MachineMachine /stream - tagged with law http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com The Enlightenment, Naturalism, And The Secularization Of Values http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=kors_32_3/council-for-secular-humanism The Enlightenment, Naturalism, And The Secularization Of Values : http://t.co/VVPManIW cc @tomcolls ]]> Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:20:24 -0700 http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=kors_32_3/council-for-secular-humanism The meaning of monsters, magic and miracles http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article869724.ece Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The physical prodigy becomes a test of ethics and, in the move between literal and figurative, displays the crucial role fictions play in the establishment of value and the common sense. Or, one might say in the era when the Humanities are under such stress, thinking with monsters shows how an understanding of Nature, and of medicine, law and custom is impossible without cultural expression. ]]> Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:33:07 -0700 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article869724.ece What Immanuel Kant got right about digital piracy http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/caleb_crain_why_matt_yglesias_is_wrong_about_copyright.html It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an author's words, the author himself still had them. It was better for an author to argue that his book was not an object but an exercise of his powers, which "he can concede, it is true, to others, but never alienate". In other words, ... a pirated book was not to be understood as property that had been stolen; it was rather a speech act that had been compromised.… ]]> Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:28:23 -0700 http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/caleb_crain_why_matt_yglesias_is_wrong_about_copyright.html Internet Regulation & the Economics of Piracy http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/internet-regulation-the-economics-of-piracy//internet-regulation-amp-the-economics-of-piracy-cato-liberty Internet Regulation & the Economics of Piracy http://t.co/CXiWp8I0 ]]> Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:08:17 -0700 http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/internet-regulation-the-economics-of-piracy//internet-regulation-amp-the-economics-of-piracy-cato-liberty The US schools with their own police http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools/the-us-schools-with-their-own-police-world-news-the-guardian One of the most shocking stories I've ever read: the criminalisation of childhood in #Texas. http://t.co/uqiuR9Il ]]> Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:36:45 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/09/texas-police-schools/the-us-schools-with-their-own-police-world-news-the-guardian Trap street http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as non-existent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.[1] Trap streets are often nonexistent streets; but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:10:08 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents, University of Michigan Press http://press.umich.edu/titledetaildesc.do?id=356801/samir-chopra-and-laurence-f-white-a-legal-theory-for-autonomous-artificial-agents-university-of-michigan-press RT @XiXiDu: A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents http://t.co/RioYhh3

#x #agency #ai #law #politics #books #autonomy ]]> Mon, 15 Aug 2011 01:47:50 -0700 http://press.umich.edu/titledetaildesc.do?id=356801/samir-chopra-and-laurence-f-white-a-legal-theory-for-autonomous-artificial-agents-university-of-michigan-press Internet Activist Aaron Swartz Indicted for Data Theft: Downloading Millions of Academic Articles http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_activist_aaron_swartz_indicted_for_data_t.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.
Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up… ]]> Wed, 20 Jul 2011 04:10:10 -0700 http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_activist_aaron_swartz_indicted_for_data_t.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7350819493 “Nothing new under the reign of the same and under the same reign, preserved. Nothing new and nothing to be born, no nature. This is death, eternally. Nature put to death, its birth unwanted. The science of this is nothing. It is calculably nothing. Stable, immutable, redundant. It recopies the same writings, with the same atom-letters. The law is the plague. Reason is the fall. The reiterated cause is death. Repetition is redundancy. And identity is death. Every­thing falls to zero: the nullity of information, the emptiness of knowledge, non-existence. The same is Non-Being.”

- The Birth of Physics by Michel… ]]> Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:03:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7350819493 The decline of the serial killer http://www.slate.com/id/2280097 The number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public's fascination with them. "It does seem the golden age of serial murderers is probably past," says Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College of the City University of New York who studies crime.
Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by—the FBI doesn't keep numbers, according to a spokeswoman—but the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and co-author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass… ]]> Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:55:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2280097 On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth http://www.bu.edu/arion/on-the-absolute-the-sublime-and-ecstatic-truth/ This text was originally delivered by Werner Herzog as a speech in Milano, Italy, following a screening of his film “Lessons of Dark­ness” on the fires in Kuwait. He was asked to speak about the Absolute, but he spontaneously changed the subject to the Sublime. Because of that, a good part of what follows was improvised in the moment.]
*

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.

