A Google search for "George Galloway demagogue" yields nearly fifty thousand hits (probably, after today, more) which is hardly surprising. Demagogue is generally the term of abuse hurled at politicians in lieu of more openly mocking the people who vote for them.
Sordel is, as regular reader of these pages will know, thoroughly disaffected with the democratic system of government, but it has its moments, and last night's ringing endorsement of Galloway by the electors of Bradford West was one of them. Rather than celebrate this vindication of a system that most people regard as an unequivocal good thing, however, many commentators will conclude that Galloway was elected because most of the people voting were too stupid or gullible to recognise a scoundrel when he stood before them demanding their voices. Unable to say this openly, for fear that their implicitly racist position will be seen for what it is, they use the word demagogue.
Labour Blogger Mark Ferguson nicely epitomises this view: "Voter ID and anti-Tory campaigning was, on this occasion, insufficient up against the onslaught of demagoguery."
The Times today - covering the event as though it were a massive electoral upset and smack in the face for Ed Miliband - gave a brief summary of Galloway's career taking in, as highlights, his deselection as a Labour MP in 1988 for admitting to sexual carryings-on while in Greece (surely the most bizarre career-threatening scandal ever); his support for Saddam Hussein; his expulsion from the Labour Party for opposing the war in Iraq; his defeat in the Poplar & Limehouse constituency in 2010; and, his subsequent failure to win a seat in the Scottish Parliament. "His credibility as a serious political figure appeared to have been finished by his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, where he was shown pretending to lap milk like a cat from the hands of the actress Rula Lenska."
The Times's account at no point suggests that the voters would have had a good reason to vote for Galloway; nor does it provide any analysis of the background to a victory in which Galloway got more than twice the votes cast for his Labour opponent and 60% of the overall vote.
So, let's do it for them. (I have laboured for several minutes on Wikipedia to bring you this special report.)
The Bradford West election was precipitated by the fact that the previous MP, Marsha Singh, stepped down through ill health. The Labour candidate was Imran Hussein, a former Labour councillor, who announced that he would not attend hustings with other candidates. (Not that Sordel would like to do battle with Galloway, but it's hardly the act of a political lion to run away.) Galloway's campaign was run by the defecting Labour campaign manager who had previously overseen Marsha Singh's victory.
All was clearly not well in the Labour camp.
Having inherited the Labour political machine, Galloway was in a strong position to mobilise popular sentiment. When his campaign manager was helping Labour, this was doubtless called "mustering grass-roots support", but now that he was helping RESPECT it became the "onslaught of demagoguery".
RESPECT has had a troubled few years due to a split between the Galloway faction and the Socialist Workers Party faction within what is a fairly small political organisation. Nevertheless, the core of its policies are focused on social values that might reasonably resonate with any voter: the rights of refugees and immigrants; redistributive taxation; an increase in the minimum wage; and implacable opposition to military adventuring.
On the face of it, then, Bradford voters would be making a rational and broadly self-interested decision to elect George Galloway as their MP. Regarding them as having been hoodwinked is an understandable slur on Galloway himself by his political opponents, but a revealing glimpse of their true estimation of the value of "democracy".
Friday, March 30, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Dining With The Tax-Collectors
One of the things that her Majesty's Government has recently been banging on about is what a terrible thing it is to avoid tax "aggressively".
(I'm not sure how much aggression goes into that, to be honest: most individuals with high net worth would delegate the job of cutting tax payments to their accountants, who are not typically of the attack-dog demeanour. Perhaps Mr. Osborne should be more worried about people avoiding tax ploddingly.)
Be that as it may, the cry of the Coalition has gone out that evading tax is morally wrong.
But are they right?
The usual citation from Revealed Theology on this one is Christ's admonition - when asked if the Jews should continue to pay tax to their Roman occupiers - to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's". The point of this story is that His political adversaries were trying to whip up some trouble and had set this question as a trap, which He nimbly sidestepped. The answer, then, was really a nice piece of verbal sleight-of-hand.
In any case, very few people today look to revelation for their moral attitudes (what with all the stoning and eye-putting-out 'n' all) so the more usual question is whether there is a rational reason for thinking that evading tax is ethically a bad thing.
If one considers tax to be a form of charity or wealth distribution (a way to fund healthcare and social security for those less fortunate than those with taxable income) then I suppose one can argue that taxation serves a socially benign purpose. There is no logical reason, however, why someone who dodges taxation may not contribute to charity at least as much money as they withhold through avoiding tax. Charity may have a definite moral character that paying tax does not, since it is voluntary.
Moreover, not all taxation has a socially beneficial function. There is theOffence Defence Budget for a start. And before you complain that were everyone to withhold tax revenue then we could not nationally benefit all citizens such as the military, police and fire services: the responsibility for funding these services has an equal benefit to all, yet all citizens capable of paying for them do not contribute equally. The redistributive function of taxation and the social contract element should not be confused.
People who avoid taxation tend to top-slice their payments: they still pay at least as much as is required for essential services and often tens of thousands of pounds more.
Tax avoidance is generally intended to mitigate disadvantageously high tax regimes, and the people best placed to use it are the ones who have such wealth that they can pretty much afford to switch tax regime at will. Try sheltering your assets when you have no assets to shelter. The ultimate sanction of those wishing to avoid tax is therefore to emigrate, at which point we lose not only income tax, but also the many other sources of taxation to which the rich, and the rest of us, are usually subject. Such as V.A.T. on purchases.
The wealthy live under no moral or ethical obligation to pay tax. The politicians and media who - with increasing frequency - treat as wrongdoers those who take practical steps to husband their resources are, on the other hand, venturing onto very perilous moral & practical grounds.
(I'm not sure how much aggression goes into that, to be honest: most individuals with high net worth would delegate the job of cutting tax payments to their accountants, who are not typically of the attack-dog demeanour. Perhaps Mr. Osborne should be more worried about people avoiding tax ploddingly.)
Be that as it may, the cry of the Coalition has gone out that evading tax is morally wrong.
But are they right?
The usual citation from Revealed Theology on this one is Christ's admonition - when asked if the Jews should continue to pay tax to their Roman occupiers - to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's". The point of this story is that His political adversaries were trying to whip up some trouble and had set this question as a trap, which He nimbly sidestepped. The answer, then, was really a nice piece of verbal sleight-of-hand.
In any case, very few people today look to revelation for their moral attitudes (what with all the stoning and eye-putting-out 'n' all) so the more usual question is whether there is a rational reason for thinking that evading tax is ethically a bad thing.
If one considers tax to be a form of charity or wealth distribution (a way to fund healthcare and social security for those less fortunate than those with taxable income) then I suppose one can argue that taxation serves a socially benign purpose. There is no logical reason, however, why someone who dodges taxation may not contribute to charity at least as much money as they withhold through avoiding tax. Charity may have a definite moral character that paying tax does not, since it is voluntary.
Moreover, not all taxation has a socially beneficial function. There is the
People who avoid taxation tend to top-slice their payments: they still pay at least as much as is required for essential services and often tens of thousands of pounds more.
Tax avoidance is generally intended to mitigate disadvantageously high tax regimes, and the people best placed to use it are the ones who have such wealth that they can pretty much afford to switch tax regime at will. Try sheltering your assets when you have no assets to shelter. The ultimate sanction of those wishing to avoid tax is therefore to emigrate, at which point we lose not only income tax, but also the many other sources of taxation to which the rich, and the rest of us, are usually subject. Such as V.A.T. on purchases.
The wealthy live under no moral or ethical obligation to pay tax. The politicians and media who - with increasing frequency - treat as wrongdoers those who take practical steps to husband their resources are, on the other hand, venturing onto very perilous moral & practical grounds.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
From Eton To Cheatin'?
Had Sordel started cracking this particular nutshell little over a week ago then its kernel might well have been the resilience and avuncular charm of David Cameron. Obviously one distrusts anyone who rises far in British Politics, since one cannot be a Snake Charmer without (at the very least) having more access to venomous serpents than is decent or proper in any human being. Nevertheless, Cameron has an air of broad decency that is difficult to gainsay.
If Cameron has a type, it is surely that of the young housemaster: unfailingly smooth with parents and boys, capable of the winning joke but also with just enough steel to suggest that one wouldn't want to be carpeted by him for smoking in the dorm. He gives the impression of being utterly fair-minded, though his dealings with Miliband Minor also have the sort of cheerful brutality that might send a fat boy on an impromptu cross-country run.
Quite how the nickname "Flashman" has attached itself to Cameron is hard to say, since he is very much more the type to have handed Flashman his prefect's badge.
Except that now he faces the dual accusation of swiping Granny's gin-money and pocketing a sizeable series of donations to the Conservative Party in return for an invitation for to dinner.
Where did it all go so wrong?
