Via Boing Boing, some shocking news:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

And from an October 13, 2009 statement by Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge, a group that received copies of the text:

While we appreciate USTR's recognition that increased participation is important, and its efforts in that regard, this process is still miles away from anything approaching real, public transparency. In terms of openness, a lot of the tension between what USTR says it wants to do and what has been done so far seems to come from the characterization of ACTA as a trade agreement, when its aims seem considerably broader than that. If we're going to be seeing a new kind of trade agreement that more broadly affects policy and legal interpretation, we're going to need a new, more open kind of process that lets the public see what agenda its government is pushing.

Nothing makes me angrier than corporations using the U.S. government for their own private security force - and the feds happily cooperating. I suppose we'll now require that copiers check copyrights every time someone makes a copy?

The Founding Fathers wanted copyrights that lasted no longer than 10 years. This isn't how America is supposed to be - and we have no right to demand it of everyone else, unless we're finally admitting we're more interested in protecting plantation corporate profits than we are in being a nation of laws.

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(Welcome to California!)

With the current state of eternal/ongoing financial crisis in California, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit the day where things went south. On June 8, 1978; the day after the election and the "voters revolt", California was poised to go from budget surplus to bankruptcy in a very short time.

Gov. Brown: “The message is, that the Property Tax must be sharply curtailed and that government spending, wherever it is, must be held in check. We must look forward to lean and frugal budgets.”

Lots of people forget just how this thing got started, since it was 31 years ago - time has a tendency to cloud things over, particularly events that seemed like a good idea at the time, but over the long haul just spelled disaster.

So in case you were wondering . . .

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Howard Kurtz is still playing water carrier for the Bush administration and their WMD lies used to justify invading Iraq and when called out for it by Daniel Ellsberg who says he'll name names as to who in the Bush administration knew better what does he do? Why try to change the subject of course!

Ellsberg is the subject of a new documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers which debuts this week in New York, Los Angeles and at the Toronto Film Festival.

KURTZ: Do you think that the Obama administration is getting as much pressure from the press as it should, particularly compared to previous administrations, say the Bush administration?

ELLSBERG: None. No administration has gotten the pressure that it should from the press on this point. We got into Iraq with as much deceptions as occurred in Vietnam, a generation earlier. A performance by the press no better than we saw of pressing behind the lies of the administration than we got during the Johnson administration when I was in; nor did we get a single person within the administration, the Bush administration now, who saw that the adventure into Iraq was going to hurt our counter-terrorism efforts, hurt our security, and was violating the Constitution in terms of treaties. Another example would be treaties on torture and our domestic laws on torture. People who saw that clearly, not one of them leaked to Congress, or to the press.

(CROSS TALK)

KURTZ: Obviously, there were conflicting opinions and conflicting evidence, for example on WMDs. But let me come back to this.

ELLSBERG: No, pardon me.

KURTZ: Go ahead.

ELLSBERG: When it came to lying -- when it came to lying about the nature of the evidence that the evidence was unequivocal, that was as much of a lie as saying that evidence of the attack on August 4th, on our destroyers, was unequivocal. Yes, there was --

KURTZ: You're comparing the Bush's building of the case to go to war in Iraq, with Lyndon Johnson's Tonkin Gulf war incident, just to be clear.

ELLSBERG: I am, indeed. It's exactly the same in the performance not only by the president, but by all of the people who knew that it was a disaster. And I could name names there, if you want.

Continue reading »

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(Capability Brown - GREAT singles. But albums . . . . well . . .)

Capability Brown were one of those bands who had all the elements of being great. Amazing vocal harmonies, good instrumental licks, great up-and-coming label (Charisma came about as the brainchild of former manager of the bands Creation, Bonzo Dog and The Nice Tony Stratton-Smith) with lots of positive Press. And Capability Brown had a couple of great singles, like this one "Windfall".

But when it came to putting an album together, that was another story. The material was just bland and not well produced. And that spelled disaster for anyone trying at the high-stakes rock n' roll game and perplexity for reviewers who were anticipating their albums, based on the positive reaction to their singles.

Like I said, the singles were another story - and "Windfall" was everything the albums weren't. Capability Brown is largely forgotten now. their first album never issued on CD and their second album issued briefly on CD in Japan and the singles only issued as part of anniversary compilation in 1973. By that time the band had split and Charisma was reaping the benefits of Genesis.