Day: May 20, 2002

A few weeks ago I wrote about Zafran Bibi who was convicted of adultery by a Pakistani court and sentenced to death by stoning. The New York Times‘ Seth Mydans recently wrote an in-depth look at Zafran’s fate as well as the status of the sharia law in Pakistan.

Zafran claims that while her husband was serving a jail term for murder, her brother-in-law repeatedly raped her, eventually resulting in a pregnancy. When Zafran reported the rape, she was charged with adultery. All charges against her alleged rapist were dropped due to insufficient evidence, whereas Zafran was tried and convicted of adultery.

Mydans offers a relatively thorough look at Pakistan’s hudood laws that resulted in this result. For example, under the 23-year old set of laws, whether or not Zafran was raped is irrelevant to her own adultery charge. Mydans reports that the laws formally ban “all forms of adultery, whether the offense is committed with or without the consent of the parties.”

So a woman who claims she was raped is by definition admitting that she is guilty of adultery, with the lack of consent being a mere side issue.

Under those same hudood laws, however, it is almost impossible for Zafran or any other woman to make a rape charge against a man stick. The law only allows a charge of rape to proceed against a man if four Muslim men testify to having witnessed the rape. Mydans quotes Rukhshanda Naz who heads up a branch of a women’s rights group known as Aurat as saying,

The proof is totally impossible. If a woman brings a charge of rape, she puts herself in grave danger.

Mydans reports that as many as half of women who report rapes are later charged with committing adultery. As a result, few women make rape accusations. In addition, the laws about rape kick in as soon as a woman hits puberty, leading to girls as young as 12 or 13 being imprisoned for reporting being raped.

Earlier this month a Pakistani court ordered a review of Zafran’s case, but even if her death sentence is eventually vacated, she will still likely spend 10 to 15 years in prison according to Naz.

Commentators can try to paper over it all they like, but there is cultural and political chasm between Western liberal democracies and these illiberal Islamic states.

Source:

In Pakistan, Rape Victims Are the ‘Criminals’. Seth Mydans, The New York Times, May 17, 2002.

The beta toolset for Neverwinter Nights was released over the weekend and it looked pretty impressive until a raging debate was started on Slashdot over the phrasing of the toolset’s EULA. Section 4(b) of the license says,

By distributing or permitting the distribution of any of your Modules, you hereby grant back to INFOGRAMES and BIOWARE an irrevocable royalty-free right to use and distribute them by any means. Infogrames or BIOWARE may at any time and in its sole discretion revoke your right to make your Modules publicly available.

Now the first part — that Infogrames and Bioware would have an “irrevocable” right to redistribute publicly available mods is pretty standard in the EULA’s for these sorts games. Which doesn’t mean that they are right. As people on Slashdot noted, this is like someone who makes a compiler asserting a property interest in programs compiled using that software. Or, Microsoft claiming a property interest in documents created with Word (well, give them a few years there).

What is unusual is Infogrames and Bioware’s assertion that they have a right to revoke the ability of an individual to make his or her modules for the game publicly available. People are always going to want to make content and mods that somebody finds objectionable. For these companies to assert this right is a bit like Microsoft asserting that it has the right to force people it disagrees with to stop using Word.

Software tools are obviously used by individuals who most of us find despicable. I was reading a story the other day about white supremacists using commonly available audio compression schemes available from Real, Microsoft and others to distribute their hateful message. Should those companies include clauses that bar people with certain viewpoints from using their software? That would be an enormous mistake.

Part of the problem here with Neverwinter Nights, though, is the additional intersection of copyright and trademark issues, with Bioware and Infogrames probably relying on lawyers concerned that the companies do not dilute their intellectual property through dilution of same over the Internet.

The controversy did have on positive effect — Bioware said that it would have its lawyers reexamine the EULA and respond sometime later this week.