Rapidshare Cries about Intellectual Property Rights

Now this is sorta funny. Rapidshare whining about someone violating its intellectual property rights. See RapidShare AG , Christian Schmid v. N/A Maxim Tvortsov WIPO Case No. D2010-0696 (June 22, 2010). Rapidshare lost. When you lose a trademark infringement case to an unrepresented Russian who doesn’t even respond to the complaint, that’s a sign that you have shit-ass karma or shit-ass lawyers.

H/T: Defend My Domain Blog

Floatopia! The Unintended Consequences of a Nanny State

“The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” – Leia Organa, Princess of Alderaan

And the more you pass stupid laws for the purpose of screwing with drunks’ fun “for their own good,” and the more you pass stupid laws because the authorities are too lazy to simply enforce the laws we have on the books, the more you will force the drunks to adapt and be resourceful — and the more idiocy will ensue.

The Whale’s Vagina isn’t really a drunkard’s town. You rarely see overly inebriated toolbags on the street — unless that street happens to be in Pacific Beach. But, that’s what Pacific Beach is there for — every city needs a neighborhood where you go to drink, puke, piss in the street, and act like you’re between 19 and 29. If you go to Pacific Beach, you ought to be looking for that kind of a good time. If you move there, you know what you’re getting into.

A few years back, a few idiots who bought property in Pacific Beach started whining, and the city council decided that since a few teenage meatheads couldn’t hold their liquor, they would just ban all alcohol on the beaches of the entire city. That means no bringing a bottle of wine to the beach at sunset and no six pack next to your chair on a nice day.

The average drinker and the sunset wine-sippers complied. Booze ain’t that important to them.

But the hard-core drunks were not to be deterred. As drunks are more resourceful than sober people, they came up with a solution. They started “Floatopia.” Floatopia is a party in which you drink your booze on anything that floats, from rubber rafts to inflatable sex dolls to canoes. Everyone ties the floating devices together, a few feet from shore, and you have your work-around the stupid alcohol ban.

I haven’t had a drink in three months (I’m not quitting… just taking a health hiatus), but when I start drinking again, I can’t imagine that I would want to go to Floatopia. It looks like a few thousand of the dumbest fuckers you can find, all concentrated in the same place. In short, it doesn’t look like fun.

But I certainly wouldn’t vote to ban it — nor would I have voted to ban drinking on the beaches in the first place.

Councilman Tony Young got it right:

“I believe those who act like adults should get adult privileges,” he said. But now, he says, there is a domino affect taking place as a result of the booze ban. “When you start taking these things(Freedoms) away these are the types of things that are happening. You get Floatopia and who knows what’s going to be next,” he questioned. (source)

But … but … Tony… you’re talking about c…c…common sense! There goes your political career.

“White Collar Trash”

JD Hull’s “What About Clients?” blog could kick Chuck Norris’ ass. Evidence: Read this little passage he writes about law professor Peter Friedman.

This man can help you. He deferred teaching full-time until after more than, say, an 18-month law prof-law firm stint before joining the ranks of a group that, in recent years, has screwed the pooch badly on the education of students. Which has been a living hell and nightmare for our law firm. (source)

I think that Dan and I might have come from the same litter. See The Worthlessness of Legal Education.

Dan then swoops in with this roundhouse kick to the face

At a minimum, I’d like American law schools to help my firm defray some of the costs of recruiting, developing and paying the delusional and alarmingly helpless young white collar trash, almost always Coif and Law Review stock, who we have fired or–with mixed feelings of relief and self-loathing–have wathced quit our firm since 2005. (source)

Preach on brother.

Dipshit Dines and her MacKinnonite Crusade

Sound the alarm! The pornographers are coming to get us. Or so says the ever-hysterical Gail Dines in a recent Boston Globe article about her latest book.

To Dines, it is not coincidental that pornography has grown increasingly brutal in its treatment of women as the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan have underscored the real-world gains of women in the fields of politics, law, business, and medicine. Among other things, she says, “Pornography is a backlash against women’s advancement.’’ (source)

Yeah, that’s it. The moment that I heard about Elena Kagan’s nomination, I just had this incredible desire to jack off watching Belladonna suck dick. I mean, how else is a real man to react to this uppity behavior?

Dines tries to make her quest seem like mere criticism and education, but she has a control-freak’s sinister side.

Having viewed countless images as part of her research, Dines says there should be legislation that would define pornography as a violation of women’s civil rights and would entitle women to sue the industry for harm done to them. (source)

And it would all of a sudden make her research actually relevant and useful to a tribe of worthless lawyers who went from graduating from a womens’ studies program to law school to stewing in their own bitterness that nobody wants to pay them $200,000 per year to whine about how much they hate men.

Arguments like this have earned her — along with threats, hate mail, and vitriolic broadsides from the pornography industry — the inevitable accusation that she favors censorship (Dines says she does not) and that she is an anti-sex prude. At that, she just rolls her eyes.

“If I was criticizing McDonald’s, you wouldn’t accuse me of being against eating,’’ she says. “I’m against the commodification and industrialization of a human desire. I’m not against sex. Pornography does not equal sex, and sex does not equal pornography.’’ (source)

If she wants to criticize pornography, I’m all for it. She doesn’t just want to criticize it though. She wants to smear her grubby nasty hands all over our laws so that they fit her Victorian / Comstockian social agenda. If she was criticizing McDonalds, nobody would care. If she came up with her own diet program and wanted the government to help her take away your choice of what you got to eat for lunch — then THAT would be an accurate analogy.

Great Editorial on Snyder v. Phelps

I have written a lot on the Snyder v. Phelps case since my first post on it, here.

Now that Phelps is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, there seems to be more to say about the case, and John W. Whitehead says it brilliantly:

America once symbolized the very essence of free speech, where society’s most arduous and insidious ideas could be put to the test in what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes termed the “free marketplace of ideas.” Today, however, we have been captured by the chains of political correctness and an emerging war empire. And if we do not throw off these chains, we will bury freedom along with our fallen soldiers.

Read his whole brilliant editorial here.

Suck it, El Jobso

by Jason Fischer

A while back, attorneys for Apple concocted a creative argument for why jailbreaking your iPhone constituted an infringement of the copyrights in the device’s software, based on the anit-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (more familiarly known as the “DMCA”).  The Library of Congress (as the body that promulgates regulations for enforcement of the Copyright Act) has today proposed an exemption to liability that specifically puts the kibosh on Apple’s legal theory.

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This article was originally posted on The Tactical IP Blog

First Amendment meets Second Amendment

The sheriff of Osceola County, Iowa denied a concealed weapons permit to Paul Dorr because he engaged in too much protesting, passing out leaflets, and writing letters to the editor. (source)

U.S. District Court Judge Mark W. Bennett wasn’t having any of that.

Sheriff Weber’s rationale for denying the permit was reported as “concern from public. Don’t trust him.” (source). This was despite the fact that Dorr held a permit for a number of years, apparently without incident. Sheriff Weber informed Dorr that he would deny future applications as well.

Weber testified that he had heard people refer to Paul as “a whacko, delusional, a nut job, a spook, and narcissist,” Bennett’s decision noted. “Regardless of the adjective used to describe Paul, however, Sheriff Weber stated that Paul’s ‘lousy’ reputation was due to his political activities of writing letters to the editor and distributing fliers.”

The ruling continued, “Giving Sheriff Weber more deference than is due his elected status, the court finds that Sheriff Weber denied Paul’s application for a concealed weapons permit not because of the content of his First Amendment activity but because it was effective and agitated many members of the local community.”

And, Bennett said, “In denying Paul a concealed weapons permit, Sheriff Weber single-handedly hijacked the First Amendment and nullified its freedoms and protections. Ironically, Sheriff Weber, sworn to uphold the Constitution, in fact retaliated against a citizen of his county who used this important freedom of speech and association precisely in the manner envisioned by the founding members of our nation … (source)

In finding for Dorr, Judge Bennett also ordered Sheriff Weber to attend a remedial course on Constitutional law!

Let’s hear it for Judge Bennett!

Libel Tourism Law Looks Like It Will Pass

The U.S. Senate passed a law that will make libel judgments from other countries void in the United States unless the judgment was won in a trial where First Amendment rights were taken into account. (source). Previous posts on this issue here, here, and here.

It looks like the bill will pass the house as well.

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, charged that libel judgments in foreign courts were “undermining” freedom of speech and of the press and “chilling” open debate in the United States.

“While we cannot legislate changes to foreign law that are chilling protected speech in our country, we can ensure that our courts do not become a tool to uphold foreign libel judgments that undermine American First Amendment or due process rights,” he said in a statement. (source)

While this is good news for free speech, it really only will affect two or three Americans per year. What would be a *lot* stronger medicine would be if someone dealt with inter-state libel tourism. We need a federal anti-SLAPP law . It really doesn’t do any good to protect Americans from unconstitutional defamation judgments from foreign countries when you can still bankrupt virtually any American by filing a bogus defamation suit against them in the 48 states without real anti-SLAPP legislation.

Thank Goodness They Are Here To Protect Us

A bunch of hippies got together to start a “raw food” cooperative. The cops busted them for selling non corporate-blessed food. (source) While I think that’s pretty retarded and a waste of time and money, the funniest part is that the junior-college-flunkouts raided the contraband-yogurt store with guns drawn. (video)

New Obscenity Prosecution – United States v. Adult DVD Empire

Federal prosecutors have filed obscenity charges against Adult DVD Empire in the Western District of Pennsylvania. (source) This is the same district where Mary Beth Buchanan held her little reign of terror. It appears that her successor, Robert Cessar, is just as much of a petty little control freak as his predecessor. this was a left-over case from her obnoxious and un-American ass. Time will tell if her successor, Robert Cesar, is as much of a petty little control freak as Buchananan or if he’s just cleaning out the old files and saving face.

Nevertheless, prosecutions like this, my readers, is why I will not be voting for Obama in 2012. I don’t give a shit if “Bible Spice” Palin is the Republican nominee. At least with her, as with George W. Bush, there was truth in advertising. They both ran as bat-shit-crazy religious fundamentalists, and you got (or you’ll get) what is on the packaging.

UPDATE: The case has apparently already ended in a plea bargain. The defendant is to plead guilty, pay a $75,000 fine, and will be on probation for three years.

Porn star saves man from wrongful CP prosecution

By J. DeVoy

Reason has a great story about a man charged with possession of child pornography due to a Nifong-esque disregard of evidence favorable to the defendant.  Ultimately, the case’s heroine, Lupe Fuentes, made an appearance to set the defendant free.

The Legal Satyricon Hits the Road

Three Satyricon correspondents are taking bar exams in the coming days.  Wish them luck, or at least neutrality.  If you’re fortunate enough to be in one of the following cities, let us know in the comments.

Christopher Harbin - Buffalo, New York (a/k/a Legal Satyricon on Ice).  Chris will be taking the New York bar exam in the Buffalo Convention Center.  Afterward, he plans on taking in an unseasonable blizzard as well as the sights and smells of urban decay.

Jason Fischer - San Diego, California.  Jason will be taking the three-day California bar exam in sunny San Diego, despite being a licensed attorney in Florida.  As Bill Carradine once said, “this is me at my most…masochistic.”  During this time, he will contemplate whether he prefers the view of the Pacific ocean to his view of the Atlantic in Miami.

Jay DeVoy - Las Vegas, Nevada.  Though licensed to practice law in Wisconsin, Jay will be taking the Nevada bar exam.  Following the exam, he will probably eschew the city’s temptations to drink wine and watch films such as The Devil’s Rejects and Return of the Living Dead, holding an audience with anyone who wishes to join.

But whatever the exam, and wherever its location, we give it the same rating:

Hole in the sea floor

By J. DeVoy

BP confirms that there’s a hole in the sea floor, spewing oil and deadly methane gas into the Gulf of Mexico.  While some reports indicate that this fissure has existed since the crisis’ beginning, details remain hard to find.  The high volume of methane gas found in this fissure is worth noting, and troubling, as it corroborates earlier reports about a giant, deadly lake of methane gas lying beneath the oil reserves tapped by the Deepwater Horizon.

An event for the free speech-minded

By J. DeVoy

The Lords of Acid are touring!  For those who haven’t heard of this group, it’s the kind of bizarre music and stage act that only a First Amendment zealot can truly appreciate.  For others familiar with the group, this is a bit of a head-scratcher, as it hasn’t released new material in roughly a decade.  It is, however, up every Satyricon reader’s alley.

Perhaps this is not in the top tier of shocking concerts like Gwar’s and Gorgoroth’s, but it’s enough to raise puritanical eyebrows across “are” country.

Also headlining with the Lords of Acid is My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult (“TKK”).  While not as extreme as the Lords, TKK has always proven to be a funky, campy, good time, with subtle overt satan-worship thrown in the mix.  I last saw the band live on Thanksgiving 2007, when I blew off the turkey, and my sister came out to visit.  We share a special bond of thinking that day is worthless.

FYI

If I get asked about Congress’s postal power on the bar exam, I will cut someone.