C4SS.org | If you, as an individual, go to your neighbor’s house and order him to stop smoking dope or parking his car on the lawn, and shove him around or take him prisoner for refusing to comply, you’re nothing but a thug. Your neighbor has the right to tell you to mind your own business and leave him alone, and to resist your aggression if necessary. If you and a large number of other people in the community do the same thing to your neighbor, under cover of a so-called “government,” you’re still just thugs — plain and simple. And your neighbor has just as much right to tell you all to mind your own business, or to resist if necessary.
QuestionCopyright.org | There is one group of people not shocked by the record industry's policy of suing randomly chosen file sharers: historians of copyright. They already know what everyone else is slowly finding out: that copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies. But now that the Internet has given us a world without distribution costs, it no longer makes any sense to restrict sharing in order to pay for centralized distribution. Abandoning copyright is now not only possible, but desirable. Both artists and audiences would benefit, financially and aesthetically. In place of corporate gatekeepers determining what can and can't be distributed, a much finer-grained filtering process would allow works to spread based on their merit alone. We would see a return to an older and richer cosmology of creativity, one in which copying and borrowing openly from others' works is simply a normal part of the creative process, a way of acknowledging one's sources and of improving on what has come before. And the old canard that artists need copyright to earn a living would be revealed as the pretense it has always been.
"Sita Sings the Blues" was released in 2008 only after long negotiations with the copyright holders of the 80-year-old songs recorded by Annette Hanshaw. Following the experience of almost having her film blocked from distribution, Nina Paley released it freely under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, and now devotes a significant portion of her time to free culture activism. She is Artist in Residence at the non-profit QuestionCopyright.org.
CannabisNews.com | On the day that he purchased Rainbow Farm, Tom Crosslin said destiny had led him to the place. By the late 1990s the farm would become a well-known stop on the hippie trail, a scenic overlook for the migratory flocks of travelers and Phish fans who crisscrossed the country.
Wikipedia.org | Malum prohibitum (plural mala prohibita, literal translation: "wrong [as or because] prohibited") is a Latin phrase used in law to refer to conduct that constitutes an unlawful act only by virtue of statute, as opposed to conduct evil in and of itself, or malum in se. Conduct that was so clearly violative of society's standards for allowable conduct that it was illegal under English common law is usually regarded as "malum in se". An offense that is malum prohibitum, for example, may not appear on the face to directly violate moral standards. The distinction between these two cases is discussed in State of Washington v. Thaddius X. Anderson:
