Remember Ward Churchill?

Back in 2001, University of Colorado at Boulder professor Ward Churchill -- who is not a Cherokee -- wrote an essay in which he condemned the victims of the World Trade Center attacks as "little Eichmans" and suggested that they deserved their fate. In keeping with his crazy communist mindset, he later said that his statements were "obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack," as though the fact that the latter group were working class and not "technicians," as he calls the middle-class employees of the World Trade Center, made them somehow exempt from guilt, all the while refusing to acknowledge that investment bankers themselves might not be guilty of anything, nor that working-class people are just as important as investment bankers in keeping Churchill's semi-mythological capitalist machine running.

Anyway, a UC Boulder committee released a report yesterday saying that Churchill had committed "academic misconduct" in his scholarly work, that among this were "plagiarism, misrepresentation of facts and fabrication of scholarly work." Churchill's lawyers said, predictably, that "the investigation was retaliation for the essay." Or, maybe, Churchill was obscure enough before the essay that his plagiarism fell under the radar of academia, and only after he became a controversial figure did people go back to his work and try to find misconduct. Sure, they may have re-checked his work because of his essay-gained notoriety, but a substantiated charge of plagiarism means just that: he probably committed plagiarism.

Score one for freedom

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker rejected an attempt by AT&T to bar the public from a hearing dealing with a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over whether or not AT&T broke the law in freely giving customer phone records to the NSA. Boy, that was a lot of prepositions.

In the hearing today, the same judge ruled that secret leaked AT&T documents, which might contain "trade secrets," could be used as evidence in the case, but they would still remain under seal until it could be determined whether or not they actually contain trade secrets. AT&T had been trying to get the judge to throw out the documents as evidence on the grounds that they contained trade secrets. The government has filed a brief asking the judge to -- surprise! -- dismiss the case.

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges that AT&T violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934, among other laws, by freely giving consumer information to the NSA without a court order or warrant.

Is this really in Georgia?

Wow. In Georgia, of all places, a judge struck down the state's new gay marriage amendment on technical grounds.

Judge Constance C. Russell said that the amendment, as put before voters, violated a Georgia state law requiring that each amendment put before voters deal with only one subject. Georgia's gay marriage amendment proposal "defined marriage as between a man and a woman, banned same-sex civil unions and said that same-sex unions performed in other states would not be recognized." From the NYT article:

"People who believe marriages between men and women should have a unique and privileged place in our society may also believe that same-sex relationships should have some place, although not marriage," the judge wrote. "The single-subject rule protects the right of those people to hold both views and reflect both judgments by their vote."

The RIAA is awful

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a cartel composed of the major music-distribution labels, filed a lawsuit yesterday against XM Satellite Radio, contending that XM's new Inno device allows users to store songs in memory, which is apparently a violation of some law the RIAA made up yesterday. According to Reuters, the RIAA is seeking "$150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM customers using the devices." XM has 6.5 million subscribers and plays 160,000 songs per month. If just 10% of subscribers bought an Inno earlier this month, and each of them recorded just one song, that means that the RIAA is demanding $97.5 billion from XM.

That amount looks like this: $97,500,000,000. It's spelled like this: ninety-seven billion, five hundred million dollars. Only in the Ectjylop dimension, where dogs have humans as pets and Paris Hilton is the unquestioned dictator of the galaxy, would a judge ever allow that request to stand. Also, as per the 1984 case Sony v. Universal, "time-shifting" is not an infringement of copyright. In our dimension, we call that extortion. Thankfully, XM will not give in to the RIAA's strong-arm tactics and has vowed to "vigorously defend this lawsuit on behalf of consumers."

That's all the news I can find on my lunch break. See you next time!