Uncategorized – Page 3 – Common Infirmities

New applications for IP

The Guardian reports that the English Premier League is asserting its copyright over fans sharing short films of goals on social networks:

Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, said posting goal vines was illegal, as was sharing the videos on websites such as Twitter, and amounted to breaking copyright laws.

“You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law,” he told the BBC’s Newsbeat programme. “It’s a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we’re developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity. I know it sounds as if we’re killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property.”

If it is really possible to copyright events, so that making or distributing images would be illegal, this could provide a solution to the modern problem of hardworking police officers being pilloried by the public when a viral video shows them working hard to beat a crime suspect senseless. Police departments could declare certain operations to be “performances”, and then impose heavy fines on anyone who distributes video on social networks.
(They’d need a release from the accused, who also participated in the performance, but the Metropolitan Police have never had difficulty obtaining the signatures they need.)

How Harold Wilson kept it together

One could spend the whole day and half the night recording the weird infelicities of expression that automatic spell-checking has wrought upon once-proud journalistic enterprises. But some are truly exceptional.

According tq The New Republic, his close associate Joseph Kagan (who was rumoured to be his KGB handler, by those who thought he was a Soviet mole) was a “clothing magnet”.

It sounds like the kind of excuse a teenager caught shoplifting might use. “I don’t know how it got into my bag, your Honour. I seem to be a clothing magnet.”

The political opinions of corporations

I’ve been intrigued by the forced resignation of Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla Corporation, on account of his donation of $1000 to the 2008 campaign to amend the California constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Some fascinating issues it brings up:
1. I’d forgotten that the last great political battle over same-sex marriage was fought in California. And the conservatives won it. How fascinating to be reminded that barely five years ago it was still possible to muster a majority for banning same-sex marriage in California of all places, and in the same year that Barack Obama was elected (also promising to oppose same-sex marriage). And after that Pyrrhic victory the conservatives basically fled the field, overwhelmed by an almost inexplicable tide of social change. Continue reading “The political opinions of corporations”

Remind me to choose a different lawyer…

The Guardian published an article on the organised crime war in the Israeli city of Ashkelon, and the reputed mob boss Shalom Domrani. Speaking in his defence were “a mother and her daughter whose family provide legal services to Domrani”: “He helps the poorer people.” His people bring vegetables, she said.

Fair enough. But then the report asked why the police were investigating him.

“Well, he is a criminal,” the mother said. “He’s just not responsible for everything that people say he is.”

You just can’t put a price on that kind of advocacy…

A squash, not a pumpkin

A NY Times article on the spread of Halloween culture in Britain, includes this explanation

Britain’s adoption of the American holiday is perhaps not a surprise. Halloween was originally an ancient Celtic celebration in Ireland and Scotland, exported to the United States by immigrants. The Irish and Scots point to older Halloween traditions. The jack-o’-lantern was originally a squash, not a pumpkin; apple-bobbing began as a matchmaking ritual; and people wore costumes to ward off evil spirits.

A bit confusing to those of us who know that pumpkins are squash. What they mean to say, I think, is that before the pumpkin and its squashy compatriots migrated to Europe in the backwash of the conquistadores, the jack o’lantern was a turnip, hence the famous quip of Winston Churchill on seeing Stanley Baldwin in his dotage “the light is at last out of that old turnip.”

(I did a Google search to check the provenance of this quote. Amusingly, two web sites that mention it give diametrically opposed contexts. The website winstonchurchill.org cites a book Irrepressible Churchill for placing the anecdote as a devastating barb in the Commons smoking room in 1937, shortly after the end of Baldwin’s active political career. Another website cites no source for making it a “fond” remark after Baldwin’s death, in 1947.)

Renters are horrible, evil people, says the NY Times

In many parts of the US the financial crisis has led to more houses being rented rather than bought by the people who want to live in them, according to an article in today’s NY Times, titled “As Renters Move In and Neighborhoods Change, Homeowners Grumble”.

Now, this might seem like a good thing, given how many families and overextended themselves financially to invest in real estate. But if you think that, you are forgetting renters are a bunch of thieves and drug dealers and all around no-goodniks. Why are they occupying single-family homes among nice Americans? Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

The Times reporter Shaila Dawan visited a neighbourhood of Memphis, TN called Hillshire.

