Day: September 3, 2002

Avoid Deadbeat Parent Problems by Enforcing Visitation Orders/Joint Physical Custody

The Christian Science Monitor’s Marilyn Gardner wrote an interesting article about ‘deadbeat’ dads that acknowledged the problem with parents failing to pay child support but balanced it with a look at the obstacles that stand in the way of noncustodial fathers and mothers.

One of the interesting statistics Gardner cites is how the likelihood of a parent failing to pay child support increases when the noncustodial parent’s ability to visit the child is cut off by the custodial parent. Gardner writes,

Some fathers want an end to what appears to be a double standard in the legal system.

“They throw fathers in jail for not paying support,” [Fathers’ Rights Foundation founder Ronald] Isaacs said. “But they don’t throw mothers in jail for denying visitation. If the courts would enforce visitation orders with the same vigor that they enforce child support, they would get a lot more money than they do by going after these few people.”

As Gardner notes, custodial parents sometimes have what they believe are very good reasons to violate court-ordered visitation. But those sorts of issues should be addressed by independent mediators and/or the courts, not the custodial parent. Courts should enforce visitation orders just as they enforce child support and other orders.

Going even further, courts should have a presumption of joint physical custody. Joint legal custody is already common, and several states have a presumption of joint legal custody. With joint physical custody, the child spends time living with both parents on an agreed upon schedule, typically with the child residing with one parent 70 percent of the time and with the other parent 30 percent of the time (50/50 arrangements are also common). This keeps both parents active in the life of the children.

Now obviously there are many circumstances in which joint physical custody is simply not possible or feasible, but courts should presume joint physical custody unless and until circumstances of the individual case suggest that a different arrangement would be better for the children involved.

Source:

Making ‘deadbeat’ parents a thing of the past. Marilyn Gardner, Christian Science Monitor, August 28, 2002.

Hollywood vs. the Digital Hub

A few weeks ago Cory Doctorow wrote an article noting that a) computer applications are converging to the point where every form of media people interact with will soon be entirely digital, creating all sorts of opportunities for interesting new applications (what Doctorow calls the digital hub) and b) that Hollywood is actively trying to kill this sort of digital hub before it becomes widespread and unstoppable.

This effort is led by the Broadcast Production Discussion Group (BPDG) which has a proposal to build copy protection in at the hardware level in all new digital devices that is very likely to be adopted as an FCC regulation soon. As Doctorow notes,

Hollywood wants to be sure that you can’t do anything with video form TV or cable without the film studios’ permission. So while you may want to be able to stick a DVD full of home movies into your Mac and edit a five minute short for your distant relatives to download from you iDisk, Hollywood wants to be sure you won’t be able to do the same with that episode of Buffy you recorded from the TV. When your distant relatives download your home movies to their computers and burn them to DVD, Hollywood wants to be sure that what they’re burning is really a home movie and not a Law & Order episode that slipped through the cracks and made it onto a Web site.

. . .

How can this be accomplished? . . . absent any way to achieve Hollywood-grade perfect control over the technology’s use, the BPDG simply won’t let it come into being. It will be illegal to manufacture this device.

I suspect that what will ultimately kill BPDG is that it will result in devices that consumers hate to use. Doctorow notes that there was literally no opposition to the BPDG proposal from computer manufacturers. But when people refuse to buy their digital hub-style products because of all the limitations, that will all change.

CNET’s Joe Wilcox looks at digital entertainment computers that Microsoft and HP are working on — computers which have restriction after restriction to accommodate Hollywood. For example, these machines include a digital video recorder, but they encode the recorded video such that it can be played only the machine that created it.

Wilcox quotes analyst Toni Duboise saying,

You have to applaud their efforts (on copyright protection). But this is not a mainstream product, particularly if you’re going to limit it where consumers are not going to be able to share that digital media between their DVD players and other devices. To take that (copying) flexibility away from consumers is a big mistake. There’s no way consumers are going to like this proprietary way of doing business.

People will expect their computers to give them exactly the sort of experience they’ve come to expect with analog devices such as VCRs and cassette recorders. When they find out that Hollywood has dictated otherwise, they will abandon the market for such digital convergence devices in droves. When that happens, I don’t think you’ll have technology companies or Members of Congress as positive about the bounty of hardware-level copy protection anymore.

