Day: September 28, 2000

A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would overturn the recent ruling against MP3.Com by establishing that it is legal to stream music to consumers provided the consumer can prove he has already bought a copy of the CD. This is A Very Bad Idea(TM).

The bill’s language reads like this,

it is not an infringement of copyright for a transmitting organization that transmits a personal interactive performance to make or cause to be made phonorecords or copies of a sound recording and any nondramatic musical works embodied therein if such phonorecords and copies are used by the transmitting organization soley in connection with the transmission of personal interactive performances.

A lot of folks at Slashdot and elsewhere are really pushing this sort of bill, but I wonder if they’ve really thought it through. One of the effects this bill has is to make it impossible for performers or record companies to decide who to associate with, even when the association might damage the reputation of the performer.

Suppose, for example, Penthouse or some other porn site decided to start marketing a “listen to your top 40 CDs while you view porn” service using an MP3.Com-style system (and don’t think it won’t happen — we’ve already seen “get your stock quotes with your porn” businesses, so I doubt it would take someone very long to combine music and porn). Under this bill, a performer or record company who objects to being associated with a pornographer would have absolutely no recourse under U.S. law.

In fact the irony here is that a lot of musicians who like to work outside of the record label system could easily be co-opted by large labels who could build MP3.Com style systems incorporating the music of bands who definitely do not want to be associated with them.

The Associated Press today reported that sixth-grader Ashley Smith was suspended for 10-days from her suburban Atlanta school for bringing a Tweedy Bird wallet to school. Why? The wallet meets the school’s definition of a weapon.

The 11-year-old Smith runs a web site devoted to Tweedy Bird so naturally the Tweedy Bird wallet was a given. Unfortunately for Smith the wallet contains a chain inside it which is designed to hold keys. The chain is just over the 10-inch limit the school imposes on chains, and so they sent her home for 10 days for bringing a weapon to school.

This reminds me of a case a couple years ago where a student was expelled for assaulting a school official. Certainly he deserved severe punishment for that, but more interesting was what started the argument that led to the fight. Security officials at the school noticed what they thought was a gun under the driver’s side seat of the car. They pulled the student out of class and had him unlock the car. Sure enough there was a gun under the seat — a toy gun left in the car by the student’s much younger brother.

At which point the school official informed the student that he was suspended for several days because the school has a zero tolerance policy against bringing even toy guns on school premises. Again, violence is always wrong but if somebody at the university told me I was suspended without pay from my job because my daughter left a toy gun in my car, things would get very heated.

Some schools are taking this even further. Another story that hit national wires recently was the case of several young children suspended from school for playing cops and robbers. They didn’t have toy guns, but they did shape their hands into guns and yell “bang bang,” etc., at each other. The school kicked them out saying that making your hand like a gun and saying “bang” constituted a death threat and was a big no no under the zero tolerance policy.

After thinking about both cases, one thing really bothers me about these sorts of cases — don’t you wish that some of these schools put as much effort into teaching kids to read, write and learn math as they do in kicking them out under these absurd zero tolerance rules? I remember playing “Battlestar Galactica” and “Star Wars” on playgrounds as a kid — today I guess they’d probably have read my friends and I the riot act before kicking us out.

Source:

Girl suspended for Tweety chain. The Associated Press, September 28, 2000.

For those of you not enamored of bioethics, Arthur Caplan is easily the most prominent bioethicist in the country. Personally I can’t stand him because he’s so inconsistent — I think most bioethicists like to call it nonideological, but as far as I can tell there is no single ethical view that guides Caplan’s thinking. He, and most other bioethicists, tend to be moral pragmatists who make it up as they go along.

That being said, the family of an 18-year old man who died during from a genetic engineering experiment have sued Caplan in the sort of legal action that could only occur in the United States. Follow the bouncing ball here with me for a moment:

Researchers originally planned to do the experiments on fatally ill babies under the theory that the babies were going to die anyway, and even if the gene therapy didn’t work it wouldn’t likely worsen the babies conditions. Caplan stepped in and said no way. First, by definition the babies can’t consent, and second, the parents of babies with this particular genetic condition tend to be so grief stricken that they’ll grab at any chance and so they can’t really give consent (I agree with Caplan on the first part, but think the second part is the sort of noxious holier-than-thou moralizing common to the field).

So the researchers decided instead to only do the gene therapy experiments on consulting adults. Which brings us to the lawsuit. The lawsuit essentially claims that if Caplan had just kept his big mouth shut, the researchers would have used babies and there’s no way this 18-year-old would have ever agreed to be in the study, and as a result he wouldn’t have died. Therefore, Caplan is partially to blame for the young man’s death.

The amusing thing about the lawsuit is that the lawsuit essentially turns the tables on Caplan and argues that the 18-year-old couldn’t possibly have consented to the experiments. This is kind of fitting since Caplan and other bioethicists have done so much to undermine reasonable definitions of what it means to consent to a medical treatment.