Day: May 28, 2001

Who Puts Out More FUD: Microsoft or Slashdot?

Sometimes I think the answer to that question is Slashdot. Today’s case in point is a post by Timothy about Google’s terms and conditions for posting to Usenet via Google.

Slashdot summarizes the policy as, “Google Owns Your UseNet Post,” which is completely false. The actual terms of service say,

By posting communications on or through the Service, you automatically grant Google a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display the communication alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed, and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees.

This is a very sensible policy; anything less would be asking for legal problems. Contrary to the Slashdot take on the TOS, Google doesn’t own your Usenet posts. Rather by posting you are granting them a “non-exclusive license to use, reproduce,” etc., etc. your post. Why would they want this?

For a number of reasons, but the main reason is that it will help forestall frivolous lawsuits as technology changes. For example, I ran an animal rights discussion group that had about 20,000 posts that were not part of a database. The current software I’m using for my web site uses a database and at some point I plan on bringing those old posts into the new system.

In that case you don’t want to have to deal with lawsuits from people saying “I never authorized you to include my post as part of a database compilation.” Sounds like hair splitting, but the Supreme Court has already ruled that there is a substantive difference between the two that is actionable.

Google also doesn’t want to get be left behind by technological change. Suppose that accessing the Internet by cell phone becomes all the rage, and people begin searching Google’s Usenet archive from their phones. Again, you want to protect yourself as much as possible from people suing on the grounds they intended their posts to be accessible from computer web browsers, but never gave permission for those posts to be accessed from a cell phone.

Finally, I can’t help but point out the sheer hypocrisy of Slashdot doing hand wringing over who owns posts after that web site’s own debacle when it decided to take posts from its web site and reprint them in a book without even trying to obtain permission to do so.

Supreme Court Rules on Wiretapping Statute

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States recently upheld the right of a radio station to broadcast a tape recording of a cellular phone conversation, even though the act of recording the conversation was itself a crime.

In the case before the Court, somebody secretly recorded a 1993 cellular phone conversation between a teachers’ union negotiator and the president of the teachers union in Wyoming, Pennsylvania. In the conversation the negotiator threatened to commit acts of violence against recalcitrant school board members.

The tape of the conversation was left in the mailbox of Jack Yocum, who opposed the teacher’s union, and Yocum gave the tape to a local radio station which broadcast it repeatedly.

The negotiator and the head of the union sued arguing that the broadcast of the tape violated laws which made recording cellular telephone conversations illegal.

In a narrow ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the media’s free speech right trumps the wiretap law, and as such the broadcast of the tape was legal.

In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern.”

In dissent, however, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist worried that the majority was ignoring the genuine privacy interests of people using cellular phones. “Surely the interest in individual privacy, at its narrowest must embrace the right to be free from surreptitious eavesdropping on, and involuntary broadcast of, our cellular telephone conversations,” Rehnquist wrote.

The debate over the balance between freedom and privacy is certain to be one that comes up repeatedly in the next few decades as technological innovations expand both people’s ability to communicate and the ability for such communications to be monitored surreptitiously.

Supreme Court rules First Amendment trumps wiretap law. The Associated Press, May 21, 2001.

Israel’s Water Shortage

Israel is experiencing severe water shortages at the moment, though most of the shallow media coverage of the problem completely missed the main reason for the shortages — Israel’s massive subsidies that encourage wasteful water use.

The BBC recently reported that Israeli Water Commissioner Shimon Tal will call for a total ban on watering lawns for the next three years and cut available water supplied to Israeli industry by ten percent. The entire issue is a political hot potato since Israel diverts water from the Palestinian territories to provide it to Jewish settlements.

But the shortages are caused because the government underprices water to farmers. Since the 1960s, Israel has sold waters to farmers at a rate that is 35 percent below what it sells to households and industry (and the price it sells to households and industry is also likely below the market cost of water).

Not surprisingly, agricultural use of water is through the roof, with 500 million cubic meters of subsidized water expected to be used for agriculture in 2001 alone. One of the things driving this use is that much of the subsidized water use in settlements is used for nonagricultural purposes.

Israeli National Infrastructure Minister Avigdor Lieberman wants to scrap the water subsidy, which is really the only way to restore a bit of sanity to Israeli water use. Unfortunately it is likely to be politically unpopular.

Sources:

Lieberman seeks end to water subsidy for farmers. Amiram Cohen, Ha’aretz, April 16, 2001.

Israel faces water crisis. Paul Wood, The BBC, May 23, 2001.

PETA Making Waves About Foot-And-Mouth Disease Again

Once again People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is making news by again hoping that |foot and mouth| disease finds its way to the United States. This time around its Bruce Friedrich who sent a letter to officials planning the World Dairy Expo to ask them to cancel the event. In the letter, Friedrich reaffirms PETA’s belief that the disease would be a godsend for the animal rights movement in the U.S. As is typical with PETA, Friedrich’s claims are based on lousy logic and misinformation.

According to Friedrich, if animals in the United States came down with foot-and-mouth disease this would spare them from a trip to the slaughter house. In fact U.S. agricultural officials have planned a scorched earth policy for containing a possible outbreak of the disease that would likely make the British reaction seem mild in comparison. Such planning has been kept relatively low key, but a confirmed case of the disease would result in a very thorough and systematic slaughtering of animals in the area of the outbreak to contain the disease.

Friedrich and PETA also seem to be under the impression that a foot-and-mouth outbreak might turn more people into vegetarians. “I suppose if it happens [an outbreak of foot-and-mouth in the United States], we’ll write a massive thank you note because it’ll turn a massive amount of people into vegetarians.”

The immediate result of a serious outbreak would be a rapid increase in the cost of some meat, especially beef. But past disease outbreaks contradict the view that people would then turn to vegetarianism. Even in the UK, where mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth have garnered plenty of negative attention, people seem to prefer switching to meat they perceive as safe and/or cheap rather than become vegetarians.

Tom Thieding, communications director for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation, came closer to the truth when he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “We’re not worried. We know there are nuts out there and PETA confirms that. We don’t get too hung up on anything that PETA says anymore.”

Source:

PETA welcomes foot-and-mouth disease. Meg Jones, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 24, 2001.

Feminists and Free Speech

Writing in National Review, the Hudson Institute’s Stanley Kurtz does a good job of puncturing the anti-free speech views held by many radical feminists, which are now on full display in the controversy over the Independent Women’s Forum newspaper ad.

As Kurtz points out, when University of California-Los Angeles Clothesline Project activist Christie Scott says of that ad that, “I think it was a violent ad, a very hostile ad” or that “the ad is so violent in nature and is presented in such a hostile way,” that she’s simply applying the anti-speech rhetoric of radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon to real world issues.

It is no coincidence that, like MacKinnon herself has often done in the past, Scott and others casually dismiss the First Amendment in ways that used to be reserved for those on the far right. Scott, for example, complained that the Daily Bruin, which ran the IWF ad, claimed that it “was basically justified through a free-speech argument. I feel that’s somewhat cowardly.”

For Kurtz, this latest flap — along with that surrounding the anti-slavery reparations ad that David Horowitz attempted to place in campus newspapers — is yet more proof that the campus speech codes and “authoritarian rants” from feminists and others is have a long-term deleterious effect on the way that college students view freedom and democracy.

Source:

Feminists Against Speech. Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online, May 24, 2001.