—Blaise Pascal

The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by… ]]> Sun, 17 Oct 2010 14:33:00 -0700 http://www.bu.edu/arion/on-the-absolute-the-sublime-and-ecstatic-truth/ UK government acts to prevent arrest of Pope http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/295022 The UK government is said to have set in motion a law change that will prevent the Pope from being arrested when he visits the country in September.
Officials in Whitehall – the UK government’s administrative offices – are said to be worried over plans by the atheist authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to have Pope Benedict arrested for crimes against humanity, because of his alleged cover-up of priestly assaults on children.
“Mr Dawkins, the atheist campaigner, and Mr Hitchens, an atheist author, asked human rights lawyers in April to put together a case for charging the… ]]> Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:14:00 -0700 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/295022 Inside Code: A Conversation with Dr. Lane DeNicola and Seph Rodney http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/inside-code-a-conversation.html
posted by Daniel Rourke

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread's host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola,…

]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:25:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/06/inside-code-a-conversation.html Radio Open Source » The Ecstasy of Influence http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ We can’t stop talking about Jonathan Lethem’s essay in this month’s Harper’s. If you haven’t read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to.
plagiarism

Caught [Digirebelle / Flickr]

Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen — er, appropriated — from some other source and then cobbled together with a big dose of Lethem magic to form a cohesive whole. Even the “I”s… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:01:00 -0700 http://www.radioopensource.org/the-ecstasy-of-influence/ The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism, By Jonathan Lethem (Harper's Magazine) http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale… ]]> Sat, 29 May 2010 02:00:00 -0700 http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 'It's time to let you hear the song which earned me a juvenile restraining order' http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/apr/07/andrew-wk-juvenile-restraining-order Aged 17, I set about writing a song for a girl I was obsessed with. When she heard it, she called the police. Have a listen – you'll understand why.

I've never let anyone hear this song before. I'm deeply humiliated and embarrassed at the thought of anyone hearing it. This is probably the most intense and personal song I've ever recorded – it's called My Destiny and it was written and recorded when I was 17. I shouldn't do this.

I was in high school in the 1990s, in a town called… ]]> Fri, 09 Apr 2010 03:34:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/apr/07/andrew-wk-juvenile-restraining-order Code is Law http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law.html Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about the regulation by social norms in nineteenth-century England; his book On Liberty is written against that regulation. Many of the progressives in the twentieth century worried about the injustices of the market. The reforms of the market, and the safety nets that surround it, were erected in response. This regulator is code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace as it is. This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which… ]]> Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:20:00 -0700 http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law.html GOOD COPY BAD COPY http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/ A documentary about the current state of copyright and culture ]]> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:17:00 -0700 http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/ NASA moon bombing violates space law & may cause conflict with lunar ET/UFO civilizations http://www.examiner.com/x-2912-Seattle-Exopolitics-Examiner~y2009m6d19-NASA-moon-bombing-violates-space-law--may-cause-conflict-with-lunar-extraterrestrial-civilizations The planned October 9, 2009 bombing of the moon by a NASA orbiter that will bomb the moon with a 2-ton kinetic weapon to create a 5 mile wide deep crater as an alleged water-seeking and lunar colonization experiment, is contrary to space law prohibiting environmental modification of celestial bodies. The NASA moon bombing, a component of the LCROSS mission, may also trigger conflict with known extraterrestrial civilizations on the moon as reported on the moon in witnessed statements by U.S. astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and in witnessed statements to NSA (National Security Agency) photos and documents regarding… ]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:39:00 -0700 http://www.examiner.com/x-2912-Seattle-Exopolitics-Examiner~y2009m6d19-NASA-moon-bombing-violates-space-law--may-cause-conflict-with-lunar-extraterrestrial-civilizations