Sites like Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, and Reddit have gone black this morning in protest of The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which threatens Internet independence and free speech as well as a host of other rights. We have long discussed the ever-widening array of criminal and civil penalties pushed through Congress by the powerful radio and television lobby as well as other industry groups. The Obama Administration has been particularly willing to carry the water for these groups over objections from public interest groups. SOPA reflects the power of this lobby and its hold over members of Congress and the Obama Administration. While the Obama Administration has now responded to the outcry by insisting that it will tweak the bill, such promises ring hallow given its past efforts to appease this industry and its dishonest statements recently in other areas like the indefinite detention controversy. Notably, the recent admission from the White House that it has some concerns over the bill did not come until the public rallied against the bill — another indication of the control of an industry group in the drafting of legislation. This lobby is not going to go quietly into the night. It is more likely that it will work with the White House and Congress to achieve the same purposes with an incremental series of laws — if it does not simply win outright.
Category: Media
Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
Freedom of speech is a well established right in this country and rooted in the 1st Amendment. “Congress shall make no law [. . .] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. The U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 19 reads, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Within the United States and our jurisprudence there are some exceptions to this freedom, but by in large (up to this point in history) the restrictions are both reasonable and necessary: the Miller test for obscenity, child pornography laws, laws prohibiting speech that incites imminent lawless action, restrictions on fighting words, regulation of commercial speech such as advertising, copyright and patent laws protecting authors and inventors control over their work, and the prohibition of slander and defamation.
Let’s be clear here that the subject isn’t just free speech, but anonymous political free speech.
Here at Res Ipsa Loqitur, there is a long standing policy of allowing anonymous posting to comments and protecting poster’s anonymity. The decision to post under your own name or not is entirely yours. This policy encourages free speech while allowing that having an unpopular or minority point of view should not have negative political consequences for the speaker or unnecessarily complicate their lives simply for expressing their views. Many political insiders and Washington professionals have told Professor Turley that they enjoy reading this blog and have enjoyed posting anonymously. The only posters here required to use their real identities are the guest bloggers and the requirement is voluntary. None of us were coerced into using our real names. When offered the honor of being a guest blogger, it was simply (and I think I speak for all the guest bloggers when I say fairly) a requirement in assuming editorial responsibilities. However, all of this raises an important question.
Do you have a right to anonymous political free speech?
According to the Supreme Court, you do. According to the Department of Homeland Security, you don’t. They’ve hired General Dynamics to track U.S. citizens exercising this critical civil right.
Below is today’s column in the Sunday Washington Post. The column addresses how the continued rollbacks on civil liberties in the United States conflicts with the view of the country as the land of the free. If we are going to adopt Chinese legal principles, we should at least have the integrity to adopt one Chinese proverb: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.” We seem as a country to be in denial as to the implications of these laws and policies. Whether we are viewed as a free country with authoritarian inclinations or an authoritarian nation with free aspirations (or some other hybrid definition), we are clearly not what we once were. [Update: in addition to the column below, a later column in the Washington Post explores more closely the loss of free speech rights in the West].
Continue reading “10 Reasons The U.S. Is No Longer The Land Of The Free”
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Almost four weeks ago I read an article in Huffington Post entitled: “Can Loving A Robot Lead to Divorce?” by Vicki Larson, a journalist. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vicki-larson/robots_1_b_1150679.html Ms. Larson introduces her piece by quoting the claims of a current manufacturer of anatomically correct “sex robots”, who presumably speak and move in sexual ways. I followed the article’s link to the website of the robots inventor, Douglas Hines, who enthusiastically discusses his creation and has a few videos (non-explicit) that demonstrate the robot’s “capabilities”. While the HuffPost article links the Company’s website, I’m not doing it here, since publicizing this device is not my aim. Should you want further information it is available at the articles link. The “sex robot” being produced now is but an update on inflatable sex toys, though with a “skeleton”, rudimentary movement and speech added. It therefore is only an opening reference to a real issue that will shortly become scientifically possible.
