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[youtube]igC4bPDp6cU[/youtube] Yet again Japan is beating America with its innovations. Its latest one is called Hard Gay. Japan has finally harnessed the raw energy of a gay man wearing leather and is using it to turn its economy around. From this clip you can see how Hard Gay uses the power from his leather clad pelvic thrusts to turn around a failing ramen shop. Just think how many businesses we could save in this country if we would stop persecuting homosexuals and use them for good, like Hard Gay. Who doesn't love Hard Gay?  As you can see, even the children love him and get in on the act. In the end isn't there a little Hard Gay inside all of us, and if there isn't I'm sure Hard Gay could fix that!

In 1998, there was no bittorrent, no Kazaa, not even Napster. But there was still piracy. Not Johnny Depp piracy, which the MPAA likes, but movie, music and software piracy, which the MPAA hates.

Are you afraid of getting one of those scary letters from the RIAA? In fact, many of the old methods still work today, and so far they are under the lawyers' radar.

Some of you are familiar with the old standbys like IRC, Usenet, and Sneaker Net. In 1998, another method (which very few people remember) was even more popular – especially outside of the United States. This method was called PoE, or Pester over Email.

First, the person desiring a video game must find a fan site. Next they find the site admin's email address and send a message such as this one below:

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From: Arturo Soriano Murillo Date: 10/24/1997 7:07 PM To: Jason Subject: hi friend hi i am fanatic of simcity 2000 but my files were destroyed and the friend that have the CD he change of state I want to see if you can sendme a copy of the complete version of simcity 2000 i need play more more more yeah cool cool PLEASE PLEASE send me that at the address of [removed] Javier Bravo Camelo Thanks friend

---

The above may look like a normal email, but it is fact a message formatted for the PoE protocol. The protocol RFC states that each PoE message must contain:

1. Shallow declarations of friendship;

2. Fictional, yet uninteresting story justifying piracy of the desired item;

3. BEGGING IN ALL CAPS; and

4. The string “more more more yeah cool cool,� used to pad the message to the correct byte size.

I happened to have a Sim City 2000 website at the time, and I found myself constantly on the “server� send of PoE transactions. I got emails such as this every week from exotic locations such as Argentina, Costa Rica, Russia, their dad's AOL account, Canada, and their mom's AOL account.

I dutifully responded to each any every one, and since 5 MB emails did not really fly back then, that meant I had to copy disks, booklets, and box art and ship everything via airmail (PoE RFC section 2.3.5). This was at great expense to myself--do you how much it cost to send “the sim cti 2000 2me NOW PLEASE� in 1998?

In the end, I couldn't keep up with the volume, fell below five nines uptime, and was eventually stripped of my PoE credentials by Vint Cerf and Al Gore in a brutal, but efficient ceremony that left me wet, naked, and shaking.

None of that happened. Most of the time I ignored these emails and eventually too many spam bots found that email address and I dropped it like an email address that was very hot or slippery and difficult to hold. But before that fateful day, when I could be bothered, I would reply with this standard email. Instructions for downloading video games with no risk of lawsuit:

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From: Brandon Date: 3/29/1998 1:19 PM To: Jason Subject: Hi, could you please tell me where I can download the full version of Simcity 2000,

---

From: Jason Date: 3/20/1998 2:09 PM To: Jason Subject: Re: Sure, but you're going to need to use an older method of downloading the game. Since a lot of people aren't familiar with it, here's what you do: 1) Boot up your computer. 2) Load up DOS, Windows, or the Mac OS to determine which one your system uses. 3) Determine whether you have a CD-ROM drive, a disk drive, or both 4) Type that information down in a word processor and print it out. 5) If you do not have a printer, download it by hand on to a piece of paper. 6) Turn off your computer. 7) Get in your car, put your seat belt on and turn the ignition. 8) Carefully back out of your driveway and in to the street. 9) Drive to the nearest computer, office, or electronics store. (This is much like anonymous FTP). 10) Find the video games section of the store. If you cannot find it, locate a salesperson and click on "help". 11) Locate a large icon, or "box" labeled Sim City 2000. Do not double click! 12) Using the information from step 4-5, determine which "box" you should purchase. 13) Click and drag it up to the counter. Upload your credit card number or ash to the clerk. 14) Return home.

---

And just in case you've forgotten, don't copy that floppy.[wmv width="320" height="240"]http://www.archive.org/download/dontcopythatfloppy/dontcopythatfloppy.wmv[/wmv]

The attorney general of most states has quite a bit of power over nonprofits. He is generally charged with the responsibility of supervision and oversight of charitable trusts and corporations and can bring actions against nonprofits to protect the public interest. The following are some of the specific powers attorney generals wield over nonprofits registered in their state: the power to investigate, subpoena witnesses, require the production of books and records, annul corporate existence (corporate death sentence), corporate dissolvement (ultra vires), restrain unauthorized activities, remove directors and trustees, enforce member rights, supervise indemnification awards, investigate transactions and relationships between directors, bring quo warranto actions to assure that absolute gifts are applied according to their terms, etc. The attorney general is a necessary party to litigation against nonprofits, he must receive notice when a suit is initiated by others, and nonprofits must register and file annual reports with his office. Judging by this cursory listing of attorney general powers, it would seem as if nonprofits are comprehensively overseen by the government. Yet, despite the existence of such powers, attorney general oversight remains more theoretical than deterrent. Here is why and here is the solution. Despite the enormous range and depth of powers at the attorney general's office's hands, there is very little litigation brought against nonprofits. In an age where nonprofits have proliferated wildly, it would be surprising if untoward activities were not occurring at a greater rate, yet the statistics (as far as can be compiled) do not show an increase in prosecution. The two main culprits are staffing problems and a relative lack of interest in monitoring nonprofits. Only thirteen states have specific charity sections within the attorney general's office. Attorneys general have much power in many legal realms and they must triage their duties. Nonprofit oversight often finds itself at the bottom of the heap. In ten states, there is no general system of registering and reporting at all. Before moving on to look for solutions, it must be said that the vast majority of nonprofits behave honorably and with good faith, their directors, members, and executives carrying out their fiduciary duties with high fidelity. Charitiable fiduciaries have generally internalized the norms of right behavior and adhere to the best practices promulgated by professional associations such as Independent Sector. One proposed solution to the twin effects of increasing number of charitable organization and decreasing enforcement is to create a new state agency that deals specificly with nonprofits. Kenneth Karst first wrote about this idea in the 1960s, envisioning an agency that would take over the role of the attorney general in this sector and would consolidate all the nonprofit information spread across mutliple agencies. To me, this sounds like a terrible idea. It would be one more bureaucracy prone to laziness and corruption. It would merely be creating two agencies to accomplish what only one did before. If this was the desired type of solution, then why not just divert more tax dollars to the attorney general's office with the purpose of hiring more lawyers to police nonprofits? A better and more efficient solution would be to increase the use of relators, as suggested by some, including James Fishman and Stephen Schwartz. "Relator" in this context refers to a party who may or may not have a direct interest in a transaction, but is permitted to institute an action in the name of the people when the right to sue resides solely in the attorney general. As of now, most states do not allow the general public to instigate suits against nonprofits unless they have been directly and particularly harmed or have a specific and particularized interest in the transaction. This is generally a good thing, shielding nonprofits from vexatious and unserious litigation. Expanding the use of relators by statute would avoid the problems of broadening standing, preserving the constitutional controls that require one to have been directly hurt in some way to initiate a law suit (there are some exceptions to this basic standing rule, but that is for another post). The relator could, with the permission of the attorney general, bring the suit on behalf of the affected interests. The attorney general would retain control over the general conduct of the law suit if it wanted, but the relator would be liable for cost and damages. Relator status has been granted to bar associations in California, cemetery plot holders in Kansas, directors of other state departments in Illinois, and members of social clubs in Florida. The biggest drawback is finding people or entities that want to bring suit knowing that the attorney general can take control at any point during the action and the entity would still be liable for damages found against the plaintiff. Regardless, there are interested parties that are willing to take that risk out of ideological or other concerns. Frivolous lawsuits would remain at a minimum because the attorney general could refuse to grant relator status. But for those cases where suits have merit, but the attorney general's office is too busy to handle them, relator statutes can serve to keep nonprofits in check without exhausting our tax dollars. What do you think? Does this seem a reasonable solution or is it enough of a social good that it is worth throwing more money at the problem?

I read a blog entry at ZDNet about Google and YouTube basing their business models on the shaky ground of the fair use doctrine. This could be a very interesting issue to talk about. Even today, 10 years since the web became mainstream, the application of copyright law and the boundaries of fair use on the Internet are not exactly nailed down. For a good intro to intellectual property law, take a look at the video at the end of the article.

Judging by the tone and word choice of the author of the ZDNet article, I think this is an attack on Google and YouTube's practices and business models. The author constantly uses loaded words and accuses Google and YouTube of trying to

...garner public support for their self-aggrandizing business models based on obtaining, exploiting, controlling, owning and monetizing others’ content cost-free and on a calculated disregard for certain copyright owners’ rights over their own content.

That's pretty harsh. The word “exploiting,� in particular, strikes me as over the top – this is the same word used to describe sexual abuse of children. I guess Google is evil, and YouTube is the IP version of the southern slaveholder, sitting on the veranda with a mint julep in hand while poor, downtrodden multinational media corporations slave away in the fields.

But later, when the writer quotes Google and YouTube directly, their quotes seem pretty measured, intelligent, and reasonable. For example, Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

...I've learned that the law is not as crisply defined in this area as you might want. So in our case, we've analyzed this pretty carefully. We believe that the library work we're doing, given that we're not, in fact, reproducing the book but rather simply a snippet and then we have a pointer to the book, is absolutely permitted by fair use. Reasonable people can disagree with that, but that is our view and we spent a lot of time on it.

The truth of the matter is, Google is not an evil, insidious parasite raping the intellectual property of poor, defenseless media companies. Google is a search engine. I have run several web sites, and I can tell you, search engines almost always provide most of your traffic. For every content producer that thinks Google's links or excerpts are unauthorized use of content, there are 1000 begging Google to link and excerpt their content more. Google provides a valuable service connecting people looking for content with content providers.

The more I look at the ZDNet article, the less I'm really sure what the problem is supposed to be. A good number of publishers are mad about the book search project, but that is only mentioned once or twice. Is the Google cache the problem? As far as I can tell, Google doesn't make any money off the cache, and the article seems more worried about Google's ill-gotten gains. If Google's caching of web pages is illegal copyright infringement, the entire web is in big trouble. It would mean you, dear reader, just broke the law - web browsers are constantly caching pages and images as you surf. Caching is one of the basic techniques used on every scale to make the web more usable.

Is Google's indexing of pages and news articles the infringement here? If I search for "Crappy music with huge marketing budgets" and a link to Paris Hilton's new CD comes up, Paris doesn't make any money off the ads that also appear on the right hand side of the search results page. So what? She doesn't make any money if I pick up Rolling Stone or USA Today and read about how crappy the CD is there, either.

I agree that there are some legal and moral gray areas here, especially with YouTube, but the discussion keeps getting bogged down by ludicrous crap like this. If linking to something is copyright infringement, the only possible remedy is to shut off the Internet, entirely.

In fact, such a precedent would spell big trouble for magazines and newspapers, who write thousands of words "reviewing" (their word for infringing) copyrighted intellectual property - without permission - and then profit off of advertisements on the very same page. If you're a grad student, you might want to get your thesis turned in real quick-such a ruling would make academic research impossible as well.

What do you think? Throw out fair use? Throw out copyright law? Ask Congress to make clear, logical rules about the use of content on the mysterious series of tubes their staff sends them Internets over? Post a comment below.

[youtube]rr9SQ4qkMMk[/youtube]

News broke a couple days ago about California Attorney General Bill Lockyer suing what he calls "the Big Six" - GM, FoMoCo, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, Nissan North America and Honda North America - for "contribut[ing] significantly to global warming, harm[ing] the resources, infrastructure and environmental health of California, and cost[ing] the state millions of dollars to address current and future effects." Pundits jumped on the news immediately, calling it the next Big Tobacco lawsuit. But I think that Lockyer, if he's so inclined to believe his state's fascination with wheeled transport is doing it some harm, could have found a better target. First off, while the lawsuit appears similar to Big Tobacco on first glance - industry creates product, product harms people on a national scale, industry becomes wealthy, hey-we-should-sue-somebody mentality sets in - anybody who read anything more than headlines over the last decade will be able to point out the differences. The companies that make up Big Tobacco conspired to keep their knowingly harmful and knowingly addictive products in the mouths of the public for decades solely for the gain of profit. Meanwhile, the companies that make up "the Big Six" (btw, Lockyer kinda made that up himself - the motoring press has so far refused to admit the foreign automakers into any Big category and have really dropped the term other than in jest since Daimler-Benz and Chrysler merged in 2000) can hardly conspire on anything. Only the most paranoid conspiracy theorist would argue that the heads of those six companies get together in a secret cabal meeting room and chuckle sadistically over their plan to put particulate matter into the skies above California. That theory follows gnomic philosophy - Step 1: Pollute the Golden State; Step 2: (nothing); Step 3: Profit!!! Also, any automotive manufacturer in the United States has to pass pretty severe emissions regulations, and has had to do so since 1968. Granted, the emisssions regulations today are much more strict than the 1968 rules, but the point is that they have abided by every effort the government has made since then to clean up the gasoline-fired internal combustion engine. And California, through its California Air Resources Board, has imposed even tougher emissions regulations since about that same time. So Lockyer can't argue that all of this has taken place in a vacuum. We'll skip the argument about California's nearly petulant refusal to offer comprehensive public transportation (San Fran's trolleys don't count). We'll skip the argument about Big Oil artifically keeping the cost of fuel in America down, feeding our addiction to wheeled transport, while Europeans with their high fuel costs have learned to find alternative means of transportation. We'll skip the argument that market forces - not GM - killed the elctric car and will continue to do so until a viable EV with the range and power of an internal combustion vehicle appears. We'll skip the questioning of why smaller manufacturers - Hyundai, BMW, Mitsubishi, VW/Audi among them - didn't make the list. While "the Big Six" make for an easy target, I'll argue that another industry - let's call them "the Big Five" (if Lockyer can make shit up, then so can I) - has contributed more to greenhouse emissions and has spent many more years in unregulated bliss than our major automotive manufacturers. If any industry were to profit from collaborating with Big Oil, it would be the trucking industry - Big Diesel. Over the last few decades, this country has shifted almost entirely away from hauling its goods by rail and toward shipping them via truck. I'll surmise that it's a direct result of our insistence on having our stuff ASAP. Trains take too long because the tracks don't go everywhere; roads go everywhere that consumers do, so let's just ship it all via truck. I've driven across this country twice; I ply the roads of the Northeast on a regular basis. And I see the preponderance of trucks on the road, belching emissions and tearing up highways with seeming impunity. I see really five major diesel brands on the road nowaday: International (a brand of Navistar), Freightliner (owned by DaimlerChrysler), Volvo, Mack (owned by Volvo) and Isuzu (partnered mostly with GM). Why not go after them? According to the EPA, "reducing emissions from diesel engines is one of the most important air quality challenges facing the country." Granted, federal emissions regulations have just recently started to take diesels to task, with members of "the Big Six" scrambling to meet 2007 calendar year diesel deadlines (GM's completely revamping its diesels; DaimlerChrysler's all-new BlueTec diesel couldn't pass muster in five states). But where have diesel regs been since 1968? It wasn't until 1998 that diesel particulate matter was identified as a toxic air contaminant and carcinogen, and CARB all of a sudden decided to reduce diesel emissions in California 75 percent by 2010 and 85 percent by 2020. It wasn't until June 1, 2006, that refiners had to start production of ultra-low sulfur diesel engines. Remember middle school health class, when they showed you pictures of a normal healthy lung, then pictures of a tobacco smoker's lung, then pictures of a marijuana user's lung? The relative cleanliness of a gasoline engine versus a diesel engine is kinda like that. So Lockyer's insistence on going after "the Big Six" rather than Big Diesel is like going after Big Tobacco (ignore my deconstruction of the faulty analogy above for a second) when Big Marijuana is just sitting around (if, of course, marijuana were legal and thus spawned a legitimate industry). Is Lockyer afraid to piss of Big Diesel and risk more price hikes in consumer goods if such a lawsuit were successful? (Incidentally, have consumer goods dropped in price since last year's $3-plus gas "forced" transportation companies to hike their rates, thus "forcing" consumer good manufacturers to up their prices?) Is Lockyer afraid of pissing off unionized truck drivers? Or does he just not realize what real damage is going on beyond the sensational headlines he's created? I should probably state somewhere here that, even though I'm a car guy and car guys generally despise regulation of their cars, all internal combustion engines do pollute. Heck, any mode of transportation aside from walking or riding a horse ultimately pollutes, considering the manufacturing processes that go into creating anything from a bicycle to an automobile. I'd like to see fewer greenhouse gases like anyone, so why not start with the biggest polluters?