Copyrights Gone Wild

We've been saying for a long time that the DMCA was an asinine measure to protect copyrights. Here's another reason why. A major cell phone company is suing the maker of software that unlocks phones. A "locked" phone is a phone that is programmed to work specifically with one wireless carrier. An unlocked phone can be programmed for any carrier.

The above linked article goes into how the issue plays out in terms of violating the DMCA, and cites another example: the Lexmark Printer case. Lexmark sued makers of generic print cartridges claiming they violated the DMCA by circumventing the software that requires Lexmark ink.

In either case, the very fact that people think its a good idea to sue people using the DMCA over cases like this, we think, is reason enough to scrap the whole law.

If we buy a cellular phone, its ours, not the phone companies. If we want to change the software on it, there is no reason why we shouldn't be allowed to. The DMCA was largely pushed by the recording industry to stop Napster and Napster like services. Again, the problem comes along with what rights does the consumer have.

If you buy a recording of music, there should be no reason for the recording industry to dictate how you listen to that music. If you want to copy the CD onto an ipod, well yuo should be able to do that. If you want to copy the music onto a cassette, then power to you for that also. The only issue that really comes up is if you start handing out copies of the music to friends. Handing out copies to friends for free, was allowed before the DMCA, which closed the loophole. But then the recording industry used the DMCA to prevent not sharing copies of music, but to prevent people from listening to music they purchased in the format they wanted.

Another similar instance is game consoles. Consoles, particularly the more powerful xbox, were modified by users with additional harddrives and software to turn the devices into full portable media centers. Under strict interpretation of the DMCA, such modification are illegal. And early on, Microsoft had looked into taking legal action.

All of these instances are thanks to the DMCA, which big business essentially wrote, handed over to congress, who then passed the bill without actually reading it.

Shitting On The Go

New York is set to install pay-per-piss toilets. Yum-o. The article notes the chronic shortages of public restrooms throughout the city. We have a better solution: legislate that people cannot be denied admittance to privately owned public restrooms. That is to say, make those "Restroom For Customer Only" signs go away. Sure, the au Bon Pain in Union Square has a longer line to use a restroom than there is a line for people buying tasty pastries, but if every establishment with a public restroom -- and that includes ALL sit down restaurants -- no single place would have a line, no one place would be inundated with shit from three million tourists.

Author's Temporarily Confuse Themselves With Recording Industry, File Lawsuits

The Author's Guild filed a lawsuit against Google Print, a searchable online archive of books.

"This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law," Nick Taylor, president of the New York-based Authors Guild

Even if this point is true, we have to wonder, is the President of the Guild really so stupid as to think Google print is a bad thing?

Let's review just exactly what google print is.

According to the C-net article reporting on the lawsuit, Google Print is "working to scan all or parts of the book collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University. It intends to make those texts searchable on Google and to sell advertisements on the Web pages."

It might seem from this brief summary of the project, that in fact, writers and authors and book publishers should be very frightened of the project. It would seem that Google is in fact trying to take the hard work of these writers and make money from the books in collections of a few select libraries. But hold on just a second. Has anyone from the Guild or C-Net or anywhere actually used the service?

Let's say for a moment, you are like us, and are really turned on by a good discussion of suburban sprawl. Let's say you want to use Google Print to find out more information, so that, if you come across some one else who wants to talk about sprawl, you can.

Search Google Print for "Suburban Sprawl" and you get a list of books.

Wow! you think, looking over the list hoping to find the time to digest the entirely list before your next session of Suburban Sprawl Addicts Anonymous. You click on the first book. Suddenly you are looking at the table of contents, and you think, "this is a great book, I'm going to read the whole thing"

The trouble is, the whole thing isn't available for you to read. In fact, many of the titles only have the table of contents available to look at. What Google Print does provide is a number of places where you can buy the book-- Barnes and Noble, Amazon, the publisher, and others. In fact, if you want to read anything more than the table of contents in some cases, you need to buy the book.