The next part of this short article is an overview with of the opinion of Artificial Intelligence Expert David Levy http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=humans-marrying-robots “It also may be the future of love and marriage, if you believe artificial intelligent (AI) expert David Levy, author of Love and Sex With Robots. According to Levy, human-robot sex, love and marriage is inevitable — perhaps as soon as 2025. He predicts that robots may not only be more lovable and faithful than many humans, but they may even be more emotionally available than the “typical American human male.” Not only will they make us become better, more creative lovers, but they also will offer those singles who feel a void in their emotional and sexual lives and married couples with differing sexual needs new, nonjudgmental ways to be happy and healthy. Although Levy believes that the “availability of regular sex with a robot will dramatically reduce the incidence of infidelity as we know it today,” he also acknowledges there may be some potential sticky points. “Some human spouses and lovers might consider robot sex to be just as unfaithful as sex with another person.”
Levy’s view naturally flows into the conclusion of the article which is an E Mail interview with Sonya Ziaja, a San Francisco Bay Area attorney who blogs at numerous law and policy media outlets as well as her own, Shark. Laser. Blawg.
“And what could be more fraught with legal dilemmas than a love triangle among a married couple and a sexbot? How that might impact a divorce? That’s what Ziaja explores in her paper, “Homewrecker 2.0: An Exploration of Liability for Heart Balm Torts Involving AI Humanoid Consorts,” which she presented at the 2011 International Conference on Social Robotics that took place in Amsterdam at the end of November.
“If the doll’s owner becomes enamored with the doll, and leaves his spouse, can the spouse sue as she or he would be able to if the interloper had been human? And who would be sued? The manufacturer? Inventor? The AI itself?” she questions. “So long as we’re intent on adding socially interactive AI into situations that would ordinarily be only human. … socially interactive robots need to be ‘safe to play with’ in a way that manufacturers of toaster ovens never had to imagine.”
Thus we are presented here with a legal quandary instigated by the advent of revolutionary technology affecting serious legal, moral and ethical issues. How should we view this inevitability and how shall we deal with it as a society? Continue reading “Robot Love?”
Submitted by Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Venerable daytime soap One Life To Live may have signed off for the last time Friday after 44 years, but the tales of two political pundits are poised to take up the slack. msnbc reports that uber-conservative Pat Buchanan has been granted leave of absence from the cable network after coming out with his new screed book, Suicide of a Superpower. With tantalizing chapter titles like The End of White America and The Death of Christian America, network chief Phil Griffin pulled the plug on msnbc’s version of the “Wild Man of Borneo” in October saying he “didn’t think it should be part of the national dialogue much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC.” Amen to that brother, but shouldn’t we at least get a little sample like this beaut:
Back then, black and white lived apart, went to different schools and churches, played on different playgrounds, and went to different restaurants, bars, theaters, and soda fountains. But we shared a country and a culture. We were one nation. We were Americans.
Continue reading “Pat and Keith’s Excellent Adventure: Pundit Soap Operas”
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
When you contemplate all of the problems that beset us in this election year it is hard not to feel daunted by the task of finding solutions. Many millions of American’s are without jobs, with the prospect of future employment seeming illusory. The top 1% of the American population controls vast amounts of the country’s wealth. http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4?op=1 Wages of average Americans have stagnated for the past 40 years to such an extent that our middle class is shrinking rapidly. The housing boom of years past has become a bust of monumental proportions and foreclosures are destroying formerly viable neighborhoods. Our once barely adequate “safety net” has been shredded and there are attempts to destroy both Social Security and Medicare as we know it. Despite a weak attempt at Medical reform millions of Americans find health care unaffordable, with many dying and others forced into bankruptcy to stay alive. Due to lack of money America’s once magnificent infrastructure is rotting and solutions are not on the horizon.
The collapse and bailout of our banking industry has cost us trillions and appears to have been brought about by fraudulent practices on the part of the industry, yet no one has been indicted. In fact the remuneration of top executives in this duplicitous industry has actually increased. Efforts to impose stiff controls ensuring that these artificial crises don’t happen again and that these huge financial entities do business ethically, have failed to pass the Congress. We see that the fallout from the American banking crisis has undercut the world’s economy and that economic crises in other industrialized nations appear regularly. Please notice I’m only referring to the economic problems we face and only producing a partial list of those economic problems.
