The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently filed a lawsuit challenging Section 1201 of the Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) on constitutonal grounds. According to the suit, that section — which criminalizes not only the circumvention of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but criminalizes the sharing of information about how to do it — is a violation of…

The only function of “intellectual property” is to snatch scarcity from the jaws of abundance — to take goods that, thanks to the advance of human knowledge, should naturally be getting cheaper, and make them artificially expensive. This is nowhere more evident than in the war corporations are fighting against their own customers’ right to…

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick reports (“Photographer Learns to Embrace the Public Domain — And is Better Off For It,” Aug. 5) that that Swiss photographer Samuel Zeller has discovered the benefits — to his livelihood! — of putting his work in the public domain. He’s put a lot of his work into the public domain…

(TW: Brief discussion of suicide) The Washington Post reports that the state of Texas has begun its court case against the federal government for setting guidelines about treatment of transgender students. The Department of Education has stated that because Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex for institutions that receive federal funding, that…

‘Women still suffer gender pension gap’ is the title of the article published by the Financial Times (whose subtitle is that “In developed and developing countries, the risk of old age poverty falls disproportionately on females”). This is an unsurprising finding when we consider that the gender pay gap largely persists more broadly and so…

Just this past May, Elsevier — the most notorious of the price-gouging proprietary academic publishing crime families — acquired the open-access academic repository SSRN. That’s right — a publisher that charges $30 to access 30-year-old papers is closing off free legal alternatives while simultaneously whining about sharing sites like Sci-Hub. Meanwhile, a Science magazine survey…

The Independent recently reported that the Michaela Community School (MCS) in Wembley, London, is being accused of giving its students detention if their parents are unable to make payments for their child’s lunches. As punishment the school enforces a “lunch isolation” where a child is given fruit and a sandwich instead of a hot meal…

(Content Warning: Discussion of suicide and suicide attempt) The ACLU reports that due to Chelsea Manning’s attempted suicide on July 5th in the Fort Leavenworth military prison she could face additional charges including “resisting the force cell move team;” “prohibited property;” and “conduct which threatens.” The punishment could include, “indefinite solitary confinement, reclassification into maximum…

Again Trump has it backwards. According to NATO’s internal logic, the US should pay the members — not the other way around — for providing services to the empire and a tripwire for war. The empire doesn’t protect, it provokes and endangers. Who would willingly pay for that? As Andrew Levine, drawing on Andrew Bacevich,…

It’s convention time again and that means a large influx of fanatics dressed their best gather with some of the biggest names in the nation for a weekend of ceremonies, announcements, and a large show of support for what people believe truly matters in this country. Yes, I’m talking about San Diego ComicCon where every…

In “An Anarchist FAQ after 20 years” (Anarchist Writers, July 18), the FAQ’s principal author Iain McKay — writing as Anarcho — provides an engaging retrospective on that document. It’s an anniversary worth celebrating for me because An Anarchist FAQ played a major formative role in my development as an anarchist. I began thinking of…

There’s an old saying that someone who kills a man is a murderer but one who kills a million is a conqueror and killing them all makes you god. If you add the words “unintentionally” and add loaded terminology that is supposed to passively excuse murder, then you get the current US foreign policy. In…

The shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have laid bare modern statism for the entire world to see. At its core, the state is not an instrument of dialogue. It does not retain power through mere persuasion. In disputes, it does not agree to disagree. No, the state is a regional monopoly on violence,…

There are a lot of tropes in our political culture for obscuring the real nature of what happens in cases like Baton Rouge, and before it in a long string of cases going back to Ferguson, the Rodney King beating, and on into the mists of the past. What they all obscure is the structural…

On July 7th, 2016 a gunman named Micah Johnson fired on police officers using a sniper rifle during a peaceful protest in Dallas, Texas, killing five officers. The protest was centered around the recent acts of police brutality involving Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. An earlier version of a CNN article…

Britain is polarised following a referendum where the people were asked to choose between two unpleasant options. The vanilla-flavoured turd is the status quo where the nation state continues its affiliation to the European Union, a big cog in the machine of globalised neoliberalism — a situation that would likely continue to centralise power in…

At Reason, Nick Gillespie (“The Scandal of K-12 Education — and How to Fix It,” June 5) points to the sorry state of education and — once again — proposes charter schools as the solution. The amazing thing is that the repeated right-libertarian shilling for charter schools — at Reason and elsewhere — comes from…

The horrifying thing about Trump’s recent remarks about Saddam Hussein is not that he expressed admiration for the late Iraqi dictator — in fact Trump called him a “bad guy” three times. What is horrifying is that Trump seemed envious that Saddam could “kill terrorists” without due process — the most important element of which…

Recently two US soldiers were arrested attempting to smuggling undocumented Mexicans over the border. Marco Nava, Jr. and Joseph Cleveland had successfully done this once before and when arrested during their second run, they opted to snitch on the entire operation. It seems that either only a few facts are known or the details of…

On June 28th 2016 history was made when not only one but two openly transgender candidates won their respective congressional primaries. The victories were even more momentous given the current climate and opinions about the way that trans folks should live their lives. Whether it is about which restrooms they use, the protections they do…