Of course, there are some cases where you can look at text from the actually book, not just the table of contents. What does google do after you click through a few pages? Google blocks the rest of the book. Again, you are encouraged to buy the whole thing.

In both cases, the user does not have access to the whole book. The user has no more access than they might reasonably have at a bookstore or a library after casually flipping through a few pages of the book. Even in the case where a few pages of the text are visible, the true contents of the book are kept safely sealed away in the google archives.

What might this remind you of? Amazon.com started a system of scanning its books in for searching a year ago, although, with permission of publishers. In essence, Google print is no different than Amazon, except Amazon is working with publishers and Google is working with libraries.

Google print will actually produce greater book sales for authors. Authors from small presses like those attached to universities and without the mass market appeal will find a whole knew audience. Even better, the readers who come across their book will actually read the book because they have an interest in the book-- thus they searched for a keyword.

Sure in some cases, people might read the table of contents and decide a particular book is not for them. But those people are not avoiding purchasing the book because Google Print "infringed" on the copyright of the author. Those people are instead not buying the book because it is not what they were looking for.

Google Print will be a fabulous service that will help connect authors with readers. It will help organize information in age when there is already too much and not enough ways of tracking it. The author's Guild is moronic to think Google Print will do anything but help them.

Put another way, the Author's Guild suit is akin to me suing Google for indexing this blog so that when people use google's search feature, they access the site. If an author doesn't want his book read, he or she never should have published it to begin with.

Gun Loving Nuts To Find Vindication, Comeupance In New Orleans

New Orleans is still filled with citizens who are refusing to leave their homes which are surrounded by toxic flood waters. The mayor is prepared to forcibly remove anyone who remains now that voluntary evacuations are complete.

While we tend to think its lunacy anyone would want to stay in the without water, electricity, or food and while the dangers flood waters filled with of 150,000 household's toxic chemicals, snakes, and disease loom, we can also understand why people still there would refuse to leave: their pets.

Officials so far have refused to allow evacuees to bring their household pets with them. And so, obviously, people are going to want to stay. We feel that any pet owner who is told they are going to forcibly removed and their dog or cat is going to be left behind is entirely justified in shooting at "rescue" workers.

You read us right. We think New Orleans residents have every right to shoot at people forcing them to leave their homes.

Let's back track for a moment. We titled this post "Gun Loving Nuts To Find Vindication, Comeupance In New Orleans" for a reason. One of the favorite expressions that gun lovers use in protest of gun control laws goes something like: "the first thing the Nazis did was take away people's guns."

Well, take away the toxic flood waters, disease, and lack of potable water, and New Orleans is not very different than 1930's Germany where government agents forcibly removed citizens. Nor is it very different than Soviet Revolution era Russia.

In either case, gun enthusiasts who cite Nazi confiscation of guns prior to the Holocaust should be waiting eagerly for their well armed American brothers to open fire on the government agents attempting to remove them from their homes. After all, that is exactly what they are referring to when they cite such an example of gun control. So gun enthusiasts are going to be both vindicated in defending a homeowner's right to bare arms, and recieving their comeupance when a law enforcement agent is shot.

And one last thing: if the mayor of New Orleans is so set on removing the last of the civilians in his city, then he should at the very least be prepared to accept their cats, dogs, gerbils, and other family pets.

Could Katrina Tip the Electoral College?

Disasters are often a boon for incumbent office holders who do even a marginal job. In disasters, voters like stability-- much the same way voters rarely vote against incumbants in wartime. A major disaster like Katrina could mean an opportunity to hand out cash to a Republican friendly state.

While the money seems to be flowing out of Washington faster than the canals flowed into the New Orleans basin, George Bush II has taken the heat for what is an on going flop of disaster recovery. While we never hestitate to mention Bush II's faults, we don't often think the office of the president can be held responsible for disaster recovery. That being said, we do tend to think that executive offices both at the national level and the state level are responsible for pre-disaster preperation. In that sense, certainly Bush II can be held accountable for failing to direct FEMA to adaquately prepare for a disaster on the scale of Katrina.

However, determining who to blame is really a secondary matter to that of public perception, and at the moment, Bush II seems to be losing the battle.

