Sarah Palin vs PETA

I despise Sarah Palin as much as the next sane person. Well, I would imagine that John McCain has stronger feelings about her, but that’s another story. I agree that she should be beaten into dust by the marketplace of ideas – since she has very little, if anything, to sell in that marketplace.

Nevertheless, watching her fight with PETA is sorta like watching two assholes fight in a bar. You ever been in a bar where two assholes, both of whom could use a beat down, wind up fighting with each other? As long as you stay out of the way, everyone wins. They both get a beating of some sorts, and perhaps one or both go to jail. Then you go on with your night, laugh your ass off, drink too much, slump into a cab, get home and laugh your ass off some more. Meanwhile, the assholes get stitches and bail bondsmen in their lives.

Link (The Legal Satyricon)

I find this deeply offensive

So we just had a story about a 19-year-old guy being arrested for making a (bad) joke tweet about an out of control garbage truck. The Northumbria police who arrested Ross Loraine are insisting that the bad joke was a “malicious communication” under The Communications Act. Many people have been calling out this rather ridiculous attack on free speech, but police in Scotland seem to be doubling down. They just sent out the following tweet:

View post on imgur.com

Link (Techdirt)

How Copyright Forced A Filmmaker To Rewrite Martin Luther King’s Historic Words

Among the most powerful moments of Selma, the new film about the march Martin Luther King, Jr. led in 1965 in support of voting rights for African Americans, are the speeches, sermons, and eulogies King delivered during that tumultuous period. However, the speeches performed by actor David Oyelowo in the film do not contain the actual words spoken by King. This is because the King estate would not license the copyright in the speeches to filmmaker Ava DuVernay. Thus, the King estate’s aggressive stance on copyright has literally forced the re-writing of history.

According to the Washington Post, the King estate licensed the film rights to King’s speeches to DreamWorks, with Steven Spielberg producing any resulting films. DuVernay said that she never even asked for the rights to King’s speeches “because we knew those rights are already gone, they’re with Spielberg.” She added that she knew that there were strings attached to the rights: “with those rights came a certain collaboration.” In other words, the King estate uses its control over the copyright to control how King is portrayed. The Post article suggests that this control has prevented the making of a feature film about King

Link (Techdirt)

Indian Government Orders 32 Web Sites Blocked, Including GitHub, Archive.Org, Pastebin, DailyMotion And Vimeo

“It now appears that the blocks are being carried out on the instructions of [India’s] DoT (Department of Telecom). The telecom body reportedly issued a notification regarding the same on December 17. A screenshot of the circular has been posted on Twitter by Pranesh Prakash. The notification mentions that 32 URLs including Pastebin, video sharing sites Vimeo and DailyMotion, Internet archive site archive.org and Github.com( a web-based software code repository), have been blocked under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. DoT has also asked ISPs to submit compliance reports. However, we have not been able to verify the authenticity of the circular.”

Link (Techdirt)

When The FISA Court Rejects A Surveillance Request, The FBI Just Issues A National Security Letter Instead

“We considered the Section 215 request for [REDACTED] discussed earlier in this report at pages 33 to 34 to be a noteworthy item. In this case, the FISA Court had twice declined to approve a Section 215 application based on First Amendment Concerns. However, the FBI subsequently issued NSLs for information [REDACTED] even though the statute authorizing the NSLs contained the same First Amendment restriction as Section 215 and the ECs authorizing the NSLs relied on the same facts contained in the Section 215 applicants…”

In other words, the FBI had a neat way to get around a rare FISA Court rejection: just issue an NSL and ignore the First Amendment concerns.

Link (Techdirt)

 

Talos Principle Traps Pirating Gamers in An Elevator

Every day hundreds of thousands of games are downloaded from various torrent sites. While it can be quite a challenge to get a pirated game working, most will play just fine.

The same is true for Croteam’s latest release The Talos Principle. A few days ago a pirated copy of the puzzle title surfaced online which initially appeared to work as a regular game.

However, the fun didn’t last long as the developers had previously embedded a feature that traps free-riding pirates in a virtual elevator.

(…)

Croteam acknowledged the feature on social media by retweeting a mention of the puzzled Steam user, which must have been good for a few laughs among the developers.

Even more so, it probably led to a few extra sales as well. Apparently some pirates were hooked enough to get a legit copy of the game on Steam, to continue playing without any hassles.

“I hit the bug where the elevators stopped working correctly, so I bought the game on Steam and was able to import my save,” an anonymous user wrote on a popular torrent site, adding that it’s been worth the money.

Link (Torrentfreak)