December 2010 – Page 15 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Mysteries I’ll Never Fully Understand: Copyright Law

I’m a little peeved. I’m madly in love with Alfie Boe’s voice.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYNN_OpNUIA[/youtube]
(He’s sadly silent until he really belts it out at 2:11.)

So I want to buy some beautiful Boe tunes. iTunes has very little to choose from at the moment, as does Amazon. In cd form, most of what I was most interested in simply wasn’t available or wasn’t available in any reasonable time frame. The 2010 album from Les Mis available in the US is a cast recording from the international tour, not the concert with Boe. The 2010 dvd of the concert isn’t available in the United States as far as I can tell, even though I knew in listening to interviews that it was available in the UK. So, a little clicking over to Amazon.co.uk, and I find all of the Alfie Boe albums in stock and ready to deliver, along with the 2010 concert dvd. I’m thinking it’s time to place an international order* when I decide to double check their shipping rules for international shipments. This, my friends, is where copyright law blows my mind.

Books, Music, DVD and Video items
Most countries in the world. Please note that customers in the US and Canada may be restricted to one copy of certain book titles because multiple copies may infringe US copyright laws.

I could understand a warning about dvd country encoding. But what the hell do they mean that my purchase of more than one copy of a book could violate US laws? I thought copyright law was about stealing the work of others. If you offer that item for sale, I agree to your price, and we complete the transaction, that should not be a violation of copyright laws.

That said, I need to figure out what the price would be to ship everything over here since apparently the music companies don’t want our damn Yankee money paying to enjoy the songs of hot English tenors. Pardon me as I go get my fill of my new musical crush.

*I also can’t buy the mp3 versions of said albums due to generically cited “geographical restrictions.”

Pardoning Aitken

The Daily Caller is noting the growing pressure on Governor Christie to pardon Brian Aitken.

UPDATE: More from Fox News.

‘Twas the Night before Christmas

When all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse – because creatures that go bump in the night know we’re well armed in the Snowflake household.

Christmas presents have started to arrive here at the house, and now it’s time for me to really get crackin’ with decorations so I can start wrapping them. However, one is still in production and won’t be here until a few days before the holiday. When it is finally wrapped, I’ll have to punch holes in the box and wrapping paper. Is it a cat? Lord, no. I’m not bringing any of those demons home. Is it a dog? If so, it would have my name on it and this gift is solely Sebastian’s baby. Nope, it’s not an animal at all. It’s a holster. The holes are so I can smell it from time to time because I know the leather will smell that good.*

MitchRosenPSF — Photo from MitchRosen.com - The Pocket Softy

We got a preview a week or so ago after I placed the order for a Mitch Rosen holster and they sent a catalog. OMG, I have never wished for a scratch and sniff catalog before, but oh how I wanted one for his holsters and belts. I don’t even care that we wouldn’t have a need for many of his products, I wanted to order one of everything the second I opened it up. If we don’t have a gun that would fit some of his designs, we could buy one later. In fact, that’s what we’ll be doing with this piece. We don’t actually own the gun yet. But, I know that Sebastian will order one sometime soon, and then he’ll have a nice new custom holster for it.

Mitch’s work is incredible, and I can’t wait to see what arrives shortly before Christmas.

*If I wasn’t trying so hard to stay off of Santa’s naughty list, I would wrap the holster in the girliest wrapping paper we own and slap my own name on it – at least until Sebastian gets the gun.

Interesting Article on Condie Rice

From the Philly Inquirer. It almost seems like Harold Jackson is afraid to say too many good things about her, but what tripped over my alerts was this passage:

Rice’s recollection of events that night comes pretty close to my own, although we were in different households. “The men of the community took up their neighborhood watch,” she said. Rice explained that these watches had begun months earlier, after homes and churches were bombed.

She said that when her father was on watch, he would sit on the porch with a “gun on his lap . . . looking for white night riders.” Because of that experience, seeing her father take up a weapon to protect his family, Rice said, she was “a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.”

My father and other men in our housing project also armed themselves to protect us after Sixteenth Street Baptist was bombed. That never made me want to join the NRA. But as I said, my life and Rice’s were very different. The little gun violence I saw as a teenager convinced me that it should be harder to get a gun.

Except it it had been harder to get a gun, you can bet the hoops one had to jump through would be enforced vigorously against the black community, while the Klan would have had all the guns they want. What few gun control laws exist in this country were mostly targeted at disarming minorities. Read the whole article. It’s quite good.

Not Something You See Everyday

Lancaster County is taking a look at park rules, and getting rid of some. Among them are the rules banning firearms in county parks:

Currently, the regulations manual outlaws the carrying of firearms in county parks by anyone except law-enforcement officers.

“Obviously, that is not consistent with the Uniform Firearms Act,” Weiss said.

The Act authorizes people to openly carry handguns in Pennsylvania, or to carry them with a concealed weapons permit, anywhere in the state except for a few places, such as schools and court facilities.