Part of the problem, of course, is that Cameron (being fair-minded himself) doesn't expect others to be such colossal bounders. Such is his innocence that he honestly believes that decreasing the highest taxation rate from 50% to 45% will encourage those previously evading tax to pay it. It would never occur to him that this is akin to a shop's offering reduced prices in an effort to appease shoplifters.
Another thing that Cameron's straight bat will not block is the politician who wants to spin a broadly neutral tax measure as a swinging tax increase for the elderly and infirm. Only the Conservative Party at its most ingenuous can believe that it would be given the benefit of the doubt when cutting pensioners' tax allowances, but ingenuousness is Cameron's stock in trade. One might call it his Achilles' Heel were he not so clearly more of the Hector stamp.
And finally, it would never occur to Cameron that there was anything in the least improper about opening up pot luck chez David & Samantha to wealthy business interests. These are just the sort of fellows that he's been dining with all his life, after all, and what greater evidence of personal integrity than kicking in a couple of hundred thousand to the club funds?
The problem is not so much that he might be cheating himself, then, as that he might be cheerfully oblivious to the illicit still in the prefects' common room.
A gentlemanly bearing is all very well & good ... so long as one is only required to deal with gentlemen. But when, as a politician, can you count on doing that?
If Cameron has a type, it is surely that of the young housemaster: unfailingly smooth with parents and boys, capable of the winning joke but also with just enough steel to suggest that one wouldn't want to be carpeted by him for smoking in the dorm. He gives the impression of being utterly fair-minded, though his dealings with Miliband Minor also have the sort of cheerful brutality that might send a fat boy on an impromptu cross-country run.
Quite how the nickname "Flashman" has attached itself to Cameron is hard to say, since he is very much more the type to have handed Flashman his prefect's badge.
Except that now he faces the dual accusation of swiping Granny's gin-money and pocketing a sizeable series of donations to the Conservative Party in return for an invitation for to dinner.
Where did it all go so wrong?
Part of the problem, of course, is that Cameron (being fair-minded himself) doesn't expect others to be such colossal bounders. Such is his innocence that he honestly believes that decreasing the highest taxation rate from 50% to 45% will encourage those previously evading tax to pay it. It would never occur to him that this is akin to a shop's offering reduced prices in an effort to appease shoplifters.
Another thing that Cameron's straight bat will not block is the politician who wants to spin a broadly neutral tax measure as a swinging tax increase for the elderly and infirm. Only the Conservative Party at its most ingenuous can believe that it would be given the benefit of the doubt when cutting pensioners' tax allowances, but ingenuousness is Cameron's stock in trade. One might call it his Achilles' Heel were he not so clearly more of the Hector stamp.
And finally, it would never occur to Cameron that there was anything in the least improper about opening up pot luck chez David & Samantha to wealthy business interests. These are just the sort of fellows that he's been dining with all his life, after all, and what greater evidence of personal integrity than kicking in a couple of hundred thousand to the club funds?
The problem is not so much that he might be cheating himself, then, as that he might be cheerfully oblivious to the illicit still in the prefects' common room.
A gentlemanly bearing is all very well & good ... so long as one is only required to deal with gentlemen. But when, as a politician, can you count on doing that?
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Some Guy Behind A Desk
Here at Bounded, we take research pretty seriously and our policy research team has really been putting in the hours. In fact, we are offering our expertise to all media outlets as The Association of British School Leavers.
Seriously.
Any newspaper running a story on the subject of, for example, University fees, or voting preferences amongst young voters, or drug use, or Post-Compulsory Examination & Accreditation Standards, can now ask Sordel and - as a representative of The Association of British School Leavers - I am authorised to give a view on that in the name of the Association, for attribution.
Sordel has been inspired to do this by the Taxpayers' Alliance which, as you will be aware, regularly comments on public policy and which, since it has a name, must be a thing. Personally, I always assumed that it was a bit like Mumsnet ... which, for all I know about Mumsnet, it might be. It is, after all, Britain's Non-Partisan Grassroots Campaign for Lower Taxes and Better Government. They say so themselves.
They're on Question Time and everything, so it must be true. (Note to BBC producers: The Association of British School Leavers is able to furnish spokespersons for broadcast events.)
Yet, for a grass-roots campaign, The Taxpayers' Alliance does not have especially "grass roots" origins. A rather elderly article from The Guardian informs me that they are or were actually funded by a small number of affluent businessmen. Nothing wrong with that, of course: millionaires are taxpayers too, after all, nearly as much as the rest of us.
