 8AM. I realized that when I plugged in my laptop I'd unplugged the alarm clock. I hurried to change into my suit and go downstairs.
It was 8:30. I realized there was no way I was going to make it to the lawyer's offices to pick up my ticket. I went straight to the courthouse. The camp that had been set up had disappeared, and now Lisa and the gang were at the front of a line that stretched down the many steps of the court, and all the way around the block. There was no way they'd all get in.
Remembering that my email said if I couldn't make it to the office, I should go to the Marshal's Office in the Supreme Court. Seth showed me how to get into the courthouse and I was informed by the guard that I should wait until 9AM. I milled around with a bunch of other lawyers. Brewster later appeared with a toasted buttered bagel in a bag and a bottle of water, which he offered to share.
As we waited together, I began to realize what an extraordinary person Brewster is. Despite his gruelling journey, he didn't seem the least bit tired. He was always selfless, thinking of how to help others, not himself. He was patient when people would talk, and talk, and talk to him. He talked about how hateful the anti-Scientologists were. "Clearly those people were very hurt," he noted. "I just don't like being around people so filled with hatred, even if it's for the 'right' side." When someone mentioned an "enemy", he said "It must be so hard to be her" sympathetically. And of course, he's spent his life building the world's biggest library and making it available to everyone.
We took the elevator up to the Marshall's office, and put our stuff away in the quarter-operated lockers. We got in line. I realized I had no ID, and that the Supreme Court probably wouldn't recognized be. But it turned out not to be a problem: when I got to the front of the line, they simply asked my name and crossed it off a list before seating me.
The Case
The courtroom itself was an impressive structure. Everything was very, very tall. We entered through tall gates into long rows of red-padded benches. I ended up sitting next to Jake Shapiro, formerly Assistant Director of the Berkman Center who is now started his own project, the Radio Exchange. He was a quiet person and good at recognizing famous people. He would catch my attention, look in their direction and then whisper their name: "Ken Starr".
Alan Greenspan sat several row in front of us. Jack Valenti came in a little late and sat down in front of him. Apparently Steven Levy, Declan McCullaugh, Rep. Mary Bono (whose law we were trying to overturn) and Rep. Boucher (whose almost certainly our side) were also there. Everyone in our group got in. Jace was #1, Lisa #2, Seth #6. They estimate only 25-50 people out of the hundreds waiting got a seat.
There was a loud crack, which sounded sort of like some speaker blowing out. As if pulled by some invisible force, everyone's legs immediate snapped straight and we all rised to stand as one. "The Honorable, the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting." (I looked, the justices were still standing.) "God Save the United States and this Honorable Court!" The crack sounded again, and I realized it was a gavel. We all took our seats, not as simultaneously as we had stood up.
They called someone to the stand. "Muh, muh, muh, Mr. Chief Juh, Jih, Justice and mih, mih, may it please the court." Oh no, I thought, Larry was really nervous. Luckily, it turned out not to be Larry. Instead, people were asking for other people to be sworn into the Supreme Court Bar. The Chief Justice granted their requests. It was all very formal, with the same dialog replayed each time. The new members were sworn in.
Larry came up to the stand. "Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the court, Plaintiffs..." Larry got a few minutes of speaking in before he was interrupted. One of the female justices interrupted and pressed him on the First Ammendment issues. They went back and forth a few times with Larry doing a poor job of explaining. They gave up and moved on to what distinguished the '76 copyright extension from the '97 one. Larry stated that nothing did, his theory would have overturned both. "Perhaps we should find another theory then," said one of the male justices. I kept waiting for Larry to explain that Congress could set the copyright to any reasonable limit, but then they had to stick to it, and not retroactively extend it when it expired. But he didn't. Of course, as Brewster later noted, "it was a dance for which I don't know the steps."
I thought Larry had done an awful job until Solicitor General Olson (the man who argued for Bush in Bush v. Gore) came up. The Justices had a field day with him. Rehnquist got him to admit that a perpetual copyright would violate the Constitution. Kennedy got him to admit that a functionally perpetual (900 year) copyright would also be a violation. "Isn't that what petitioners argue?" asked another Justice. "That if you keep extending the term of copyright it's the functional equivalent?"
Justice Breyer seemed to have the economist's spreadsheet going in his head. "Alright, so $2.4 billion dollars have gone to vested copyright holders. This bill will give them $6 billion more dollars. And the additional incentive that gives is zero--to three decimal places as the economists say. I consider that on the harm side. It will also introduce, let's say $1 billion dollars in searching for copyright holders in this legal thicket--and for many you won't be able to find them, an immeasurable cost! So those are the costs. On the benefit side, I see unification [and two other things I forgot - ASw]. What do you see as the benefits?" "Well, there's harmonizing with Europe," said Olsen, "that lowe--". "That's unification," said Breyer. (Lessig(?) noted, that if France passed a law that didn't give copyright to hate speech, because of the First Ammendment, we wouldn't be able to harmonize with it. Similarly, if the EU extends copyright such that it violates the Copyright Clause we also can't harmonize.) Olson couldn't think of any other benefits.
One Justice asked how extending the copyright of a dead person by twenty years would give them extra incentive to promote science and the useful arts. "Was [famous classical dead author] sitting there and thinking, well I'd write some more if only copyright lasted another 20 years after my death? (Laughter from the crowd.)" Olson said that the publisher would be able to distribute more. Ah, one Justice joked, I guess we should give someone the copyright to Shakespeare, since there apparently is no incentive to distribute his works.
Many Justices repeatedly said that they felt it was a dumb law, that it took things out of the public domain without justification. But they were having trouble finding a way to declare it unconstitutional without also having to overturn the '76 extension, something they clearly didn't want to do. No Justices said they felt that the law was a good idea.
I was impressed by how smart the Justices were. These were people who very thoroughly understood the issues and thought quickly on their feet. They were interested in long-lasting effects and classics, I doubted many cared much for Mickey or Steamboat Willie. It's sad we don't have this level of intellectualism and intelligence in the rest of our government today.
However, it was extremely funny that in such a formal setting, with imposing red drapes surrounding the room and the Justices sitting high above the supplicants in big chairs that the Justices were so informal. They interrupted each other, spun around and tipped back and forth in their chairs, and some even pretended to go to sleep with their head on their desks. The whole thing looked like a bunch of kids and school, all of which would almost certainly be diagnosed with ADD for their curiosity and inability to resist asking questions. Macki mentioned that Justice Clarence Thomas looked like he was chewing gum, trying hard to hide it from the teacher.
During the argument, one of the security guards busted someone who was taking notes and made him put his paper and pen away.
Soon enough the case was over, and we got up and left the building.
Luncheon
Outside, news media surrounded Larry, who gave a short speech I was unable to hear. Rep. Mary Bono showed her friendlyness by speaking afterwards and shaking hands with Eric Eldred. Eldred spoke third, before the media cloud dissipated. After we all got sick of talking to journalists, we walked across the street to a luncheon hosted by Public Knowledge at a Women's Suffrage museum. A carboard Mickey-head behind bars was at the top of the building, marking the place.
Larry and Eldred gave short talks, then Larry went home for a nap. Many interesting people, like Eben Moglen (of the FSF) and Danny Weitzner (of the W3C) were there. Seth kept mentioning that the leaders of major trade associations were there, and that he felt bad for not talking to them about the broadcast flag he is fighting.
Library of Congress
After talking with lots of people for a while, Seth and I went to the Library of Congress. Seth exclaimed that the LOC Reading Room was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. Unfortunately, no one was allowed in the stacks because people stole books when they were and even the reading room could only be used if you were a Congressman, a student or a registered researcher with photo ID. Seth bought many postcards of the building.
However, they did have a display room with many of their most famous works and it was very interesting.
Set Puzzles
We went back to the hotel and played Set for a bit. Seth left me with two interesting puzzles: What's the largest number of Set cards you can lay out that have no valid set? and What's the largest number of Set cards that can be left at the end of a legal game of Set? (which, by definition have no valid set).
Heading Home
I took a cab back to the airport. When I got there, I realized I'd left my ticket at the hotel. I asked at the desk if I could get a new ticket. They said normally cost $100. I didn't have $100. They said they would waive the fee for me because I couldn't pay. They started punching keys into the computer, muttering. Soon four people joined in. It looked like they were playing a computer game. "Try PQRS! No, wait that won't work. PQRH." "Oh yeah, then you try!" They switched positions. "Hah! You've got to remand and reverse before you insert." After what seemed like an eternity, they presented me with a boarding pass.
When they put the pass through the machine, I was marked for screening. They searched me and my luggage pretty thoroughly. I was let on board. THe plane was pretty empty, I slept most of the way back. At one point I woke up and the plane was shaking. The captain announced that we should buckle our seat belts and outside the window a lot of gray stuff surrounded the planes. I thought we were going to crash.
I made it home safely, and went to sleep. I didn't wake up until 10AM. Then I wrote this. Now it is 1PM.
Thanks
Many, many, many, many thanks to Larry Lessig who made something for me to come to and let me come. It was such an incredible experience, I am forever in your debt. Thanks to Seth, for putting up with me, teaching me, helping me and showing me around. Thanks to everyone who said nice things about me and made me feel at home. Thanks to Lisa for arranging the line. Thanks to Eric Miller for not going, which is the reason (I suspect) I was able to. (I'm sorry you couldn't make it, though!) Thanks to the Justices for taking the case. Thanks to Eric Eldred and the other plaintiffs for raising the issue. Thank you for reading this. Thanks to everyone I forgot to thank, please let me know.
Posted by Aaron Swartz at October 10, 2002 01:02 PM in Personal
Aaron Swartz (me@aaronsw.com)
All text above by me is placed in the public domain.
Some of the greatest artistic phenomena in the world (like jazz) would never have been allowed to be created if today's copyright laws had been in existence back then.
What an excellent, timely art exhibit.
Thanks to Kendra Mayfield for writing such a great story for Wired News about it:
Art: What's Original, Anyway?
If current copyright laws had been on the books when jazz musicians were borrowing riffs from other artists in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators were creating cartoons in the 1940s, entire art genres such as hip-hop, collage and Pop Art might never have existed...
To acknowledge this landmark case, an exhibit will celebrate "degenerate art" in a corporate age: art and ideas on the fringes of intellectual property law.
The exhibit, Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age, will take place in New York from Nov. 13 to Dec. 6 and in Chicago from Jan. 25 to Feb. 22.