Technically speaking, the act doesn’t authorize open carry. There’s just no law against the practice, and the UFA preempts the counties from making one. But that’s nitpicking. Lancaster County is doing the right thing here, and for that they should be commended. Most of the time, government loves to just add laws. You hardly ever see them looking existing laws over to see if they still make sense. We need more of this.

Displeasure Among the Gun Control Ranks

Seems some didn’t particularly care for Ed Rendell’s departing surrender on the issue of gun control. Chief among them Joe Grace, who Kinney reports as “pained by the glum talk about guns.”Â Joe’s pain is my content. It doesn’t look like Representative Tim Briggs thinks to highly of it either:

Montgomery County progressive Democrat Tim Briggs became a loyal CeaseFirePA soldier in his first term, but frets that building a broad coalition might be for naught if Corbett and Co. “try to push an extreme social agenda.” Indeed, Corbett has said he would happily sign the “castle doctrine” expansion.

Broad coalition? 159 Pennsylvania representatives voted for Castle Doctrine the first time, only 38 voted against it. 38 out of 202 seats is a broad coalition? I’d say you were tilting at windmills out of the gate, Rep. Briggs. Second time around he lost two votes from his “broad coalition.”

Ed Rendell sees the writing on the wall because he can count. I have no doubt Rendell did what he thought he could to advance the issue, particularly pushing Democrats who would run on gun control vocally. But that ultimately failed. Having failed, Ed is giving up, and riding off into the sunset, leaving suckers who bought his line on the issue, like Tim Briggs, in the dust.

Tell Me I’m Dreaming This?

Rick Santorum seems to be camped out in New Hampshire. This is not good news for folks like me who got so fed up with him they voted for Bob Casey, who, in sharp contrast to Santorum, seems to keep a low profile. So low I often wonder if he’s still alive. My problems with Casey aside, it ought to be no surprise thatÂ Santorum is stumping on social issues:

Santorum will be heading to Boston to speak on Saturday on religion in public life at the â€œSymposium on Catholic Statesmanshipâ€ sponsored by the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.

Hey Rick, I don’t know of anyone’s told you this, but I think people are a lot more concerned about government in private life than they are about religion in public life these days. But I’m sort of OK with Santorum throwing his hat into the ring, if only because he might suck enough of the religious conservative vote away from this guy to prevent that potential disaster in 2012.

I guess the only question would be “Why New Hampshire?” This is a state who’s motto is “Live Free or Die!” not “Love Jesus or Die!” Why not stump in Iowa with this message ahead of the game? He’s probably worried they’ll remember he hates ethanol, and in Iowa, if you hate ethanol, you hate corn, and if you hate corn, you hate Iowa. Iowans might love Jesus, but corn is their true religion.

In other news, it’s time to create a “2012 Election” category. It never stops, does it?

Onorato’s Political Future

Capitol Ideas is reporting on what’s-his-name’s political future. Sounds like he’s mulling a run for Auditor General. I don’t think Onorato is an impressive fundraiser or campaigner. While this was a Republican year, I think Onorato would have struggled even if this election was in 2008. If I were advising him, I’d suggest County Executive was as high as he is meant to go in this game, and that a return to private law practice is probably the best path forward for him. My own political views aside, I’m not sure he has the talent to run for state wide office, absent being able to ride in on a much stronger candidate’s coattails. You can do that as Auditor General, but who is that much stronger candidate going to be?

On the Ropes

Jacob takes a look at the sad state of the gun control movement. He points out they haven’t gotten any new gun control passed in New York in a decade. Thinking a bit, it’s really only been California and New Jersey they’ve been able to get anything done, and lawsuits are underway that will hopefully reverse even that in due course.

Pots, Kettles and Secrets

SayUncle doesn’t think the Government that snoops ought to have much to complain about when the tables get turned. When it comes to leaking government malfeasance, even if those documents are technically classified, I agree. I’m a lot less sympathetic to someone who dumps reams of diplomatically sensitive classified information online with the sole purpose of embarrassing the US government and destroying its capacity to engage in diplomacy worldwide. In a world where you have a nuclear armed North Korea itching to start a war, and your documents contain sensitive information about plans to reunify the Korean Peninsula, that kind of crap can get millions of people killed. As far as I’m concerned, Assange (and you can’t spell “Assange” without “Ass”) ought to be charged with espionage (I’ve heard talk of Treason. Treason is when you betray your own country). It looks like the Swedes already want him for rape.

But we’re increasingly living in a transparent society. None of us will have any privacy, but that’s going to be true of the government as well. The only effective ways to keep secrets in a world as interconnected as ours is to keep the number of people who know the secrets down to as small a number as possible. If more than a few dozen people have access to your secrets, chances are one of them will be a malcontent, and your secret is no longer.

Even in a transparent world, the governments still have legitimate reasons to keep secrets, but for better or worse that’s going to become more difficult if not impossible. On the balance, I think that will be a good thing rather than a bad thing.