The representatives of the Taxpayers' Alliance are also, quite probably, taxpayers. (Sordel did, at some point in the distant past, leave school.) But they aren't exactly canonical examples of your concerned taxpayer. For the most part they are right-leaning policy wonks & bloggers, much as one would expect of an organisation with a professed hostility to increased public sector expenditure.
If you want, you can join the grassroots side of their campaign, although on their site the section on Our Branches is "Coming Soon". (We at The Association of British School Leavers hope to get details of our University Liaison Programme up even sooner. Watch this space.) Careful how you use that site, though, because if you happen to leave your name there, then you just joined their campaign.
There is absolutely nothing sinister about any of this, except for the fact that our response to a story might be very different if the newspaper decoded its source slightly more than it does.
It's not The Taxpayers' Alliance, speaking for millions. It's not The Association of British School Leavers. It's just some guy behind a desk.
Seriously.
Any newspaper running a story on the subject of, for example, University fees, or voting preferences amongst young voters, or drug use, or Post-Compulsory Examination & Accreditation Standards, can now ask Sordel and - as a representative of The Association of British School Leavers - I am authorised to give a view on that in the name of the Association, for attribution.
Sordel has been inspired to do this by the Taxpayers' Alliance which, as you will be aware, regularly comments on public policy and which, since it has a name, must be a thing. Personally, I always assumed that it was a bit like Mumsnet ... which, for all I know about Mumsnet, it might be. It is, after all, Britain's Non-Partisan Grassroots Campaign for Lower Taxes and Better Government. They say so themselves.
They're on Question Time and everything, so it must be true. (Note to BBC producers: The Association of British School Leavers is able to furnish spokespersons for broadcast events.)
Yet, for a grass-roots campaign, The Taxpayers' Alliance does not have especially "grass roots" origins. A rather elderly article from The Guardian informs me that they are or were actually funded by a small number of affluent businessmen. Nothing wrong with that, of course: millionaires are taxpayers too, after all, nearly as much as the rest of us.
The representatives of the Taxpayers' Alliance are also, quite probably, taxpayers. (Sordel did, at some point in the distant past, leave school.) But they aren't exactly canonical examples of your concerned taxpayer. For the most part they are right-leaning policy wonks & bloggers, much as one would expect of an organisation with a professed hostility to increased public sector expenditure.
If you want, you can join the grassroots side of their campaign, although on their site the section on Our Branches is "Coming Soon". (We at The Association of British School Leavers hope to get details of our University Liaison Programme up even sooner. Watch this space.) Careful how you use that site, though, because if you happen to leave your name there, then you just joined their campaign.
There is absolutely nothing sinister about any of this, except for the fact that our response to a story might be very different if the newspaper decoded its source slightly more than it does.
It's not The Taxpayers' Alliance, speaking for millions. It's not The Association of British School Leavers. It's just some guy behind a desk.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Hard Times for Dickens
It must be a very slow day at the offices of The Times (and, for that matter, at Sordel Villas) since they've decided to devote an entire article to the decline in readership for the works of Charles Dickens.
Claire Tomalin (whom, probably quite unjustly, Sordel can only imagine as a Miss Flite character, poring over her clippings and promising a large colony of domesticated cats their liberation on the day that the royalties come in on her biography) has popped up to complain that young people have destroyed their attention span by watching television and playing videogames and are therefore incapable of sitting still long enough to sup at the whiskery nipple of her favourite author.
"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity." So says Claire, but she does not tell us which of those two things is a pity.
What she does tell us is the reasons for reading Dickens in the first place. For example: "You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant — the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament, how the country is run by Old Etonians, you name it, he said it."
Of course, if you want to know about any of those things, you could just read about them in some august periodical of the day (such as ... The Times) for, though far-sighted, Dickens did not actually know more details about those matters as they concern 21st Century Britain than Wikipedia. Equally, it might be felt that the little toerags have whittled their attention span to the point at which they could only tolerate a column-inch of newsprint. Is it strictly necessary to read a six hundred page novel for the benefits to the young in terms of their awareness of current affairs?
What else have you got, Claire?
"When he went to America in 1842, one of the points he made was that the ‘unimportant’ and ‘peripheral’ people were just as interesting to write about as ‘great’ people."
Do we really need Dickens to make this point today when we have Eastenders? Surely you were only droning on a minute ago about the country being run by Old Etonians ... it seems to me that you are the one with a disproportionate interest in 'great' people ... but, pray, tell me more.
"He has gone on entertaining people since the 1830s and his characters' names are known all over the world."
... and his reputation is thus surely safe without being read by the lovable ragamuffins of today ..?
Sorry, Sordel's attention span just came down like the blade of the guillotine upon Sydney's Carton's neck. Even a nutshell is proving tiresomely protracted these days.
My point, though, would have been this: there is nothing innately laudable about bringing up the young to read Dickens. Dickens is actually good. Where the work would be required would be ... to get someone to read a biography of Dickens.
Or was that her concern all along?
Claire Tomalin (whom, probably quite unjustly, Sordel can only imagine as a Miss Flite character, poring over her clippings and promising a large colony of domesticated cats their liberation on the day that the royalties come in on her biography) has popped up to complain that young people have destroyed their attention span by watching television and playing videogames and are therefore incapable of sitting still long enough to sup at the whiskery nipple of her favourite author.
"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that’s a pity." So says Claire, but she does not tell us which of those two things is a pity.
What she does tell us is the reasons for reading Dickens in the first place. For example: "You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant — the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament, how the country is run by Old Etonians, you name it, he said it."
Of course, if you want to know about any of those things, you could just read about them in some august periodical of the day (such as ... The Times) for, though far-sighted, Dickens did not actually know more details about those matters as they concern 21st Century Britain than Wikipedia. Equally, it might be felt that the little toerags have whittled their attention span to the point at which they could only tolerate a column-inch of newsprint. Is it strictly necessary to read a six hundred page novel for the benefits to the young in terms of their awareness of current affairs?
What else have you got, Claire?
"When he went to America in 1842, one of the points he made was that the ‘unimportant’ and ‘peripheral’ people were just as interesting to write about as ‘great’ people."
Do we really need Dickens to make this point today when we have Eastenders? Surely you were only droning on a minute ago about the country being run by Old Etonians ... it seems to me that you are the one with a disproportionate interest in 'great' people ... but, pray, tell me more.
"He has gone on entertaining people since the 1830s and his characters' names are known all over the world."
... and his reputation is thus surely safe without being read by the lovable ragamuffins of today ..?
Sorry, Sordel's attention span just came down like the blade of the guillotine upon Sydney's Carton's neck. Even a nutshell is proving tiresomely protracted these days.
My point, though, would have been this: there is nothing innately laudable about bringing up the young to read Dickens. Dickens is actually good. Where the work would be required would be ... to get someone to read a biography of Dickens.
Or was that her concern all along?
Friday, January 20, 2012
Today's Robin Hood
That bandwagon leaving town has Kim Dotcom on it, probably in manacles, leg irons and, for all we know, nipple clamps depending on the proclivities of the people who arrested him.
Millions of people who have never heard of him before are scrambling to don the Lincoln green and enlist themselves as his merry men. As far as casting goes, he would probably make a better Friar Tuck, yet the ability of multi-lateral policing to create heroes seemingly knows no bounds.
Like Julian Assange, Kim Schmitz has been largely complicit in his own fall. He is a self-professed (nay, self-acclaimed) hacker and has had several brushes with the law. Unfortunately, though, people who demand due legal process cannot always draw their clients from a cast of orphans, waifs and choirboys. The fact is that the legal assault on Schmitz has treated someone whose alleged crime is copyright infringement as though he were, at the very least, a drug kingpin.
This was an arrest targeted mainly at the press: if you can treat someone publicly enough as a criminal, you might be able to convince the world that he is a criminal: something which (by the way) may be very difficult indeed to prove at law.
The indictment rather cheeringly refers to the alleged criminals as the 'Mega Conspiracy', which sounds like something that falls beyond the remit of the U.S. Justice Department but for which Batman or his ilk would be the ideal investigators. The indictment then goes on to describe many felonious features of the Mega Conspiracy, many of which sound uncannily like the business habits of any other internet business: the use of advertising, the desire to push users onto premium accounts; reliance upon third-person links for dissemination and advertising etc. etc.
Often the claims in the indictment are largely unsupported: "the popularity of the infringing content on the Mega Sites has generated more than $25 million of advertising revenue for the Conspiracy". (Well, perhaps, but it remains to be demonstrated that it was the infringing content that brought to the site the traffic that generated those advertising revenues.)