"Almost all art, to a certain extent, is unoriginal," said Carrie McLaren, publisher of Stay Free! magazine and organizer of the exhibit. "(In) an environment where you can have free exchange of ideas, you get better art."
Here's the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://r.hotwired.com/r/wn_html_link/http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55592,00.html
Art: What's Original, Anyway?
By Kendra Mayfield
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Notmickey (Pen, paper, and photocopies; 2002) The Symbolic Lotus of A Thousand Colonels Meet the Residents (LP Cover; 1974) In 1974, a mysterious band called the Residents released its first full-length LP with a cover that parodied Meet the Beatles. When rumors circulated that Capitol, the Beatles' record label, was threatening to sue, the band decided to repress the LP with new artwork. How Mao (Sewn U.S. currency; 2002) Mao is one of a series of 20th century masterpieces that Beldner recreated using U.S currency. Although Beldner has not been sued, he has been threatened by artists' estates for appropriating their work, most notably, Pablo Picasso's. This particular piece is based on Andy Warhol's silkscreen. American Alphabet (Installation; 2000) The letters shown here are from corporate logos. So far Cody has not had any legal troubles. Ad agencies have even purchased parts of the Alphabet.
Click thumbnails to expand Images from various sources
2:00 a.m. Oct. 10, 2002 PDT
If current copyright laws had been on the books when jazz musicians were borrowing riffs from other artists in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators were creating cartoons in the 1940s, entire art genres such as hip-hop, collage and Pop Art might never have existed.
The debate over whether artists can use copyrighted materials entered the national spotlight this week as the Supreme Court heard opening arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a case in which plaintiffs are seeking to overturn the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act.
To acknowledge this landmark case, an exhibit will celebrate "degenerate art" in a corporate age: art and ideas on the fringes of intellectual property law.
The exhibit, Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age, will take place in New York from Nov. 13 to Dec. 6 and in Chicago from Jan. 25 to Feb. 22.
"Almost all art, to a certain extent, is unoriginal," said Carrie McLaren, publisher of Stay Free! magazine and organizer of the exhibit. "(In) an environment where you can have free exchange of ideas, you get better art."
The show will examine the intersection between intellectual property and the First Amendment. Some pieces have been the focus of court battles, while others have eluded copyright lawyers.
Digital rights activists argue that creativity is under assault with the recent passage of laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Current copyright laws discourage the creation of new works, McLaren said. For example, filmmakers typically screen anything that appears on camera for copyright violations.
"That effectively makes filmmaking off limits for anyone who's not a millionaire," McLaren said.
Some digital rights advocates believe that Eldred v. Ashcroft could shift the balance of power.
"The fact that the Supreme Court is taking this case is a major opportunity for this discussion," McLaren said. "It shows that the court is concerned about the First Amendment implications of copyright."
Timed with the exhibit's opening in November, a panel discussion at New York University will focus on some of the aspects of using and archiving artworks that appropriate copyrighted or trademarked material.
"Understanding the sociopolitical implications of the current copyright regime is of particular concern at this time," said Meg McLagan, an assistant professor of anthropology at NYU, "given the challenges posed by corporate attempts to limit access to works that should be moving into the public domain." McLagan is the panel's moderator.
Exhibit organizer McLaren hopes Illegal Art will "wake people up" to restrictive copyright legislation. "When people see this exhibit they won't want to support the laws that make this type of work illegal," she said.
The exhibit surveys a variety of mediums -- from collage to audio and film -- and includes pieces that flout intellectual property law by violating copyrights or infringing on trademarks.
The visual art exhibit, viewable online, features murdered Disney characters, a parody of the Starbucks logo and a painting of a lace doily that incorporates the Texaco logo.
The exhibit's site also highlights illegal films and videos that appropriate others' intellectual property through the use of found footage, unauthorized music, or shots of copyrighted or trademarked material.
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Art: What's Original, Anyway?
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(page 2)
Site visitors can also download illegal MP3s, including recycled lyrics from 2 Live Crew's parody of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" and Vanilla Ice's 1990 hit "Ice Ice Baby," which borrowed the main riff from David Bowie and Queen's song "Under Pressure."
The site includes links to audio works by experimental music and art collective Negativland, longtime advocates of the concept of fair use since the group was forced to cease performing and distributing a parody of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" in 1995.
Since the early '90s, "these issues have become more and more mainstream," said Mark Hosler, one of Negativland's founding members.
Groups like Negativland have felt the repercussions of the digital copyright wars. In 1998, Negativland's CD manufacturer refused to press the band's latest album because of concerns over the inclusion of unlicensed samples.
"It really has impacted us very directly," Hosler said. "It seems like the content owners don't care any more about what we're doing. But in terms of getting (CDs with samples) manufactured, that's the problem."
A compilation CD of music featuring plundered hits by Negativland, Public Enemy, John Oswald and other artists will be given away free at Illegal Art events in New York and Chicago.
The free CD, which includes several tracks that were sued out of existence, could create some legal entanglements of its own.
But the exhibit's organizers insist that its material is fair game.
"Since we're criticizing and educating about this, we think it falls under fair use," McLaren said. "We wanted to have more discussion and debate about this. We're not just throwing this stuff out there."
This just in by Michael Grebb for Wired News:
Justices Doubt Free Speech Link
Eric Eldred, who brought the case in January 1999, runs a burgeoning website that has posted the text of some 50 rare and out-of-print books whose copyrights have expired. Outside the court, he said the justices sent mixed messages."They asked some tough questions," he said. "But it's hard to judge how they'll rule."
Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, said Congress will most likely overturn the CTEA on its own even if the court upholds it.
"Hollywood pushed something through Congress, and nobody was watching," Shapiro said. "There is no question that this legislation would not pass Congress today. Five years ago, we should have opposed this. We made a big mistake."
Shapiro, an industry veteran who's observed dozens of cases, said you can't always tell how the court will rule based on the questions they ask. "I don't read too much into the justices asking questions."
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55684,00.html
Justices Doubt Free Speech Link
By Michael Grebb
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3:15 p.m. Oct. 9, 2002 PDT
WASHINGTON -- In a case that could affect how many digital works end up on the Internet and in other areas of the public domain, U.S. Supreme Court justices on Wednesday expressed measured skepticism that copyright law and the First Amendment are intertwined.
"This would be quite a new proposition," said Justice Sandra Day O'Connor during oral arguments for the case, Eldred v. Ashcroft.
See also:
• Fencing Off the Public Domain
• Free Speech Same as Free Content?
• Bill: Copyright Power to People
• Music Biz Lament: Stealing Hurts
• Everybody's got issues in Politics
Plaintiffs want the court to overturn the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended current and future copyrights by 20 years.
Big media companies such as Walt Disney pushed for the law to protect early works whose copyrights were about to expire, which would have put some movies, recordings and books that included characters such as Mickey Mouse in the public domain.
Justices also said that throwing out the CTEA could affect the validity of past copyright extensions and the 1976 Copyright Act, which anchors current copyright law.
"The chaos that would ensue would be horrendous," said Justice Stephen Breyer.
But, First Amendment issues aside, justices also asked if CTEA violates the "limited time" copyright clause in the U.S. Constitution.
Justice Breyer wondered whether allowing Congress to extend copyright terms whenever it chooses could defeat the purpose of the copyright clause itself. "Isn't there no difference between this and a permanent copyright?" he asked.
Justice Antonin Scalia agreed, suggesting that allowing unlimited extensions makes the term "limited" in the copyright clause meaningless.
U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson defended the CTEA as necessary to repel piracy and create incentives for copyright holders.
When justices pressed Olson to explain why Congress should not be limited to extend copyright terms to just future works, Olson said the Constitution requires that Congress -- not the courts -- make that call.
"We're living in an era where piracy is a significant problem," Olson said. He added that the law also puts U.S. copyright holders on par with the European Union, which recently extended its copyright terms.
Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, told the court that unless it "draws the line" by overturning the CTEA, the "limited term" envisioned by the framers of the Constitution would be moot.
On the marble rotunda outside the court, Lessig and his supporters continued to argue the point.
"No, there's no chaos," Lessig said in response to Breyer's courtroom comment. But Lessig acknowledged that the 1976 Copyright Act "would have to be evaluated" if the court sides with plaintiffs.
"But this case affects so many millions of people who use the Internet," Lessig said. "The First Amendment argument is fundamental to understanding what's important here."
Lessig said overturning the CTEA could also boost Internet peer-to-peer systems.
"There would be tons of content out there that people could trade freely," he said.
Eric Eldred, who brought the case in January 1999, runs a burgeoning website that has posted the text of some 50 rare and out-of-print books whose copyrights have expired. Outside the court, he said the justices sent mixed messages.
"They asked some tough questions," he said. "But it's hard to judge how they'll rule."
Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association, said Congress will most likely overturn the CTEA on its own even if the court upholds it.
"Hollywood pushed something through Congress, and nobody was watching," Shapiro said. "There is no question that this legislation would not pass Congress today. Five years ago, we should have opposed this. We made a big mistake."
Shapiro, an industry veteran who's observed dozens of cases, said you can't always tell how the court will rule based on the questions they ask. "I don't read too much into the justices asking questions."
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wasn't immediately available for comment following oral arguments.
I haven't had time to positively determine for myself if this is good news or bad news yet, but at first glance, it sure seems like a bad idea to put Digital Radio in the hands of a single company.
See the USA Today story on it:
FCC approves plan for radio stations to go digital
Here's the full text of the story in case the link goes bad:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2002-10-10-digital-radio_x.htm
10/10/2002 - Updated 10:18 AM ET
FCC approves plan for radio stations to go digital
WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal regulators gave the go-ahead Thursday for digital radio, approving a plan to modernize the medium with better sound and new features for personalized programming.
The Federal Communications Commission voted 4-0 to adopt digital radio technology created by iBiquity Digital, a company backed by large broadcasters including ABC and Viacom.
The commissioners enthusiastically endorsed the technology, saying it will benefit the industry and consumers.
"We don't get many items where it's a win-win for everyone. There's no down side," Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy said.
Radio has changed little for decades. FCC Chairman Michael Powell said he's heartened that such a dramatic leap forward in technology is in store.
"I'm thrilled and excited to see the radio wagon train finally get to the other side," he said.
The approval allows radio stations to immediately begin broadcasting digital signals, though it probably will take a few months for the first stations to start.
Manufacturers plan to sell digital receivers for car stereos and high-end audio systems starting next year, adding about $100 to the price of a traditional unit. It's unclear how soon digital technology will be included in portable radios.
The iBiquity technology allows broadcasters to use their existing airwaves to simultaneously send digital and analog signals. Listeners won't have to buy a new radio to continue listening to their favorite stations, but can if they want better sound and other options.
Supporters say the new technology will bring CD-quality sound to FM broadcasts, an end to static for AM and new data features.
Radio One, which owns and operates 65 stations and primarily targets black listeners, already has ordered digital transmitters, said John Mathews, the company's director of engineering. He said the Lanham, Md.-based company plans to start digital broadcasts within three months in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Detroit and Los Angeles.
"We wanted to be in the front on this," he said. "The quality improvement is just phenomenal. It's analogous to the transition between cassettes and CDs."
Some digital car stereos will have small screens, displaying news or advertising or pictures of the artist whose song is playing. Others will allow listeners to choose when to hear reports on stocks, sports, weather and traffic.
The digital broadcasts will be free, unlike the subscriber services offered by Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio Holdings, which beam music and talk to radios from satellites.
Digital broadcasts use the same language as computers - a series of on and off electronic pulses. Broadcasts with the proposed technology won't increase a radio station's range, but digital signals can be cleaned up, removing garble and uneven reception.
Below is what I managed to write at 3am from the front steps of the Supreme Court. I meant to post it that night, but things started getting really hectic as the hour of 6am approached because we had to all take turns going back to a room I had rented close by so we could all change into our court clothes and dump off all of our blankets and stuff.
I'm going to keep posting these in small segments, but I will be putting them all together into some kind of a comprehensive document next week (I'll be on the road till next Tuesday.)
Enjoy!
10/09/02 - 3:00am -- From in front of the Supreme Court Building, Washington DC
Tonight has been a really great time so far waiting in line.
I thought there would be a ton of people in line, but it has turned out to be just us for the first few hours (from 7pm till around 10 or 11pm). So we may have overdone it a bit showing up at 7pm, but there was just no way to know for sure and we didn't want to risk it. (As it turns out, only 25 members of the general public were admitted!)
Jace Cooke got there first at 7pm (right when I asked him too!) -- I was still packing up my friend Doug McVay's car with the blankets and things I was bringing, so that made me second in line when I got there around 7:30.
We were on the steps very briefly before the Police Officer on duty asked us very nicely to move down to the sidewalk where the "first line" usually forms. (I will be posting more details about how the lines work in another posting...)
We laid out the blakets I had brought to cover about two or three ten foot squares so we would have enough room for our group as they arrived. I had never met Jace before this, so the time flew by really quickly talking about things. We ordered a pizza and yapped the time away.
Lodrina and Macki showed up around 10pm. Then Seth Schoen and Aaron Swartz showed up around 10:30, and Kevin Burton got there around 11pm.
There were a few other small groups of mostly law students that showed up too over the course of the evening between 11pm - 1am. We had coupons from our earlier pizza now, so we ordered four more pizzas and some people got a SET game going. The entire Internet Bookmobile gang showed up around midnight too!
The U.S. Supreme Court Federal Police Officers were consistently helpful and courteous over the course of the evening. Each time a new officer came on duty, he or she would walk over and ask what the case was about. They seemed really interested too -- and they all "got it" pretty quickly in terms of what the public was losing as a result of these multiple extensions to what what originally intented to be a "limited" copyright term of 14 years, renewable once to 28 years.
All of the Officers seemed rather impressed that we would feel so strongly about it to wait in line all night to see the Argument first hand. When the outdoor patrols stopped soon after midnite, one of the Officers gave us his card so we'd have his phone number if we needed anything over the course of the night. There was a police car and/or truck about 200 yards away kitty-corner to the Supreme Court for most of the evening too -- that made me feel a little safer as I attempted to close my eyes and get some sleep.
Good thing I brought extra blankets just in case -- some of the law students that showed up later that weren't in our weren't as well prepared, so I gave them a blanket and a cup of hot tea. I also had toe warmers if necessary but only Macki ended up needing them. I also had a couple extra pairs of gloves that we were rotating as needed.
So now it's 3:00am in front of the Supreme Court and I can't sleep. Jace, Kevin and Seth have gone for a walk around the Capitol, and most of the others are bundled up in blankets sleeping or trying to sleep. (I can hear snoring so I know somebody's sleeping.) It's extremely quiet and beautiful here out in front of the Supreme Court. I'm taking video of it so you can all see for yourselves when I get back home next week. (Sorry for the hold up, but my travel Mac isn't equipped for video editing.)
It's not as cold as I had feared, but I sure wish I could get some sleep. Guess I'm just too excited...
Justices Hear Arguments in Challenge to Copyrights
By Linda Greenhouse.
The justices appeared to agree that there should be a limit somewhere, but not that they should be the ones to impose it. "I can find a lot of fault with what Congress did here," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told Professor Lessig. But she added that "it's very difficult to find the basis in the Constitution for saying" lawmakers do not have the right to set the limit even if "it's longer than one might think desirable..."Is there any limiting principle out there that would ever kick in?" Justice O'Connor asked. An explicitly perpetual copyright would be unconstitutional, Mr. Olson conceded. He said that even if extending existing copyrights did not induce new creative efforts, Congress was entitled to have other goals in mind, like giving copyright holders a continued financial incentive to keep their works in distribution.
Professor Lessig's argument was exactly the opposite. The Internet had brought about a "fundamentally important changed circumstance" in the traditional copyright equation, he said, by making the public domain so readily accessible and therefore raising the stakes in keeping copyrighted material flowing into the public domain.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/10/business/10BIZC.html
Justices Hear Arguments in Challenge to Copyrights
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — No member of the Supreme Court had a good word today for the 1998 law that added 20 years to all existing copyrights. But that did not make the job any easier for Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School, who faced an uphill battle to persuade the justices that the extension, which Congress adopted at the behest of the Walt Disney Company and other powerful corporate copyright holders, was not only bad policy but unconstitutional.
Hadn't Congress granted copyright extensions numerous times since the country's earliest years, the justices wanted to know. Didn't this challenge to the latest extension necessarily call into question the validity of the major rewriting of federal copyright law in 1976? Wouldn't accepting Professor Lessig's theory mean that "the chaos that would ensue would be horrendous?" Justice Stephen G. Breyer asked.
"Under our theory as we've advanced it, you're right," Professor Lessig conceded, adding that the court would not have to go so far.
Justice Breyer responded, "Maybe we ought to find another theory."
Before the court opened this morning, the line of people hoping to get a glimpse of the most important argument in years about intellectual property was already around the block. The lucky few who got in witnessed a fast-moving tutorial in which the justices clearly came prepared to listen and learn. Although they had many questions for Professor Lessig and Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, who argued in defense of the law, the justices uncharacteristically appeared to go out of their way to permit the lawyers to answer with a minimum of interruptions.
The basis for Professor Lessig's challenge to the Copyright Term Extension Act is the text of the clause in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution authorizing Congress "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" by issuing exclusive copyrights for "limited times." The first federal copyright law, enacted in 1790, provided for a 14-year copyright, renewable for another 14 years. The latest law extended individual copyrights to 70 years after the creator's death and copyrights held by corporations to 95 years.
Not only is this the functional equivalent of a perpetual copyright, Professor Lessig argued, but extending existing copyrights fails to serve the constitutional purpose of promoting creativity. His role in organizing the lawsuit on behalf of a coalition of Internet publishers and others seeking access to the public domain has given Mr. Lessig a kind of cult status as a cyberspace guru. An article in the current Wired magazine proclaims him "the great liberator" who is "about to tell the Supreme Court to smash apart the copyright machine."
While Professor Lessig's low-key argument reflected a narrower goal, it is nonetheless true that after losing in two lower federal courts, he managed to take the case further than most people expected. He persuaded the Supreme Court to hear his appeal, Eldred v. Ashcroft, No. 01-618, with a petition that played into the current majority's interest in placing limits on the exercise of Congressional power. He said today that the Copyright Clause was "the most carefully limited" of all the clauses in Article I, Section 8 that define Congress's powers. "This case is about limits to an enumerated power," he said, adding that if the latest extension was permissible, "there is no limit" to Congress's ability to extend copyright terms.
The justices appeared to agree that there should be a limit somewhere, but not that they should be the ones to impose it. "I can find a lot of fault with what Congress did here," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told Professor Lessig. But she added that "it's very difficult to find the basis in the Constitution for saying" lawmakers do not have the right to set the limit even if "it's longer than one might think desirable."
In his defense of the law, Solicitor General Olson said Congress operated under a "broad grant of power" and made "quintessentially legislative judgments" when it passed copyright laws.
"Is there any limiting principle out there that would ever kick in?" Justice O'Connor asked. An explicitly perpetual copyright would be unconstitutional, Mr. Olson conceded. He said that even if extending existing copyrights did not induce new creative efforts, Congress was entitled to have other goals in mind, like giving copyright holders a continued financial incentive to keep their works in distribution.
Professor Lessig's argument was exactly the opposite. The Internet had brought about a "fundamentally important changed circumstance" in the traditional copyright equation, he said, by making the public domain so readily accessible and therefore raising the stakes in keeping copyrighted material flowing into the public domain.
"You want the right to copy verbatim other people's books, don't you?" Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist demanded.
Professor Lessig replied, "We want the right to copy verbatim works that should be in the public domain and would be in the public domain but for a statute that cannot be justified" either under the First Amendment or Congress's copyright power.
Eric Eldred, the named plaintiff in the case, wanted to publish some Robert Frost poems that will now be copyrighted for another 20 years. Other plaintiffs include a church choir director, an orchestral sheet music company, a company that restores old films, and Dover Publications, a publisher of books that have passed into the public domain.
And without the extension, Disney's copyright on the earliest version of Mickey Mouse would have expired next year.
Well it was an incredible experience waiting in line overnight to hear the Eldred argument.
Me and my buddies were joined by a number of neat people over the course of the evening.
I've made a movie of the whole experience, and am waiting till Friday to fly home so I can spend all day tomorrow writing and posting and uploading photos and the like. (Movie footage won't be up till early next week.)
But first I've got to seriously catch up on some sleep!
Court to Review Copyright Law
By Amy Harmon.
Here is the entire text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/business/media/07ARGU.html
Court to Review Copyright Law
By AMY HARMON
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments this week over the constitutionality of a 1998 law that extended copyright protection by 20 years. Experts on both sides of the closely watched case say that its outcome could reshape the way cultural products are consumed and how their profits are divided.
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The court's decision will determine whether a host of material — including early Mickey Mouse movies, Cole Porter songs and Robert Frost poems — will become available for free to the public or remain in the control of their copyright holders.
Since the court agreed to hear the case in February, it has become a touchstone in an increasingly acrimonious debate over how to balance the rights of consumers with those of big media companies at a time when digital technology is threatening both.
Under the 1998 law, material whose copyright formerly would have lapsed 50 years after its creator's death became protected for an additional 20 years. Copyrights held by corporations, meanwhile, were extended to 95 years, from 75 previously.
Over the long term, supporters of the law say, it will promote creative work by offering a bigger economic payoff to those who invest in it.
The 1998 law also aligns the United States' copyright terms with those of European countries.
But detractors say the statute inhibits creativity by making it harder and more expensive for other people to obtain and build upon existing works. The 1998 law, these critics argue, mainly benefits powerful corporate copyright holders like the Walt Disney Company, whose intensive lobbying helped pass the legislation.
The law's challengers say that it disregards the public's side of the balance that the Constitution sought to strike when it authorized Congress to issue copyrights "for limited times" to "promoted the progress of science and useful arts." The initial Copyright Act, in 1790, set a maximum term of only 28 years.
Opponents of the 1998 law say that by issuing a series of 11 extensions over the last 40 years — the latest being by far the longest — Congress has exceeded its powers by, in effect, giving copyright holders a permanent monopoly over the use of their material.
Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor who has spearheaded the case since its inception almost four years ago, says that the rise of the Internet makes the copyright issue all the more urgent, because works that fall into the public domain would for the first time be easily accessible via the Internet for millions of people to enjoy and to incorporate into new digital works of their own.
"Imagine you want to do something with the New Deal, and you get images and songs and stories and put it together on the Internet for everyone to see," Mr. Lessig said last week in a telephone interview from a Washington hotel room, where he was preparing for this Wednesday's oral argument. "Just at a point where technology is making all of this available, the law ought not to get in the way for no good reason."
Mr. Lessig said that he planned to argue that throughout the last century, copyrights primarily governed only commercial entities — companies with the printing presses, movie studios or broadcast stations capable of widely distributing information and entertainment. But now, Mr. Lessig said, copyright law touches everyone who has an Internet connection, which makes it more important than ever to adhere to the limits the Constitution intended to place on the duration of copyrights.
The government, to be represented on Wednesday by Theodore B. Olson, the solicitor general, is expected to argue that no one, including the Supreme Court, can impose an arbitrary definition of "limited times." In its filings on the case, the government has argued that the Constitution leaves such definitions up to Congress.
But the law's opponents argue that any law limiting speech must satisfy a compelling state interest in the least restrictive way possible. The copyright term extension, they say, should be tested under the First Amendment to see whether it is overly restrictive of the free-speech rights of would-be users of copyrighted material that previously would have been in the public domain.
Courts have traditionally rejected that position. It is also rebutted in the government's filings and in a brief by Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment lawyer. Mr. Abrams argues that free speech is protected under the extension because of the fair-use provisions built into copyright law, which enable scholars, critics and other individuals to make some use of copyrighted material in their own work. What is more, he argues, the copyright law protects only the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves.
Jack Valenti, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said that, in practice, a longer copyright term would serve the Constitution's goal of harnessing copyright for the public good. Private ownership is the necessary incentive to make material widely available, he said.
"Who is going to digitize these public domain movies?" Mr. Valenti said. "To digitize a movie costs a huge amount of money. Who would spend the money if they didn't own it? If you didn't own your house would you spend a lot of money to bring it up to snuff?"
The entertainment industry is particularly sensitive to copyright issues these days. File-swapping services like KaZaA are enabling Internet users to easily exchange free digital copies of copyrighted music. And the impending transition to digital television raises copyright concerns about viewers' ability to trade high-quality digital copies of movies and television shows over the Internet.
The case has attracted 38 friend-of-the-court briefs from prominent intellectuals, artists, elected officials and advocates in numerous fields — who in some instances seem to defy traditional political lines. Fifteen economists from across the political spectrum, including the Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and Kenneth Arrow, for instance, wrote a brief in support of the challenge, arguing that it is "highly unlikely that the economic benefits from copyright extension" outweigh the additional costs.
The conservative advocate Phyllis Schlafly, who is the founder of the Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund, also submitted a brief in support of overturning the law, as did the Intel Corporation, besides more predictable partisans like the Free Software Foundation and several library associations.
Mr. Lessig filed the suit on behalf of Eric Eldred, a New Hampshire computer administrator who had published dozens of public-domain books online as a hobby until the copyright extension act prevented him from posting a selection of Robert Frost poems in 1998.
In an elaborate demonstration of what it means to have a public domain, Brewster Kahle, the founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco, is driving across the country in a van that has an Internet-linked satellite antenna on top and a laser printer inside.
Last week Mr. Kahle made several stops at schools and libraries, as well as a bookmobile conference, to distribute "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Heart of Darkness" and other books in the public domain that have been scanned and are available free online. He plans to park outside the Supreme Court and do the same on Wednesday.
Lined up on the government's side are Mr. Abrams; Dr. Seuss Enterprises; Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican; several members of the House Judiciary Committee, and virtually all of the major copyright holder trade associations.
It will fall to Mr. Lessig, who is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and who has become a kind of rock star for the digital liberties set, to convince the justices to accept the unconventional analysis.
If they do, the decision could be a turning point in redefining a balance between copyright consumers and producers — and the technology companies that are often in the middle.
Among the points Mr. Lessig likes to make is that extending copyright terms for works of great artists who are deceased, like George Gershwin, cannot promote the creation of new works because the original artists themselves can no longer create.
Only about 2 percent of works protected by copyright produce continuing revenue for their owners, Mr. Lessig says. But no one can use the rest without hunting down the owners and negotiating licenses.
Disney faced no such restrictions, he says, when the company drew on Victor Hugo's work to produce the animated film "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm to make "Cinderella" and "Snow White."
So I'm here in DC and I'm about to go get in line overnight for the Eldred argument tomorrow.
Why am I getting in line the night before, you may ask?
Just in case :-)
I'll be making a little movie about waiting in the Eldred line and the experience in general.
Wish me luck!
You can find other photos and things on the Internet Bookmobile website.
Drat! I didn't get much of the stuff from the Senate transcribed over the weekend due to my having to get ready to fly to Washington DC today for Wednesday's Eldred argument.
Just know that on Friday in the House and Senate in particular there was a lot of talk about accountability to the people -- about how questions about this War have not been answered to the members of the House and Senate's satisfaction and therefore not to the people's satisfaction -- and that many of the committees put together to discuss and decide on some of the most critical issues surrounding the exact details of the situation still have not yet been provided with the information promised to them by the Defense and Intelligence Agencies that were assigned to the task.
There was also a strong urgency from the Senate to at least wait until we could invade with a proper international coalition. Also we would be going against the advice of a number of our own War experts if we invade now.
Damn I wish I had time to transcribe a bit more of the tape. I'm bringing it with me, maybe there's a library or something somewhere I can use this week...
I'll fish around for links online backing this stuff up, once I'm back online this evening.
Bush is going to come on television tonight and try to scare you into believing in this War. Don't be fooled.
Note: I will be putting these all on one page sometime tomorrow, but I thought I'd post them as they trickle in for those who are interested.
Quotes from Senator Byrd from my video tape of yesterday's U.S. Senate hearings (as broadcast on CSPAN):
Let's go back to that war in Vietnam. I was here (referring to the Senate). I was one of the Senators that voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Yes! I voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. I'm sorry for it. I'm guilty of doing this.I should have been one of the two, or at least I should have made it three Senators who voted against that Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, but I'm not wanting to commit that sin twice!
And that's exactly what we're doing here. This is another Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. And I'm not going to vote for that this time. No! Don't count me in that!
Public Domain Bookmobile Hits the Road
Now it looks like the safety of our own troops during an invasion of Iraq is largely in question, and just plain hasn't been thought out all that well yet.
There could be a ton of bogus equipment (including as many as 250,000 unaccounted for defective biohazard suits) that's mixed in with the inventory shipped out to our active troops.
The Department of Defense Reps are also admitting that they are recalculating the risk because the old way of calculating the risk was inaccurate. Although they don't want to commit to saying one way or the other yet until they are finished, they did admit that they no longer feel that the risk would clearly be "low" (their previous assessment) and in fact might be "high" but that they really don't know yet because they've just come up with a new, better way of calculating the risk and they're not done yet.
It's worth watching and recording on CSPAN-HOUSE if you've got a VCR handy.
Wow things are finally heating up in the Senate today:
"I was one of the people that voted yes on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and I made a huge mistake...I don't want to make that mistake again," said Senator Robert Byrd, holding up the President's Resolution for attacking Iraq. "That's what this is -- another Gulf of Tonkin Resolution!"
I'm recording it all today and I'll be transcribing it tonight and tomorrow as fast as I can.
Ha! Talk about a Freudian slip! Today's lead Weapons of Mass Destruction story on Salon had "Weapons of Mass Distraction" in the browser window title bar up top -- and that's exactly what this story is -- a big distraction from the fact that we shouldn't even be in this "War On Terror" -- complete with its undefined enemies and open-ended time table.
Here are some quotes from Black Hawk Down film maker Mark Bowden, who refused to participate in the development of the America's Army video game because he didn't feel comfortable working on a game that might trivialize the actual realities of war (paraphrasing of his words my own):
"I think there's a substantial difference between a work of art, which I consider a film to be, even a Hollywood film, [and a game]," Bowden explains, reached while on a train headed for Manhattan. For him, "A game is a game. It's something that you play. And this story is about real people, and I know many of the family members who lost brothers and husbands and sons in that battle. And I did not want to be part of something that turns it into a game......[Games] have a certain amount of potential value in making someone interested in history or in the military or how the military operates," says Bowden. "It has that kind of educational value." But he's skeptical their utility may extend beyond that. "In terms of preparing someone for the actual experience of combat, particularly infantry soldiers, I just regard that as really unlikely. Because I think the essential element in real combat is terror. And I don't believe you can re-create actual terror in a video game. It's a game; you can turn it off whenever you want to."
