The Death of the Mind

A year ago, Techdirt wrote about an important lawsuit in India, brought by the academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen. A couple of factors make this particular legal action different from previous attempts to shut down these sites. First, an Indian court ruled in 2016 that photocopying textbooks for educational purposes is fair use; the parallels with SciHub, which provides free access to copies of academic papers for students and researchers who might not otherwise be able to afford the high subscription fees, are clear. Secondly, the person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, is fighting, rather than ignoring, the case, as she has done on previous occasions.

One manifestation…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211229/08580848194/sci-hubs-creator-thinks-academic-publishers-not-her-site-are-real-threat-to-science-says-any-law-against-knowledge-is.shtml

We’ve joked in the past about how Republicans hate Section 230 for letting websites moderate too much content, while Democrats hate it for letting websites not moderate enough content. Of course, the reality is they both are mad about content moderation (at different extremes) because they both want to control the internet in a manner that helps “their team.” But both approaches involve unconstitutional desires to interfere with 1st Amendment rights. For Republicans, it’s often the compelled hosting of speech, and for Democrats, it’s often the compelled deletion of speech. Both of those are unconstitutional.

On the Republican side, we’ve already seen states like Florida and Texas sign into law content moderation bills — and both have…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211229/17174248199/ny-senator-proposes-ridiculously-unconstitutional-social-media-law-that-is-mirror-opposite-equally-unconstitutional-laws.shtml

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar posted a massive set of patches today: 2,297 patches that have been in the works since late 2020 and completely rework the Linux kernel’s header file hierarchy. The goal of this “fast kernel headers” effort is to speed up kernel build times and also clean=up a lot of things in the proces to address the “dependency hell”…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Fast-Kernel-Headers

On December 30, the Oregon Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph opinion, upholding a decision of the State Court of Appeals that signatures of persons on the inactive voter list are not valid. Whitehead v Fagan, S068382.
The decision relates to whether a statewide initiative, Petition 50, should be on the ballot. It had enough valid signatures if inactive voters counted, but now it won’t appear on the ballot. The subject of the initiative is for a carbon-free economy by the year 2050.
The decision seems irrational. The reason voters are transferred to the inactive list is that the post office has indicated the person has moved and has not re-registered at the new address. But when such a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2021/12/31/oregon-supreme-court-rules-that-inactive-voters-cant-sign-petitions/

Every January we feature works that are entering the public domain. And this year the big story is in recorded music. Recorded Music from 1922 and earlier Approximately 400,000 sound recordings made before 1923 will join the public domain in the U.S. for the first time due to the Music Modernization Act (read more at copyright.gov). You can peruse about 38,000 of them in our collection of digitized 78rpm records. By 1922 we were solidly in the Jazz Age – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age was published in 1922, and the term was already in popular usage. Jazz migrated from Black American communities in New Orleans into the rest of the United States,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2022/01/01/welcoming-recorded-music-to-the-public-domain/

New launch date could be a marvelous Christmas gift to humanity

The James Webb Telescope has been cleared for launch, only for weather to delay its ascent for at least a day.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/12/23/james_webb_telescope_launch_rescheduled_for_christmas_day/

The Hill has published an essay of mine, arguing that the modern filibuster is unconstitutional. There are many who have insisted as much — see, e.g., Gregory Diskant, Robert Reich, Erwin Chemerinsky & Bert Neuborne, Madeleine Polubinski, Kirk Jenkins; but see Michael Gerhardt, and this great debate between Josh Chafetz and Michael Gerhardt.The point I emphasize in this debate is that it is the evolution of the procedure that has rendered it unconstitutional. (Adam Jentleson’s book, Kill Switch, is a brilliant account of that history.) When it was a procedure to assure members had the opportunity to speak, it was fine (if a bother). But as a procedure to effectively block the beginning of any debate, it has…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lessig.medium.com/on-the-constitutionality-of-the-filibuster-cc6879e4b1f5?source=rss-7239b1d04c28——2

Assange’s fiancée Stella Moris warned, “Look at animals trapped in cages in a zoo. It cuts their life short. That’s what’s happening to Julian.”

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/12/13/jass-d13.html

Anyone who is 14 or younger today will never be able to purchase cigarettes legally in in New Zealand, according to new legislation expected to pass. The aim is to annually increase the legal smoking age by one year and make tobacco smoking illegal by 2025. — Read the rest

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2021/12/09/new-zealand-will-ban-smoking-for-entire-next-generation-and-beyond.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-zealand-will-ban-smoking-for-entire-next-generation-and-beyond