Tag: law

But… But… International Law!

No doubt all the groups in the USA and Europe that are always nattering on about how one thing or another is necessary and supersedes national sovereignty because of international law will do their part and demand Benjamin Netanyahu turn himself in to face justice for his alleged crimes against international law, right?

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague announced on Thursday that it has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to the Gaza conflict. Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif has also been named in a warrant for similar charges.

The court accuses Netanyahu and Gallant of using starvation as a method of warfare, alleging they deliberately deprived Gaza’s civilian population of essential supplies, including food, water, and medicine. Prosecutors claim there was “no obvious military necessity” for such actions, which amount to violations of international law.

Both Israeli politicians could face arrest if they travel to any of the 123 countries that are signatories to the ICC’s Rome Statute.

International law is, of course, a nullity. It’s pseudo-dialectic at best; one might as reasonably appeal to the intersolar law of the Federated Planets. Even so, it’s long past time for Israel’s leaders to recognize that neither the Holocaust nor the October 7th attacks are some sort of historical get-out-of-jail-free card. Especially when they’re actively engaged in what very much looks like ethnic cleansing.

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No Childhood Vaccine is Tested

Don’t trust the scientists, trust the HISTORY of science. Which, by the way, very few scientists actually know.

“My position on vaccines… is that vaccines should be tested, like other medicines. Of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated… for American children, none of them—not one—has ever been subject to a pre-licensing, placebo-controlled trial. Other medicines are required to do that, and we should have to do that for vaccines. If I’m wrong, show me the test. Show me the study. You won’t be able to, because there are none. That means that we don’t know what the long-term risks are.”
– RFK Jr.

I’ve been pointing this out for years, very nearly decades now. Forget the Covid-19 vaxx. There are no vaccines, ZERO, which have been demonstrated to be either safe or effective by a proper application of the scientific method. It’s all statistics and hand-waving and blustering and hiding the adverse effects. There is more scientific and statistical evidence that vaccines cause autism, however flawed it might be, than there is providing evidence that any childhood vaccine is safe for children. RFK Jr. established this via the legal process when he sued Anthony Fauci for calling him a liar for stating that simple fact. After a year of trying to stay out of court, Fauci’s lawyers finally admitted on their client’s behalf that RFK Jr. had been telling the truth.

“There’s no downstream liability, there’s no front-end safety testing… and there’s no marketing and advertising costs, because the federal government is ordering 78 million school kids to take that vaccine every year. What better product could you have? And so there was a gold rush to add all these new vaccines to the schedule… because if you get onto that schedule, it’s a billion dollars a year for your company. So we got all of these new vaccines, 72 shots, 16 vaccines… And that year, 1989, we saw an explosion in chronic disease in American children… ADHD, sleep disorders, language delays, ASD, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, ticks, narcolepsy. Autism went from one in 10,000 in my generation… to one in every 34 kids today.”
– RFK Jr.

And now he’s the government official in charge of these matters. You wouldn’t want to DENY what the government is telling you about vaccines would you? You wouldn’t want to be a VACCINE SCIENCE DENIER!

UPDATE: A once-skeptical reader admits that he was unable to disprove any of the historical facts about vaccines, their irrelevance to public health, and the nonexistence of vaccine safety science despite a serious effort to do so.

Following your RFK post today, I wanted to thank you for inspiring me years ago. Long before COVID, you were talking about the issues and lack of information on vaccines; as a naive college kid, I decided to look up everything I could to prove you wrong. I found what you said I would: layers of rhetoric and misdirection on top of shockingly poor official data. It’s primed me to look deeper into things, and that has kept me and my family safe from many things. It’s also trained me to seek expertise rather than experts, which has helped sift through the clown nonsense.

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SUPER★HERO

Thanks to the U.S. Trademark Office, it may be time to consider changing the name of Alt★Hero. Or, even better, introducing a new line with our new superhero universe.

A U.S. Trademark Office tribunal has canceled a set of “Super Hero” trademarks jointly owned by comic giants Marvel and DC at the request of a London-based comic book artist, according to a Thursday order. The USPTO’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled for S.J. Richold’s Superbabies Ltd, opens new tab after DC did not file an answer to Superbabies’ request to invalidate the marks.

Spokespeople and attorneys for Marvel and DC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Superbabies attorney Adam Adler of Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg said in a statement that the ruling was “not just a win for our client but a victory for creativity and innovation. By establishing SUPER HEROES’ place in the public domain, we safeguard it as a symbol of heroism available to all storytellers.”