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/10/04/why_we_fight/index.html
page 1
Weapons of mass destruction
A new breed of computer games is teaching today's teenagers how to wage, and win, the war against terror.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Wagner James Au
printe-mail
Oct. 4, 2002 | You can never be the enemy, in America's Army. In this popular new game of multiplayer combat, you can log on as a U.S. soldier who must, say, invade a terrorist camp -- but if someone logs onto the opposing side, to fight you, he also plays as a U.S. soldier. It's just that from his point of view, he's defending a U.S. camp from terrorist invasion. You will always see yourself and your squad in U.S. Army uniforms, wielding U.S. weapons. Everyone who signs up to fight, then, fights as an American.
The game has become so popular with U.S. troops and Pentagon brass, says Lt. Colonel Wardynski, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis and the man who initially conceived it, that there's even talk of shipping computers to Afghanistan, so soldiers can play it from there.
"I had high hopes that it would be something pretty hot," says Capt. Jason Amerine, an Army officer who recently served in Afghanistan. A longtime gamer who counts Command & Conquer and Rainbow Six among his favorites, Amerine was not disappointed. America's Army was so realistic that for the first time, he says, "I was actually looking at it more as a soldier than even a gamer -- but it happened to be good in both ways."
But America's Army's real purpose is to be a recruiting tool, which is why the game has been made freely available since July, with new units and missions added on a regular basis. (It'll be out on CD in recruitment offices soon.) And while its impact on recruitment won't be evident until December, when July enlistees arrive for basic training, early signs, say Army spokesmen, are promising: 28 percent of Americasarmy.com visitors click through to goarmy.com, the government's official recruitment site.
The Army claims that 470,000 people have the game or are playing it now. But there is some skepticism as to whether such success will translate into more recruits. "I don't believe it is any more likely to do this than a good book or a good movie," says Henry Jenkins, director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. But in terms of cost effectiveness, that might be enough. Compared to investment in traditional recruiting ads in other media, says Mike Zyda, director of the MOVES Institute, the Navy's Monterey, Calif., virtual-reality think tank that developed the project with Wardynski, the game is much cheaper.
America's Army is the first game to make recruitment an explicit goal, but it snugly fits into a subgenre of games already in vogue: the "tactical shooter," a first-person shooter that emphasizes realistic, squad-based combat. The realism factor means these games are often modeled on recent events. Next month comes NovaLogic's Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, adapted from journalist Mark Bowden's 1999 book and from Ridley Scott's film of the same name, which reenact the brutal firefight between U.S. soldiers and Somalia's bin Laden-funded militants in 1993. Before that, gamers will get to replay an earlier battle: SCi/Gotham Games' Conflict Desert Storm is loosely based on covert operations against the Iraqi defense infrastructure conducted by American Delta Force and British SAS commandos, in the days leading up to the Gulf War.
Given the warlike tenor of current events, it's not surprising that America's Army has taken fire from its left flank. An article on the liberal-left Web site Tompaine.com called it "propaganda," part of "America's escalating militarization -- designed by the Bush administration," while the Nation's Web site recently fretted over the "political implications" of its gameplay: "nonstop Army cheerleading, with frequent terrorist and Arab bashing ... What better way to reinforce [the war on terrorism's] legitimacy?"
But the squeamishness some lefty critics are expressing over America's Army only demonstrates how many people are still too incurious or too craven to acknowledge the brutal reality the terrorist threat currently poses. Even now, antiwar advocates prattle on about the "root causes of terrorism" -- when the only meaningful cause spurring on al-Qaida and their like is, in Christopher Hitchens' clumsily apt coinage, Islamofascism: a well-organized assault on Western democracy and values (and a close nephew to the original German variation).
Meanwhile, the spiritual sons of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who turned his hatred for American secularism, Jews and sexually liberated women into a galvanizing cry for totalitarian theocracy, are still active and influential, even now sending out calls for world domination.
During World War II, as the country girded for battle, director Frank Capra created a series of films to instruct the Army's soldiers. A classic of righteous propaganda, "Why We Fight" laid out for the greatest generation who the enemy was, and why they must be defeated. If the presentation was simplistic, its message was irrefutable, and comprehensible to the least literate recruit.
A contemporary version of "Why We Fight" seems unlikely to emerge from Hollywood, outside of a rush of thrillers with stock terrorist villains. But the need for one now is just as urgent, even as al-Qaida is whittled away by gun battles in Karachi or raids on a Buffalo suburb. The war on terror -- which, if we parse out the diplomatic niceties, really means a war on Islamist militants, and the nations who back them (beginning with Saddam's Iraq) -- must be fought, and over a campaign of many years, decisively won.
In that regard, America's Army and Delta Force: Black Hawk Down are the "Why We Fight" for the digital generation. Though not explicitly doctrinaire in an ideological sense, by showing the very young how we fight, applying the moral application of lethal force on behalf of liberal values, these games create the wartime culture that is so desperately needed now. One hopes they'll inspire the best gamers to consider a career of military service, while preparing them for the battles to come. There are even indications that playing these games provide useful experience for when they do go into real-world combat. All to the good: it will aid them in the war to conclude what is truly the unfinished business of 1945.
page 2
The first-person shooter was invented roughly a year after the Gulf War. In 1992's Wolfenstein 3D, you mowed your way through a Nazi stronghold, gunning down poorly animated waves of blobby fascists. (They yelped, "Mein leiben!" when you shot them.) After that game and Doom, its follow-up, the archetypal antagonist for the FPS was pretty much set: Nazis, aliens or some variation of either. And why not? The Cold War was over -- who was left to fight in the real world?
That there was a larger geopolitical context to 1993's firefight in Mogadishu would remain obscure, even after Bowden's 1999 book -- even after a grandiose fanatic began taking credit for arming the militants who drove the Americans from Somalia. For the rest of the decade, it seemed as if there would be no other real-world enemies worth depicting -- certainly not for killing over and over. Subsequent shooters like Unreal and the Quake series made their aliens bigger, and their weapons more absurdly elephantine. In a decade of peace and excess, this looked like grotesque overcompensation to many, including myself; all that firepower directed at enemies who didn't exist, by bloodthirsty adolescents who'd never see genuine violence in their entire lives.
Half-Life (1998) also featured aliens, but emphasized realistic, contemporary weapons; many gamers counted as their favorite opponents not the spoogey invaders from another dimension, but the artificial-intelligence-driven commandos who fought you with coordinated precision at the beginning of the game. Counterstrike, a fan-made, custom modification (or mod) of Half-Life, ran with the human element, to create the most popular multiplayer game of all time. Millions still gather on thousands of servers worldwide, taking on the role of terrorist, or a special forces operative out to stop them.
Rainbow Six and other Tom Clancy-derived franchises sold well, as did NovaLogic's Delta Force series, but it was probably the growing popularity of Counterstrike that fostered the current audience for tactical shooters. And while African bodies were removed from the rubble of the double strike on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1999, and lifeless sailors were lifted from the thrashed hull of the USS Cole in 2000, Counterstrike went from free mod to retail game, and kept right on drawing fans. But it was the gameplay, not hatred of terrorism, that made it a phenomenon. "Tactical games take the best elements of first-person shooters and add in accuracy and teamwork," says Jason Bergman, news editor at Shacknews.com. "You simply can not do well in a tactical shooter without teamwork."
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Teamwork is also key in America's Army, as a strategy and as a value Col. Wardynski wants to impart. Notwithstanding how some misinterpret the Army's new "Army of One" slogan, says Wardynski. "What [that] really means is that the Army is a lot of individuals put together so that it adds up to more than the sum of the parts -- and the game is sort of designed to capture it as well."
Some have dismissed the game as a recruiting gimmick. But the weight that the Army puts on this project might be better gauged by looking at the other duties that fall to the colonel -- while he tracks the download stats for America's Army, for example, Wardynski also handles personnel and funding issues for Afghanistan's very fragile, very real army. This is not the brainchild of a geeky corporal in Pentagon P.R.
As it turns out, the priority placed on America's Army is due to its integral place in "transformation," a new American military doctrine that aims to fully upgrade the Army into an information-driven force. "Mr. Rumsfeld talks about it a lot," says Wardynski. Starting next year, they'll begin to implement helmet-mounted, heads-up displays [HUDS] that will provide the next iteration of infantrymen with real-time data on terrain, enemy concentrations and so on -- "and it looks a lot like a game," according to Wardynski.
While writing a dissertation at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Wardynski would return home to watch his kids play games like Mechwarrior, and he was impressed by their ability to process multiple data streams from several HUDs at once. "The kinds of kids that are very comfortable with lots of information coming at them in visual presentations will feel very comfortable with our transformed Army," he says. This was the seed to America's Army; the funding to create it was approved in the final year of the tech-friendly Clinton administration.
So Wardynski and MOVES were already developing the game when American Airlines Flight 77 went plowing through the northwest side of the Pentagon. Among the 189 killed was Wardynski's boss.
Up to then, the designers were leaning more toward narco-terrorists or drug traffickers as the opposing combatants. "After 9/11 it was pretty clear the United States was at war, and we do have real enemies out there," says Wardynski.
page 3
When I ask Wardynski about the theories of Lt. Col. David Grossman, his "Oh, yeah" is mixed with a barely audible sigh. After the Columbine massacre, Grossman enjoyed momentary prominence for his theories of "killology."
By playing first-person shooters, Grossman asserted to "60 Minutes," Clinton and anyone else who'd listen, kids were training in a "murder simulator," being taught -- as the Army does in boot camp -- to deliver expert kill shots on reflex.
So does this mean America's Army is rearing the next generation of serial killers?
"We brought in Ph.D.s in behavioral science, political science, Army experts in training, and I have yet to find one who [subscribes to these theories]," says Wardynski. (Grossman did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)
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In a similar vein, I challenge Wardynski on the game's dearth of on-screen gore. (Hits are rendered with a prim red dot, as if the weapons were shooting out magic markers.) Doesn't that sanitize the gruesome aftermath of an M-16 hit? Gore would disqualify the game from getting the intended Teen rating from the ratings board, he responds -- and besides, "We respect our audience [enough] to know that if we don't have that in our game, they're not dumb and they'll still know that [gore is] part of combat."
Even with terrorism designated as the primary enemy, care was taken to keep scenarios and combatants as generic as possible, says Wardynski. While his men in Kabul are conducting subject-matter reviews, so that future missions can be based on active units in Afghanistan, no nation or people is identified in its depiction of terrorists: "There's some blond white guys, there's some skinheads ... so it's not like we settled on any ethnic group or anything like that." (This despite the Nation's dishonest claim that the game encourages "Arab bashing.")
There's nothing generic about the opponents in NovaLogic's Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, who fire at you from turret-mounted jeeps, or from the rooftops in the game's vividly rendered, 3-D Mogadishu. They unmistakably resemble the Somali militants who took the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers, after downing two troop choppers with rocket-propelled grenades -- an operation orchestrated in part by Qutb disciple and bin Laden consigliere Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The United States' subsequent withdrawal from Somalia was a milestone in the al-Qaida narrative, one more victory that proved that atrocity would be met with retreat -- eventually making their designs on New York and Washington seem like an inevitable next step.
For unrelated reasons, the game generated some controversy, especially after Mark Bowden refused to have anything to do with NovaLogic's project. "I think there's a substantial difference between a work of art, which I consider a film to be, even a Hollywood film, [and a game]," Bowden explains, reached while on a train headed for Manhattan. For him, "A game is a game. It's something that you play. And this story is about real people, and I know many of the family members who lost brothers and husbands and sons in that battle. And I did not want to be part of something that turns it into a game."
"Mr. Bowden is certainly entitled to his opinion," NovaLogic producer Wes Eckhart e-mails me later, "but who is he to judge what a work of art is, or even what an acceptable form of entertainment is?" Eckhart says that NovaLogic hired two Rangers who fought and were wounded in the conflict as the game's subject-matter experts, and on their request, will donate some of the profits from the game to charities that will benefit those families.
"[Games] have a certain amount of potential value in making someone interested in history or in the military or how the military operates," says Bowden. "It has that kind of educational value." But he's skeptical their utility may extend beyond that. "In terms of preparing someone for the actual experience of combat, particularly infantry soldiers, I just regard that as really unlikely. Because I think the essential element in real combat is terror. And I don't believe you can re-create actual terror in a video game. It's a game; you can turn it off whenever you want to."
I ask Bowden how many games he's actually played. "I think I got pretty good at Super Breakout, but that's pretty much the extent of my video game experience." He readily agrees that declining NovaLogic was a visceral reaction to the medium, though "I have no personal grudge against video games; my kids play them all the time."
Bowden's repute as a journalist of military and international affairs is without peer -- his stunning Atlantic Monthly profile of Saddam Hussein is a tour de force -- so it's understandable if he's not also versed on the latest in interactive entertainment. If anything, his wariness says more about the distance between generations, and the mediums they call their culture.
The tactical shooter is already a tool in the military's regimen. "Indeed," says Eckhart, "a modified version of NovaLogic's Delta Force is used for training plebes in their first year at West Point. The software helps teach principles of maneuver, elements of combat power and land navigation."
Capt. Jason Amerine, a West Point grad who recently served in Afghanistan, agrees with Eckhart's observations on the value of games as training tools. "The Army taught me all the skills I have, but at the same time, a lot of these first-person shooters, I think that they do tend to kind of get you in the right mind-set for some of the situations you might encounter in real life," he says. He compares them to the battle drills of his field training. "When you're sitting there in some of these multiplayer shootouts, engaging your opposition, I think that it does kind of condition you a little bit to know what to look for. You get those visual cues down, I think is the best way to put it."
page 4
Capt. Amerine is a Green Beret with Fifth Special Forces Group. And when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld demanded summary "boots on the ground," two of the first were Amerine's. Scarcely a month after 9/11, his A-Team detachment was airdropped deep within Taliban-controlled territory, to link up with then-tribal leader Hamid Karzai and his lightly armed band of highly irregulars. Armed with an improvised arsenal of satellite phones, Karzai's charisma and the best air support after the wrath of God, Amerine's detachment and Karzai's freedom fighters rode in motley caravan from village to village, fomenting rebellion, gathering a makeshift militia, until they reached and took the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. (A friendly fire incident blew out Amerine's left ear and battered his leg with shrapnel, removing him from action days before Karzai marched into the city.)
Kandahar's fall was a turning point in the conflict, but Amerine names as his proudest moment an earlier engagement, when he and his men deployed on a ridgeline above the small town of Tarin Kot. Kandahar's leaders had sent 500 heavily armed Taliban and al-Qaida fighters rumbling to the town in 80 vehicles, with orders to slaughter its civilians, sparing neither woman nor child (retribution for driving out their Islamist masters, days earlier). From the height of the ridgeline, Amerine and his men turned a tripod-mounted laser onto the convoy, to guide in the F-18's that were arcing into position, high above. (Amerine's unit was eventually forced to return to town, and continued directing the airstrike from there -- even as village children laughed and scampered at their feet.) The Taliban murder party was still barreling through a narrow valley, closing on Tarin Kot, when the laser-led bombs found them. And discounting the battered survivors who fled back to Kandahar, killed them all. The town was secure.
At the moment, though, Amerine is still trying to secure a copy of Battlefied 1942, a new tactical shooter set in various World War II theaters. "Babbages messed up and gave away the copy that I pre-ordered," he says, "but I should be picking that up I think tomorrow." He speaks with an easy, placid drawl that belies the ferocity of his chosen profession -- but seems more reflective of a childhood spent on Oahu. Recovering from his wartime injuries, he's now earning a master's, in preparation for lectureship duties at West Point.
When he first got a chance to play America's Army, "I was really curious what the Army was going to come up with," says Amerine. "Knowing Col. Wardynski and the people who were working on the game, I had high hopes that it would be something pretty hot." A longtime gamer who counts Command and Conquer and Rainbow Six among his favorites, Amerine was not disappointed. It was so realistic that for the first time, he says, "I was actually looking at it more as a soldier than even a gamer -- but it happened to be good in both ways."
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And what's impressed him, playing America's Army, is how many competitors he's fought who come to the game without his experience base, but learn usable tactics on the fly: "You could tell in some cases you have significantly younger people, probably junior high or so ... they'd be saying things back and forth that indicated to me that this was sort of an extension of guys who grew up on Rainbow Six and other first-person shooters ... the techniques they would use just by figuring it out would end up being very similar to what we would do in real life." He found himself up against kids staggering their formations, using smoke to cover their approach, closing on the enemy with fire and maneuver, individual movement techniques (IMT) -- in short, acquiring through gameplay knowledge that was once available only through military training.
At one point during his tour in Afghanistan, Amerine was on a ridge, outside a town where Taliban gunmen had pinned down Karzai's men with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
"So I got on up there and started shooting to try and get my guerrillas into the fight ... [T]he Taliban were all shooting AK-47s and RPGs, and with my M4 and an ACOG, I was able to outshoot the Taliban. Especially at 300 meters, they weren't very good shots. The RPG was getting close," Amerine deadpans, "but I got him before he could get me."
Emboldened, the freedom fighters returned to the fray, and helped Amerine drive the Taliban from the village. But during the firefight, Capt. Amerine had an odd thought. "It was kind of funny, because it was sort of like, Well, this is just like what I did on my computer, I guess." Having reenacted similar scenarios so many times, he found these games had helped prepare him for that moment, when he came up firing. "It definitely made it easier ... in a lot of ways it was similar to what you would see if you were playing a sniper in the original Delta Force, for example."
And apart from his concern for the safety of Karzai and the soldiers, Amerine describes the experience as, well, fun. "It was exhilarating, the actual going through it, bullets whizzing over your head, bombs blowing up. But as far as taking human life, that's a horrible aspect of the job -- but you know, they were trying to do the same thing to us, and we got them first."
And about here is where the similarities end. "When I was in a shootout with the Taliban, it occurred to me that I had to stick my head up to shoot at them and I might very well catch a bullet between my eyes ... and I was aware of it, but I knew what I had to do. That's not something you can re-create in a computer game, the fact that your life is in danger. And also, when you actually have to see the results of what you did, when you go over and you see the enemies that've fallen by your hand, that's something else you can't re-create."
But even here, developers are seeking to convey, if not the horror, the strategic implications of violence. With America's military dominance never in doubt, victory now depends not just on winning the battle, but on preventing as much as possible the friendly fire and civilian casualties that would turn domestic and world opinion against the action. So in "America's Army," the server keeps tabs on your fealty to the military's strict rules of engagement (ROE) -- crossing them too often gets you removed from the game, thrown into a virtual depiction of Fort Leavenworth prison. (Multiplayer games are usually anarchic, free-fire zones.)
And in the single-player game of Black Hawk Down, says NovaLogic's Wes Eckhart, "In most cases, killing civilians or noncombatants will result in the player losing the mission and being forced to replay it." Not only that, many of the game's missions emphasize the U.S. effort to protect the United Nations' relief effort to the warlord-enforced famine that was devastating Somalia.
This overall shift of focus is a positive development for the genre, says MIT's Henry Jenkins. "It seems to me that they may be making some interesting steps toward achieving the 'meaningful violence' I have been advocating," he says, "heightening the emphasis on choice and consequence."
For Amerine, it's an essential element to "America's Army" working as an educational tool for gamers who'd consider a place in the military: "On the one hand, we're becoming extremely technologically advanced; nobody can be computer illiterate in the Army anymore," he says. "The other aspect to it, though, the human aspect, that's the part that we also need to make sure we never lose sight of, because we can never forget our humanity. We still need to remember we're out there using very lethal weapons; often we're in close proximity to noncombatants, to civilians, and [we must] protect their lives as well as we can while we're attempting to engage the enemy."
Fortunately, Amerine suspects that "America's Army" gamers who do end up in the recruitment office will have a reservoir of experience to draw from. "I don't think that they'll really quite appreciate a lot of the lessons until they do it for real, and then they can kind of make the mental leap to put [the gameplay and real-world experience] together."
For his own part, as he heals and continues his education, his only regret is that he's not part of the latest deployment. "All my friends, all my soldiers, they could be invading Iraq soon, and I'm going to college -- that's kinda hard to take ... I'd want to be out there sharing the risk with everybody rather than ... watching it on the news."
When asked about Hamid Karzai's recent narrow escape from an assassination attempt, he speaks of his friend the president of Afghanistan as of a fellow soldier. "He's an incredibly brave man who's truly a patriot for his country. He knew from the beginning that there'd be people trying to assassinate him ... So this really doesn't change anything -- he's still going to work hard to bring stability to his country, and he'll just keep dodging the bullets as he tries to do so."
