Category: Justice

Creationism Lose

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A federal judge has just ruled that public funding of private schools with creationist curriculums violates the 1st amendment:

A Louisiana District judge named Tim Kelley recently ruled that a Louisiana voucher program which used public money to pay for tuition for private religious schools has been deemed unconstitutional to the cheers of some, and sneers of others.

 In July Republican Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal, enacted legislation that allowed more than $11 million taxpayer dollars to be given to schools that teach Christian creationism. At the time this was a big win for Jindal, who is a self-professed Christian.

 According to Reuters.com the state argued public money was well within the rights of the state to grant to religious institutions, but Judge Kelley disagreed. He ruled that:

Louisiana’s annual education appropriation, calculated under a complex formula known as the Minimum Foundation Program, was intended exclusively for public schools. To divert it violated the state constitution.

It’s a loss for the people who are trying to divert public funds to private schools in order to fund religious education and desegregate the schools, which makes it a win for the good old US of A.

One interesting thing though, the article, from the Examiner uses a very interesting turn of phrase to describe Bobby Jindal.  They called him a, “Self-professed Christian.”

Why the hell do they call him that?

There are any number of reasons to dislike Jindal, he is, after all, a right wing Republican who spends much of his time pandering to the basest instincts of the right wing, but his record regarding his personal faith has been very consistent.

I note this, because the Examiner has a noted right-wing editorial bent, and Bobby Jindal has a surfeit of pigmentation, and I think that the two are linked.

They are doubting his religiosity because he is not white enough.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

No Justice No Peace — Know Justice Know Peace

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Seriously, when a cop is convicted of torture, a pardon is not a good way to resolve the issue:

More than 200 judges across Spain have come out publicly to manifest their anger with the Popular Party (PP) government over its decision to pardon four Catalan police officers who were found guilty of torturing a man who they mistakenly believed was an assailant.

 “The government’s decision is an improper one in a democracy; illegitimate and unethical. For that reason, we cannot just stand back and not raise our voices against the abuses committed in the right to pardon and warn of their effects, which are devastating,” reads a statement released by the judges.

 Among those who signed the document are Supreme Court Justices Perfecto Andrés and Joaquín Giménez, and a senior member of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), Margarita Robles.

 The four members of the Mossos d’Esquadra were convicted and sentenced in 2008 for torturing the suspect they had arrested. Their convictions had been upheld by the Supreme Court.

 ………

 In February, the Cabinet reduced their sentences to two years and gave them suspensions from the force rather than banning them for life as the court had ruled. It was a decision designed to prevent any of the four from serving time; in Spain jail terms of two years or less handed down to first-time offenders are habitually converted into suspended sentences.

A Barcelona provincial court, which advised the government that it was against the partial pardons, decided that the four officers must serve the remainder of their time in prison. In response the Cabinet last week decided on full pardons and agreed to give them fines.

So, these guys get to be cops again in 2 years.

You just know that they will have enthusiastic support of their fellow officers, so being back on the beat (pun not intended) is highly likely.

This sort of sh%$, abusive police officers and the craven politicians who support them in order to appear “tough on crime” is why you need a strong constitution and a strong judiciary.

You cannot ever trust the police to protect your rights as a citizen.

Someone Here Should Be Going to Jail, and It Ain’t Kim Dotcom

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It turns out that most of the evidence in the case against Kim Dotcom and Megaupload was kept on their servers at the request of the US government:

A fresh legal bid to throw out the case against Kim Dotcom in the United States is being made after claims of an FBI double-cross.

 Evidence has emerged showing the Department of Homeland Security served a search warrant on Mr Dotcom’s file-sharing company Megaupload in 2010 which he claims forced it to preserve pirated movies found in an unrelated piracy investigation.

 The 39 files were identified during an investigation into the NinjaVideo website, which had used Megaupload’s cloud storage to store pirated movies.

 ………

 Mr Dotcom said Megaupload co-operated with the US Government investigation into copyright pirates NinjaVideo and was legally unable to delete the 39 movies identified in the search warrant.

 Mr Dotcom said: “We were informed by (the US Government) we were not to interfere with the investigation. We completely co-operated.

 ………

 The FBI application to seize the sites said the “Mega Conspiracy” members were told by “criminal search warrant” in June 2010 “that 39 infringing copies of copyrighted motion pictures were present on their leased servers”. The application was approved to allow the seizure of the domain names.

Someone was outright lying to judges in both the United States and New Zealand in order to do a favor for the pukes at the MPAA.

This is what happens when you make the conscious decision to use the powers of government as the enforcement arm of private interests.

It is inherently corrupt, and inherently corrupting.

(on edit)

If you want to make the argument that the MPAA is just being a zealous protector of its client studios, it’s not.  It’s about power.

If the movie studios were to look at the effect of low levels of file sharing, like that which was done by some Megaupload customers, they would know that shutting down the file storage site cost them money:

A new paper suggests that box office revenues were negatively impacted after the shutdown of Megaupload. The dip in revenues was most visible for average size and smaller films. According to the researchers this may have been caused by the loss of word-of-mouth promotion by people who used the popular file-hosting site to share movies. For blockbuster movies the Megaupload shutdown had the opposite effect.

In common with every file-sharing service, Megaupload was used by some of its members to host copyright-infringing movies.

For this reason the MPAA was one of the main facilitators of the Megaupload investigation, which ultimately led to the shutdown of the company in January.

The movie industry was quick to praise the government’s actions, but a new report suggests that Megaupload’s demise actually resulted in lower box office revenues.

Researchers from Munich School of Management and Copenhagen Business School published a short paper titled “Piracy and Movie Revenues: Evidence from Megaupload.” The study analyzes weekly data from 1344 movies in 49 countries over a five-year period, to asses the impact of the Megaupload shutdown on movie theater visits.

The researchers theorize that some films may actually benefit from piracy due to word of mouth promotion, and their findings partly support this idea.

So some level of file sharing can help, particularly with smaller films, like indie films.

There appears to be less/no benefit to larger films, probably because most of the studio blockbusters are crap, and so word of mouth is a bad thing.

This is not about protecting the artist. This is about protecting the do-nothing job of the studio chief’s brother in law.

Or, to be a little bit less flip, it’s about shutting down potential distribution and publicity channels that threaten the movie and record distributors’ ability act as an intermediary and charge a toll.

XTC vs. PTSD, Why Not THC? EIEIO!

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There are indications that MDMA (aka Ecstasy, E, X, and XTC) is showing promise in the treatment of post traumatic stress disorder, and limited clinical trials have been ordered:

Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it.

 The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes.

(emphasis mine)

I’m an engineer, not a doctor, dammit,* so I really don’t have an informed opinion as to the therapeutic value of the drug, but when one considers the fact that THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in Marijuana) is denied this sort of research exemption, despite the fact that therapeutic effects have been fairly conclusively shown with Glaucoma and Multiple Sclerosis, as well as indications that it, much like MDMA, might be effective in the treatment of PTSD, it seems to me that something is seriously out of kilter with this process.

*I Love It when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

It Appears that the Afghans Fault US On Our Commitment to Human Rights

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Because Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered a takeover of the prison at Bagram:

President Hamid Karzai ordered Afghan forces to take control of the American-built Bagram Prison and accused American officials of violating an agreement to fully transfer the facility to the Afghans, according to a statement from his office on Monday.

The move came after what Mr. Karzai said was the expiration of a two-month grace period, agreed to by President Obama, to complete the transfer of the prison at Bagram Air Base.

At issue in particular are 57 prisoners held there who had been acquitted by the Afghan courts but who have been held by American officials at the prison for more than a month in defiance of release orders, Aimal Faizi, the spokesman for President Karzai, said in an interview.

Afghan officials were also concerned about the status of new detainees being captured by American troops. The Afghans feel those detainees should be transferred to their control under the deal signed by the two countries this year.

Mr. Faizi said hundreds of new prisoners were being held by American authorities in a closed-off section of Bagram Prison, which the American military calls the Detention Facility in Parwan. American forces, mainly Special Operations troops carrying out night raids, have been arresting more than 100 suspected insurgents a month, Afghan officials said.

So we are being lectured with justification about our commitment to human rights by Hamid f%$#ing Karzai.

God Bless America

John Roberts Looks to Keep Pigment Rich Folks From Voting

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It’s no surprise that mere days after non white voters gave Democrats their margin of victory in the Presidential and Senate elections, the Roberts court has decided to review the voting rights act:

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to review a legal challenge to the Voting Rights Act, a landmark law adopted in 1965 to protect African-American voters who had faced decades of discrimination at the polls.

 The court’s decision comes just days after a presidential election in which Latino and African-American voters played a big role in re-electing Democratic President Barack Obama, reflecting a basic shift in national demographics.

 The high court accepted an appeal brought by Shelby County, Alabama, challenging a core provision of the act that requires nine states and several local governments with a history of bias to get federal permission to change their election procedures.

 Arguments in the case will likely be heard by the Supreme Court in early 2013, with a decision expected by the end of June.

 Some justices on the nine-member court, including Chief Justice John Roberts, have signaled in earlier cases discomfort with policies that draw distinctions based on race.

 In a 2009 Voting Rights Act case, the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the law’s constitutionality. The court suggested that the federal “preclearance” requirement may no longer be needed or constitutional. Roberts, dissenting from a 2006 voting-rights decision, criticized what he called “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

 ………

Make no mistake here, this is the conservative wing of the supreme court looking to get Jim Crow voting regulations going again, because it favors conservatives in elections.


 “The America that elected and reelected Barack Obama as its first African-American president is far different than when the Voting Rights Act was first enacted in 1965. Congress unwisely reauthorized a bill that is stuck in a Jim Crow-era time warp,” he [Edward Blum, professional bigot and American Enterprise Institute Scholar*] said in a statement.

Yes, Mr. Blum, no racism in the good old USA. 

You might want to check out the Jezebel post, “Twitter Racists React to ‘That Nigger’ Getting Reelected.”

*But I am repeating myself.

Why Do Conservatives Keep Defending Child Rapists

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First, it was the Catholic Church, and now it’s the Conservative Party in the UK which is trying blame the victims and those reporting the abuse:

Downing Street has denounced “trial by Twitter” and a “silly stunt” by the ITV presenter Phillip Schofield who ambushed David Cameron live on air by handing him an internet-sourced list of suspected paedophiles – causing a shocked Prime Minister to complain of a “witch hunt” against gay people.

Schofield was forced to apologise after it emerged he had “misjudged the camera angle” and the names of several former senior Conservative politicians were visible on a card which he thrust into the hands of the Prime Minister before an audience of around 1.2 million. “You know the names on that piece of paper,” the This Morning presenter told the Prime Minister. “Will you be speaking to those people?”

The presenter claimed to have found the names of the Conservative Party figures in “three minutes” during a “cursory glance at the internet” for details of a scandal relating to abuse at children’s homes in north Wales during the 1970s and 1980s.

It’s been about 30 years since this all happened, so I’m not sure why they are going into full stonewall mode over this, unless a major Tory icon of that period, was somehow involved in the original abuse or the original cover up.

H/t Atrios.

We Finally Find Some Vote Fraud

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And it’s a Republican:

Authorities in New Mexico are investigating an Albuquerque father who allegedly showed up at a polling place to vote on behalf of his 18-year-old son, news station KOB reported on Tuesday night.

According to Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver, elections workers got suspicious when the silver-haired father showed up to vote and told them he was born in 1994. He was still allowed to cast a ballot, but the workers took down his license plate number when he left. Later, he showed up at a different location and voted under his own name, according to KOB.

………

The elder Pino later called Schwartz to tell him he had made a mistake by voting on behalf of his son, but said his son had given him permission. Both were registered as Republicans at the same Albuquerque address, according to KOB.

Seriously, how many times have I said that the ‘Phants are like the Soviets, in that you know what they are doing, because they accuse us of doing it?

Un-dirtyword-believable.

This is Huge

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A Judge in Australia has just found Standard and Poors liable for bad investments:

I’d never heard of Australian federal judge Jayne Jagot before today, but she’s my new favorite jurist, thanks to her decision in a recent court case which was brought against ABN Amro and Standard & Poors.

The coverage of the decision (Quartz, FT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters) concentrates, as it should, on the hugely important precedent being set here: that a ratings agency — in this case, S&P — is being found liable for losses that an investor suffered after trusting that agency.

S&P is appealing the decision, which runs to an astonishing 635,500 words, or almost 1,500 pages: it’s literally longer than War and Peace. At this point, it’s fair to assume that Jagot is one of the world’s foremost experts on structuring and rating CPDOs — crazy derivative instruments which had a brief moment of glory at the end of 2006 before imploding spectacularly during the financial crisis. And helpfully, her decision begins with a 56-paragraph summary of her findings, which lays out exactly how culpable and incompetent S&P really was.

Needless to say, I have not read the whole opinion, though I did look at the summary, which was eye glazing on its own.

The substance of this ruling is that:

  • ABN Amro had a model of risks and return that was crap.
    • And S&P used it without any consideration as to the quality of the model.
  • The data that ABN Amro used in this model was complete crap.
    • And S&P used used it without any consideration as to the quality of the data.

Basically, we are talking about is willful blindness, which does not eliminate culpability, and willful blindness is at the core of the the ratings agencies business model.

Here is hoping that this survives appeal.

Cloud Computing, RIP

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The Department of Justice is now arguing that you have no property rights whatsoever to your data if you use cloud storage:

Yesterday, EFF, on behalf of its client Kyle Goodwin, filed a brief proposing a process for the Court in the Megaupload case to hold the government accountable for the actions it took (and failed to take) when it shut down Megaupload’s service and denied third parties like Mr. Goodwin access to their property. The government also filed a brief of its own, calling for a long, drawn-out process that would require third parties—often individuals or small companies—to travel to courts far away and engage in multiple hearings, just to get their own property back.

Even worse, the government admitted that it has accessed Mr. Goodwin’s Megaupload account and reviewed the content of his files. By doing so, the government has taken a significant and frightening step. It apparently searched through the data it seized for one purpose when its target was Megaupload in order to use it against Mr. Goodwin, someone who was hurt by its actions but who is plainly not the target of any criminal investigation, much less the one against Megaupload. This is, of course, a bald attempt to shift the focus to Mr. Goodwin, trying to distract both the press and the Court from the government’s failure to take any steps, much less the reasonable steps required by law, to protect the property rights of third parties either before a warrant was executed or afterward. And of course, if the government is so well positioned that it can search through Mr. Goodwin’s files and opine on their content—and it is not at all clear that this second search was authorized—presumably it can also find a way to return them. .

But in addition, the government’s approach should terrify any user of cloud computer services—not to mention the providers.  The government maintains that Mr. Goodwin lost his property rights in his data by storing it on a cloud computing service.  Specifically, the government argues that both the contract between Megaupload and Mr. Goodwin (a standard cloud computing contract) and the contract between Megaupload and the server host, Carpathia (also a standard agreement), “likely limit any property interest he may have” in his data.  (Page 4). If the government is right, no provider can both protect itself against sudden losses (like those due to a hurricane) and also promise its customers that their property rights will be maintained when they use the service. Nor can they promise that their property might not suddenly disappear, with no reasonable way to get it back if the government comes in with a warrant. Apparently your property rights “become severely limited” if you allow someone else to host your data under standard cloud computing arrangements. This argument isn’t limited in any way to Megaupload — it would apply if the third party host was Amazon’s S3 or Google Apps or or Apple iCloud.  

(emphasis original)

So basically, if a prosecutor decides to go after one person using a cloud service, then they could take down the entire service, and if you do not like it, tough, you have no property rights.

Having your property seized at the whim of a prosecutor is antithetical to the very idea of the rule of law.

Still bullish on cloud storage?

H/t Ecop at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Pass the Popcorn

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A court has ruled that the Montgomery County (PA) Recorder of Deeds can sue MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) and the banks over their evading recording fees:

The federal court has upheld the Montgomery County Recorder of Deeds’ right to sue an electronic mortgage registry company and banks doing business with that company for $15.7 million that she claims is owed to the county in recording fees.

 The court Friday issued a 36-page memorandum and order denying a motion by MERS, also known as Mortgage Electronic Registry System, and its participating banks to dismiss the lawsuit filed last year by Recorder of Deeds Nancy J. Becker.

 The court’s ruling, while not discussing the merits of the case, essentially states that Pennsylvania does have a law requiring that mortgage assignments be recorded with the recorder of deeds office and that the recorder of deeds has the right to bring legal action when he or she does not believe an entity is complying with the law.

 “This is one major hurdle that we have now leaped,” Becker said Monday. “Now, we can move forward on the issues.”

………

 Some 146,715 MERS mortgages have been recorded in her office from April 2004 through September 2011, according to Becker.

146,715 mortgages?  In one county?

Well Montgomery County has about 800K people, or about ¼% of the US population.

If you assume a lower number of multi-family residences, and double it, you have something in the neighborhood of 30 million mortgages, and fee evasion on the order of $3 billion.

With penalties, it might be north of $10 billion, and when you consider the potential liabilities that the banksters might have incurred because MERS did not work, and does not provide an accurate (or for that matter legal) record of who holds the note on the loan:

Becker has said that, when these mortgage loans are transferred electronically, sometimes multiple times, through MERS and not filed in the county recorder of deeds office, “it makes it difficult, almost impossible sometimes” for property owners to determine what institutions are holding their mortgages.

I would be very surprised if the liabilities incurred by this are not hundreds, if not thousands, of times more.

Why Hasn’t Jon Corzine Been Indicted?

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The Wall Street Journal notes that there were no effective capital controls or accounting standards at MF Global:

As MF Global Holdings Ltd. teetered last October, an accountant in its Chicago office got an urgent question from regulators: How much cash did the firm have left?

 It is supposed to be an easy question for brokerage firms to answer, even in the middle of a crisis. U.S. rules set tight controls on the accounting, oversight and movement of money that belongs to customers or firms themselves.

 This will require a significant effort,” the MF Global accountant, Matthew Hughey, wrote in an email to seven colleagues at 4:24 a.m. on Oct. 27, 2011. A copy of the email was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

 The reason Mr. Hughey couldn’t answer the question for regulators: Employees at MF Global couldn’t keep track of exactly how much money it had at any given moment, even before the company began to wobble, according to Mr. Hughey’s email. Officials had been trying to fix the problem for months.

 As regulators and lawmakers plow ahead with investigations that began when MF Global tumbled into bankruptcy a year ago this week, yawning gaps in the New York company’s procedures for moving and keeping track of money are getting new attention.

 A private lawsuit expected to be updated early next month is expected to highlight such issues and how they are tied to the more than $1 billion that went missing from customer accounts as MF Global failed last October, according to people involved in the suit.

 A House financial services committee report, which will be released in the next few weeks, is expected to scrutinize how regulators handled MF Global. It is unclear how much focus will be given to the deficiencies in internal computer systems and procedures at the firm.

………

There are no signs that prosecutors are planning to bring criminal charges related to the firm’s demise.

Jon S. Corzine and Henri J. Steenkamp, MF Global’s chief executive and finance chief, respectively, have told lawmakers that they believed internal controls at the company were sound when they signed securities filings in 2011. Their signatures were required under the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-governance law.

Mr. Corzine, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. chairman, strongly backed the 2002 law while he was a Democratic U.S. senator from New Jersey. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing related to MF Global. A spokesman for Mr. Corzine declined to comment Sunday. Mr. Steenkamp’s lawyer and Mr. Hughey couldn’t be reached for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Hughey declined to comment.

(emphasis mine)

Under Sarbanes Oxley, Jon Corzine personally certified that MF Global had established and was maintainied “internal controls” and “designed such internal controls to ensure that material information relating to the company and its consolidated subsidiaries is made known to such officers by others within those entities, particularly during the period in which the periodic reports are being prepared.” (From the Wiki)

The didn’t. It wasn’t even close, and Jon Corzine was in violation of the law, and should be subject to criminal penalties.

What have we heard from the Department of Justice? **crickets**

It is a disgrace.

Good News Out of Pakistan

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Yes, this is a phrase that I did not expect to say, but the fact that Pakistani law enforcement is beginning to enforce notorious blasphemy laws against Islamic extremists too:

Most people have heard of Pakistan’s blasphemy law. Carrying the death penalty of life imprisonment for anyone who criticises the Prophet Muhammed or the Qur’an, it gained renewed international scrutiny this year after Rimsha Masih, a young Christian girl apparently suffering from Down’s Syndrome, was arrested in Islamabad. She was subsequently freed and a Muslim cleric now stands accused of fabricating evidence against her.

………

But could that be changing? Here in Karachi, protests against the anti-Islam film that have caused rallies across the Muslim world turned violent. One of the incidents on 21 September was an attack on a Hindu Temple on the outskirts of the city. Protesters attacked the Sri Krishna Ram temple, breaking religious statues, tearing up the Bhagavad Gita (the holy book), and assaulting the temple’s caretaker.

Community leaders took the unusual step of going to the police, who have announced that the case against nine attackers has been registered under Section 295-A of the blasphemy laws. This lesser known section, which covers the “outraging of religious feelings”, can apply to any religion and carries a fine or imprisonment of up to 10 years.

Of course, this case does not represent a sea-change in attitudes just yet. For a start, no one has been charged, or even arrested. But it was a positive move by local police, if only because Pakistan’s religious minorities are frequently too frightened to speak out at all. Numbering about four per cent of the population, this small minority of Christians, Hindus and Islamic sects such as the Ahmadis (regarded as non-Muslims) translates to nearly ten million people, the equivalent of the population of Tunisia. It is not an insignificant number.

While this is not the same as the death penalty for defaming the Mohammad or Islam, I am tickled pink that the same people who are this law’s most vociferous supporters are now being targeted by this same law.

A Good Primer on Why the US Patent System is F%$#ed Up

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Over at Ars Technica, Timothy Lee has a couple of very good articles on what was wrong with our patent system.

The first is about how the Federal Circuit Appeals Court, which set up to be the sole appellate court for patent matters, and how is has gone completely off the rails ). He calls it a rogue court:

“It is not common in the life of the law in America for a lower court and a major segment of its bar to take on the nation’s highest court, effectively reversing some major precedents or at least substantially mitigating their impact,” notes Steven Flanders in a recent history of the patent court. “Yet this was done.”

 The Federal Circuit, he said, also took on “the quieter and subtler effort to re-educate trial judges throughout the judiciary, to make them friendlier to patent-holders (or at least to the system of patents) as well.” (Flanders, it should be noted, is an avowed supporter of the Federal Circuit and its efforts to reshape patent law).

 This dismissive attitude toward Supreme Court precedents apparently survives to this day among patent lawyers. In the wake of this year’s decision limiting patents on the practice of medicine, patent attorney Gene Quinn wondered, “How long will it take the Federal Circuit to overrule this inexplicable nonsense?” Obviously, the Federal Circuit can’t “overrule” a Supreme Court decision. But with enough persistence, it can, and often does, subvert the principles enunciated by the nation’s highest court. And when it does so, it almost always works in the direction of making patents easier to obtain and enforce.

It’s a good description of how and why our patent system has gone nuts. 

He gives a good summary of how we got there, and why the Supreme court is increasingly willing (perhaps eager) to bitch slap this court.

My only complaint is that he did not cover the seminal patent trolling case, NTP v. RIM (Blackberry), which was crucial in making both SCOTUS, and increasingly larger segments of the “Very Serious People”.  (You are seeing this in legislation about patents floating around Congress)

As some background, when NTP got an injunction against RIM, they asked RIM to cut off all commercial and residential users in the United States, and RIM’s response was that this wasn’t possible, so they would cut off all their users, including the government.

This would mean is that people like Congressmen, their aides, and Supreme Court Justices and their clerks would lose access to their “Crackberries”.

As a result, the consequences of patent trolling suddenly got real for them, and they realized that the Federal Circuit Appeals Court is full of a bunch of extremist nutcases.  (I’m sure that there is an obscure legal term for this in Latin, but I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit.*)

I emailed him about this and he noted that he had included a number of injunctions from patent trolls, including the Blackberry case, but ended up on the cutting room floor.

Additionally, he writes a good article on the International Trade Commission, which routinely prevents products from being imported on the basis of (frequently bogus) patent claims:

If you follow the smartphone patent wars, you’ve probably heard of the International Trade Commission (ITC), which seems to get dragged into every high-profile patent dispute over the devices. Just this month, Motorola asked the ITC to ban various Apple products from the US, and the ITC separately ruled that Apple doesn’t infringe some Samsung patents. But how did this obscure Washington bureaucracy become a major front in the patent wars?

The ITC has the authority to police “unfair methods of competition” by importers, a phrase interpreted to include patent infringement. Because virtually all mobile devices are manufactured overseas, getting the ITC to ban the importation of a device can be just as effective as getting an injunction from a regular court.

A new study from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggests that the ITC’s patent-enforcement process is tilted in favor of patent holders—and especially patent trolls. The author, K. William Watson, argues that the inherently discriminatory nature of ITC patent enforcement—ITC cases can only be brought against imported products, not domestically produced ones—violates America’s obligations under World Trade Organization rules not to discriminate against foreign products. He says Congress should eliminate the provision of trade law, known as Section 337, that gives the ITC authority over patent issues.

Go read both articles.

*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

This is F%$#ing Nuts!

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The Department of Justice has charged Aaron Schwartz with 13 felonies for violating the terms of service TOS of a web site:

Federal prosectors added nine new felony counts against well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged last year for allegedly breaching hacking laws by downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database via an open connection at MIT.

Swartz, the 25-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.

Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public.

………

In essence, many of the charges stem from Swartz allegedly breaching the terms of service agreement for those using the research service.

“JSTOR authorizes users to download a limited number of journal articles at a time,” according to the latest indictment. “Before being given access to JSTOR’s digital archive, each user must agree and acknowledge that they cannot download or export content from JSTOR’s computer servers with automated programs such as web robots, spiders, and scrapers. JSTOR also uses computerized measures to prevent users from downloading an unauthorized number of articles using automated techniques.”

It gets better.

The DoJ lost big in the 9th circuit court, which said that a violation of the TOS was a matter for civil court, but Obama’s DiJ decided not to appeal, so that they could continue to use their bogus vendettas in other jurisdictions.

Prosecutors have an obligation to represent the people.

This obligation goes beyond fishing for a suitably technically illiterate jury and using multiple indictments and the threat of decades in jail to extract a plea bargain.

This is a despicable case of prosecutorial overreach.

They are saying that, for example, lying about my appearance on a dating site would be a felony.

Prosecutors want to make their job easier, but their method, creating a world where everyone can be thrown in jail for a felony, because there is some law that they are in violation of, is repellant.

It is the hallmark of a police state.

Great, I Just Got Caught Up in the Patriot Act

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I was getting some medicine containing some Pseudoephedrine HCL, and because of a glitch with a card swipe, their computer had me getting it, so I could not get another dose for 24 hours.

You wee, when the Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2006, it included legislation that made it tougher to buy Sudafed than it is to buy Plutonium.

After an hour of trying to fix the computer glitch, I left without the decongestant (Zyrtec® D).

F%$# the Patriot Act, and F%$# every F%$#ing member of Congress who F%$#ing voted for this F%$#ing piece of Sh%$ legislation, either the original, or the renewal.

No Prosecutions of Banksters, People are Finally Noticing

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At least the reporters at McClatchy are noticing:

Running for re-election, President Barack Obama frequently blames Wall Street and the deep financial crisis it caused for the underperforming economy. He doesn’t advertise that no major honcho of finance has been jailed under his watch for the mess, however.

The lack of a high-profile arrest and trial is all the more surprising given that Obama has tried to stain his Republican rival, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, as a creature of Wall Street.

Past financial crises have always had antagonist. The savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s had banker Charles Keating. The CEO of collapsed energy trader Enron, Kenneth Lay, became the face behind a drive to revamp accounting laws in 2002. Both men were prosecuted for and convicted of financial crimes.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-08 and the subsequent Great Recession, there’ve been plenty of scapegoats but no important actor fitted for pinstripes.

Why not? There’s no single compelling answer to that question.

“Some people (in regulatory agencies) believe that the folks at the Treasury and the Fed felt that pursuing chief executive officers would delay the economic recovery and continue to destabilize the financial system,” said John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who frequently testifies before Congress on securities law. “They had that point of view. Whether they had any influence over the Department of Justice is very uncertain.”

Yeah, very uncertain.

The issue is not the influence of the Treasury Department over the Department of Justice.

Not prosecuting is the official policy of the President.  His response to wrongdoing whenever someone connected (CIA torturers and Dick Cheney) or powerful (banksters) is to say that he will “look forward, not back.”  (But he’s going balls to the wall prosecuting medical marijuana).

Whether Treasury has influence does not matter.  This is the a directive from Potus.

As an aside, McClatchy was just about the only major US news org to treat the run up to Iraq with any skepticism.

What I want, and what a solid majority of Americans want, is some bankster heads on a pike.