Rivals Marvel and DC jointly own four federal trademarks covering the terms “Super Hero” and “Super Heroes,” the oldest of which dates back to 1967.

Richold writes comics featuring a team of super-hero babies called the Super Babies. According to Richold, DC accused his company of infringing the “Super Hero” marks and threatened legal action after Superbabies Ltd applied for U.S. trademarks covering the “Super Babies” name. Marvel and DC have cited their marks in opposing dozens of superhero-related trademark applications at the USPTO, according to the office’s records.

Superbabies petitioned the office to cancel the marks in May. It argued that Marvel and DC cannot “claim ownership over an entire genre” with their trademarks, and that the two competitors cannot own trademarks together.

We need a name for the universe of Black Warrant, Red Hornet, and our other new heroes. That just might do…

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Reads Like Victory

Remember this any time someone tells you that it’s not possible to make a difference in this world. The Cavalry did this.

The Updated Steam Subscriber Agreement

We’d like to share some information about recent updates to the Steam Subscriber Agreement (SSA), which mainly relate to how any disputes between Valve and Steam users are resolved.

We’ve eliminated the requirement that disputes be resolved by individual arbitration. As always, we encourage you to contact Steam Support when you have any issues, as that will nearly always be the best way to reach a solution. But if that doesn’t work, the updated SSA now provides that any disputes are to go forward in court instead of arbitration. We’ve also removed the class action waiver, as well as the cost and fee-shifting provisions, that were in prior versions of the SSA.

The whole approach was abusive and poorly conceived from the start.

Tech companies: You MUST arbitrate!
Users: Okay, let’s arbitrate.
Tech companies: NOOO! We will take you to court to avoid arbitration!
Court: You all said you wanted arbitration and you stuck them with it. So arbitrate, bitches!
Tech companies: (change terms of agreement)

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Authors Sue ChatGPT

I’m not privy to the technical details, but based upon what I understand of how AIs are trained and how they work, I suspect the authors have a very strong case against the defendants.

John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

In papers filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

The suit was organized by the Authors Guild and also includes David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand among others.

“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”

The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” that was titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and used “the same characters from Martin’s existing books in the series “A Song of Ice and Fire.”

AI is a fantastic tool, but just because it allows the less creative and the less talented to better exploit their imaginations, that doesn’t give anyone the right or the permission to tread upon the legal rights of others.

I’m a strong skeptic of copyright, particularly beyond the life of the author, but the fact is that it exists and while neither a title nor a style can be protected, the characters and existing works are. There really isn’t any difference between a human writing a pastiche – like Scalzi did with Old Man’s War or I did with “The Deported” – and an AI-written text that imitates an author’s style. That is, and should be, permissible.

The problem, of course, is that most people aren’t content with that, and they want to cross the line into the theft of the author’s actual characters and storylines. And if the AI manufacturer’s aren’t preventing their tools from being used in that manner, they are clearly complicit in the violations.

Regardless, AI is going to destroy the popular book market for the vast majority of writers. Because no author can compete with an automated book factories of the sort that AI now permits. In fact, we will probably explore creating one ourselves; some incredible and innovate sagas are going to be produced with these new tools.

Amazon is also limiting authors to three new self-published books on Kindle Direct per day, an effort to restrict the proliferation of AI texts.

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Not the Worst Idea

Australia contemplates a ban on social media for children under the age of 16:

Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, the prime minister said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and ‘onto the footy fields’.

Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, Anthony Albanese said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a ‘scourge’.

The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said.

The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16.

Social media can literally be as dangerous as driving for children, as they are far too immature to be dealing with some of the personal issues and challenges that social media can create for them. Also, it will be considerably harder for child predators to groom and lure children away from their homes if they have no electronic access to them.

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The Evil of Copyright Stands

The Internet Archive lost its appeal in its copyright case against Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House.

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in the copyright case against Hachette and three other publishers. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the previous decision, from March 2023, that the Internet Archive’s Open Library program qualifies as copyright infringement. Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley initially filed a lawsuit against the popular nonprofit organization in 2020.

“This appeal presents the following question: Is it ‘fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors?” Wednesday’s decision reads. “Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no.”

The court rejected most of the Internet Archive’s defense, including the notion that the archive provides a public service. “While IA claims that prohibiting its practices would harm consumers and researchers, allowing its practices would―and does―harm authors,” the decision reads. “With each digital book IA disseminates, it deprives Publishers and authors of the revenues due to them as compensation for their unique creations. Though IA and its amici may lament the consolidation of editorial power and criticize Publishers for being motivated by profits, behind Publishers stand authors who are entitled to compensation for the reproduction of their works and whose ‘private motivation’ ultimately serve[s] the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts.”

