In 2001, a group of eco-vigilantes committed serious acts of arson (the picture there is particularly gripping) against various logging operations in the Pacific Northwest.
To read the support site of convicted felon Danial McGowan, you'd think he was a completely innocent victim in all of this. I mean, seriously: he was arrested by federal agents and while in custody, was not allowed to talk to his wife for two whole weeks. He eventually pleaded guilty to some of the charges against him (arson, conspiracy, destruction of property, etc.), and started serving a seven-year sentence in July. The outrage on the site is just unbelievable. McGowan received exactly the same treatment that any arsonist would. He has not been mistreated at all.
Burning down buildings is a crime, and even proponents of civil disobedience believe that you have to be willing to go to jail if you break the law, no matter how unjust the law may be. But the site and his supporters don't seem nearly as concerned about the fact he helped destroy several million dollars in property, or that there are laws that make that kind of thing illegal. No, they're concerned that he was treated like any other arsonist, because clearly, having political reasons for doing what you're doing makes you special.
The College Opportunity and Affordability Act has just passed its relevant committee. Why is this a bad thing? I mean, the bill is intended to fix the byzantine financial aid application process and encourage campus safety, right?
Because it also includes a provision to require colleges and universities to play copyright police for the media cartels as a precondition of receiving financial aid for their students. So much for "promoting Science and the Useful Arts".
This is exactly the kind of thing that the original 1710 copyright statute was intended to prevent: publishers using their control of media to enforce draconian restrictions on access.
A helpful legal type has complied a detailed compendium of bogus legal arguments commonly used by tax evaders, ahem, "protesters," complete with case law showing how the arguments have been rejected.
We've got nonsense ranging from the denial of US citizenship all the way to contesting jurisdiction because there is a fringe on the flag in the courtroom. And they're all counter by relevant legal decisions on the subject, most of which simply reject the nonsense out of hand.
This stuff is legal garlic for militia-type vampires.
Public.resource.org and Fastcase, Inc. have announced the publication of approximately 1.8 million pages of federal case law on a freely-available publicly-accessible online database. This includes all Circuit Court of Appeals cases since 1950 and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754 [sic; not sure how they got that particular figure, as SCOTUS wasn't convened until the 1780s]. The database should be up by early next year.
This is definitely a step in the right direction, as previously cases were only available on commercial databases, namely Westlaw and LexisNexis, which charge a pretty penny indeed for membership, and then charge for every search and document retrieved.
How can they do this? Aren't judicial documents automatically public domain? Quite so. And all Westlaw and Lexis documents have some statement about making no claim to government materials, including the U.S. Code. The reason they can make money and restrict their databases in this way is that they do an incredible amount of editorial work and cross-referencing on every case they publish. They're perfectly within their rights to charge for that. What's really happening here is not a jab against commercial law databases and for free access to information, but a decision by non-profits finally to spend the money necessary to make such a vast amount of material available.
The editorial system, particularly West's Key Number system, really are quite valuable. If you find a single case in any jurisdiction which mentions a subject in which you are interested, West allows you to cross reference every other case in every other jurisdiction which mentions that issue. This was true even before the Internet or searchable databases of any kind, making it an absolutely invaluable resource in decades past.
But the advent of powerful search engines and remote networks may make this of less importance. I myself don't use Key Numbers all that much, because the basic search engine is powerful enough as it is. It allows searches not only for words and exact phrases, but for terms within a certain number of words or in the same sentence or paragraph. All of a sudden I can search for terms that I'm interested in instead of having to figure out how the editors have organized their hierarchy.
Big aw firms will continue to use the commercial databases, of course. And they're still needed if you want reliable access to secondary literature. But it wouldn't surprise me if small firms, solo practitioners, and state and local government offices found this resource to be massively useful.
Apparently there's a elaborate fan movie based on the Warhammer 40k setting that's being made in Germany. The fans are excited. Games Workshop is excited.
So why is the film never to be released?
Because German copyright law treats artistic creations as part of the identity of the author, and prevents any kind of transfer of the work to anyone but heirs. The fan producers would be entirely happy to turn over all of their rights to Games Workshop, which would be entirely happy to take them. But German law doesn't allow this, and most other European countries wouldn't either (I think the UK might be an exception, as their copyright system, while bad, is far more rational). If the film were to be distributed, Games Workshop could theoretically lose a lot of their rights to the Warhammer 40k universe in Germany, and clearly that's not acceptable.
End result? Copyright law suppresses yet another work of creative expression.
City-Data.com is featuring their lists of the top 101 cities for... just about every comparative demographic statistic you can think of. For example, the the city with the largest positive difference between never-married females and never-married males is none other than Roseland, IN. What, pray tell is in Roseland, IN? Why St. Mary's College, one of the largest girl's schools in the country, and just about the entire town. (Okay, it's not technically a girl's school anymore, but there are like six guys that go there, so sue me.)
The city with the largest difference between never-married males to never-married females? That'd be Chuckwalla, CA. The site of one of the most remote state penitentiaries in the country.
Other fun facts:
- The city with the most advanced degrees of any type is Cayuga Heights, NY (near Ithaca, must feed Cornell).
- The city with the highest percentage of citizens born at sea is Hutchins, WI (2 of 'em).
- The county in excess of 50,000 citizens with the most births per 100,000 people is Webb County, TX (gotta set a bottom level there or you wind up at local hospitals in Alaska and Hawaii)
- The city with the highest percentage divorced people is Winchester, NV. That's not particularly interesting. What is interesting is that second place goes to South Salt Lake, UT. (The smallest is Stanford, CA).
- The city with the highest housing density is Friendship Village, MD (it's only 0.06 square miles and has 4,600 people living in it).
- The city with the highest percentage of mobile homes is Village Park, FL (all of 'em).
And it occurs to me that though this has been entertaining, it's also been a complete waste of time.
I'm a bit late in learning this, but apparently Willow Creek, the godfather of the mainstream, evangelical, suburban, programmatic megachurch, has, well, repented. A multi-year study has led them to conclude that their ministry style just doesn't work, and what people are really looking for is instruction, particularly in understanding the Bible and prayer.
It's about time. Willow Creek has, in my view and the views of others, been an incredibly destructive force in American Christianity in its substitution of contemporary business principles for theology and ecclesiology. One can only hope that this realization on their part will lead to real changes. But as the appetite of the human heart--especially in today's consumer culture--is for things that "tickle the ear", not challenge the heart, I would not be surprised if they lose their place of influence as they try to correct their mistakes.
My hopes are with them.