Maria

It turns out that Kazaa has succeeded in having Google remove several responses to search queries involving ‘Kazaa’ and ‘Kazaa Lite’. The grounds? Violation of copyright of course.

Google ‘Kazaa Lite’ and a note pops up on the bottom of the page;

“In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 11 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.”

Googling ‘Kazaa’ yields 6 removed results. Have no fear, though. The DMCA complaint that Google thoughtfully links to contains a list of the banished urls.

What’s interesting here is that rights holders are now picking off the low-hanging fruit by targetting search engines – shooting the messenger, so to speak. Rightsholders much prefer the big, easy targets, e.g. technical intermediaries such as telcos and ISPs, and are succeeding in changing laws all over the world to tip the balance even further against the idea of communications companies providing ‘mere conduit’ as the postal service does.

The latest push comes through the EU Commission’s IPR Enforcement Directive, which sacrifices the right to privacy, the European internal market, competitiveness and the entire communications industry to keep on filling the coffers of content owners. Check out London-based FIPR for an excellent analysis of everything that’s wrong with this proposal.

The US is not the only place where political dissent is considered a reasonable basis to prevent individuals from travelling freely. If the Italians have their way, all of Europe will be a no-go zone for anti-globalisation protesters, anti-war demo organisers, and a whole slew of objectors to the current soft-authoritarian right that prevails around the Mediterranean.

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While many other CT bloggers muse about conference etiquette, I find myself daydreaming about just getting into a PhD programme. Tacitus posted a question on how to get into a US grad school (poli sci or thereabouts) with a low GPA.

As someone who spends far too much time surfing through admissions and advice pages, and wondering what’s behind all the rhetoric, I think there is more good sense concentrated in Tacitus’ comments than I’ve seen anywhere else. Good luck T.

Le Monde ran a story yesterday about the ‘Russians’ in Guantanamo who are begging NOT to be extradited. The Russian government is trying to have 8 prisoners – including Chechens and Tartars – sent to Russia to face trial on terrorism charges. Meanwhile, the mothers of two of them are begging the US not to send their sons to Russian prisons where they could face torture and death.

America has certainly fallen well below its own standards of justice and fair treatment in Guantanamo. But to a prisoner who’s already known jails in Chechnya, Russia and Afghanistan, the prison camp evidently measures up to the best of Russian sanatoriums.

Radio Free Europe ran a piece on this last week. The story was then picked up and a further corroborating interview added by a Russian tv station, and that seems to be where Le Monde’s reporter saw it.

Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:

“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”

I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.

And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had only one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…

BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.

Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:

“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”

I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.

And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had ony one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…

BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.

Maureen Dowd writes today about how bland and trite US political bloggers have been to date, and how it heralds the death of the internet. Right.

It’s true, blogs by Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, John Kerry, etc. are just another outlet for relentless campaign-speak. Even Dean’s guest spot on Lessig’s blog was dull, dull, dull. All that talk about political blogging opening up new opportunities for ‘engagement’, ‘debate’, and creating a truly participatory democracy etc. etc. is a bit of a nonsense when you think of how risk-averse the average candidate is. But before we worry that blogging is being taken over by The Establishment, let’s consider; are these people really bloggers at all?

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It’s a while since I discovered a blog that satisfies so deeply as Transport Blog which I discovered thanks to Natalie Solent on Samizdata.

How can you not jump right into entries that start;

“A new tube torture

Ever since I first saw automatic ticket selling machines, in Germany in the eighties, and then saw them arrive in the London Underground or the “tube” as we call it here, and then saw these machines sporting “OUT OF ORDER” or “EXACT MONEY PLEASE” messages, I know that there is no machine, no matter how Teutonically efficient in its apparently inherent nature, that the tube wouldn’t find a way of mucking up and rendering English.

Yesterday I observed a new version of this syndrome, in the form of a new London Underground torture inflicted by means of automatic train doors.”

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Helen Szamuely reacts in EU Observer to Jan-Werner Muller’s reaction in European Voice to the Habermas/Derrida manifesto on a European identity. (pause for intake of breath) Muller’s article can’t be got at unless you’re a subscriber to European Voice, which is a shame – he seemed to be saying that Habermas was calling for a kind of historicism that would have Benjamin spinning in his grave. I have a special hatred for articles that end with that hoary old chestnut ‘we need a debate’, but as Muller’s piece is unobtainable by the masses, Szamuely’s is worth checking out.

By the by, I can’t bring myself to fork out for a subscription to EV. It costs almost as much as the Economist but often reads like a provincial gossip sheet. EU Observer is only available online and seems to draw on a wider pool of commentators.

