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Upholding the doctrine.

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013

Oddly enough, FARK made note of this yesterday, but I wanted to link it here: it is one of the few things that’s actually made me happy recently.

Yesterday, on a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court upheld the doctrine of “first sale”. Specifically, the Court stated that, if you legally purchase copyrighted material in another country, you have the right to rent out or resell it in the United States.

In the case before the Court, Supap Kirtsaeng, a student at Cornell and USC, got his family to purchase textbooks in his home country of Thailand, where they were cheaper. His family shipped the textbooks to him in the United States, where he re-sold them for a profit. The publisher John Wiley & Sons sued Mr. Kirtsaeng, alleging this violated copyright law. Wiley and Sons won a $600,000 award in lower courts, but the Supreme Court decision tosses out the lower court verdicts.

Two points I’d like to make:

  1. Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion, and was joined by Chief Justice Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagen. Ginsburg and Kennedy wrote a dissenting opinion. Scalia partially joined the dissenting opinion, but also took exception to parts of it. I have not found the actual opinions online yet; when I do, I will link to them.
  2. It might be worth keeping in mind that John Wiley and Sons was in favor of restricting your right to lend or resell things you’d purchased. I’d suggest that you consider the role of John Wiley and Sons in this case very carefully before purchasing any publications from John Wiley and Sons.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 17, 2013.

Sunday, March 17th, 2013

Well, this is odd. I completely missed the story until I went over to ESPN’s web site. (I was trying to find out when the NCAA brackets will be announced. Again, not that I care about men’s basketball, but Gonzaga!)

Ruth Ann Steinhagen passed away on December 29th, but her death did not become public knowledge until last week.

“Who?”

On the night of June 14, 1949, Ms. Steinhagen lured Eddie Waittkus, first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, to her room in the Edgewater Beach Hotel. Mr. Waitkus had played for the Chicago Cubs, but was traded after the 1948 season. Ms. Steinhagen had an obsession with him.

After he sat down, Steinhagen walked to a closet, said, “I have a surprise for you,” then turned with the rifle she had hidden there and shot him in the chest. Theodore wrote that she then knelt by his side and held his hand on her lap. She told a psychiatrist afterward about how she had dreamed of killing him and found it strange that she was now “holding him in my arms.”

Mr. Waitkus survived. Ms. Steinhagen was found to be insane and spent three years in a mental hospital. And if this story sounds very familiar, yes, this was the basis for Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, which was in turn made into the movie starring Robert Redford.

The “Theodore” in the quote above is John Theodore, who wrote what sounds like an interesting non-fiction book about the incident, Baseball’s Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Law, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Happy Pi Day!

Thursday, March 14th, 2013

My celebration is subdued this year, for various reasons, but I hope all of you have a good day. I also hope that you have some pie today, whether you go out somewhere or bake your own. (And if you feel like baking your own, once again I’ll link to the King Arthur Flour pie crust video.)

Also, the good folks at O’Reilly are offering 50% off on “science and math” ebooks today, just in case you see something you’re interested in.

Posted in Books, Geek | Comments Closed

The Spiders from Cleveland.

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

By way of Borepatch, I found this rather amusing post on the 1899 Cleveland Spiders.

For those who don’t follow baseball history (or loser history) the Spiders were a major league baseball team. But you would have been hard pressed to tell in 1899: the team went 20-134, the worst record ever in baseball history. (That’s a .130 winning percentage.)

They finished 84 games out of first place. They lost 40 of their last 41 games.

(I would actually kind of like one of the hats, but I’m not sure it is a $49 hat. And the J. Thomas Hetrick book MISFITS! Baseball’s Worst Ever Team is not just available from Amazon, but actually has a Kindle edition.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Loser, Spiders, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: February 20, 2013.

Wednesday, February 20th, 2013

We must ban the deadly killer backboards!

Former Texas basketball player Gary Johnson was in stable condition Wednesday morning after undergoing surgery to repair a fractured skull he suffered during a game in Israel, his friend and marketing representative said.

I don’t have much to offer as a Bell trial update. I am assuming the court took Monday off, and there doesn’t seem to have been any reported activity on Tuesday. The LAT does have a story datelined today, but it is just a summary of the past week of testimony, focusing on the whole “it was all Rizzo!” defense strategy.

Obit watch: Donald Richie, “prominent American critic and writer on Japan who helped introduce much of the English-speaking world to the golden age of Japanese cinema in 1959”. Among Richie’s works was The Films of Akira Kurosawa, a book I recommend to anyone interested in Kurosawa’s films.

Posted in Books, California Über Alles, Clippings, Law, Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: February 19, 2013.

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013

Well, isn’t this special. Julie Roe Lach, the NCAA’s chief enforcement officer, has been fired. You may remember Ms. Lach from such hits as “my people totally f–ked up the Miami investigation”.

Is Sherlock Holmes in the public domain? Or is he under copyright?

…according to a civil complaint filed on Thursday in federal court in Illinois by a leading Holmes scholar, many licensing fees paid to the Arthur Conan Doyle estate have been unnecessary, since the main characters and elements of their story derived from materials published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law.

The scholar in question is Leslie S. Klinger, the man behind the recent Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Klinger and the mystery writer Laurie R. King are planning a collection of “Holmes-related” stories by various authors, but the Conan Doyle estate is demanding a licensing fee. Klinger and King did a previous collection of Holmes-related stories in 2011, and paid a $5,000 licensing fee.

The complaint asks that the court make a declaratory judgment establishing that the basic “Sherlock Holmes story elements” are in the public domain, a point that some have previously argued, if not in court.

What can you say about the only college Greco-Roman wrestling program in the country? What are they going to do if wrestling is no longer an Olympic sport? I don’t know, and I wasn’t going to say anything until I read this:

After losing its federal funding last year, the program relies on USA Wrestling and the university for financial support.

Wait. The Federal Government was funding a wrestling program? On the God-forsaken Upper Peninsula of Michigan?

Hermann always has recruits visit the campus during the summer, which he acknowledges is a bit of subterfuge. When they arrive as freshmen, just as the cold winds are beginning to blow, Hermann instructs their parents to wait in the parking lot for a few minute
“I’ve actually had recruits turn around and go back home the same day,” he said.

Competition tractor restoration. No snark here: I think this is nifty. (And, really, it isn’t any different than car shows, is it? Indeed, thinking about it some more, this might also be worth noting as an example of how the mass media is out of touch with the rest of the country.)

In addition to the Delo, which is sponsored by Chevron’s brand of oil and lubricants and is considered a Super Bowl of tractor restoration, there’s also a tractor restoration Web series (“Tractor Fanatic,” with episodes available in a two-DVD set) and Midwest tractor shows that draw thousands of fans each summer.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2013.

Monday, February 18th, 2013

Barnaby Conrad Jr. — bullfighter, bon vivant, portrait artist, saloonkeeper to the stars, author of 36 books, and founder of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, led a life that was anything but boring. Ninety years old, he died Tuesday in his Carpinteria home after a battle with congestive heart disease.

Conrad wrote two books that I liked very much: The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic and Absinthe: History in a Bottle.

I have very little to say about Mindy McCready except this: the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Mixology, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: February 11, 2013.

Monday, February 11th, 2013

Benny’s stepping down from the Papacy is going to be one of the biggest news stories of the year. I wanted to note it here because it gives me a chance to plug a book I really liked: Thomas J. Reese’s Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.

Reese devotes a fair amount of space to discussing questions about the papacy, such as: what happens if the Pope develops Alzheimer’s? What happens if he becomes totally incapacitated, say by a stroke? Or if he goes crazy? What happens if the Pope is in a coma (I know it’s serious)? And, can the Pope resign? I guess we have an answer to that last question: “Yes”.

I missed the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the troop transport Dorchester on February 3, 1943. You remember the story of the Dorchester, right? Or if you don’t remember the name of the ship…

For a long time, the story of the four chaplains was everywhere.
In classrooms, posters showed the men of different faiths, arms linked in prayer, braced against the waves engulfing the deck of their torpedoed troop ship on Feb. 3, 1943. They had given their life preservers to frantic soldiers and urged troops paralyzed with fear to jump into the icy North Atlantic before they were sucked down by the sinking ship’s whirlpool.

They were:

I didn’t get a chance to post an update from Friday’s Bell trial, so let me do that now: Teresa Jacobo is still on the stand, and they’re still going over the “working full time for the city” thing.

Questioned Friday by her attorney Shepard Kopp, Jacobo testified that Rizzo never mentioned that a full-time salary required additional work on authorities.
“Did anyone tell you that you needed to devote a certain number of hours per week, per month or per year to work on those authorities?” Kopp asked, referring to the various boards on which council members served.
“No,” Jacobo said.

In addition, nobody told Jacobo that “a certain number of meetings of those authorities” needed to be conducted at city council meetings, or that the meetings needed to last for a certain amount of time. Jacobo also claims that she gave out business cards with her home and cell numbers to her constituents; “Residents would often call her at all hours, she testified, for help with city issues.”

As I’ve said previously, a lot of the defense seems to be “it was all Rizzo”, as well as “nobody told me”, and “I assumed it was okay because the city attorney didn’t say it wasn’t”. I’m still thinking we’re going to end up with acquittals for the council members, and the bus is going to run over Rizzo, back up, and run over him again.

Posted in Books, California Über Alles, Clippings, History, Law | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: February 5, 2013.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

Today’s the last TMQ of the season!
Hurrah, hurrah!
No more “cosmic thoughts”!
Hurrah, hurrah!
The readers will cheer and the blogger will shout!
And we’ll all feel happy after the last TMQ of the year…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Bridges, Clippings, Geek, NFL, Roads, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Random notes: February 5, 2013.

Tuesday, February 5th, 2013

In Idaho’s graceful, striated-marble Capitol, home to one of the more ardent and adamant state legislatures in the nation in standing up for the Second Amendment, lawmakers from both parties say that a torrent of public passion, even panic, about new proposed federal gun rules is pushing in only one direction: toward more guns, not fewer.

Hurrah Idaho!

First, they came for the owners of modern sporting rifles, and I didn’t speak out because I hate guns and want everyone to live in peace and harmony. Then they came to shut down the raves…

A concert company featured in a Times report Sunday detailing the drug-related deaths of 14 people who attended raves denounced the story in an online statement and took to social media to urge fans to speak out.

More:

Many of the concerts were staged with the blessing of local governments hungry for the revenue they brought in.
James Penman, the San Bernardino city attorney, said economics should never be a justification for raves. He long has urged officials to disallow the events at the National Orange Show Events Center there. Coroners’ reports show that two people have fatally overdosed at National Orange Show raves.
“The city should have zero tolerance for any activity where drugs are an integral part,” Penman said. “A rave without drugs is like a rodeo without horses. They don’t happen.”

Yesterday’s update from the Bell trial: Craig Rhudy of the “L.A. County district attorney’s office’s public integrity division” is on the stand now. So far, he’s testified that “former council members drew most of their nearly $100,000 salaries from panels that seldom met.”

Rhudy has charts.

The chart for 2006, for instance, showed that out of 20 City Council meetings, the Solid Waste and Recycling Authority met just once; the Community Housing and Public Finance Authorities each met five times, and the Surplus Property Authority had four meetings.
All of the defendants, except [Luis] Artiga, who was appointed in 2008, were paid $12,857 for each authority served in 2006.

In 2007, the Finance Authority met once, while the Housing Authority met twice. “By 2009, in spite of the fact that the panels continued to meet only sporadically, the pay for serving on each had jumped to $18,368, according to Rhudy’s chart.” In 2010, the Housing Authority was the only one that had a meeting.

And why does this matter? “In total, the defendants drew more than $1.3 million of their salaries from the authorities in question, Rhudy confirmed.”

I missed noting this over the weekend, but the LAT also ran a story on the “mountain of lawsuits” Bell is dealing with.

Former city leaders are suing the city. Bell is suing the former leaders. The city is suing its former lawyers. A European bank is suing Bell.

And the SEC and IRS are both investigating Bell’s bond sales. Here’s a great story:

Bell’s biggest concern is a lawsuit filed by Dexia Credit Local, part of a European banking group, over the city’s default on $35 million in bonds. The case involves 25 acres of undeveloped land near the 710 Freeway that Bell bought from the federal government with plans to lease it to a railroad.
Dexia bought all the lease revenue bonds the city issued to pay for the deal, which came to more than twice the city’s annual budget.
The deal went bad when an environmental group sued, arguing the city had failed to conduct the required environmental review. The judge agreed. Unable to lease the property — now worth far less than the bonds — Bell had no income to pay back Dexia.

The Richard III story has been reported everywhere, but I want to throw in a link to the Richard III Society, another group that deserves your support. And if you haven’t read it, I commend to your attention Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Guns, History, Law, Sarcasm | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 31, 2013.

Thursday, January 31st, 2013

Obit watch: Patty Andrews, the last surviving Andrews Sister. (NYT. A/V Club.)

If a publisher is reissuing a non-fiction book, do they have an obligation to go back and do fact checking? What if the facts have been called into question since the book was issued? What if the book is “38 Witnesses” by A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times?

In the years since, however, as court records have been examined and witnesses reinterviewed, some facts of both the coverage and the book have been challenged on many fronts, including the element at the center of the indictment: 38 silent witnesses. Yet none of the weighty counter-evidence was acknowledged when Mr. Rosenthal’s book was reissued in digital form by Melville — raising questions of what, if any, obligation a publisher has to account for updated versions of events featured in nonfiction titles. Dennis Johnson, the publisher of Melville House, said he knew about the controversy but decided to stand behind Mr. Rosenthal’s account. “There are, notably, works of fraud where revising or withdrawing the book is possible or even recommended, but this is not one of those cases,” he said. “This is a matter of historical record. This is a reprint of reporting done for The New York Times by one the great journalists of the 20th century. We understand there are people taking issue with it, but this is not something we think needs to be corrected.”

What is there to correct?

As early as 1984 The Daily News published an article pointing to flaws in the reporting. In 2004 The Times did its own summation of the critical research, showing that since Ms. Genovese crawled around to the back of the building after she was stabbed the first time (her assailant fled and returned) very few people would have seen anything.
The article quoted among others Charles E. Skoller, the former Queens assistant district attorney who helped prosecute the case and who also has written a book on it. “I don’t think 38 people witnessed it,” said Mr. Skoller, who had retired by the time of the interview. “I don’t know where that came from, the 38. I didn’t count 38. We only found half a dozen that saw what was going on, that we could use.” There were other mitigating factors as well; it was a cold night, and most people had their windows closed.

This 2009 NPR interview goes into more detail about the many problems with the popular narrative of the case.

This lead made me giggle:

George Ryan was released from a federal prison in the dark on Wednesday morning, and Illinois became a state with only one former governor behind bars.

Hey, as long as we’re talking about crooked governors:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s approval rating has fallen sharply among New York voters since he pushed restrictive gun laws through the Legislature, a poll released on Wednesday said.

And lying politicians:

…it is also curious that the White House refuses to provide any documentary evidence that he actually used the shooting range at Camp David, since he claims he uses it “all the time,” or that a presidential friend has not come forward to confirm the president’s comments.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Guns, Law, Media, Music, Obits, Schadenfreude | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 21, 2013.

Monday, January 21st, 2013

I’ve written previously about the pot growers of Mendocino County. Today’s LAT reports on a new development.

Mendocino County set up a program to register medical marijuana growers:

Those who registered with the sheriff had to install security fencing and cameras, pay permitting fees up to $6,450 a year and undergo inspections four times a year. Every plant was given a zip-tie with a sheriff’s serial number on it.

The DEA raided the first person who registered.

Still, 91 growers signed up the next year.
Agents then targeted Matt Cohen, the grower most vocal in advocating for the program and getting it set up.

In spite of this, the county intended to continue registering growers:

But county officials stopped the permitting and inspections in March after the U.S. attorney threatened them with legal action. The federal subpoena landed in October, demanding records of inspections, applications, internal county emails, notes, memos and bank account numbers.

The county is now fighting the subpoenas. Three things about this:

Meanwhile, in local news: Austin has a moderately successful chains of bars known as “Little Woodrow’s”. The owners want to put a new location at 5425 Burnet, but they need a zoning change first. Here’s 5425 Burnet on Google Maps:


View Larger Map

This is a stretch of road I’m fairly familiar with; there’s not much along there except strip centers and stand-alone businesses. As the Statesman notes, there’s a mixed-use apartment/shopping development (with a parking garage) right across the street, which Little Woodrow’s hopes to cater to. There’s two bars close by that I can think of: Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon, mentioned in the article, which is also famous for chicken (stuff) bingo, and Billy’s on Burnet (which does very good hamburgers and has limited parking).

Anyway, the point is: the usual suspects – the Brentwood and Allandale neighborhood associations – are all butthurt over this, claiming there won’t be enough parking, the bar would be too noisy, yadda yadda. In spite of their opposition, “the opponents are short by roughly half the number of signatures needed on a petition that would require six of seven council members to approve the rezoning”. They had two votes against in a preliminary vote: Laura Morrison and Kathie Tovo.

(On a completely unrelated note: anyone got any experience organizing recall elections?)

Posted in Austin, Books, Clippings, Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Another bookmark.

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

KInd of literally, in this case. I’ve observed in the past that NYC is one of the few cities where you can find a speciality bookstore for just about anything, and here’s a good example: Chartwell Booksellers, which I learned about from the Freakonomics podcast.

Chartwell is “the only standing bookshop in the world devoted to the writings of Winston Churchill”. And the owner, Barry Singer, also has a book out: Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill. I plan to pick that up once conditions improve; and, if I ever make it back to NYC, I intend to visit Chartwell.

(By the way, if you’re interested in either Churchill or copyright law, that episode of Freakonomics is worth a listen.)

Posted in Books, History | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 17, 2013.

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

In case you were wondering what the local reaction to Obama’s proposals was, the Statesman has your answer. Joe McBride was too busy to talk, and they mangled the name of the guy at Tex-Guns (WCD’s official purveyor of fine weapons, who does not currently have a web site). However, they did get long quotes from Steve Rose at Austin Gun Liquidators, and “Gun owner Michael Lombard of Liberty Hill, who said he voted for Obama twice and would do so again…” (!!!!)

The LAT calls the federal background check system “flawed”. Why?

The system’s main handicap, Obama and gun control advocates say, is that it covers only federally licensed gun dealers, and not private transactions — estimated at 40% of all gun sales.

So that’s not “flawed”, that’s “working by design”. Only licensed dealers can run background checks. I, as a private citizen, have no ability to run a check, even if I wanted to; the federal database is simply not available to me.

Edited to add: Forgot to mention this. “…estimated at 40% of all gun sales”. Estimated by who? (Whom?) The LAT cites that figure, but gives absolutely no source for it. Since private sales are private sales – unreported to the government – how is that figure arrived at? What is the methodology? Without a source, the LAT leaves us no way to evaluate that figure.

Federal agencies are supposed to turn over any relevant records — for instance, names of people who failed drug tests or those judged mentally ill — but most, including the Defense Department, haven’t provided anything.

Wait, wait. Federal agencies aren’t doing what they’re supposed to? Stop the freakin’ presses!

Many more records are under the control of states, but progress in moving them into the NICS system has been slow. Studies have shown that millions of criminal and drug cases are still missing, in large part because of difficulties in making state court data mesh with the federal system. Mental health records have been a particularly thorny obstacle: Because of privacy concerns, confusion and the difficulties in finding and converting paper records, most states have made “little or no progress” in turning those records over to NICS, according to a study last year by the Government Accountability Office.

Unstated, but implied here, is that the problem is also partially an IT problem; how do you interface the computer systems of 50 states, plus DC and US territories, with the Federal databases?

Meanwhile:

On Internet forums there is perhaps no more fiercely discussed topic than the question of what constitutes an assault weapon. And some argue that it would be impossible to come up with a definition comprehensive enough to effectively remove the weapons from the market.

I know this. You know this. People living under rocks know this. But it is nice to see the NYT admit this in print. Of course, the NYT still insists on exaggerating the advantages of pistol grips, folding stocks, “bayonet lugs” (we must stop the drive-by bayonettings!) and “grenade launchers”, but this is a start.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Guns | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 14, 2013.

Monday, January 14th, 2013

Steven Utley, Texas SF writer.

Tributes from Lawrence here and here. Tribute from Rick Klaw here.

Posted in Books, Obits, SF | Comments Closed

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