On a recent evening, parents pushed strollers and lawn mowers droned, children played on a tire swing and in one driveway, a longtime resident and his grandson tinkered with the fat tire of a slick red drag racer.

But there was a seedy underside. Jimmy Fumich, a homeowner and air-conditioner repairman, said he had been in court that day as a witness in an animal cruelty case against a neighbor, a renter, who had left a dog chained to a stop sign in the heat. She was already in trouble, he said, for breaking into an empty house on the block. Mr. Fumich… mentioned a couple of meth houses and one that had been used as a brothel. All were rentals.

A renter mistreated an animal. Others ran a brothel (in a rented house). Or did they just have too many visitors? Mr. Fumich complains further that the renters don’t join the neighbourhood watch.

It almost seems irrelevant when the article adds, parenthetically, that “Police department records show that major crime in the area, which does not include drug offenses, has actually gone down.”

But it’s not just the homeowners who hate the renters. The renters hate themselves:

In a small cul-de-sac near Hillshire… Rusby Amador cooked dinner for her three sons while waiting for her husband, a tile layer, to get home. One son was hosing off the walkway of their rented home. Two prodigious Boston ferns hung in the entry, and at the curb a colorful ceramic urn sat atop the mailbox.

“When the people buy a house, the people’s more nice,” Ms. Amador said. “Renters, they don’t care about neighbors. We don’t know who’s going to move in. We worry all the time because we don’t know. I have children.”

So, neighbours are good, but new neighbours are instruments of the devil. Unless you know who is going to move in which, in my experience, is not usual.

Insider trading and the birth of America

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin I’ve just encountered the following anecdote. Edward Bancroft was secretary to the American commissioners — Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee — who were in Paris negotiating the crucial military alliance with France. The British were desperate to forestall this alliance with their own peace overtures:

The British sent to Paris the most trusted envoy they could muster, Paul Wentworth, their able spymaster. At the time, Wentworth was angry with his secret agent Bancroft for sending inside information to his stock-speculating partner before sending it to Wentworth, who was also a speculator. King George III, upset by the bad news that his spies were giving him, denounced them all as “untrustworthy stock manipulators”, but he reluctantly approved Wentworth’s secret mission.

And indeed,

years later, when he was haggling with the British over back pay, Bancroft wrote a secret memo, telling the foreign secretary that this was “information for which many individuals here would, for purposes of speculation, have given me more than all that I have received from the government.” In fact, Bancroft had indeed used this information to make money speculating on the markets. He had sent 420 pounds to his stock partner in England… and provided him word of the impending treaties, so that it could be used to short stocks… Bancroft ended up making 1000 pounds in the transaction.

I find it delicious to think that American independence was made possible, or was, at least, expedited by British agents’ clumsy insider trading.

(Anyone who is interested in the culture of speculation and market-manipulation driven by political information, and also enjoys a good philosophical yarn, should read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.)

Billions or millions?

This headline is on the Guardian home page at 11:30 PST (no link, because it’s presumably going to be changed). I thought $3.6bn seemed like an unimaginably large sum for copyright infringement related to a single photo, and indeed, when I clicked through I found

A photographer who failed to see the funny side of a Buzzfeed post on “The 30 Funniest Header Faces” is suing the site for $3.6m (£2.3m) over claims it breached his copyright.

Billions or millions? It seems important… And that’s not even mentioning the fact that I thought British billions were actually American trillions, which would push the error up by another factor of a thousand.

Not the Lake Wobegon Hospital

From the front page of the West County Times:

Death rates at Bay Area hospitals vary widely, new report reveals

While some hospitals excelled at keeping patients alive, more than half of institutions around the Bay Area had worse-than-average death rates for at least one medical procedure or patient condition in 2010 and 2011, a new state report reveals.

Julian Assange’s password

One of the weirdest facts in the fascinating book on underground cryptography and the anti-secrecy movement represented by Wikileaks — beyond the general fundamental link, which I’d never quite put together before, between cryptography (keeping secrets) and whistleblowing (revealing secrets) — was the comment that Guardian journalist David Leigh had published Julian Assange’s password — ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay# — to the unredacted US State Department cables. Master of Secrets Assange gives out his own password to a journalist — rather than giving the Guardian a version encoded with a throwaway password — and then expresses shock and dismay when it ends up in print. Did he also give Leigh the PIN code for his bank card, but ask him only to use it to check the balance?