paul schreiber

Ruth Bader Ginsburg chats with the Times about the Supreme Court.

Ginsburg likes Canada.

Q: At your confirmation hearings in 1993, you talked about how you hoped to see three or four women on the court. How do you feel about how long it has taken to see simply one more woman nominated?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: My prediction was right for the Supreme Court of Canada. They have Beverley McLachlin as the chief justice, and they have at least three other women. The attrition rate is slow on this court.

Please call today and oppose the FISA Amendments Act (HR 6304).

It is not acceptable to give away our civil liberties. Granting retroactive immunity to telecom companies is wrong.

This bill is not a “compromise.” It is a get-out-of-jail-free card bought by lobbyists for large phone companies. No matter how illegal, offensive or intrusive a company’s invasion of your privacy has been, it won’t make a difference if this legislation passes. If the president gave the company a note claiming their behavior was legal, they’re completely off the hook.

If we want to change Washington, it starts by telling Verizon, AT&T and Sprint that buying votes after they broke the law will not be tolerated:

All House Members (June 20th vote:)
Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging:
$9,659 to each member of the House voting “YES” (105-Dem, 188-Rep)
$4,810 to each member of the House voting “NO” (128-Dem, 1-Rep)

Here’s what you can do:

1. Go to Stop The Spying and find your Senator’s contact information. Call them now.

   California people: Dianne Feinstein’s office numbers are:
   202-224-3841 (DC)
   310-914-7300 (LA)
   619-231-9712 (SD)
   415-393-0707 (SF)
   559-485-7430 (Fresno)

   Barbara Boxer’s office numbers are:
   202-224-3553 (DC)
   213-894-5000 (LA)
   619-239-3884 (SD)
   415-403-0100 (SF)
   559-497-5109 (Fresno)
   916-448-2787 (Sacramento)
   909-888-8525 (Inland Empire)

2. Call the Obama offices. Tell them not only must Senator Obama oppose this bill, but he needs to join in any filibuster.
   866-675-2008 (campaign headquarters)
   202-224-2854 (DC)
   312-886-3506 (IL)

3. Join the Senator Obama Please Vote Against FISA group on my.barackobama.com. It’s currently the #5 biggest group on barackobama.com. Let’s make it #1.

My new Trek bike came with not one, not two, but three warning stickers. They difficult to read, state only the obvious, help no one, and leave an annoying, gooey mess when you remove them.

I wonder if bikes in other countries have to be covered with crap like this.

Wendy Seltzer, a former EFF attorney and current professor at Brooklyn Law School, posted a clip of the NFL’s copyright notice to YouTube as an example of fair use.

Pursuant to the DMCA, the NFL’s bots find the clip and send YouTube a takedown notice. Wendy then sent a counter-notification and YouTube reposted the clip.

Guess what?

The NFL took the clip down again, sending another takedown notice instead of following proper procedure:

The DMCA way for NFL to challenge that, per 512(g)(2)(C), would be to “file[] an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material,” which they haven’t. Sending a second notification that fails to acknowledge the fair use claims instead puts NFL into the 512(f)(1) category of “knowingly materially misrepresent[ing] … that material or activity is infringing.”

What next?

MoveOn is organizing a net neutrality awareness campaign. Sign the petition to the US Congress asking for meaningful and enforceable network neutrality:

I signed this petition, along with 250,000 others so far. This petiton will be delivered to Congress before the House of Representatives votes next week. When you sign, you’ll be kept informed of the next steps we can take to keep the heat on Congress.

Snopes.com, which monitors various causes that circulate on the Internet, explained:

Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site’s traffic has precedence over any other’s…Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend’s MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user’s web browser with the same priority. In recent months, however, some of the telephone and cable companies that control the telecommunications networks over which Internet data flows have floated the idea of creating the electronic equivalent of a paid carpool lane.

If companies like AT&T have their way, Web sites ranging from Google to eBay to iTunes either pay protection money to get into the “fast lane” or risk opening slowly on your computer. We can’t let the Internet—this incredible medium which has been such a revolutionary force for democratic participation, economic innovation, and free speech—become captive to large corporations.

Politicians don’t think we are paying attention to this issue. Together, we do care about preserving the free and open Internet.

Boing Boing points us at a New York Times piece and blog entry from OK Go’s Damian Kulash on the futility of DRM:

From the blog:

DRM just flat out sucks.

Its most obvious problem is that it doesn’t work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, once, and the music that was “protected” by the DRM is free to roam the vast expanses of the P2P networks. It’s the most ridiculous house-of-cards model imaginable: one single breech and the whole system implodes. As if to underscore the superlative absurdity of their goal, the lightbulb-heads also managed to cook up software that is comically easy to break. Way to go, guys.
…
s I understand it, EMI decreed that all of its labels (including our label Capitol) would be required to copy protect all of their releases starting on the day of our album’s release. When I heard this, I fucking lost it. Not only did our label want to make a gigantic business mistake across the board, but we, apparently arbitrarily, were chosen to be at the prow of the crashing ship. Guinea pigs, as it were.

And the more tempered Times piece:

Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it’s the right thing to do, just get insulted. They’ve made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that’s at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.