We have seemingly come to the conclusion of an unnecessary war in Iraq, where trillions were spent and perhaps a million were killed, yet the withdrawal of troops is to bases that surround Iraq. We are leaving about 40,000 Americans in country, many as mercenaries (contractors is a euphemism) as we support the largest diplomatic infrastructure in any foreign nation. The war in Afghanistan still rages in a land that has never been significantly shaped by any outside empire, this despite the killing of Osama Bin Laden and the virtual destruction of Al Qaeda. Hundreds of billions are being spent and the lives of our troops are put in danger, in an exercise with little hope of success. Billions are going towards building Afghanistan’s infrastructure as ours is falling apart. Yet these instances fail to raise the broad spectrum of the military/foreign policy problems continuing to plague us. These issues include a military budget that far greater than that of all other nations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
However, these three paragraphs still do not encompass the broad range of problems we Americans face. There is more to be touched on before we come to the conclusion that I’ve reached, that there is one problem that not only transcends all of these, but its need for immediate solution supersedes any of the others in importance. Continue reading “America’s Transcendent Issue”
We have yet another live mike mishap. While reporters were waiting to hear from President Obama on his reform of the military, a C-Span mike picked up on reporters saying “See this room? Two-thirds of us laid off when Ron Paul is president.” It is a far point. How can Paul claim to be serious about creating jobs when fewer wars mean fewer war correspondents? In the meantime, President Obama should be credited with taking an unpopular step in calling for a reexamination of our long-standing “two-war” strategy of maintaining an army ready to fight two conventional wars.
Continue reading “Is Ron Paul A Clear and Present Threat To War Correspondents?”
Last night, we received word of two considerable accomplishments. First, we won the ABA Journal’s selection as the top opinion blog. Second, we hit our 10 millionth viewer on the blog. We are routinely ranked as one of the most visited legal blogs by AVVO. As our viewership has grown in only a few short years, we have reached a wider and wider international audience.
Continue reading “Turley Blog Hits 10 Million Viewers”
Last night the editors of the ABA Journal informed us that we have voted the top opinion blog of 2011 in the ABA Journal competition. It is our second such top award in the annual competition and it is an honor shared equally by all of our contributors and readers.
Continue reading “TURLEY BLOG PICKED AS TOP OPINION LEGAL BLOG IN 2011”
This story has it all from culinary, cultural, legal and political angles. Chinese police have arrested a local Communist party official from Guangdong for poisoning the boiled cat stew of a billionaire, Long Liyuan, 49. The accused, Huang Guang, is deputy director of agriculture in Guangdong’s Bajia township and was in a business dispute with Long.
Continue reading “Chinese Official Arrested In Suspected Murder Of Tycoon By Poisoning His Cat Stew”
It seems like every election we have another extreme religious figure who becomes a campaign issue for a candidate. Obama had Rev. Wright and McCain had Rev. Hagee and Parsley. Sarah Palin has an actual Kenyan witch hunter. Now Ron Paul has his own embarrassing association. The preacher is Rev. Phillip G. Kayser, a pastor at the Dominion Covenant Church in Nebraska, who has a following in Iowa. The Paul campaign issued a press release (that it later removed from its site) heralding the endorsement of Kayser. The problem is that Kayser believes that gays should be executed according to biblical law. It was a a highly destructive endorsement for Paul who is attracting civil libertarians to his campaign. No one can stop someone from endorsing you, but the campaign clearly sought this endorsement from an extremist with reprehensible views. Unlike Wright, Kayser is not Paul’s personal minister, but the press release made him Paul’s problem in reaching out to civil libertarians.
Continue reading “Paul’s Preacher Probem: Meet Phillip G. Kayser”
Just as Henry V rallied the thin, tired troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, it is time to make that final call for votes in this year’s competition for the top opinion blog by the American Bar Association. There are now just two days left and, while we have pulled ahead in the last week, the contest remains very close with one of the top five largest legal blogs. If you like our blog, it is time to pony up and vote.
Continue reading “Just Two Days Left In The ABA Competition: We Need Your Vote!”
In Jacksonville, police are being accused of arresting and beating the wrong man in response to a report of a fight on Christmas Eve. They then arrested family members who say that were just trying to stop police from beating their relative. Daisy Besancourt, 57, was charged with failure to disperse on command, after she reportedly filmed the police and refused to turn off her phone.
Continue reading “North Carolina Police Reportedly Arrest Woman Who Refuses To Turn Over Cellphone After Filming Alleged Abuse”
The previously discussed tension between Orthodox Jews and the Israeli government has reached a flash point with violent clashes in the town of Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem. Reporters have been attacked by Orthodox Jews in filming the town.
Continue reading “Orthodox Jews Clashes With Police Over Segregation of Women”
-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger