Viacom responds to EFF/MoveOn lawsuit

EFF filed a lawsuit against Viacom for abusing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to cause the takedown of a YouTube video clip called "Stop the Falsiness" which used video from The Colbert Report within the boundaries of fair use.

Viacom has issued a pretty solid response (PDF)--that they issued no such DMCA notice, and if they had, YouTube should have notified the user who submitted the clip and given them a chance to file a counter-notice. Viacom further stated that they found the clip elsewhere, reviewed it, and agree that it constitutes fair use of their content and should be put back up. (YouTube has put the clip back up.)

This is not good news for YouTube--this is further evidence that they are taking down content without receiving DMCA notices, which means that they are exercising editorial control over their content, which places them at greater risk of failing to successfully defend their claim to be protected by the DMCA's "safe harbor" protections.

Other such evidence comes from Mark Cuban, who has been issuing DMCA subpoenas to YouTube users who have used his content (movies produced by his companies such as HDNet). He has also issued takedown notices for some such content, while explicitly choosing not to issue takedown notices for others--because he wants the promotion from YouTube, just not wholesale theft of his content. Yet YouTube has taken down clips that he has specifically chosen not to issue takedown notices for.

This looks like a misstep for the EFF.

UPDATE (March 28, 2007): As noted by commenter Jamie, there apparently was a DMCA notice issued by BayTSP, which was hired by Viacom to send out DMCA notices on its behalf, so Viacom may not be in the clear.

White House involvement in Duke Cunningham scandal

Talking Points Memo has been discussing the fact that the very first contract that Mitchell Wade's MZM, Inc. got with the federal government, back in July 2002, was with the Executive Office of the President, allegedly for office furniture.

It now turns out that it was actually to screen mail for anthrax.

How did MZM, Inc., which had no record or experience, get such an important contract? Who did Mitchell Wade bribe to get that one?

Rep. Henry Waxman is asking for answers.

And remember, the Cunningham/MZM scandal is what San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam was investigating when she was asked to resign, the day after she announced that she was going after "Dusty" Foggo, then #3 at the CIA.

More at Talking Points Memo.

Returned soldier killed by police in Delaware

Sgt. Derek Hale, returned from two tours of duty in Iraq, was in Wilmington, Delaware for a "Toys for Tots" campaign in November of last year sponsored by the Pagan Motorcycle Club, which he had recently joined. He was house-sitting for a friend, sitting on the steps outside the house, when the friend's ex-wife showed up with her two kids. An unmarked police car and black SUV also showed up, and Hale, clad in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, was told to take his hands out of his pockets. He was tasered less than a second later, which dropped him to the ground, with his right hand out of the pocket and spasming involuntarily. He was again asked to remove his hands from his pockets, and tasered again, causing him to roll onto his side and vomit. Howard Mixon, a contractor working nearby, shouted that this was "overkill," to which a black-clad officer responded, "I'll f*****g show you overkill!"

Lt. William Brown of the Wilmington Police Department proceeded to do just that--as Hale was being tasered a third time, and attempting unsuccessfully to extricate his left hand from his pocket as his body convulsed from the tasering, Brown shot Hale three times in the chest, killing him.

There were no drugs found, nor any evidence of a crime. There was no warrant for Hale's arrest--he was a "person of interest" in a drug investigation of his motorcycle club.

Wilmington police claim that Hale was killed because Lt. Brown "feared for the safety of his fellow officers and believed that the suspect was in a position to pose an imminent threat." Police say they recovered pepper spray and a switchblade from Hale's body, though Hale's stepbrother says he never carried a knife other than a Swiss Army knife.

Several Wilmington police falsely claimed that Hale had been charged with drug trafficking two days before he was killed, which was used by Virginia police to obtain a warrant to search Hale's home in Manassas, which found nothing incriminating.

Derek Hale's widow and parents have now filed a lawsuit against several Delaware police officers, with the support of the Rutherford Institute and a private lawfirm.

If the above details are accurate, why isn't Lt. William Brown on trial for murder?

(Details from Pro Libertate by way of The Agitator, the latter of which seems to have multiple stories like this every week. The comments of the former include some observations that the Pagan Motorcycle Club is heavily involved in criminal activity, which should be taken into consideration but still wouldn't justify a killing in cold blood.)

Anti-Mormon DVDs distributed to home across Arizona

An anti-Mormon Christian ministry, "Concerned Christians," has distributed 18,000 DVDs to homes across Arizona, mainly targeting areas with high Mormon populations such as Mesa and Snowflake. 15,000 DVDs were distributed to homes in Mesa, Tempe, and Gilbert, 2,000 in Snowflake, and 1,000 in Tucson.

The DVD, titled "Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith," argues against the latter but not the former. The DVD was apparently produced by and distributed nationally by Living Hope Ministries of Brigham City, Utah, a Christian church that criticizes the Mormon religion. [UPDATE (July 6, 2007): My cousin and his wife inform me in the comments that this is not correct, contrary to the statement from the Arizona distributor in the Arizona Republic's report, and that this was produced and distributed by TriGrace Ministries and GoodnewsfortheLDS.com.]

That name was familiar to me--I suspected, and verified, that this is the same church that previously produced a DVD about how DNA evidence disproved Mormon claims about Native Americans being descendants of the lost tribe of Israel. In 2001, the pastor of Living Hope Ministries was Joel Kramer, who was the officiant at the wedding of my cousin Aaron Lippard, which I attended at their storefront church in Brigham City.

Kramer, a former Tucson resident, has authored a book, Beyond Fear, which tells the story of how Kramer and my cousin Aaron traveled across Papua New Guinea solely under their own power. I read the book after seeing my cousin present a slide presentation about his harrowing trip (and show off his septum piercing, which was pierced by a New Guinea aborigine with a bird bone, by sticking a meat thermometer through it). I found the book enjoyable, though preachy and annoying in spots. Kramer's voice as a writer struck me as arrogant and condescending towards my cousin, portraying himself as a Christian real-man and my cousin as an inexperienced, naive fellow who had much to learn about becoming a mature Christian male.

A film Kramer has produced is called The Bible vs. the Book of Mormon, which is reviewed here by the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at Brigham Young University. This review makes a point that I've made about Living Hope's Mormons & DNA DVD and about Richard Abanes' One Nation Under Gods--they don't seem to apply the same standard of criticism to Christianity that they apply to Mormonism.

I'm sure the same is true of "Jesus Christ/Joseph Smith."

The rsync.net warrant canary

You aren't allowed to say if you've received a National Security Letter. But there's no law that says you can't say that you haven't received one.

Thus, rsync.net has a "warrant canary"--they periodically post a cryptographically signed statement that they have not, to date, received any PATRIOT Act warrants or had any searches and seizures. If they stop updating the statement, then you can draw your own conclusions.

The second of these library signs uses the same principle: "The FBI has not been here [watch closely for removal of this sign]."

(Via jwz's blog, where some commenters question whether the recent Washington Post piece by the recipient of a National Security Letter is truthful. Note that the ACLU has a lawsuit going on about this case, which I previously noted back in 2005.)

NIST's 9/11 Investigation FAQ

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster has produced a FAQ about the causes of the WTC building collapses (along with other FAQs and factsheets):

NIST conducted an extremely thorough three-year investigation into what caused the WTC towers to collapse, as explained in NIST’s dedicated Web site, http://wtc.nist.gov. This included consideration of a number of hypotheses for the collapses of the towers.

Some 200 technical experts—including about 85 career NIST experts and 125 leading experts from the private sector and academia—reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they began to collapse.

Based on this comprehensive investigation, NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers. Both photographic and video evidence—as well as accounts from the New York Police Department aviation unit during a half-hour period prior to collapse—support this sequence for each tower.

Their study doesn't support the "pancake" hypothesis of floor-by-floor collapse:

NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse, which is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers (the composite floor system—that connected the core columns and the perimeter columns—consisted of a grid of steel “trusses” integrated with a concrete slab; see diagram below). Instead, the NIST investigation showed conclusively that the failure of the inwardly bowed perimeter columns initiated collapse and that the occurrence of this inward bowing required the sagging floors to remain connected to the columns and pull the columns inwards. Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon.

And the FAQ responds to "controlled demolition" claims:

NIST’s findings also do not support the “controlled demolition” theory since there is conclusive evidence that:

• the collapse was initiated in the impact and fire floors of the WTC towers and nowhere else, and;

• the time it took for the collapse to initiate (56 minutes for WTC 2 and 102 minutes for WTC 1) was dictated by (1) the extent of damage caused by the aircraft impact, and (2) the time it took for the fires to reach critical locations and weaken the structure to the point that the towers could not resist the tremendous energy released by the downward movement of the massive top section of the building at and above the fire and impact floors.

Video evidence also showed unambiguously that the collapse progressed from the top to the bottom, and there was no evidence (collected by NIST, or by the New York Police Department, the Port Authority Police Department or the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions in the region below the impact and fire floors as the top building sections (including and above the 98th floor in WTC 1 and the 82nd floor in WTC 2) began their downward movement upon collapse initiation.

In summary, NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to Sept. 11, 2001. NIST also did not find any evidence that missiles were fired at or hit the towers. Instead, photographs and videos from several angles clearly show that the collapse initiated at the fire and impact floors and that the collapse progressed from the initiating floors downward until the dust clouds obscured the view.

There's lots more in the NIST FAQs.

My National Security Letter Gag Order

Yesterday's Washington Post prints a first-hand anonymous account from the head of a small ISP who received a National Security Letter from the FBI, which was an apparent abuse of authority:

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

More at the Washington Post.

Trent Franks defends Egyptian blogger

Although I'm not generally a fan of Arizona's U.S. Rep. Trent Franks (R-District 2), I have to give him compliments for his stance on this issue. He's one of only two Congressmen who has reached out to the Egyptian ambassador to the United States on behalf of Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabil Soliman (also known as Kareem Amer), who was arrested, beaten, held in solitary confinement, and sentenced to four years in prison for criticizing his government in his blog. As the other Congressman is Massachusetts' Rep. Barney Frank (D-District 4), this is about as bipartisan as it gets.

Kudos to Franks and Frank.

(Via Tim Lee at the Technology Liberation Front.)

Daily Show on Viacom v. Google lawsuit

Here's Demetri Martin on the Daily Show commenting on the Viacom lawsuit against Google. This is one that's better to watch on YouTube than on Comedy Central...



(Via Tim Lee at the Technology Liberation Front.)

Former Arizona governor endorses extraterrestrial spacecraft hypothesis

In a CNN interview, former Arizona governor and current pastry chef Fife Symington says he saw the "Phoenix lights" in 1997 and believes that the cause was an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

The CNN coverage fails to offer any alternative explanations (see the "Skepticism" section of the Wikipedia entry on the Phoenix lights and Tony Ortega's 1998 New Times story), or to note that Symington was the second Arizona Republican governor of the 1980s to be indicted on criminal charges, impeached, and removed from office.

Also see the Arizona Republic's coverage.