Category Archives: Stupidity

Senator Orrin Hatch’s new Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act (S.2560, Induce Act) would make it a crime to aid, abet, or induce copyright infringement. He want us all to think that the Induce Act is no big deal and that it only targets “the bad guys” while leaving “the good guys” alone. He says that it doesn’t change the law; it just clarifies it.

He’s wrong.

Right now, under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sony v. Universal (the Betamax VCR case), devices like the iPod and CD burners are 100% legal — not because they aren’t sometimes used for infringement, but because they also have legitimate uses. The Court in Sony called these “substantial non-infringing uses.” This has been the rule in the technology sector for the last 20 years. Billions of dollars and thousands of jobs have depended on it. Industries have blossomed under it. But the Induce Act would end that era of innovation. Don’t let this happen on your watch – tell your Senators to fight the Induce Act!

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Several journalism groups are expressing outrage over the actions of a deputy marshal who forced the erasure of two journalists’ audio recordings of a speech by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a Mississippi high school.

The U.S. Marshals Service stopped short of fully defending the deputy’s actions.

“The deputy’s actions were based on the justice’s standing policy prohibiting such recordings of his remarks,” said Marshals Service spokesman David Turner.

Officials at Presbyterian Christian High School in Hattiesburg did not announce the policy before Scalia’s Wednesday appearance there.

Two reporters recorded the beginning of Scalia’s speech but were ordered to stop and to delete their tapes. One reporter complied, the other refused.

The Associated Press reported that at the event Deputy Marshal Melanie Rube demanded that an AP reporter erase a digital recording of the speech.

The reporter resisted, but when the deputy took the recording device from her, she showed the deputy how to erase the speech, the AP said.
Rube also made a reporter with the Hattiesburg American erase her tape, the AP said.

The U.S. Marshals service did not dispute the AP account of what had happened.
“In such cases the Marshals Services takes the appropriate actions,” said Turner.

But when asked whether the deputy’s actions were “appropriate,” the spokesman replied, “I can’t go that far right now.”

Crossing the U.S.-Canada border to go to church on a Sunday cost a U.S. citizen $10,000 for breaching Washington’s tough new security rules.

The expensive trip to church was a surprise for Richard Albert, a resident of rural Maine who lives so close to the Canadian border the U.S. customs office is right next door to his house.

The local U.S. customs station is closed on Sundays, so he just drove around the locked gate, as he had done every weekend since the gate appeared last May, following a tightening of border security.

Two days later, Albert was summoned to the customs office, where an officer told him he had been caught on camera crossing the border illegally.

An off-duty deputy says he approached Holmes and noticed his speech was slurred and his breath smelled of alcohol.
Holmes denies any wrong-doing. He says he was driving home from the state house that night when his pickup truck started to overheat. He says he pulled over to look for a flashlight and that’s when the deputy pulled in behind him.

Holmes wasn’t arrested because he’s a state legislator and a state law gives legislators immunity to certain crimes. During the one hundred and five days of the legislative session, the law says legislators can only be arrested for treason, a felony, or a breach of peace.

The law is a privilege which many say helps legislators break the law. Republican Senator Larry Dixon says it was needed in the 19th century to stop sheriffs from using their power to keep legislators from voting.

Congress may crack down on businesses and people who provide false information when they register a website, proposing huge fines and extra jail time for those who violate copyright and trademark law.

Backers say the bill, known as the Fraudulent Online Identity Sanctions Act, targets only those who lie when submitting data to domain-registration databases and then go on to break federal laws.

Co-sponsors Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Howard Berman (D-California) hope the law will help copyright holders track down those who sell counterfeit merchandise on the Web, set up “phisher” sites to con unsuspecting Internet users into turning over credit card and PIN numbers, or illegally offer copyright works for download.