Sources:

New ‘entertainment’ PCs restrict copying . Joe Wilcox, CNet, September 3, 2002.

Can the digital hub survive Hollywood? Cory Doctorow, TidBITS#642, August 12, 2002.

When Hypocritical News Corp. Executives Attack

Okay I’m a little late to the party here, but a couple weeks ago News Corp. president Peter Chernin lashed out at the Internet at a conference sponsored by the Progress & Freedom Foundation. Chernin said,

The vast potential of broadband has so far benefited nobody as clearly as it’s benefited downloaders of pornography and pirates of digital content.

. . .

The prevalence of pornographic Web sites and e-mails is a lot more than an insult to common decency. It’s an increasing reason to keep kids and families off of the Internet. And these are only part of the virtual logjam of valueless clutter.

Huh? Has Chernin ever actually watched Fox Television, which News Corp. owns? What, we need to get rid of all the porn and piracy so we can have “Who Wants To Marry a Millionaire: The Broadband Internet Edition”? Or “When Poorly Designed Web Sites Attack”?

To see Chernin criticizing the poor taste of Internet content is a bit like Ted Kaczynski complaining how violent American schools have become.

Source:

Media chief decries Net’s moral fiber. Declan McCullagh, CNET News.Com, August 21, 2002.

Why Michigan Doesn’t Have a Death Penalty

Michigan, where I live, does not have capital punishment and was one of the first government’s in the world to ban capital punishment for all crimes except treason (the state later abolished the potential treason punishment as well). And a story in The New York Times illustrates why — a Detroit man was just released after spending more than 17 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit.

Eddie Joe Lloyd was convicted of the 1984 rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl and the evidence at his trial was more than enough to convict him. After all, the jury got to hear an audiotape of a detailed confession that Lloyd gave to police (he also signed a written confession) and Lloyd knew details about the crime not released to the public.

Lloyd became a suspect in the case when he wrote to police from the mental hospital where he had been committed asking to see the case file for the murder of the young girl. In his letter, Lloyd mentioned that the girl had been sexually assaulted with a green bottle. That was in fact correct, but it was a detail the police had not made public.

Police interviewed him three times, made the audiotape of his confession, and Lloyd was convicted. But Lloyd maintains that he only made the confession as part of an effort to trip up the real killer. Lloyd’s mental illness apparently led him to confess to the crime out of some bizarre view that by doing so he would help capture the real killer.

DNA tests on both that bottle and on the underwear used to strangle the victim showed that Lloyd was not the killer and he was released after prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed that his conviction should be overturned.

After he was released, Lloyd said,

I consider myself lucky. Seventeen years? If Michigan had the death penalty, I would have been through, the angels would have sung a long time ago.

Michigan originally banned capital punishment after the wrongful execution of a man in the early 19th century. Even if it is acceptable for the state to kill its own citizens in cold blood (which I firmly maintain it is not), the risk of executing innocent individuals is an intolerable risk.

Source:

Man freed after DNA clears him of murder. Jodi Wilgoren, The New York Times, August 27, 2002.

Why Do Few Parents Exercise Right to Move Children to Better Schools?

In January, George W. Bush signed an education act which, among other things, gives parents the right to move their children out of a failing public school and into a better one within the same school ssytem. The New York Times recently ran a story noting that, so far, few parents seem to be taking advantage of this option.

The Times offered an interesting quote from Ira Scwartz, a coordinator with the New York State Education Department, who opines that,

In some cases, parents don’t believe the choices they’re offered rerpesent a significant improvement. They make a judgment that there’s likely to be better services avaiable een as the school may be closing for poor performance.

My wife and I faced this choice in finding a kindergarten for my daughter. The public school we were assigned to by the district was simply atrocious — the reading and math scores of students going through the school were among the lowest in the state.

On the other hand, other schools in the district weren’t much better. We were finally able to get her transferred to the one school that was doing well.

Otherwise we would have likely abandoned the school district for private schools — as several of our neighbors have already done. And that’s probably the ultimate reason few parents are taking advantage of this program. Those parents dissatisfied with their schools have likely either worked out alternate arrangements already or abandoned the public school district outright or there simply are no good choices.

This is why vouchers are so important to give parents a real choice rather than the option of simply sending their children from one school to another in a failing district.

Source:

Few exercise new right to leave failing schools. Diana Jean Schemo, The New York Tiems, August 27, 2002.