Deer flies are one of my most hated things. They are the size of ordinary house flies and they bite like a motherfucker. You'll always know if one is in the area because it will find you, and it will incessantly circle your head until it either bites you, or you kill it. Normally, they are encountered one or two at a time. Not this year...
Here's a few seconds of video to show you what was waiting outside my car window when I got home yesterday evening:
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The president's speech tonight was quite good. Hidden inside of it was a speech that was truly great.
What follows is a careful excerpt which describes exactly why we are in Iraq and how we fighting the overall war. Plenty of the original text was removed, but no other changes were necessary.
This is the speech I've been waiting three years to hear:
After September 11, I made a commitment to the American people: This Nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will take the fight to the enemy. We will defend our freedom.
Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war.
Our mission in Iraq is clear. We are hunting down the terrorists. We are helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We are advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability - and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren.
[The terrorists know] that as freedom takes root in Iraq, it will inspire millions across the Middle East to claim their liberty as well. And when the Middle East grows in democracy, prosperity, and hope, the terrorists will lose their sponsors, lose their recruits, and lose their hopes for turning that region into a base for attacks on America and our allies around the world.
[Despite all their car bombs and terror attacks, the enemy are not] any closer to achieving their strategic objectives. The terrorists failed to stop the transfer of sovereignty. They failed to break our Coalition and force a mass withdrawal by our allies. They failed to incite an Iraqi civil war. They failed to prevent free elections. They failed to stop the formation of a democratic Iraqi government that represents all of Iraq's diverse population. And they failed to stop Iraqis from signing up in large numbers with the police forces and the army to defend their new democracy.
The principal task of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists - and that is why we are on the offense. And as we pursue the terrorists, our military is helping to train Iraqi Security Forces so that they can defend their people and fight the enemy on their own. Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.
We have more work to do, and there will be tough moments that test America's resolve. We are fighting against men with blind hatred - and armed with lethal weapons - who are capable of any atrocity. They wear no uniform; they respect no laws of warfare or morality.
America and our friends are in a conflict that demands much of us. [We] fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens - and Iraq is where they are making their stand. So we will fight them there ... we will fight them across the world - and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won.
I can't imagine how you could say it any more clearly than that.
I'm in the wilderness here. No matter who you are or what you believe about file sharing, read the next few paragraphs and I'll probably piss you off. But hang on... if you read to the end, I might actually convince you that today's ruling was a genuine gift to filesharing and to the future of new internet technologies.
I'm going to start with the assumption that copyrights are worth protecting, but that the preferred methods of protecting them are harmful to both personal freedom and to technological progress. I'm the first to agree that government-mandated DRM is a nightmare, and that respect for property rights does not demand the end of the general-purpose computer.
I'm also going to point out that this debate is not simply going to go away. You simply cannot have a billion-dollar information economy without stable, exchangeable property rights. Something has got to give.
Since there are no easy answers here, we have our pick of the hard ones. The winner would be something which works, if only just well enough, and which protects, to a reasonable extent, both individual freedom and technological innovation. It doesn't have to be be pretty or even perfect; it just has to not suck.
We already know what these sorts of solutions are like.
Child porn is a good example. When it comes to the exploitation of real, live children, anyone worth listening to is going to agree that efforts to control child porn are worthwhile, but this does not mean that every half-assed attempt at censorship is going to be a good idea. No, you may not censor the whole internet, and no, you may not outlaw encryption. No, you may not build a national firewall to exclude foreign sites which do not meet your approval.
What we get instead is a more subtle, less effective, but more practical approach. The police have some power to find and prosecute violators, but generally not so much power that they trample the rest of us. Intent matters. Fine distinctions matter. It's imperfect all around, but it's pretty much the best we can do.
For example, when I run my peer-to-peer software, I might unwittingly act as a server for files that contain prohibited content. I might even know that this is possibility when I install the software, but this does not make me liable. Absent any evidence of my intent to distribute illegal material, I'm safe.
Similarly, I could leave an FTP directory open on the web and invite all of you to use it. If some of you used it for illegal purposes, does that mean that I am at fault? Of course not. However, if I invite you to use it for illegal purposes, and some of you do, am I at fault then? You bet. Should I be? Yes. That's fair, and I don't have a problem with it.
And that brings me back to Grokster.
Today's ruling said that Grokster could get their asses handed to them in lower court if their actions met a certain standard. That standard?