The Canadian justice ministry has published the results of last year’s consultation on communications interception. Reading it is like entering an alternate universe where sanity and moderation prevailed. There’s no sign of the draft legislation yet, but the signs are good that it may actually contain the ‘balance’ between law enforcement, human rights and industry interests we’re always hearing about but I have yet to see. And for a justice ministry, the Department of Justice of Canada runs an exemplary consultation.

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Statewatch has issued an alert about a proposal of the Italian Presidency under the Schengen accord to use plainclothes police and unmarked cars to deport expelled illegal immigrants. I’m often in agreement with Statewatch’s criticisms of undemocratic and often downright nasty decisions taken under the EU’s Third Pillar of Justice and Home Affairs, but this piece seems hyperbolic and unnecessarily shrill. If a migrant is unlucky enough to be deported, does it really matter if there is a police insignia on the van?

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Does America need a new agency to combine law enforcement and intelligence functions, AKA spy on American citizens?

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Howard Dean’s guest spot on Lawrence Lessig’s blog has gotten off to a slow-ish start. Today’s post was pretty waffly campaign-speak and didn’t seem to answer any of the almost 200 questions posed yesterday. Fair enough, as Dean says he can’t get to every question, but I hope as the week continues he’ll get more of a feel for the give and take of blogging. I scanned today’s and yesterday’s comments and didn’t see responses from Dean amongst them, but there was one from his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, asking for some input to speed up their learning process. Perhaps a little unreasonably, Lessig’s readership were expecting a much more detailed treatment of IP and copyright issues. Myself, I’d just assumed this was a free for all for whatever issues the commenters posed. Anyway, as one of the comments pointed out, the very least this exercise has done is bring many Dean supporters to Lessig’s site where they’ll pick up a lot about the IP and copyright protection debate.

But if you’re after politicians who’ve already crested the blogging learning curve, Westminster is where you need to be. Huge thanks to Mick Fealty over at Slugger O’Toole for his account of an informal meeting about political blogging in the UK. Top of the class is Lib Dem Richard Allan. I’ve been following his blog for a while and, insofar as anyone actually does, he really gets it. He’s come up with an ‘adopt an MP’ idea for getting more MPs into blogging, and is the only person I can think of who could have made a genuinely amusing pun out of the phrase ‘peer to peer networking’. I’m with Mick Fealty, though, in wondering who and when will be the first Irish politician blogger. Probably a Sinn Fein-er. They’ve been several steps ahead on the communications front for a long old time.

Oh, one for the Irish readership. Lessig’s commenters had a long discussion yesterday about the whole FCC and alternative channels of media issue. It got me thinking of the old days of RTE a h-aon agus RTE a do. I think people of Henry’s and my generation are about the last cohort to refer to changing the tv channel as ‘turning it to the other side’.

So, Italian tourism minister Stefano Stefani has finally fallen on his sword and apologised for his anti-German comments in defense of Berlusconi. Except that it’s not really an apology at all;

“I love Germany,” Mr Stefani wrote to (German newspaper) Bild. “If, through my words, a misunderstanding resulted for many Germans, I would like to hereby apologise many times.”

Just like his boss, Stefani merely ‘expresses regret’ that the thick headed targets of various insults – ‘Nazi guard’ or “stereotyped blondes with ultra-nationalist pride” who have no sense of humour and pass their time with belching contests – actually interpreted these comments as offensive. It takes a certain amount of pig-headedness to issue an apology that offers fresh insult, but I suppose that’s inevitable when the apology is triggered by political necessity and not genuine remorse.

Marina Warner, in a series of essays for Open Democracy, examines the history and politics of another kind of political apology; the currently trendy apologies made by leaders for long past acts, an easier task than a heartfelt mea culpa for last week’s gaffe. She notes that direct apologies for recent wrongdoings are the only ones that really count, but that they’re mostly in the female preserve. The grand political gestures – Blair’s apology for the Irish Famine, Pope JP II’s millennium apology to women and Jews – may help bind modern day identity politics, but rarely amount to more than words;

“Apologising represents a bid for virtue and can even imply an excuse not to do anything more about the injustice in question. Encurled inside it may well be the earlier meaning of vindication. So it can offer hypocrites a main chance. It can also, as in the case of the priestly self-fashioning of some political leaders, make a claim on their own behalf for some sacred, legitimate authority.”

So it seems that we may have to wait a century or two for our friends at Forza Italia to (hypocritically) bend the knee.