Category: Electronic Rights

Hollywoods Tax on ALL of us

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Wisconsin Public Radio’s Home page tells the story:

NOTICE: Due to rights issues, the Ideas Network internet streaming service cannot carry the BBC and CBC programming from 11:30pm to 6am weekdays and 12am to 6am on weekends until the conclusion of the Olympics on September 1st. Our live streaming for the Ideas Network will be off the air during these periods.

This absurdity, due to NBC’s broadcast rights deal with the IOC (International Olympic Committee), is yet another example of how the media has had its way with our politicians.

Interview with Grateful Dead Lyricist John Perry Barlow

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Reason posts a useful interview with John Perry Barlow (currently vice chair of the EFF):

Every existing power relation is up for renewal with cyberspace, and it was only natural there would be an awful lot of fracas where cyberspace met the physical world. EFF has been the primary mediator on that border. We have been very successful at protecting against excessive government encroachment into the virtual world.
Copyright and intellectual property are the most important issues now. If you don?t have something that assures fair use, then you don?t have a free society. If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.

Checking Account Fraud

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Caroline Mayer and Griff Witte cover a growing problem with checking account fraud (helped, in part by the growth of automated payments):

When Shereen Greene recently scanned her bank statement, she found a $139 charge from a company she had never heard of — Pharmacycards.com.
The Atlanta paralegal dug out her canceled check and easily saw it was fake. The name on it was her maiden name, which she had not used in seven years. The address was five years old and her signature was missing. In its place, was a brief message: “Authorized by your customer. No signature required.”
Still, the numbers at the bottom of the check belonged to Greene’s bank account, and in the increasingly automated world of check processing, that was all that mattered.

Forsaking Privacy

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If the government had access to the communications between a client and his lawyer, the lawyer would be nothing but a government agent, like Soviet defense attorneys, whose official role was to serve as adjuncts to the prosecution.
Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, “The Tyranny of Good Intentions”

Once upon a time, the U.S. Justice Department respected the legal rights that make law a shield of the innocent rather than a weapon of government. No more. What the great English jurist William Blackstone called “the Rights of Englishmen” have been eroded beyond recognition.
The last remaining right ? the attorney-client privilege ? is under full-scale assault by Justice Department prosecutors in the tax shelter case involving the accounting firm KPMG. The Justice Department has demanded, and the accounting firm has agreed to, a waiver of the attorney-client privilege for communications between lawyers and KPMG employees involved in marketing tax shelters the Internal Revenue Service has challenged.
The attorney-client privilege was long championed by jurists because they realized the privilege promoted equality under the law. Convictions can result from lack of access to legal knowledge as well as from actual wrongdoing. To ensure defendants would avail themselves of legal counsel, their communications with attorneys were made confidential, outside the reach of prosecutors.

I’ve written about tax issues before, including this article on our very odd SUV subsidies.

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EFF: Illegitimate Patents

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Patent Busting Contest:

Every year numerous illegitimate patent applications make their way through the United States patent examination process without adequate review. The problem is particularly acute in the software and Internet fields where the history of prior inventions (often called ?prior art?) is widely distributed and poorly documented. As a result, we have seen patents asserted on such simple technologies as: