Do you think it is a good idea for police to be allowed to listen to phone calls without getting a warrant first?
That is exactly what the Harper Conservatives are proposing to imbed into our Criminal Code.
We should all oppose this – especially as more of use use VOIP and as our cars and smart meters are constantly recording bucketloads of information about us.
We should never forget about cookies and their dangers…nor should we forget that cookie-monsters are always trying to figure out how to make their datamining code sneakier, harder to detect and harder to remove.
Though, not all is sad on the technology front: Gabe Newell recently explained Valve’s philosophy…piracy happens less when companies treat their customers like, well, valued customers. I know this is anecdotal only, but my highly limited experience confirms the veracity of this philosophy.
And for something neat:
HT: Hacker News
The #occupy folks are still at it – still sounding rather shrill, poorly informed and selfish.
Most are idealistic – yes, I’ll give them points for that. (On the honesty front, that is.)
But they also sound dangerously naive and deeply ignorant. And if we san see the historical pattern, honest idealism coupled with naivite and ignorance is usually a deadly combination.
What makes it even scarier is that some very pragmatic forces have successfully infiltrated the movement and are focusing the idealistic crowds to their own ends. That also is a historical pattern – with grave consequences (pun intended).
Psema4 commented on my earlier post about Anonymous (where I expressed my conviction that these #occupy protests were seeded by them) where he (she?) expressed similar misgivings about Anonymous and left a link to this site: ‘What is The Plan’. (Thank you for bringing it to my attention!)
On the home page, there is this movie:
Was your reaction to the video similar to mine? I think that the neo-marxist semi-anarchist drivel that we hear from the majority of the #occupy people sounds very much like the remnants of this rant…
First things first: the video is demonstrably self-contradictory. At about 7 1/2 minutes, it claims that there is no such thing as membership in Anonymous, while just before the 9 minute mark, it boasts it has 50 thousand members. That is just the most easily demonstrated internal inconsistency within the video… There are a few more, but they would take a long time to pull out and dissect – plus I am sure most people will have picked up on them anyway.
If you find the first part of the video painfully tedious, you can skip forward a bit: ‘The Plan’ comes up at around the 8:40 mark. As Psema4 pointed out, the pattern for ‘The Plan’ as outlined in the video would very much fit in with the #occupy ‘movement’, either as step 2 or step 3…
These people sound a lot like a bunch of insulated anarcho-marxists and elitists who want to take a shortcut to fixing what is wrong with the world. These types of short cuts have a history of becoming very bloody and resulting in great loss of civil liberties.
As long as Anonymous had limited themselves to the role of ‘the man with no name’, I had little problem with them. But playing Russian roulette with a revolution? That is immoral, plain and simple.
Like CodeSlinger said: “End well, this will not!”
Why is ‘Anonymous’ so much on my ‘radar’ now?
Couple of reasons…
They are, well, enigmatic… When a big company picks on little guys – and this appears on their radar – they kick but. Their aims are altruistic – perhaps idealistic – at least for now. And they are big-time fans of freedom of speech!
They are techies who are kicking some slick behinds – you have GOT to love that! (OK, I am indulging in a bit of tribalism here – even if the ‘tribe’ is diffuse and I don’t know them personally. I suspect that most of the people behind Anonymous are Aspies or have strong Aspie tendencies: they are, after all, techies. And I like to think that I am rather good at playing ‘spot the Aspie’. The rules they pick and the way they adhere to them: very Aspie-like…)
We are still full of the #occupy news….and Anonymous was there first. No, I don’t think that the majority of people who are there now are in any way connected to Anonymous, but, please, consider the following:
It is not a coincidence that the vast majority of the people protesting in the #occupy movement have no idea what they want to accomplish with this protest: it is not a ‘regular’ protest of the sort where people want to accomplish a specific goal, analyze the approaches to achieving this goal and then choose protesting as their tool. Rather, I suspect, this may have been a bit of an experiment…
…an experiment to see IF Anonymous can harness the power of the professional protest organizers when they need to – and to get an idea of how it would play out.
…an experiment to see how ‘neurotypicals’ (non-techies/non-Aspies) would react and behave, to gage their intelligence, initiative and individuality – or lack thereof in this type of a situation. How soon and how deeply would ‘mob mentallity’ set in?
…an experiment to see whether ‘if we build it, they will come’ would work with protests.
Recently, when an Islamist group doc-dropped/outed Thunderf00t and his family members and threatened them by urging ‘all Muslims to do their duty’ because he dares to criticize Islam (he criticizes all irrational belief systems – systematically and effectively), Thunderf00t dropped the name of Anonymous as his protectors….and potential avengers!
Which got me thinking: this is not the first time Thunderf00t has talked about Anonymous in his videos. So, I went back and looked through his earliest material. Here it is:
Interesting, is it not?
But there is more here, here, here, here (note the Guy Fawkes mask in the background) and here.
Not just in what Thunderf00t says – and how he says it, but also in how fascinated Anonymous is by Scientology. Remember how, a few years back, they tried to build some sort of a movement against that cult? I wonder if this is an indication of their fascination in how brainwashed neurotypical behave in groups … or the source of this fascination.
Don’t get me wrong – I do not think Anonymous has bad intentions. I rather suspect that they are attempting to figure out how to help neurotypicals help themselves from self-imposed servitude (if this was not a full fledged attempt of its own to get them to help themselves).
But experiments/projects can go wrong – and more people than just Anonymous are keenly watching this and taking notes.
The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that inserting a hyperlink does not constitute re-publishing (Crookes v Newton).
Justice Abella wrote:
Hyperlinks thus share the same relationship with the content to which they refer as do references. Both communicate that something exists, but do not, by themselves, communicate its content. And they both require some act on the part of a third party before he or she gains access to the content. The fact that access to that content is far easier with hyperlinks than with footnotes does not change the reality that a hyperlink, by itself, is content neutral – it expresses no opinion, nor does it have any control over, the content to which it refers.
There is much equivocation in the ruling, so it cannot be regarded as a full victory of reason – but it is close. And it clearly states that one should err on the side f not restricting free speech:
To prove the publication element of defamation, a plaintiff must establish that the defendant has, by any act, conveyed defamatory meaning to a single third party who has received it. Traditionally, the form the defendant’s act takes and the manner in which it assists in causing the defamatory content to reach the third party are irrelevant. Applying this traditional rule to hyperlinks, however, would have the effect of creating a presumption of liability for all hyperlinkers. This would seriously restrict the flow of information on the Internet and, as a result, freedom of expression. (my emphasis)
H/T: Walker
Also see commentary by Michael Geist and Dr. Dawg
UPDATE: Ezra Levant has an opinion, too:
It has taken me more than a week to write this up – my apologies. I was hoping the decision would come soon and that I would be able to report it along with what I had witnessed in the courtroom.
This was a hearing for a motion in the lawsuit that Richard Warman is bringing against the Fourniers for infringing his copyright on 3 grounds:
The full background to this post is here.
The motion hearing was my first experience in Federal Court – so far, all my spectating has been done in Ontario Provincial Court. I must admit, the atmosphere is a bit different, the security a bit more along the lines of what one might expect. The courtroom, however, was not at all equipped for spectators: instead of the benches with built-in headphones (for translation, if the case was being tried in French), 10 office chairs were placed along the back wall of the courtroom, appearing more as an afterthought than anything else. Most of these were occupied by people waiting to present future cases – their particular type of grooming suggested they were lawyer-types and/or their aides. I would appear to have been the lone spectator on Courtroom #2 that October 6th morning.
The motion hearing was presided over by the Honourable judge R. Aronovitch.
Mr. Richard Warman was represented by the ever-charismatic Mr. Katz.
Mrs. Fournier spoke on behalf of herself and her husband, as they were representing themselves.
This was not a long hearing: each side made a short presentation of how they saw the situation and an even shorter rebuttal.
(As it is easier to follow what happened if I focus on each thread of the argument and follow it rather than report on the proceedings sequentially, I will jump back and forth in time in order to follow each ‘thread’.)
Mr. Katz was the first to speak; he was presenting the reason for this motion: Mr. Warman had filed the copyright lawsuit against the Fourniers and they had filed their statement of defense (OK – there are proper legaleese terms for these, but I am not trained in the law whatsoever, so, please, do not take what I write as anything more than an untrained person’s observations – and if you can correct me on some points I got wrong, please, I would be grateful if you did).
When the Fourniers filed their statement of defense, this document included some phrases that, according to Mr. Katz, were irrelevant and prejudicial – and which should, therefore, be removed from their statement of defense. If I recall Mr. Katz’s words correctly, their primary argument was that these paragraphs (named in the motion) are clearly not relevant and are simply character assassination of his client.
Mr. Katz asserted that some of the these paragraphs are describing actions of third parties and not those of Mr. Warman, others are simple hearsay and would better be addressed in the cross-examination rather in the submission. There was a little back-and-forth with the judge on the salient points of hearsay and cross-examination.
Mr. Katz also said that Mrs. Fournier had originally agreed to longer cross-examination time, then reneged on her word: Mrs. Fournier seemed surprised by this claim and said she is agreeable to setting the cross-examination time to whatever length the judge would like to specify.
The Fourniers’ main argument was that it was best left up to the judge who would preside over the lawsuit itself to read the evidence and then to decide what is and what is not irrelevant. Removing the offending paragraphs earlier would prevent the judge from making that decision – and this is why it should all be left in.
Mr. Katz said that the Fourniers were making claims that by bringing this copyright infringement lawsuit is somehow an abuse of judicial process, that he is being disingenuous and harassing them – when his client is only trying to protect his rights to the literary work (the article). He charged that it was not his client but the Fourniers who were abusing the judicial process by trying to have this motion dropped.
Mrs. Fournier defended their position by pointing out that Mr. Warman had initiated 64 lawsuits/actions similar to this one, several of these against themselves, many still under way. It was important to their defense to paint a complete picture of Mr. Warman’s activities related to these lawsuits/actions, including his openly and publicly stated desire to sue people he finds annoying.
(If I am not mistaken, the phrasing was somewhat along the lines that the more annoying Mr. Warman finds someone, or the more fun prosecuting them would be, the higher up his target-list they get moved up, regardless of anything else. However, the website which documented this quote, along with many other things related to Mr. Warman, has recently been shut down. This makes it impossible for me to verify the precise wording and reference it, as I normally would. My apologies.)
Without presenting this full picture, including speeches to radical and militant groups with history of lawlessness and violence, it is impossible to demonstrate how Mr. Warman’s current activities follow the pattern of ‘maximum disruption’ which he has publicly ascribed to himself – and which include the subversion of the courts to promote his own political agenda. (Again, I am paraphrasing, but this, to the best of my understanding, is the main thrust of the Fourniers’ argument.)
It is always difficult for lay people to represent themselves in court. As such, Mrs. Fournier explained that she put great weight to what the opposing counsel said. When he had sent them the notification that some parts of their statement of defense were inadmissible from a legal point of view, she gave it great credence. However, she thought it integral to their case to let the judge who will hear the case see all the evidence and decide for him/herself. Yet, she never doubted the opposing counsel’s word: which is why she was surprised to see that only some of the paragraphs that Mr. Katz had told her were inadmissible were no longer being objected to on these grounds. If they were legally inadmissible at one point, as he had advised her, why were they acceptable now?
At this, the judge leaned forward and asked for clarification: did Mrs. Fournier mean that there was a difference between what was originally asked to be removed from the record, and what was actually included in the final motion? Yes, that was it: only some of the phrases/paragraphs that were in the original motion to strike from the record were in the latest draft, others were no longer being objected to. This seemed to intrigue the judge – but I am not certain what the legal impact of this difference would be.
Mr. Katz did not, to the best of my recollection (and notes), address this point very clearly. There was another point which had been raised at that moment which seemed to occupy his attention: it was to do with costs and Mr. Katz’s role in them.
There is a rule (404, unless I am mistaken) which states that if the opposing counsel makes some mistake which ends up costing people money, then that opposing counsel must pay those costs. Not the client, but the counsel.
The Fourniers claimed that there was some sort of an irregularity in how they had been served with this lawsuit: an irregularity which cost them money and which was Mr. Katz’s fault. If I understand this correctly, this irregularity was also a subject of a complaint the Fourniers lodged with The Law Society of Upper Canada, the body which licenses lawyers to practice in Ontario.
Mr. Katz responded that the complaint was trivial and was dismissed without him having to even attend to it.
Mrs. Fournier disagreed with that, stating she had correspondence from the Law Society of Upper Canada which stated that they will only attend to the complaint based on what the judge’s ruling will be: if the judge will rule that the irregularity had indeed been Mr. Katz’s fault and awarded Fourniers financial compensation for the damages, they would look into the complaint. So, in her words, it was not dismissed but rather will either go forward or be dismissed, based on what the judge finds in the courtroom. Since it relates to the costs in the lawsuit, it will have to be the judge in this case whose opinion will determine how the complaint proceeds.
Mr. Katz was very focused on this part of the discussion, though he did not seem as cool and collected as he usually appears in the courtroom. He seemed downright anxious – and, who would not be, with such a serious charge against him? Once the topic of this irregularity and its consequences was brought up, he focused most of his attention and arguments in that direction.
This was a very interesting – if short – courtroom appearance. All was over by 10:20, less than an hour from when it started.
To recap:
Mr. Warman charged (through his lawyer, Mr. Katz) that much of what was in the statement of defense was irrelevant and prejudicial and should be excluded from court documents. The defendants are abusing the judicial process by including inadmissible statements in their statement of defense.
The Fourniers defense had 3 parts:
All the evidence should be left in: if the judge decides it is irrelevant, it can be removed at that point. This decision should rest with the judge.
We certainly live in interesting times!
It is the nature of laws – at least, in free societies – to be passed in response to new developments in society. That is why, in the common law tradition, legal precedents affect not only how old laws are applied but also how new laws evolve.
This creates a feedback mechanism: the laws affect how the rules of society evolve, the rules of society affect how the laws evolve.
Currently, the courts are trying to interpret the existing laws to accommodate the changes due to our ‘communications revolution’. Since more and more of our public and private communication as well as our public and private information is online, the impact these ruling will have over the coming decades is truly profound.
This makes Connie and Mark Fournier’s ongoing legal battles very important to all of us: if you are reading this on a computer, then the rulings in their legal battles will affect the rules under which you live your life. And not just in Canada – the world is fast becoming one electronic family and slowly but surely, internet-affecting legal precedents set in one Western country reverberate in the whole world.
That is why I have started to document the Fourniers’ legal journey – even though I have no legal training and my understanding of what is being said in court is imperfect. But, if I document it to the best of my ability, perhaps others who are more knowledgable will be able to comment on what I have witnessed and explain it better to all of us!
Last week, the Fourniers were in Federal court in Ottawa – charged with copyright infringement by Richard Warman.
To my mind, some of the things the Fourniers are charged with are difficult to understand – but one of them is very clear and will very likely set the legal precedent for Canada on a very hot topic: ‘inline linking’. The legal precedent on copyright issues regarding the insertion of an inline web link has been ruled by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, clarifying that inserting them does not violate US copyright laws. For search engines, anyway…
There has not been a comparable ruling in Canada – yet.
Richard Warman has brought a lawsuit against the Fourniers for violating his copyright in 3 separate ways.
One – and, perhaps most important regarding the abovementioned legal precedent – is for having permitted the insertion of an ‘inline-link’ on the Free Dominion forum they operate which linked to a picture of Richard Warman, on his own website.
In other words, the picture was always posted only on Richard Warman’s own personal website and he had full control over it. An inline-link was posted on Free Dominion which would show the reader Richard Warman’s picture from Richard Warman’s site. The picture was, at all times, on Mr. Warman’s server and under his complete control – he could have, at any time, blocked inline-linking to the picture…yet he chose to permit inline-links to the picture to function.
Inserting the inline-link on Free Dominion, according to Mr. Warman’s claim, constitutes displaying his image without permission and thus infringes on his copyright.
Therefore, the ruling on this will have important implications for internet use in Canada, perhaps further. Should the ruling go against the Fourniers, then any time anyone inserts a hot-link when they comment on something on a blog or site you control, you could be liable for copyright infringement.
The other two counts of copyright infringment Mr. Warman is suing the Fourniers for are regarding words, not images, and words which were posted on the Free Dominion site and not words that were simply linked to.
Jonathan Kay had written an article for National Post in which documented how, at various court hearings, it was revealed that Mr. Warman appears to have made some highly inflammatory racist, misogynistic and anti-immigrant comments (specifically targeting Senator Anne Cools) on a white supremacist website/forum. (I myself have heard the same assertions during the ‘Vigna v Levant’ defamation hearing, where Mr. Levant had clarified that to the best of his knowledge, it was not Mr. Vigna but rather Mr. Warman who was the card-carrying member of a neo-nazi organization and the author of this most vile hate speech directed against our first black female Senator.)
This newspaper article was re-printed (with credit – but it was not stated during the hearing if fully or partially) on the Free Dominion forum.
Mr. Warman sued the National Post for publishing that article and the National Post and he reached an out-of-court settlement with them. As part of this settlement, Mr. Warman got the copyright of the article.
Once he owned the rights to the article, Mr. Warman’s lawyers contacted the Fourniers and demanded that they remove the article from their website. This they complied with immediately, as was confirmed by Mr. Warman’s lawyers.
Despite this, at some subsequent time, the Fourniers were contacted by Mr. Warman’s lawyers and were requested to pay some sum of money to Mr. Warman to avoid a lawsuit for having posted the article in the first place. The Fourniers believed that they had complied with the request to remove the offensive material in a timely manner and therefore did not think they were obligated to pay any money as well. Subsequently, Richard Warman filed a copyright violation lawsuit against them on these grounds.
The last, third count of copyright violation has me puzzled more than the previous two.
The Fourniers had posted on Free Dominion sections of court documents – public documents, to the best of my knowledge – which had contained the phrases on the basis of which Mr. Warman was taking legal action against someone (the phrases he had found offensive) which had also been published in the article from point two. Even though the Fourniers had clearly published these phrases as part of a public document, as they were also part of the article which Mr. Warman’s lawyers asked them to take down, Mr. Warman had charged them with copyright infringement for having posted them.
This, in a nutshell, is the background to this particular lawsuit Mr. Warman is pursuing against the Fourniers.
The Fourniers had filed their defense statement with the court – representing themselves. Mr. Warman’s lawyers had informed the Fourniers that some of the things which they listed in their documents were inadmissible in court and asked the Fourniers to remove them. The Fourniers refused to do so, because they believe this information to be relevant to their defense and would like the judge in the case to be the one to decide what is admissible and what is not.
Mr. Warman’s lawyers then filed a motion to have parts of the Fourniers defence statements struck from the record (not all the bits they had originally wanted removed, but still a significant amount)- something the Fourniers believe will affect their defense not only in this copyright violation lawsuit but also in three additional lawsuits (for defamation, I believe) that Mr. Warman is pursuing against them.
Last week, there was a hearing in federal court for this motion – a most interesting event in its own right (which I had gone to see for myself and will write up very, very soon, I promise!).
This is disgusting!
Yes, there are some people who abuse anonymity on the internet.
Then there are others who eschew it – they believe that attaching their real-life name to an online communication will add weight and respect to it. This is, to some degree, true: if their real-life name has some earned public credibility, attaching it to their online persona will add credibility to the online persona.
BUT!!!
Name is just a label.
If a person has built up his or her credibility using an online persona – truly built up credibility – by time and time again providing solid, verifiable, quality information, then their real-life name is really quite irrelevant.
To the contrary: it is a very useful shield!
Journalists who publish in traditional media have an organization that stands behind them and offers them at least a modicum of protection should they become threatened by those who wish to silence them.
Online communicators do not have this luxury!!!
But ‘online’ is not the beginning of ‘anonymous protest speech’!
No, nowhere near… Even the most basic bit of research into the history of anonymous protest speech demonstrates brings us to Colonial North America. Printing presses were used to print anonymous pamphlets which were distributed and which informed the public of facts that the government did not want known and which fostered the atmosphere necessary for the fight for independence.
In fact, most of the works by America’s Founding Fathers were originally published as anonymous pamphlets!
So, let’s not go down the role of silly posturing: anonymity is essential for free speech!
(Sorry if I am not particularly coherent in this post – I am so angry as I write this, I can hardly keep myself calm enough to type!)
To hear that Thunderf00t’s real-life name has been ‘outed’ by an Islamist group (which claims to be made up of ‘moderate Muslims’), that his job has been threatened, that his address has been published – and now, that his family members are being threatened with physical violence…THAT IS AN OUTRAGE!!!!
I guess all we can do is spread the word…
…and hope for the best. Because I am at a loss for what else to do to help him.
P.S.: It took me a second viewing to pick up pn it, but it does seem that the online Islamists just may have attracted the attention of ‘Anonymous’. THAT would be interesting, to say the least!
Michael Geist explains it much better than I ever could.
I’ll just add that this is very distressing – and a big strike against individual property rights.
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 