Occasional anti-hero of these pages Lazarus Galloway has been in the news this week for suing, or threatening to sue, the NUS for libel. Apparently some spotty would-be Labour MP from the NUS has described Galloway as a "rape denier".
Strictly speaking, the person doing the denying would be Julian Assange, who has consistently claimed to be innocent of the charges made against him by two women by Sweden. Galloway managed to get himself in trouble by claiming that these charges themselves, if proven, did not amount to rape. (Leave aside for a moment the considerable issue of whether they could be proven to a reasonable legal standard of certainty.)
Whatever Assange's likelihood of successful prosecution, however, Galloway clearly fancies his chances of suing the NUS. His record on legal actions is, of course, enviable, having relieved The Daily Telegraph of a considerable sum and agreed out-of-court settlements with The Christian Science Monitor (libel) and The News of the World (phone hacking). Libelling Galloway is like putting Brer Rabbit in the briar patch.
In any case, the "rape denier" charge is a bizarre one. Galloway wasn't denying that rape takes place, or that rapists should be prosecuted & punished. If the model for this form of deplorable behaviour is - as seems likely - Holocaust denial, then the pattern fits very poorly. Holocaust deniers - in the face (it needs hardly be laboured) of overwhelming evidence to the contrary - assert that the systematic execution of Jews by Nazis never happened. Galloway was claiming that if it happened as reported, it wasn't a crime.
(The rape, that is.)
One thing is nevertheless clear from all this. If Assange did rape two women in Sweden, then his crime was very felicitous indeed to his opponents, since it is a crime which very few people (and not even someone as outspoken as George Galloway) will defend.
Maybe the U. S. government is just that lucky.
It's a strange wind, though, that brings windfalls to both the U..S. administration and George Galloway.
Showing posts with label Wikileaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wikileaks. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
An Inactivist Writes ...
As though Sordel needed an excuse to down tools and interrupt the all-too terminable process of binding in nutshells: tomorrow will see a pointed not-working to rule as I join the masses doing precisely nothing to prevent the passage of a U.S. law.
Wednesday 18th January sees a web-wide protest against two pieces of legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These laws, if passed, will give copyright holders wide powers to close or block online sites holding copyright material. Moreover, they will make sites such as YouTube and (for that matter) Blogger responsible for hosting material that infringes copyright. They will also extend the U.S. legal position on copyright throughout the world by forcing U.S. companies (such as PayPal) not to trade with sites subject to allegations of copyright infringement.
The provisions of SOPA are wide-ranging, and cannot be reduced to the most obvious infractions, such as a website set up to stream pre-release copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. To take one example, if one assumes that the material published by Wikileaks was the intellectual property of the U.S. government, then it would be the case that Google could be placed under an injunction preventing it from linking to Wikileaks as part of a web search.
Moreover, the holder of the intellectual property does not need to prove an infringement; it merely needs to notify third parties of the infringement. A hosting service would have to withdraw all services from Wikileaks immediately once notified by the complainant and - if it resumed those services on the basis of a satisfactory counter-notice from Wikileaks - it would itself be vulnerable to legal action on the part of the complainant.
Moreover, if Google (for example) decided that it were safer to comply with the complaint and remove the Wikileaks site from its engine, it would be immune from action by Wikileaks even if the complaint were never upheld by any court. Voluntary suspension of services is specifically defended by the law, but there is no protection for a company that continues to extend services to a site, even if that site has provided reasonable evidence that it is not infringing copyright.
Moreover, what if the site, rather than being Wikileaks, were to be, say, a British newspaper reporting a U.S. government leak?
Effectively, then, SOPA enables limitless penalties to be levied upon any site whatsoever without the complaining party ever winning a legal action. Most of the legal liability falls not upon the complainant or even on the alleged copyright violator: it falls instead upon the companies that provide points of access to internet content.
(It would, by the way, become a civil crime knowingly to make a claim of intellectual property against a site where no such claim existed, but then the site owner would require the means and the evidence to sue the complainant, and the complainant would have to be wealthy enough to make such a suit viable.)
Sordel's opposition to SOPA is staunch but, in the interests of full disclosure, I do source a large number of my factoids from Wikipedia, which is leading the protest and will be closed tomorrow. Anyone seeking to conclude that the drawing down of Nutbinding shutters makes a virtue of a necessity would, of course, be quite quite wrong.
Wednesday 18th January sees a web-wide protest against two pieces of legislation: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These laws, if passed, will give copyright holders wide powers to close or block online sites holding copyright material. Moreover, they will make sites such as YouTube and (for that matter) Blogger responsible for hosting material that infringes copyright. They will also extend the U.S. legal position on copyright throughout the world by forcing U.S. companies (such as PayPal) not to trade with sites subject to allegations of copyright infringement.
The provisions of SOPA are wide-ranging, and cannot be reduced to the most obvious infractions, such as a website set up to stream pre-release copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. To take one example, if one assumes that the material published by Wikileaks was the intellectual property of the U.S. government, then it would be the case that Google could be placed under an injunction preventing it from linking to Wikileaks as part of a web search.
Moreover, the holder of the intellectual property does not need to prove an infringement; it merely needs to notify third parties of the infringement. A hosting service would have to withdraw all services from Wikileaks immediately once notified by the complainant and - if it resumed those services on the basis of a satisfactory counter-notice from Wikileaks - it would itself be vulnerable to legal action on the part of the complainant.
Moreover, if Google (for example) decided that it were safer to comply with the complaint and remove the Wikileaks site from its engine, it would be immune from action by Wikileaks even if the complaint were never upheld by any court. Voluntary suspension of services is specifically defended by the law, but there is no protection for a company that continues to extend services to a site, even if that site has provided reasonable evidence that it is not infringing copyright.
Moreover, what if the site, rather than being Wikileaks, were to be, say, a British newspaper reporting a U.S. government leak?
Effectively, then, SOPA enables limitless penalties to be levied upon any site whatsoever without the complaining party ever winning a legal action. Most of the legal liability falls not upon the complainant or even on the alleged copyright violator: it falls instead upon the companies that provide points of access to internet content.
(It would, by the way, become a civil crime knowingly to make a claim of intellectual property against a site where no such claim existed, but then the site owner would require the means and the evidence to sue the complainant, and the complainant would have to be wealthy enough to make such a suit viable.)
Sordel's opposition to SOPA is staunch but, in the interests of full disclosure, I do source a large number of my factoids from Wikipedia, which is leading the protest and will be closed tomorrow. Anyone seeking to conclude that the drawing down of Nutbinding shutters makes a virtue of a necessity would, of course, be quite quite wrong.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
A Ferrero Rocher Crisis
In the glamorous world of international diplomacy, a posting to Kyrgyzstan is, Sordel would guess, not the most contested of vacancies. Still, ambassador is ambassador, and Tatiana Gfoeller-Volkoff was presumably delighted when she was appointed by President George W. Bush as part of his initiative to get "all things that are difficult to spell" into the same file. Shortly after her arrival, she attended a brunch in the capitol, Bishkek (you knew that, right?), little guessing that her moment of Destiny had arrived.
When one is born with the accurate transcription of a sneeze where a surname should be, one has to try that little bit harder, so it is hardly surprising that Gfoeller attempted to spice up her reports back to the State Department: not least when the opportunity arose to venture a sketch of Prince Andrew. What is remarkable about this storm in a teacup, however, is not that she took exception to him, but that she took exception to things which seems so very unexceptional.
Among the comments recorded are his declaration that the investigation into Britain's Al-Yamama deal with Saudi-Arabia was a bad thing. The British government clearly thought so too, since it intervened to prevent the investigation. The Duke of York was hardly off-message in voicing his criticism.
Other titbits thought worthwhile for addition to the State Department's file include the Prince's referring to the current adventure in Central Asia as "The Great Game" which, one would have thought, is neither controversial nor novel.
And that the U.S. has no sense of Geography, which - given that it blithely invaded two countries which together have an area of over a million square kilometres using an army more suited in size to the occupation of Cornwall - is an assertion voiced and proven in the space of two sentences.
So the question that arises is not whether Prince Andrew has demonstrated a shocking lack of delicacy, but whether the Diplomatic Corps is really worth its cost if the intelligence data that it is providing is really of this extraordinarily low quality. It seems that the U.S. is gloating over the possession of a hoard of international secrets that even Hello magazine would consign unpublished to the editorial shredder.
As for Prince Andrew ... well, given that he is the former husband of Sarah, Duchess of York, he must be used to public revelations a good deal more embarrassing than these.
When one is born with the accurate transcription of a sneeze where a surname should be, one has to try that little bit harder, so it is hardly surprising that Gfoeller attempted to spice up her reports back to the State Department: not least when the opportunity arose to venture a sketch of Prince Andrew. What is remarkable about this storm in a teacup, however, is not that she took exception to him, but that she took exception to things which seems so very unexceptional.
Among the comments recorded are his declaration that the investigation into Britain's Al-Yamama deal with Saudi-Arabia was a bad thing. The British government clearly thought so too, since it intervened to prevent the investigation. The Duke of York was hardly off-message in voicing his criticism.
Other titbits thought worthwhile for addition to the State Department's file include the Prince's referring to the current adventure in Central Asia as "The Great Game" which, one would have thought, is neither controversial nor novel.
And that the U.S. has no sense of Geography, which - given that it blithely invaded two countries which together have an area of over a million square kilometres using an army more suited in size to the occupation of Cornwall - is an assertion voiced and proven in the space of two sentences.
So the question that arises is not whether Prince Andrew has demonstrated a shocking lack of delicacy, but whether the Diplomatic Corps is really worth its cost if the intelligence data that it is providing is really of this extraordinarily low quality. It seems that the U.S. is gloating over the possession of a hoard of international secrets that even Hello magazine would consign unpublished to the editorial shredder.
As for Prince Andrew ... well, given that he is the former husband of Sarah, Duchess of York, he must be used to public revelations a good deal more embarrassing than these.
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