This isn’t going to protect authors. This isn’t going to protect consumers. Like most “law” it does nothing but protect the financial interest of large transnational corporations at the expense of the very works that are being “protected”.

What comes of “copyright protection” is abominations like Amazon’s raping of Tolkien’s work and Disney’s destruction of Star Wars. Meanwhile, most works are lost to the ravages of history, because their “protection” combined with their unprofitability means the corporate copyright holders see no reason to produce or publish them. The fact that the “protection” extends 70 years beyond the life of the author makes it perfectly clear that this isn’t about the preserving the rights of the author to be compensated.

And yes, I have taken steps to ensure that my works, at least, will never be acquired by the usual suspects.

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Clown World Knows No Law

The reason conservatives can never win or successfully resist Clown World is because they believe that the law is something real, and something material. Whereas, as literally every single lawyer will tell you, what the law actually is not the black letter words passed by the politicians or the policies of the regulatory agencies, it is whatever the judge of the relevant matter says it is.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Court of Brazil has ordered the operations of X (formerly Twitter) to be “immediately suspended” and threatened draconian fines against anyone trying to sidestep the ban. De Moraes demanded that X censor several accounts that “spread disinformation” by criticizing him, but the platform’s owner Elon Musk refused.

On Friday, the judge ordered the platform banned in Brazil, giving Google and Apple five days to remove X from their app stores. He also threatened a fine of around 50,000 Brazilian real (approximately $8,874) a day for anyone using a virtual private network (VPN) to get around the ban.

On Thursday, de Moraes froze the accounts of Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, saying this was needed to ensure the payment of fines levied against X for failing to appoint a legal representative. Musk objected to the “absolutely illegal action” taken without any due process, pointing out that X and SpaceX are “two completely different companies with different shareholders.”

According to X’s Global Government Affairs team, de Moraes “threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts.”

We view this sort of thing as bad. But in Switzerland, the government broke multiple laws to prevent the failure of Credit Suisse from financially harming any of its account holders. Everyone, with the exception of a few shareholders and creditors who ended up getting the short end of the stick, thought this was a very good thing. But whether these things are considered good or bad is irrelevant, the point is that what everyone believes is “the law” is nothing more than a collection of general suggestions that the three branches of government will ignore in a heartbeat whenever they feel that doing so is desirable.

Nothing can be repaired or restored by so-called legal means when the authorities harbor absolutely no respect for what passes for the law. Any policy or distinction that depends upon “legality”, such as immigration or limits on legal speech, doesn’t exist in a practical sense so long as one is government by a government of men, not laws.

Nancy Pelosi just told Bill Maher that she plans to grant citizenship to every illegal immigrant and give them free housing.

See how easy it is to deal with a problem of illegality? One stroke of the pen, one judge’s order, and the problem is magically solved!

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Defending Freedom in Deutschland

The appeal of the “rights” and “freedoms” being “defended” by the “Democracies” is rapidly vanishing on an almost weekly basis:

The German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) may soon be allowed to secretly enter and search homes, according to a draft reform proposal seen by Der Spiegel and RND. According to the document, police would also have the power to install spyware on suspects’ computers or smartphones, in addition to conducting covert searches of their homes. These powers would supposedly only be used in exceptional circumstances.

The Interior Ministry has defended the initiative, claiming that the BKA plays a central role in countering international terrorism threats. A spokesperson refused to discuss details of the proposal, which is still at a very early stage, but told Der Spiegel on Wednesday that security agencies must have the necessary powers to effectively counter evolving threats.

Critics have voiced concerns that such far-reaching interventions could undermine the rule of law, as the inviolability of the home is enshrined in Article 13 of the German constitution.

You know, I’m really beginning to suspect that this whole Patriot Act thing may not have actually had as much to do with defending Americans and their rights as we were told it did. Clown World is transforming into a twisted parody of itself.

Vee are here to defend your freedomz by spying on you!

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If You Think That’s Bad

People are, quite rightly, reacting with disbelief and horror to Disney’s attempt to claim that signing up for a Disney+ subscription means that if you die at one of their restaurants at Disney World due to Disney’s negligence, you have agreed not to sue them.

That doesn’t surprise me, given what corporations have been adding to their Terms of Service. To be honest, I wouldn’t even be remotely surprised if Disney also claims the right to sell the organs of anyone who dies at one of their theme parks, or while watching Disney+.

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