He might soon act as an advisor to future expansions of "America's Army," so I ask him what kind of missions he'd imagine, if the designers were to implement, say, laser-guided airstrikes.
"You can lase a target from several kilometers away," he says. "So one thing might be you have an observation post, you have a laser setup, where you're trying to lase the enemy, and you're trying to protect your position as enemy forces are coming right up on you."
It occurs to me that such a mission would resemble what Amerine did in his finest hour, when he turned a beam of light on the would-be butchers of women and children, and brought down the thunder.
When Sayyid Qutb came to America, he reportedly admired the country's scientific and technological achievements, but seethed with contempt for its obsession with "entertainment, or what they call in their language, 'fun.'" But perhaps Western culture is poised for the ultimate in ironic revenge -- America's Army heralds the day when computer gaming's synthesis of entertainment and technology will become the greatest threat to the terrorist menace, as it continues its struggle to carry out the jihad of Qutb and bin Laden's fevered longings.
"We're going to continue to be out hunting for terrorists," Amerine promises me, "and doing what we can to support the Arab world." When I thank him for what he did in Afghanistan -- helping uproot the al-Qaida network, liberating a brutalized people, stuff like that -- Amerine answers cheerily, "I really had fun doing it."
In his early 30s, Amerine is among the first generation of soldiers to grow up with computer games. It's not hard to have confidence in the soldiers who'll come after him, kids in their early teens who are already giving him a hard fight, online. You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all -- heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture, defended on all fronts by the best of the digital generation.
1,000,000 Books on Board
By Gregg Williams.
Here's the full text of the entire article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.pubspace.com/publishing/bookmobile.html
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1,000,000 Books on Board
by Gregg Williams
Pubspace site manager
September 30, 2002
Yesterday, the Internet Archive Bookmobile was on view in San Francisco in preparation for its cross-country trip to Washington D.C.. Along the way, it will be printing out public-domain books on demand and giving them to people at schools, libraries, shopping malls, senior citizens centers, and other venues (including the Great American Bookmobile Conference in Columbus OH). The purpose of the trip is to publicize the value of works in the public domain, as well as the practicality of printing books on demand. The bookmobile will arrive in Washington D.C. on October 9, the same day that the Supreme Court will be deciding the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, a lawsuit challenging the further extension of United States copyright laws.
The bookmobile is one project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit dedicated to "offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format."
The bookmobile has conductivity to the Internet through the MotoSAT satellite dish (similar to those used by your local television crew) mounted on its roof.
Not counting the satellite dish, it doesn't take that much to print your own books: a laptop computer (below left), a thermal binding machine (a Fastback machine, center), an industrial-strength paper cutter (the kind used by bookmakers, right), and a double-sided laserprinter (not shown). According to Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive (and pictured below), the setup he is taking on the road costs about $5000, although less expensive equipment performing the same functions costs around $3000.
The bookmaking process is simple. First, you browse the Internet Archive site for books that have already been formatted for distribution. You download the desired book, print it on sheets of 11-by-17 inch paper (two book pages per sheet of paper), cut the sheets in half, and join the two halves to make the body of the book. You wrap a special cover (printed on an inkjet printer) around the book body, bind the pages with the binding machine, and use the paper cutter to trim the edges of the book. Kahle says he can print a copy of Alice in Wonderland in about 10 minutes, for a materials cost of about $1.
Copyright 2002 by Gregg Williams
Yeah ok. Let me know when it gets to cable:
Napster Founder Fanning Takes Life Story To MTV
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.billboard.com/billboard/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1730078
Edited by Jonathan Cohen / October 02, 2002, 11:20 AM
Napster Founder Fanning Takes Life Story To MTV
Napster founder Shawn Fanning, whose file-sharing software pitted him as a populist David doing battle with the Goliaths of the music industry, has found a champion in MTV. The cable network has hired filmmaker Alex Winter ("Fever") to write and direct a small-screen biopic for MTV Original Movies that will dramatize Fanning's life. As a teenager, Fanning created the Napster software program in his college dorm room that led to an online music revolution and his own booming Internet company, only to become the target of the music industry's legal wrath.
The deal with MTV gives the network exclusive rights to Fanning's life story. The Napster founder and former chief technology officer is collaborating with Winter on the screenplay, and he also plans to executive produce the telepic along with its soundtrack, which will be released through his forthcoming, yet-unnamed record label, sources said.
Asked who will star as Fanning, MTV VP of original movies Maggie Malina, who is shepherding the project, said the network is exploring all options, including the possibility of having Fanning play himself, though no decisions have been made.
In 1999, Fanning created Napster -- after his own nickname -- in his dorm room at Northeastern University in Boston as a way for college kids to swap MP3s on the Internet. He dropped out of college to launch Napster as an online business, drawing the ire of the music industry, which saw his file-sharing technology as a threat to record sales and artists' rights.
The company's legal troubles began in 1999 when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster for "facilitating copyright infringement." The next year, superstar rock act Metallica and rap impresario Dr. Dre also sued the company.
While weathering crippling legal battles, Fanning's Napster became a household name, and its inventor graced the cover of countless magazines, becoming the poster boy for online music file sharing. Fanning's company filed for bankruptcy this year after a last-ditch acquisition by media giant Bertelsmann AG was blocked.
Napster's legal battles are ongoing, and Fanning is now 21, unemployed and living in California. The MTV project -- which is aimed for the 2003-04 season -- will include Fanning's childhood, his relationship with his parents, and his life before and after Napster in an "innovative" and "unconventional" way, Malina said.
"We really want to take a look at what it was like to live and breathe that roller coaster ride with Napster while indicating what happened in his past and future -- not just for him, but for everyone who loves music," Malina said. "We really want to capture the adventuresome and pioneering spirit he brought to Napster in a way that is not the ordinary biopic. That's why Alex is great for it -- because he brings the creative artistic vision of how to tell this story."
Winter is perhaps best known for his acting work in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "The Lost Boys." He then segued to a writing and directing career working on such films as "Freaked" and "Fever" and has also worked extensively as a music video and commercial director in Europe.
-- Chris Gardner & Ian Mohr, The Hollywood Reporter
Courtesy of The Onion:
RIAA Sues Radio Stations For Giving Away Free Music
Here is the complete text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3836/riaa_sues_radio_stations.html
VOLUME 38 ISSUE 36 AMERICA'S FINEST NEWS SOURCE 2 OCTOBER 2002
Front Page News Previous Issue Archives
MEDIA
RIAA Sues Radio Stations For Giving Away Free Music
LOS ANGELES—The Recording Industry Association of America filed a $7.1 billion lawsuit against the nation's radio stations Monday, accusing them of freely distributing copyrighted music.
Above: RIAA president Hilary Rosen and attorney Russell Frackman answer questions in a Los Angeles courthouse.
Above: RIAA president Hilary Rosen and attorney Russell Frackman answer questions in a Los Angeles courthouse.
"It's criminal," RIAA president Hilary Rosen said. "Anyone at any time can simply turn on a radio and hear a copyrighted song. Making matters worse, these radio stations often play the best, catchiest song off the album over and over until people get sick of it. Where is the incentive for people to go out and buy the album?"
According to Rosen, the radio stations acquire copies of RIAA artists' CDs and then broadcast them using a special transmitter, making it possible for anyone with a compatible radio-wave receiver to listen to the songs.
"These radio stations are extremely popular," Rosen said. "They flagrantly string our songs together in 'uninterrupted music blocks' of up to 70 minutes in length, broadcasting nearly one CD's worth of product without a break, and they actually have the gall to allow businesses to advertise between songs. It's bad enough that they're giving away our music for free, but they're actually making a profit off this scheme."
RIAA attorney Russell Frackman said the lawsuit is intended to protect the artists.
"If this radio trend continues, it will severely damage a musician's ability to earn a living off his music," Frackman said. "[Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich stopped in the other day wondering why his last royalty check was so small, and I didn't know what to say. How do you tell a man who's devoted his whole life to his music that someone is able to just give it away for free? That pirates are taking away his right to support himself with his craft?"
For the record companies and the RIAA, one of the most disturbing aspects of the radio-station broadcasts is that anyone with a receiver and an analog tape recorder can record the music and play it back at will.
"I've heard reports that children as young as 8 tape radio broadcasts for their own personal use," Rosen said. "They listen to a channel that has a limited rotation of only the most popular songs—commonly called 'Top 40' stations—then hit the 'record' button when they hear the opening strains of the song they want. And how much are they paying for these songs? A big fat zip."
Above: One of the hundreds of radio stations being sued for distributing copyrighted music.
Above: One of the hundreds of radio stations being sued for distributing copyrighted music.
Continued Rosen: "According to our research, there is one of these Top 40 stations in every major city in the country. This has to be stopped before the music industry's entire economic infrastructure collapses."
Especially distressing to the RIAA are radio stations' "all-request hours," when listeners call in to ask radio announcers, or "disc jockeys," to play a certain song.
"What's the point of putting out a new Ja Rule or Sum 41 album if people can just call up and hear any song off the album that they want?" Frackman asked. "In some instances, these stations actually have the nerve to let the caller 'dedicate' his act of thievery to a friend or lover. Could you imagine a bank letting somebody rob its vaults and then allowing the thief to thank his girlfriend Tricia and the whole gang down at Bumpy's?"
Defenders of radio-based music distribution insist that the relatively poor sound quality of radio broadcasts negates the record companies' charges.
"Radio doesn't have the same sound quality as a CD," said Paul "Cubby" Bryant, music director of New York radio station Z100, one of the nation's largest distributors of free music and a defendant in the suit. "Real music lovers will still buy CDs. If anything, we're exposing people to music they might not otherwise hear. These record companies should be thanking us, not suing us."
Outraged by the RIAA suit, many radio listeners are threatening to boycott the record companies.
"All these companies care about is profits," said Amy Legrand, 21, an avid Jacksonville, FL, radio user who surreptitiously records up to 10 songs a day off the radio. "Top 40 radio is taking the power out of the hands of the Ahmet Erteguns of the world and bringing it back to the people of Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting. It's about time somebody finally stood up to those record-company fascists."
Help us Apple. Your our only hope.
