Ronald Dworkin has died.
Dworkin on Affordable Care Act.
Dworkin on Citizens United.
“Scalia therefore has not a leg to stand on. He demands something that is logically inconsistent, impossible of execution, and plainly at odds with the original understanding of the Framers of the Constitution as to how it would be applied and put to use. It is also abundantly clear that Scalia merely claims textual and/or original understanding as justification for his preferred outcome, even when the evidence is such that neither the text nor any plausible contemporaneous understanding would support him. In other words, he just makes it up. That is why I say he is a judicial crook. Perhaps a better description would be that he is a judicial charlatan.”
— Comments can be wonderful.
Where the funny piracy numbers used to justify SOPA/PIPA spring from
It seems like every discussion of SOPA/PIPA includes a phrase like “Everyone agrees that piracy is huge problem,” but in fact, the “huge problem” they’re agreeing on has been inflated to farcical proportions through the most transparent financial funny business.
Yeah this has been bugging me. Even at Wednesday’s protest in midtown we were patronized with speakers assuring the world we all agree that “something must be done” about “piracy”. That simply isn’t true. We don’t agree on the definition of the problem, or the scope of it, or much less that the US federal government should take further legislative action concerning it.
We have stacks of law, already, imposing incongruous jail times for the violation of copyright. It’s is far from clear that anything else the government does will be more effective, and in any case I as a citizen am not sorry to say I just don’t want it. We are not to be told, in a representative democracy, what is right and wrong and then given a few shitty options for combating supposed wrongs. It is in fact up to us to decide what is ethical, and what wrongs are worth government attention at all. Everyone I’ve talked to likes the internet as it is, (or better yet without the ill conceived DMCA, the one we failed to stop). You have to wonder who exactly Schumer and Gillibrand are serving, when you can’t find a soul in this state who has remotely similar priorities.
I’m sure you could find an artist or two who benefits from harsh copyright laws, but you could also find another million who do not.
Continuations: Patents and the Growing Anti-Commons
The patent wars have really been heating up. For some time now Apple has been going around trying to get various Android devices off the market based on patent claims. Now the shoe is on the other foot as a court in Germany has found in favor of Motorola Mobility against Apple based on a…
Patent warfare is a waste of time and resources. It slows innovations.
good:
A reminder that most things, if not everything, are remixes on an old idea.
Remix or Rip-Off? Deconstructing ‘The Matrix’
Making the case that nothing, not even The Matrix, is totally original, Everything Is a Remix is back with a stunning shot-by-shot breakdown of the dozens of references and influences that shaped the Hollywood blockbuster.
This video was edited by Rob Wilson and co-produced by Kirby Ferguson, the creator of the series, and written by Cynthia Closkey. In an interview with The Atlantic, Ferguson makes the case for rethinking our definitions of creativity and ownership:
I wanted to address the hypocrisy of property-centric views of creativity. Corporations — and even many authors — want monopoly rights that are as broad and enduring as possible, but the gaping hole in that approach is that all creations contain chunks of other creations. It’s a blurry boundary between where one work ends and another begins. We all copy, we all transform, we all combine.
The interview is continued here, and previous episodes of Everything Is a Remix can be found on the Video channel. Everything is a Remix is self-funded, and welcomes donations from viewers via their website.