Some of the Mega Conspiracy's practices may, however, look more questionable. Having struck a deal with copyright holders to provide an "Abuse Tool" (satirists, start your engines!), Megaupload agreed to suspend any links that accessed infringing material: in fact, however, most links terminated in common files that were not actually being deleted. Nor did the Mega Conspiracy kill other links that accessed the common file. The Mega Conspiracy (I'm going to keep typing that until it gets dull) thus created the illusion of complying with copyright holders while actually continuing to make the material available through alternative links. This may well prove to be (and here Sordel shall employ a metaphor wholly improper to the crimes under consideration) the smoking gun.
More interesting, though, are the endless emails cited in the indictment in which one thing becomes quite clear: however much the principals of the Mega Conspiracy were involved in a criminal activity, they certainly do not seem to have been conscious of being so. Certainly they were aware that there was a problem with hosting copyright material, and their habit seems to have been to comply with copyright holders to what they judged to be the minimal standard to establish cooperation for legal purposes.
The test of their strategy will certainly be the court case when they will advance the safe haven defence and the prosecutors will attempt to show that such a defence has been rendered null by their elevated awareness of the copyright infringement facilitated by their site.
Many onlookers will nonetheless share Sordel's concern at what amounts to commercial rough-housing being turned (not metaphorically but literally) into a federal case. I know that the "slippery slope" argument has been overused in an internet context but malicious prosecution should not be allowed to displace normal commercial litigation. Wouldn't the Justice Department's time and resources be better spent on turning criminals into convicts than in turning businessmen into criminals?
Millions of people who have never heard of him before are scrambling to don the Lincoln green and enlist themselves as his merry men. As far as casting goes, he would probably make a better Friar Tuck, yet the ability of multi-lateral policing to create heroes seemingly knows no bounds.
Like Julian Assange, Kim Schmitz has been largely complicit in his own fall. He is a self-professed (nay, self-acclaimed) hacker and has had several brushes with the law. Unfortunately, though, people who demand due legal process cannot always draw their clients from a cast of orphans, waifs and choirboys. The fact is that the legal assault on Schmitz has treated someone whose alleged crime is copyright infringement as though he were, at the very least, a drug kingpin.
This was an arrest targeted mainly at the press: if you can treat someone publicly enough as a criminal, you might be able to convince the world that he is a criminal: something which (by the way) may be very difficult indeed to prove at law.
The indictment rather cheeringly refers to the alleged criminals as the 'Mega Conspiracy', which sounds like something that falls beyond the remit of the U.S. Justice Department but for which Batman or his ilk would be the ideal investigators. The indictment then goes on to describe many felonious features of the Mega Conspiracy, many of which sound uncannily like the business habits of any other internet business: the use of advertising, the desire to push users onto premium accounts; reliance upon third-person links for dissemination and advertising etc. etc.
Often the claims in the indictment are largely unsupported: "the popularity of the infringing content on the Mega Sites has generated more than $25 million of advertising revenue for the Conspiracy". (Well, perhaps, but it remains to be demonstrated that it was the infringing content that brought to the site the traffic that generated those advertising revenues.)
Some of the Mega Conspiracy's practices may, however, look more questionable. Having struck a deal with copyright holders to provide an "Abuse Tool" (satirists, start your engines!), Megaupload agreed to suspend any links that accessed infringing material: in fact, however, most links terminated in common files that were not actually being deleted. Nor did the Mega Conspiracy kill other links that accessed the common file. The Mega Conspiracy (I'm going to keep typing that until it gets dull) thus created the illusion of complying with copyright holders while actually continuing to make the material available through alternative links. This may well prove to be (and here Sordel shall employ a metaphor wholly improper to the crimes under consideration) the smoking gun.
More interesting, though, are the endless emails cited in the indictment in which one thing becomes quite clear: however much the principals of the Mega Conspiracy were involved in a criminal activity, they certainly do not seem to have been conscious of being so. Certainly they were aware that there was a problem with hosting copyright material, and their habit seems to have been to comply with copyright holders to what they judged to be the minimal standard to establish cooperation for legal purposes.
The test of their strategy will certainly be the court case when they will advance the safe haven defence and the prosecutors will attempt to show that such a defence has been rendered null by their elevated awareness of the copyright infringement facilitated by their site.
Many onlookers will nonetheless share Sordel's concern at what amounts to commercial rough-housing being turned (not metaphorically but literally) into a federal case. I know that the "slippery slope" argument has been overused in an internet context but malicious prosecution should not be allowed to displace normal commercial litigation. Wouldn't the Justice Department's time and resources be better spent on turning criminals into convicts than in turning businessmen into criminals?
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.
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