Dan Gillmor: Apple stands firm against entertainment cartel
Meanwhile, Apple is holding fairly fast to the real compromise position. It's encouraging honor, but not locking us down in ways that prevent innovative uses of the gear it sells.Maybe Apple will cave, too. If it does, it will betray customers and principle. So far, however, so good.
I really hope Dan's right about Apple.
I just made the decision a few weeks ago to buy a Mac instead of a PC for my video editing system because I did not want to commit to the Windows DRM in XP that would then own all of my video files from now until eternity.
For me, choosing a Mac was like choosing freedom. (Don't think I don't know how silly that sounds.)
This was sure the first time I've ever felt that way about buying a PC or a Mac before. And it's a pretty crummy feeling actually, realizing that we live in a world where we have to make privacy and security decisions like that while in the process of buying a video editing system.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4193833.htm
Posted on Tue, Oct. 01, 2002 story:PUB_DESC
Dan Gillmor: Apple stands firm against entertainment cartel
By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist
Intel's doing it. Advanced Micro Devices is doing it. Microsoft is doing it.
Apple Computer isn't.
What's Apple not doing? It's not -- at least so far -- moving toward an anti-customer embrace with Hollywood's movie studios and the other members of the powerful entertainment cartel.
Unlike Intel and AMD, the big chip makers for Windows-based computers, Apple hasn't announced plans to put technology into hardware that could end up restricting what customers do with the products they buy. Unlike Microsoft, Apple hasn't asserted the right to remote control over users' operating systems.
The era of Digital Rights Management, commonly called DRM, is swiftly moving closer, thanks to the Intels and AMDs and Microsofts. They're busy selling and creating the tools that give copyright holders the ability to tell users of copyrighted material -- customers, scholars, libraries, etc. -- precisely how they may use it. DRM, in the most typical use of the expression, is about owners' rights. It would be more accurate to call DRM, in that context, ``Digital Restrictions Management.''
But Apple has taken a different tack in its rhetoric and its technology. As I said in an introduction to a panel I moderated Tuesday at a conference in Santa Clara, Mac OS X, Apple's modern operating system, is becoming, whether by design or by accident, a Digital Rights Management operating system where the rights in question are the user's rights -- and they are expansive.
Now, the music and movie industries have been attacking Silicon Valley and the technology companies for some time. But they've reserved particular venom for Apple among the major computing-platform organizations, and have been witheringly contemptuous of Apple's ``Rip, Mix, Burn'' advertising that describes the process of converting music CDs to MP3 files, which can be loaded on CD-ROM disks and, of course, Apple's own iPod MP3 player.
The company's ``Digital Hub'' concept has been one of its major selling points. The Mac is becoming the hub of a digital lifestyle, in which you move data between a Mac and various devices around the home, such as digital cameras, MP3 players and the like.
Apple does admonish users not to infringe the copyrights of others, as it should. And the company built a small speed bump into the iPod, which basically lets users share MP3s between one computer and the handheld player. But it took little time for a third-party programmer to come up with software that let users move MP3s to other machines, too, and as far as I can tell Apple hasn't said a word.
I recently discovered that Apple's DVD Player software, which came with my Powerbook G4 laptop, gives me flexibility in a way I hadn't expected. Sometimes I like to watch a movie while I'm on a plane, but the DVD drive in my machine drains my battery too quickly. So before I leave home, I copy a movie -- note to Hollywood: I do not do this with rental DVDs, only ones I own -- to my hard disk. The DVD Player software reads it from the disk, which uses less power than the DVD drive.
I wonder, now that I've published this, whether an upcoming version of the DVD Player will remove this user-friendly feature. Which leads me into some other questions:
Can Apple's distinctly pro-customer approach continue in the face of Hollywood's ire and the entertainment industry's clout in Congress?
Will the manufacturers of the chips that Apple uses for the central brains of its computers build in what Intel and AMD are now promising? They've embraced an idea known as ``trusted computing,'' which sounds better than it may turn out to be. Trusted computing could give us more faith that an e-mail we send to someone else will get there intact and in privacy, but it's also the perfect tool for the copyright cartel, not to mention future governments that care even less for liberty than the current one, to lock down PCs from officially unauthorized uses.
An Intel senior executive vehemently disputes my characterization of his company as a toolmaker for the control freaks. He wants me to see trusted computing as an innovation.
Sure, it's an innovation -- and could have some positive uses. But it inevitably will be used against us by the people who crave control.
Meanwhile, Apple is holding fairly fast to the real compromise position. It's encouraging honor, but not locking us down in ways that prevent innovative uses of the gear it sells.
Maybe Apple will cave, too. If it does, it will betray customers and principle. So far, however, so good.
Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal (www.dangillmor.com). E-mail dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917.
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Still watching the House and Senate on CSPAN waiting for something to happen on any of the war/anti-war and/or internet radio bills.
Now everyone's all giddy about some Sherman Amendment. (Looks like the same ill-defined war on terror-type legislation to me...)
Well there seems to be a lot of good stories up today, so let me get back to posting them for you...
President Bush (when asked to compare Al Queda and Saddam Hussein):
"And so uh, uh, a comparison that uh, uh, is uh, well I can't make because I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive."
Sure you can take out the first part of the sentence out and he won't look quite so blatantly stupid, but that still won't change the fact that the second part of the sentence doesn't make any sense.
"I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive."
In a separate statement that came either before or after the one above (but during the same interview), he also said plainly:
"You can't distinguish between Al Queda and Saddam when you talk about the War On Terror."
To which Jon Stewart replied during his Daily Show report:
"You can't? You know what? I'm gonna try. Al Queda is an ideologically-driven underground ultra-Islamic terrorist network and Saddam Hussein is the dictator of a secular middle eastern nation that seeks mild regional dominance. I did it! They said it couldn't be done!" (Enter confetti and horn blower noises.) "I did it! I've done it!""Boy! It's almost a shame we're going to war anyway!"
Great news! Senator Leahy has dropped his support for the RAVE Bill.
I'm trying to find a reference online that confirms this, but what I heard through the grapevine was that he admitted he just hadn't read it completely.
I think it's great that he could just admit he made a mistake, withdraw his support and move on. Thanks, Senator Leahy. (Wish list -- I'm going to send him a "thank you" email (even though I'm not one of his constituents :-)
Here is the full text of the page in case the link goes bad:
http://www.dancesafe.org/articles/leahynorave.php
Drug Info Search Lab Results Safe Settings Local Chapters Literature Support DanceSafe
Senator Leahy has dropped his support for the RAVE Act.
A letter from Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance
Please consider writing him a thank you note. We especially need people from Vermont to send thank you notes. We are calling for other co-sponsors - most notably Senator Durbin from Illinois - to drop their support. Any help you can be, will be much appreciated.
Special thanks to DanceSafe, SSDP, ACLU, CSDP, ROAR, Freedom to Dance, EM:DEF, Rock the Vote and all the other organizations that have provided us with crucial help. We truly appreciate it.
We're not out of the water yet, but we're getting closer. Let's keep the pressure on!
Bill Piper
Drug Policy Alliance
***
***Leahy Drops Support for RAVE Act
***Please Thank Him and Urge Other Co-Sponsors to Follow His Lead
Senator Leahy has withdrawn his support for the RAVE Act and is no longer a co-sponsor of the bill. This is the best news so far in the Drug Policy Alliance's national campaign to stop the RAVE Act. As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, loss of his support is an encouraging sign that our legislators are beginning to understand that the RAVE Act is too broad. By no longer supporting the bill, Senator Leahy has taken a stand in support of public health, safety and free speech, and he should be commended for doing so.
Please send Senator Leahy a letter thanking him for no longer supporting the RAVE Act. It is very important that Senators be thanked when they do the right thing.
We urge every voter to write Senator Leahy regardless of where they live, but we especially urge Vermont residents and membership organizations with members in Vermont to contact Leahy.
Additionally, if you live in Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, South Carolina, or Utah, we really need your help. See below, to find out more.
Opposition to the RAVE Act is growing, but we haven't defeated it yet. Supporters of the RAVE Act will redouble their efforts to pass it - we need to redouble our efforts to defeat it.
ACTIONS TO TAKE
** Send a letter to Senator Leahy thanking him for no longer being a co-sponsor of S. 2633, the RAVE Act. Thank him for supporting free speech, civil liberties, and public health.
Address:
The Honorable Patrick Leahy
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
** If you live in Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, South Carolina, or Utah, please call your Senator and ask him to follow Senator Leahy's lead and stop supporting the RAVE Act. Let them know that that the RAVE Act goes too far and that it's too threatening to free speech, property rights, and public health.
Connecticut Voters: Call Senator Joseph Lieberman at 202-224-4041
Iowa Voters: Call Senator Charles Grassley at 202-224-3744
Illinois Voters: Call Senator Richard Durbin at 202-224-2152
South Carolina: Call Senator Strom Thurmond at 202-224-5972
Utah: Call Senator Orrin Hatch at 202-224-5251
Contact Us! 510-834-7500
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Brewster and his Internet Bookmobile hit the road yesterday.
The first stop was Belle Haven Elementary School, in Menlo Park.
I've got quotes and pictures and video going up soon. And I'll be calling the gang (Brewster, Caslon, Art, Michael and Richard) on the road to get reports.
Oh yeah - the "Richard" above is Richard Koman who is coming along to write a piece for Magazine X! (I forgot if I can say this or not, so I better confirm one way or the other.)
Watching the House in action is pretty funny. They are doing one minute speeches.
One Rep has been introducing a Reverend and his family for the last full minute, for instance. This next one is explaining how a particular company has progressive health care policies (ah, back to issues of governmental concern...) Now another Rep is talking about what a big fat liar Saddam is (fair enough). Now another one is talking about a church again (what is it with that? what do these churches have to do with running our country?) "God has truly blessed the _______ Congregation..." (so what? let's get back to healthcare and the war...)
Now they're looking at a Mosquito Control Bill. Wow, cases of West Nile Virus have gone up 160% in the last year. Over 2,400 cases across the us and over 100 deaths. Holy moly! Better pass that sucker...
Yeah I've actually been meaning to write about the Mosquito Invasion of this country for a while, actually. But there's not a whole lot people can do besides try to keep the little buggers away and have treatment facilities ready. (Oh yeah, and spray the hell out of everything -- which I have mixed feelings about.)
But I digress -- No word on the Peace Bill or the Internet Radio Fairness Act :-)
