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Wednesday, March 02, 2005 |
For Your Ears Only (Alan Wexelblat).
About.com has a really amusing piece by Cory Dietz claiming that the RIAA is suing people for listening to music in cars. The claim is that the music was only provided to the original owner of the car, so passengers and hitchhikers who listen to music in the vehicle are doing so illegally.
Sadly, this story is close enough to believable that About felt the need to mark it prominently as satire. Given the reach of the Cartel to date, I confess I didn't find the basic premise totally beyond the realm of belief.
One wag commented in email that perhaps the next step should be "listening licenses," under whose terms the Cartel would be able to jail people like Mozart, who was apparently famous for being able to reproduce any piece of music he had just heard.
[Copyfight]
I was puzzled, as a kid and still, by the (to my mind) manifestly overbroad copyright statements I read in books, prohibiting (roughly) "reproduction of the work, or any part of this work, by any means, mechanical or otherwise, now existing or yet to be invented." Taken literally, that forbids reciting a favorite line from the work from memory. Odd, since teachers back in the day often assigned just such tasks and since readers regularly talk to other readers about the books they're reading and since periodicals routinely publish reviews that quote books to give a bit of their flavor.
Maybe therein lie the roots of my interest in defending fair use and the like.
11:03:41 PM 
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David Peterson: Iran IV. {summary} [ZNet Blog]
Presumably, the Ambassador’s charges are based on something other than American fears, American policy needs, and American fabrications. That is to say (again presumably), from hard evidence derived from the IAEA’s now-more-than-12-months-worth of enhanced inspections of Iranian sites, the government in Tehran formally having signed the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in December, 2003.---So what, then, has the IAEA been reporting about the Iranian sites?
Over the course of the past four months, the IAEA has produced two official assessments of the Iranian nuclear program. Namely:
Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran (GOV/2004/83), November 15, 2004
“Statement to the Board of Governors,” Pierre Goldschmidt, International Atomic Energy Agency, March 1, 2005
When over the course of the first three days of the current IAEA Board meeting in Vienna, U.S. political figures and crack reporters for some of the prestigious English-speaking news media have stated that the Iranians are lying about their nuclear program, that they are concealing its true intention, and that the “international community” should ultimately refer all questions about it to the UN Security Council, these are the two official sources of evidence to which they could have been referring. If they are referring to anything known and knowable, that is.
. . .
Anyone interested in comparing the policy-driven fabrications of the kind that came from the mouth of the American Ambassador today to what Pierre Goldschmidt, the head of the IAEA’s Safeguards Department and the flesh-and-blood individual who actually briefed the IAEA Board in Vienna yesterday (ostensibly, it was this briefing to which the American Ambassador was responding), consider what Goldschmidt plainly stated in his opening remarks:
Since the November 2004 meeting of the Board of Governors, Iran has facilitated in a timely manner Agency access to nuclear material and facilities under its Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol.
Everything else that Goldschmidt’s modest report to the Board documented---issues related to Iran’s centrifuge program, its subterranean excavation of tunnels near one facility in particular, the development of a heavy-water reactor, allegations about “dual-use” technology, efforts to “verify all elements of Iran’s voluntary suspension of all enrichment related and reprocessing activities” (a major purpose behind Russia’s effort to provide a secure supply of already-enriched uranium to Iran), and the like---came down on the side of Iranian compliance with the inspection demands that have been made of it---if always with the caveat that the more thorough the compliance, the greater the IAEA’s confidence that Iran is complying.
But reading around the last three days newspapers or the wire-services’ coverage of Ambassador Sanders’ remarks this morning, you’d never learn this.
Includes a bonus archive of great links to Iran nuclear program/potential coverage.
10:41:38 PM
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Proposed Law on Bankruptcy Has Loophole. A proposed law being debated by the Senate leaves open a loophole that lets wealthy people protect assets from creditors even after filing for bankruptcy. By GRETCHEN MORGENSON. [NYT > Business]
I feel so much better now that I know the wealthy will be protected from adverse effects of the bankruptcy bill! As long as only middle class and poor people can be hurt, and banks, credit card companies, and the rich are protected, I guess it's a good thing. Yeesh.
7:29:29 AM
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The Crisis. David Harris studies the significance of the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran with a new in-depth look at the roles played by militant Islamists, Ayatollah Khomeini, the shah, and President Carter. [WNYC New York Public Radio]
7:26:48 AM
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Worst TV Clips of the Week.
This has to be the oddest use of fairuse I've seen. I guess I don't see a better way to do discuss graphic content without putting it online for all to see, but the Parents Television Council is redistributing clips of the most graphic content on TV each week. Sort of ironic isn't it?
Here's one to watch. Surprisingly, it's one of the tamest. it's from the January 14th episode of Boston Legal. I love that show, but maybe they have a point. :)
BostonLegal11405.wmv (550K)
Link: Worst TV Clips of the Week
[unmediated]
7:24:51 AM
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Emergence. What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies, all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. How? That's our question this hour. [WNYC New York Public Radio]
7:24:48 AM
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Conspiracy Theory Rock.
 I don't know how many of you ever saw Robert Smigel's "Conspiracy Theory Rock" on Saturday Night Live but Move Left Media has posted an mpeg of it online. The short was originally broadcast on SNL in 1998, but once the powers that be at NBC got wind of it, it was pulled from episode so that it wouldn't appear in reruns. Though not as funny as some of Smigel's other shorts, it was one of those rare moments where an honest critique of big media made its way out on the airwaves, if only for a short time.
[Stay Free! Daily]
7:18:09 AM
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Online Teaching Notes.
I don’t generally post my teaching notes online, and I can’t imagine my undergrad notes would be particularly helpful, but I’m very grateful to those philosophers who do maintain good course websites. This is a roundabout way of noting that this evening I’ve been writing a lecture on the sixth meditation for tomorrow, and the notes from Jim Pryor’s Introduction to M&E course have been incredibly helpful. It’s times like this that I’m very glad the internets exist! [Thoughts Arguments and Rants]
7:17:47 AM
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