This week’s California Supreme Court Ruling to uphold the voters’ recent decision to bake discrimination into the Constitution was tragic, though it was made for reasons that have little to do with the Supremes’ actual position on gay marriage.
That’s OK. Now we’ve got two years to ramp up a properly prepared campaign for the 2010 elections, in which we can upend this topsy turvy, nonsensical situation and restore reason and compassion to our state.
Courage Campaign has launched a pledge campaign to overturn Prop 8 by 2010. It may take all we can muster to turn this around, but it’s the duty of every person who considers themselves a fair, honest human being with a basic, non-negotiable conviction in basic equal rights. Please join us.
This excellent Fidelity video is already starting to air on TV across the state:
In a case with far-reaching implications for the widespread practice of automated aggregation of headlines and ledes via RSS, GateHouse Media has, for the most part, won its case against the New York Times, who owns Boston.com, who in turn run a handful of community web sites. Those community sites were providing added value to their readers in the form of linked headlines, pointing to resources at community publications run by GateHouse. The practice of linked headline exchange is healthy for the web, useful for readers, and helpful for resource-starved community publications. However, for reasons that are still not clear (to me), GateHouse felt that the practice amounted to theft, even though the Boston.com sites were publishing the RSS feeds to begin with.
Trouble is, RSS feeds don’t come with Terms of Use. Is a publicly available feed meant purely for consumption by an individual, and not by other sites? After all, the web site you’re reading now is publicly available, but that doesn’t mean you’re free to reproduce it elsewhere. The common assumption is that a site wouldn’t publish an RSS feed if it didn’t want that feed to be re-used elsewhere. And that’s the assumption GateHouse is challenging.
Let’s be clear – this is not a scraping case (scraping is the process of writing tools to grab content from web pages automatically when an RSS feed is not available). Boston.com was simply utilizing the content GateHouse provided as a feed. I would agree that scraping is “theft-like” in a way that RSS is not, but that’s not relevant here.
In a weird footnote to all of this, GateHouse initially claimed that Boston.com was trying to work around technical measures they had put in place to prevent copying of their material. Those “technical measures” amounted to JavaScript in its web pages, but boston.com was of course not scraping the site — they were merely taking advantage of the RSS feeds freely provided by GateHouse. In other words, they were putting their “technical measures” in their web pages, not in their feed distribution mechanism, missing the point entirely.
GateHouse seems primarily concerned with the distinction between automated insertion of headlines and ledes (e.g. via RSS embeds) vs. the “human effort” required to quote a few grafs in a story body. Personally, I don’t see how the two are materially different, or how one method would affect GateHouse publications more negatively or positively than the other. If anything, now that GateHouse has gotten its way, they’re sure to receive less traffic.
The result is that Boston.com has been forced to stop using GateHouse RSS feeds to automatically populate community sites with local content. If cases like this hold sway, there will soon be a burden on every site interested in embedding external RSS feeds to find out whether it’s OK with each publisher first.
It was a compromise settlement, as most are, but one can not help but feel that GateHouse just managed to bully one of the largest and most prestigious new organizations in the world.
Also:
The frustrating thing about settlements, such as this one, is that they do not become case law and have no bearing on future cases. If and when this kind of dispute arises again, we will be starting over from square one.
I’m trying to figure out who benefits from this decision… and I honestly can’t. GateHouse loses. Boston.com loses. Community web sites with limited resources lose. And readers lose. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.
With four million people crowded into D.C. for today’s inauguration, open house at the White House is out of the question — but it wasn’t always. SF Chronicle summarizes highlights from inaugurations past, including Andrew Jackson’s 1829 public melee’ :
1829: Andrew Jackson, “the People’s President,” holds an open house. About 20,000 people trample mud and horse manure into the White House, destroy rugs, break satin-covered chairs, smash crystal and china, and spill liquor. Fights break out, women faint and Jackson has to escape through a window. Order is restored when barrels of whiskey are placed on the South Lawn, drawing the crowd outside.
I bet barrels of free gubmint whiskey would still be effective as a crowd control technique. And more fun than rubber bullets.
What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor. –The West Wing
Always impressed by the clarity and perspective of copyright law professor Larry Lessig. His video explication of reasons to vote No on 8 is worth five minutes of your time.
As much as we’re all enjoying the endless Obama/McCain character assassination circus, there are other important things to think about before November 4.
Here in California, one of the most important propositions in state history is on the ballot — Proposition 8 — which aims to enshrine bigotry in our state constitution, so that it can never be challenged again. It was written by people who so cherish their bigotry, and who so fear fairness, that they want to be able to stop thinking about it.
In one corner, people who believe marriage is a contract between a man and a woman, who often intend to create a family.
In the other corner, people who believe marriage is a contract between two people, who often intend to create a family.
It all comes down to “a man and a woman,” and an irrational reluctance to accept that marriage can be anything but.
There are no non-religious arguments against gay marriage. And religion has no place in government. If you support Prop. 8, then you support the idea that tradition and religion — not reason — should be enshrined and enforced by government. Even though our Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and says nothing about tradition.
Let me be blunt: If you don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry, you’re a bigot. And your attempt to amend the Constitution is an attempt to inject religion into politics. Worse, it’s an attempt to make unfairness into law.
If you’re a Republican, you supposedly believe in small government. That means the government stays out of people’s business, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody. Gay marriage doesn’t hurt anybody. Therefore, if you’re a Republican, you should oppose Proposition 8.
If you’re a human, you probably believe government should be fair at the most basic levels. Not discriminating on sexual preference counts as “fair at the most basic level.” Therefore, if you’re a human, you should vote NO on Proposition 8.
If you don’t want to help set a precedent that government has a business in controlling individual freedoms that have no ill effect on society, then you should vote NO on Proposition 8.
Pretty simple, really.
Maybe this song from a long-ago Simpsons episode will help to illuminate:
Four or five years ago, one would be branded a radical liberal even to suggest that Bush and his administration were acting illegally and committing war crimes, and that they should be held accountable in an international court of law. Now that the International Red Cross has delivered its report to the CIA stating categorically that the U.S. has conducted a program of torture and that torture is illegal, the remaining question is “Will these administrators be punished, or not? And if not, why not?” So many analysts pose the question as if it’s a close question… but it’s not.
It’s simple: Are we guided by rule of law, or aren’t we?
Short version: YouTube has removed one of my videos from the service with no explanation. I suspect politics.
Long version: A couple of years ago, while digitizing old 8mm and Super 8 film for my family, came across footage my father had shot on board the Coast Guard Cutter Chautauqua in 1957 — footage of a hazing ritual that sailors have gone through for centuries on their first crossing of the International Date Line or Equator. I posted the video on YouTube, and it’s been viewed more than 25,000 times since then.
A few weeks ago, received a note from a reader saying that the YouTube video had been removed for “Violation of Terms of Service.” Since the video is 100% original and involves no copyright violation of any kind, I immediately contacted YouTube, asking for an explanation. I’ve sent two follow-up messages in the past two weeks, but have yet to receive a response from the service.
There was another possibility. E! Entertainment contacted me a year ago, saying that they were preparing a documentary feature on hazing rituals, and asked for permission to reproduce the footage on TV. With Dad’s permission, I signed and faxed them an agreement, allowing them to do so. Wondered whether fine print in the agreement had given E! any exclusive rights, so looked over the contract. Didn’t appear so, but called them to be sure; they assured me that they had had no involvement whatsoever in the YouTube takedown, and that I retained the rights to the footage.
So the likeliest explanation is that the video was flagged by a YouTube user as being inappropriate, and YouTube responded by removing the video without questioning/viewing/thinking. But what exactly is it about the video that violates their terms of service? Maybe it reflects poorly on the military. Maybe it shows how weird human beings can be to each other. But I doubt the YouTube EULA prohibits display of seamen having their faces smeared in used engine oil, crawling through troughs of garbage, and being sprayed down with fire hoses.
At this point it’s a mystery. I’ve given up waiting for YouTube to respond to my inquiries, and have re-posted the video on Vimeo (amazing UI!). Here it is:
In November, when we vote for the president, there will be a ballot initiative in California in which we will be able to vote on whether or not to amend the California Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. I think it’s ironic that on the same ballot I will be able to vote for the first black president of the United States, which represents an expansion of civil rights, as well as a ban on same-sex marriage, which represents a contraction of civil rights. Nonetheless, it is heartening to know that for at least 20 weeks I will be an equal resident in California.
I don’t quite agree that having a black presidential candidate represents “an expansion of civil rights” (that right has been present for decades, though the social fabric to make it a practical reality has not been), but I see what he’s saying, and it does underline the “two steps forward, one step back” pattern of social progress.
By the way, if anyone reading this can posit a rational (i.e. non-religious) argument against gay marriage, please post it here — I’d love to hear it.