So to start things off, Louisiana is not a perfect Red state anyway. Louisiana went for Clinton both times he was elected, so on average over the last two decades, Louisiana is pretty much a swing state. Without seeing much of the specific data, we're going out on a limb and are going to say that New Orleans accounted for most of Clinton's victory, because its largely urban, largely black, and in many places, poor-- perfect Democratic demographics.

Meanwhile, Bush II is recieving quite a bit of blame from Louisiana officials for the poor response to the disaster. Again, whether he is to blame or not is irrelevant if in fact people believe he was responsible. While his successor's election is still three years away, its hard to forget who your friends were or were not when your house was destroyed.

The nine electoral votes that Louisiana offers is more than enough to tip the balance of electoral victory if it were to flip in 2008. Indeed, if H. Clinton were to run for office as has largely been speculated, Louisiana may even be more likely to flip, considering B. Clinton won the state twice.

Meanwhile...

Bush II has every reason to take his time responding to the victims of Katrina. Perhaps 100,000 New Orleans residents have been displaced out of state-- to say nothing of the other roughly 400,000 people displaced but still in Louisiana.

If indeed New Orleans is to take weeks to dry out and months before people are allowed to return, its very likely many residents displaced to Texas will stay there. Texas has gone republican for decades, and by margins of much greater than 100,000. Even if 100% of displaced refugees were Democrats and stayed in Texas, the state would still be Republican.

Since most of the refugees in Texas came from heavily Democratic New Orleans, Louisiana has essentially lost a proportionally huge number of Democrats. The longer the recovery operation lasts, the more likely large numbers of refugees will stay in their new, adopted states. In essence, the longer the recover operation takes, the more Republican Louisiana becomes.

Since there are not enough refugees to change the outcome of elections in Texas, its to Bush II's advantage to prolong the cleanup as long as possible to ensure that Louisiana remains in the Red state column.

Gasoline Finally Might Cost More Per Gallon Than Bottled Water

Besides reports of the devastation of New Orleans, newspapers, radio, and television news has not been able to get off "price gouging" by gas companies. This is nonsense. Gasoline retailers should be able to charge whatever they want, and let the market figure it out. Ever since the demise of standard oil, there has been competition among gas retailers. There is always another gas station to go to.

On the other hand, colluding gas retailers who artificially set a higher price and agree not to sell gas for less than that should be fined. Whats the difference?

As long as at least one customer is willing to pay whatever outrageously high price a retail station is selling gas for, its a fair market price. The competing gas station isn't going to raise the price of gas to woo the one customer over-- they are going to lower their price in order to sell gas. However, if two gas station owners get together and agree not to lower the price, they are essentially acting as one, monopolistic station.

So again, we ask, what's all this talk about price gouging?

If a few little kids set up a Lemonade stand and sell lemonade during their summer vacation, maybe they make a lot of money. Then they decide to do the same thing during winter recess, and wonder why they didn't sell a single Lemonade. Well, because when its 20 degrees outside, the demand for Lemonade is very low. All summer long when its 90 degrees or hotter outside, they sell a lot of Lemonade because its hot, and Lemonade is cold. The demand is high for a cold beverage when its hot out. The following summer, the same little kids set up their lemonade stand, expecting to make a lot of money. But then little kids from the other neighborhood set up and start selling lemonade on the block next to them. Suddenly, their sales go down. While demand in the summer is high, the supply of lemonade is also high.

Right now, demand for gasoline is very high. Its labor day weekend, where people are going to drive off to the shore and to barbeques and other places. The demand is very high. Meanwhile, the gulf coast has reduced output as a result of Katrina. So the supply is low and the demand is high. So why is everyone upset over high gas prices?

Its probably time people confronted the fact that their Escalade or Suburban uses too much gasoline. You don't want to spend $70 dollars to fill up your tank? Get a Civic. Get a fucking Insight.

So the next time you want to punch a gas station owner because the price of regular gas is $4.78 a gallon, just remember you did this when you bought the 7 mpg SUV.