"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties..."
In English? If Grokster promoted its product as a means of violating copyrights, then they are screwed. However, you'll first need to prove that either Grokster had clearly expressed this intent, or that they had taken some other "affirmative step" to foster infringement. I'm no lawyer, but I understand "affirmative step" to mean something intentional, not something which just happened by itself.
Now, maybe I'm totally missing the boat here, but this sounds pretty goddamn good to me. Why?
1) If Grokster (or future file-sharing technologies) are not promoted as tools for stealing content, and don't go out of their way to invite content theft, then they are protected by this ruling. This is in addition to the earlier protections provided by the Sony case. We have more protections now than we did before.
2) Copyright law is now starting to look a lot like the child porn law I discussed earlier, doesn't it? It is evolving into something balanced and complex, where intent and fine distinctions matter. Something other than brute force and heavy hands. Yes, it's imperfect and yes, we will be tweaking this balance forever. You've got a better idea?
3) How could the court have ruled the other way? If they had said, "Sure, the Sony case protects everybody, even if they market their tool as a means to conduct illegal activity" it would have undercut property rights as badly as Kelo did. Nobody wins if property rights are left to the whim of the state.
I think this was a good ruling. It's not a solution to the problem, of course, but I consider it a good step in the right direction.
Now, if you object - and I'm sure that many of you do - take a deep breath before you hit that comment button, and ask yourself: Do I have a better alternative? Don't bother telling me this is vague and imperfect, an invitation to a slippery slope to hell. I already know that. Tell me how this could be done better some other way.
Update:
It looks like others agree. There goes the wilderness...
Sure, I could write about the KELO decision, but I pretty much emptied my anti-statist bile duct on the last misguided ruling and besides, there are about 5000 other bloggers filling that very gap right now. I'll only point out that, in a more perfect world, you should be able to rearrange the letters in the words "Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer" to form the phrase "That's what you get when you vote for democrats".
I could also opine on the internet-porn-killing aspects of Section 2257, which basically require that anyone who posts a tit on a web page now provide, on demand, the model's name, age, and social security number lest they be criminally accused of peddling child porn. Seriously. I'll only point out that this looks to me like a classic example of protectionist legislation masquerading as public service. It provides an intimidating barrier for entry, it creates a sort of super-copyright for existing works, and it forces the remaining competition overseas, where 99% of the existing child porn resides anyway. (I will be pissed when it kills this site, which, sadly, it probably will).
I could also point out how odd it is that so many people believe this to be an invention of the puritanical conservatives, as if some future president Hillary would, as her first official act, strike down the Federal enforcement of child pornography laws... but, I won't.
Instead, I'll talk about something that matters. The war.
By 'the war', of course, I mean the overall War On Terror, not just the current battlefront in Iraq. I am worried about the war. There are basically two things that worry me:
1) It's not over, but too many people have grown complacent.
2) The democrats, as a whole, either think the war is over, or they think that it never existed at all.
I'm not just engaging in a bit of hyperbole to make a partisan point here, I really am quite serious about that second point, and I can prove it, too. Bear with me for just a second and I'll show you what I've got.
Some democrats support the invasion of Iraq but quite a number of them oppose it, and that's fine. They consider the invasion of Iraq unnecessary, the wrong war at the wrong time, and would have preferred that we never have overthrown Saddam to begin with. OK.
The problem here is that there are only three positions that you can take. You can agree with Bush that there is a war on, and Iraq is the place to fight it. You can agree that there is a war on, but that we ought to be fighting it somewhere else; or you can propose that we should not be using military force anywhere at this time to advance our national security.
That last sentence is the key; it's just a fancy way of saying that you don't think there is a war on at all. If you don't think we should be using military force anywhere at this time to advance our national security, that means you don't think we are at war. Period.
Each of us - and that includes every democrat - has to find their way into one of those three categories. There isn't anywhere else to go.
Those of us who are with the president think there is a war on. Those of us who would like to use our military against terrorists in Saudi Arabia, or Syria, or Iran, of Malaysia, or in any of a half-dozen other likely locations also believe there is a war on. The rest of us are living in fantasy camp, and are likely to get a very rude surprise when hostilities eventually resume here in the states.
Nobody here is going to assert that the majority of democrats are in either of those first two categories. I'm not screwing around about this. About half of us simply don't think we are at war now.
