The Write-In Candidate

Back on vacation

Be back Monday.  Taking care of some personal business.

The Youtube Dog-And-Pony-Show "Debate"

Just what we need even more than technologically illiterate candidates: technologically illiterate candidates who think they are technologically literate.  The result is the pathetic dog-and-pony show we saw on CNN the other night, in the CNN/YouTube debate, in which regular citizens asked questions of the candidates, by video, and the candidates responded, supposedly unable to dodge the public the way it dodged the media.  While the debate was a step forward, it was little more than a single, small step.

To begin with, anyone who didn't have digital recording equipment, a broadband connection, and the knowledge of how to record and upload web video could not participate.  That eliminated about 95 percent of the electorate from the question pool.  The media made sure to cull the remainder into the typically long-winded format that lacks focus, and which allows for evasive answers or attacks against straw-man arguments.  We did see a split on Iraq, with Biden on the right side of the party, a few fringe candidates urging immediate congressional action, and Hillary Clinton standing right on the bullseye, raising political centrism to a new level.  Clinton shined best when she explained how she would have envoys scope out other nations for her before arranging high-level meetings with their leaders, an obvious byproduct of her years in the White House.

The Democratic political favor economy would collapse at this point if Clinton were not the nominee.  She will have to alienate her own party before her currency would become worthless.  Look for a rerun of 1984 (again), with a Mondale-style commandeering of all delegates despite only small pluralities, which will leave Edwards in the role of Gary Hart, winning primaries but not delgates, and Obama in the role of Jesse Jackson, with a loyal fan base but not enough of one in any jurisdiction to wield any power.  Virtually every Democratic primary is run this way, except in years like 1992 where the favors are used to stay out of the race rather than to win it.  Bill Clinton was able to enter the vacuum created when Mario Cuomo refused to cash in his favors.

As for the debates, if the candidates want a true "YouTube" debate, let them stop wasting time on the road, get behind their PCs, on their own, operate their own webcams, and debate each other by posting videos and responses to each others' videos, with the public allowed to comment (maybe limit that to the first 5,000 comments).  Let them argue the way YouTubers do with each other, in freestyle fashion, without advisors, makeup artists, consultants, or any other interference.  Let's stop rewarding them for spending millions on television advertising and make them come out to the internet on their own to speak for themselves.  Let them see what two-way media is like and how it can enhance the political process.  They claim to want to govern all Americans, yet how can I believe that if they won't even use the tools that allow them to talk directly to those they claim to speak for and want to represent?

Ray Gordon is a write-in candidate for every elected office in the United States.  The Candidate Has Issues appears every Tuesday.

US Military Misusing Psychology?

Recently, there is a scandal brewing about combat veterans who are being denied benefits or status or something because they have been determined to have "personality disorders" that are not covered because they are preexisting conditions. 

Fixing this is easy: just require the military to declare these preexisting conditions BEFORE they accept the soldier, and once they accept him, especially if they send him into combat, they agree to accept the soldier "as is" with the same benefits given to those who acquire their conditions in the course of their service.  This Willy Loman treatment of our combat veterans is almost as disgusting as our electorate's tolerance for our legislators who have stood down while this was allowed to continue.

Voter, heal thyself!

Ray Gordon is a write-in candidate for every elected office in the United States.  Whistleblower Central appears every Monday.

Vacation

I will return on Monday, July 23, 2007.

Looks Like Politicians DO Understand Google!

This Time Magazine article on candidate spending for keywords Google is a bit disconcerting, not because the candidates are showing they understand the internet, but because they are showing they understand not only the internet, but Google, and are still doing nothing to stop the massive copyright infringement and defamation which is the hallmark of Google's web archives.

It's nice to know that the same senators who gave us "Section 230" immunity from defamation for ISPs and search engines, and which allow them immunity under the DMCA even when their mere existence is copyright infringement, know how to spend their money on keyword advertising  Looks like the candidates are more concerned with all the traffic Google sends to their websites than protecting the reputations and copyrights of the little guys who built the content for which people search in the first place.

In an ideal world, voters would BOYCOTT any candidate who spends even a cent on keyword advertising without first cleaning up the search engines, but every canddiate is doing it, so they can all turn to each other and give their approval and validation of that tactic.  The voters don't care either, except to the extent that the indies who used to produce content could no longer keep doing so becaue the search engines drained their revenue by stealing their copyright.  People who lose jobs, friends, lovers, and other survival resources because someone who didn't like them "Googlebombed" them will just have to deal, I guess.

Like the old song used to say: This is not America.  At least not anymore.  It won't be America again until the voters wise up and take it back, or in other words, NEVER.   As of now, it's simply not profitable for the candidates to pay attention to Google's problems, since the voters don't give them a reason to. 

Ray Gordon is an internet publisher and write-in candidate for every elected office in the United States.  He can be reached at LeModernCaveman@aol.com.  Vote Early/Vote Often appears every Friday.

Throw The Technologicaly Illiterate Bums OUT!

Do people BRAG about not being able to read?  About not having food on their table, a roof over their head, or proper education?  Do they brag about dropping out of school in the fourth grade?  Why, then do our elected officials somehow think it's "cool" not to have a clue about the internet, and not to directly participate?  Oh sure, they're campaigns and their people may know enough to set up a MySpace or a fundraising page, but do you ever see them post to a message board, send an e-mail themselves, or respond directly to one of your questions?  I'm sure it happens from time to time, but our Congress is still polluted with members who barely understand computers, let alone the internet, let further alone understanding the internet jungle the way its inhabitants do.

I will consider it a sign of human evolution when two candidates duke it out on a message board for the world to watch, unfettered by advisors, pollsters, lawyers, or anyone else who tells them to hide in the ivory tower because it pays to do so, as the voters reward filtered propaganda over a genuine, unrehearsed debate.  A Congress full of scared, tech-illiterate members is a Congress that passes abominations like 47 USC §230, immunizing ISPs and search engines from defamation by their users, or the DMCA, which creates more confusion and lawsuits than it resolves, without really offering much protection to copyright holders. 

I want my congressman (no offense to Chaka Fattah, my congressman, who is very technologically literate) to be someone who can e-mail me himself, without help, and who also knows that if he attaches a file, it should be a PDF rather than a ZIP or a DOC due to the virus potential.  I want him to know what it's like to have an internet flame war over abortion with his opponent, and then I want him to wonder if an ISP really should be held blameless for allowing its users to defame him in the course of a campaign, or if Google should be allowed to archive it forever.  Of course, when a CONGRESSMAN is defamed online, the ISPs and search engines are a bit more tepid at testing this immunity on the very people who can eliminate it; I want my congressman to understand that this privilege may make issues like Section 230 less important to him than to me, since he has natural defenses against it.  Let him try to take down some YouTube video or remove pirating of his books while he's at it.  Then, for fun, let him try to post to a message board where the website owner bans him, but allows his critics.   That would be a candidate who understands the internet and who could write more appropriate laws governning it.

Candates who pretend to be "too cool for tech" are "too functionally illiterate to hold office" and should be voted out.

Ray Gordon is a write-in protest candidate for every elected office in the United States.  He is also an internet publisher and medical transcriptionist.  My Distinguished Colleagues appears every Thursday.

Google Wins DMCA Appeal; 3rd Circuit Calls Them A "Copy Machine"

In Parker v. Google, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has held that Google is like a "copy machine" that cannot be held liable for copyright infringement over the content of its search engine.  The court also held that Google cannot be held liable for third-party defamation which appears in its archives. 

In 2004, I sued Google for defamation and copyright infringement, claiming that their archiving of USENET postings constituted direct infringement, as well as vicarious and contributory infringement committed by third parties.  While the wording was anything but crystal clear, the appellate court, by claiming that amendment to the complaint would have been futile in affirming the denial of the lower court motion for leave to amend, has shown that it is not sympathetic to DMCA claims of this nature.

Some key excerpts from the ruling include:

"Additionally, to state a direct copyright infringement claim, a plaintiff must allege volitional conduct on the part of the defendant. See CoStar Group, Inc. v. LoopNet, Inc., 373 F.3d 544, 551 (4th Cir. 2004); Religious Tech. Ctr. v. Netcom On-Line Commc’n Servs., Inc., 907 F. Supp. 1361, 1370 (N.D. Cal. 1995). The District Court determined that Parker failed to allege any volitional conduct on the part of Google in archiving USENET posts." (p. 6).

Here, the court has said that archiving USENET is an "automatic" function lacking in volition.  Obviously, Google has volition over whether or not it chooses to run the archive in the first place, so the court has held that the archiving is and of itself not illegal.  This essentially gives Google protection under the DMCA to archive USENET with impunity and put the burden on the copyright holder to send a takedown notice.

The court went on to liken Google to a "copy machine" as follows:

"In CoStar Group, the Fourth Circuit drew an analogy between an internet service provider (“ISP”) and the owner of a traditional copy machine. We agree with this analogy as it applies to Google in this case. The Fourth Circuit noted that “a copy machine owner who makes the machine available to the public to use for copying is not, without more, strictly liable under [the Copyright Act] for illegal copying by a customer.”
373 F.3d at 550. The Fourth Circuit further stated that “an ISP who owns an electronic facility that responds automatically to users’ input is not a direct infringer.” Id. Thus, the Court determined that “the ISP should not be found liable as a direct infringer when its facility is used by a subscriber to violate a copyright without intervening conduct of the ISP.” Id. The Court further noted that “[w]hen an electronic infrastructure is designed and managed as a conduit of information and data that connects users over the Internet, the owner and manager of the conduit hardly ‘copies’ the information and data in the sense that it fixes a copy in its system of more than transitory duration.” Id. at 550-51."

Google is not a "conduit" of information in the sense that an ISP is, because they are not vital to the transmission of the information, but rather a third-party archive that collects the information *after* it has been published.  Google Groups is a posting interface, but Google's USENET archive is not.  Moreoever, Google USENET archive was not created in response to user queries, but by pirating the content on USENET itself for the archive.  It is the act of building the archive which infringes. 

Wirh regard to the claims of vicarious and contributory copyright infringement, by claiming that "Parker failed to allege that Google had a direct financial interest in the purported infringing activity."   Again, the court is claiming that Google's search engine and archives are not "volitional" and that there appears to be no direct financial benefit to Google, for if either were the case, the court would also have said that this could be cured by amendment to the complaint, but they also affirmed the denial of leave to amend on the grounds that this would have been "futile."  Unless the court is inviting me to file a new lawsuit that alleges what they claimed I did not allege, then they have sanctioned that conduct as well.  Google appears to have broad DMCA immunity here.

The "meat" of this case, however, has been the defamation claims, even though they have attracted far less attention.  Although I gave it a chance to carve out an exception, the court chose to follow Green v. America Online:

"Parker’s claims for defamation, invasion of privacy and negligence arise from Parker’s allegations that Google failed to address harmful content posted by others against him on the Internet. Parker did not assert in the first amended complaint that Google is the information content provider of the statements at issue. We agree with the District Court that Section 230 bars these three claims against Google. See Green v. America Online (AOL), 318 F.3d 465, 471 (3d Cir. 2003)."

The Court clearly rejected "distributor" liability for defamation (as a republisher), and claims that I did not allege that Google was an "information content provider."  If not alleging it were the problem, that would be curable by amendment, so when the court said amendment would be futile, it also said that Google should not be treated as the "information content provider" of the defamatory statements.  The Supreme Court has never checked in on Section 230 immunity, although every circuit except the 7th, and a host of state supreme courts, have embraced it.

Section 230 has recently come under fire in a lawsuit filed against the "AutoAdmit.com" website.  In that case, two female law students sued the website operators depsite this allegedly immunity.  The suit was filed by a Yale Law professor who certainly is aware of this defense.  That case was filed in Philadelphia, which is also governed by the Third Circuit.  If the court didn't change Green here for the world's largest search engine, I doubt they will when it comes to a singular message board. 

The exceptions I was seeking to have carved out are not minor: Section 230 was written for ISPs who could identify the third-party authors who post messages or send e-mail.  With Google, or other boards on the web, the source might be anonymous and impossible to sue.  The court's ruling all but destroys defamation law on the internet, since anyone who wants to "Googlebomb" another by posting negative statements that they know will be archived and searchable can just do so untraceably, with the target unable to seek redress from the courts and unable to remove the statements from the search engines, who don't fear lawsuits.  If the Supreme Court does not reverse this decision, Congress will be the next step.  At some point, enough people will suffer this injustice that the politicians will have to take notice, but we are not at that point yet.  Instead, the candidates have taken to purchasing keywords on Google.  I say don't vote for any candidate who feeds even one cent to that defamation and copyright infringement machine). 

If Google is going to be treated as a "copy machine," look for quality free content on the internet to dry up fast.  I do not write books or make them available to an audience for free only to have their value to advertisers diluted by search engines who can "archive" a copy of it, and use that archive to sell advertisements to my competitors, while forcing me to pay money to reach people who are often reading my work to begin with?  What's to stop 1,000 "information retrieval tools" from "archiving" free content on the web (including Google's!) if there is no penalty for it other than having to wait for a DMCA notice on each infringement?  Definitely not a victory for copyright holders, and I will likely be removing a great deal of free content from my site.  The customer is always right, but that means *paying* customers.  I'd rather help five people and get paid than help five thousand and not.

Next week I'll write about how it's possible to win a lawsuit on argument yet still lose it due to timing.  In doing so I'll show more compelling evidence of gender bias in the courts than has been seen in a very long time. 

Ray Gordon is an internet publisher and a write-in candidate for every elected office in the United States.  He urges you to vote for him as a protest vote whenever you don't like the choices in your election.

Court Reform, Not Tort Reform appears every Wednesday

Social Security Discriminates Against Women And Minorities

Civil Rights laws did not govern the workplace until 1964, with the passage of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Consequently, when Social Security was built, it did not factor workplace discrimination into the equation.  This omission costs women and minorities billions of dollars every year in the form of lower benefits that can be directly attributed to discrimination. 

Study after study after study shows that, over the course of their lives, women, minorities, and whistleblowers earn less money than their male, white, and nonsnitching counterparts.  Since social security benefits (retirement and disability) are tied to earnings, each class of oppressed worker is victimized twice, first by the actual discrimination and the resulting lost income, and again in retirement through a reduced retirement benefit (or disability benefit if they are disabled).  This is an obvious injustice and yet another reason why workers don't become whistleblowers.  Disabled workers, who are least able to protect themsleves, also suffer, and all who suffer are those who need equitable retirement benefits the most. 

The solution to this is simple: a universal retirement and disability benefit for Social Security recipients.  These benefits should not be tied to employment, because employment is not a meritocracy.  You cannot say that the system rewards hard work because it does not reward it equally, and it rewards those who do not rock the boat or fight discrimination, so it also does not serve the public interest.  In a Democratic presidential race with a black candidate, and a female candidate, as well as a candidate whose wife is suffering from cancer as the three frontrunners, each can identify with the injustice, yet because each is wealthy, they will never be personally affected by this.  You, however, will be, and they will be impacted if you tie your vote to an issue like this instead of which candidate raised the most money this month. 

As the universal write-in candidate, I recommend protest votes in my name in any election where no candidate supports this issue. 

Ray Gordon is an internet publisher and a write-in candidate for every elected office in the United States.  Write his name in as a vote if you want to protest the lack of viable candidates in any election.

Welcome To Whistleblower Central

Every Monday, this blog will focus on, not the flight of the bumble bee, but the plight of the whistleblower, the "private attorney general" superhero who is supposed to risk either his life, job, home, or his friends so that he can "do the right thing" and snitch out those criminals who have placed their trust in him, or who have been unfortunate enough to have their bad behavior witnessed by him.  He is supposed to fight for justice and speak up, and suffer the consequences without complaint, lest he be kicked further by being called "bitter" or a "hater" by those who need to marginalize him because it is too difficult to pitch in.

The "don't snitch" campaign that began in the ghetto, by which residents no longer cooperate with police, even in cases where children are murdered, has led to a huge increase in unsolved murders and other crimes, calling for police to implore the public to speak up.  The public, rightly so, refuses, for once someone is identified as a snitch, there is literally no turning back, and they will never be trusted again.  Even if they seek no rewards, they will bring untold suffering on themselves, while little or nothing will change in an era where even the Democrats are more concerned with who is winning the fundraising race than who is doing the right thing.

In a way, the ghetto is catching up to the workplace, becuase workers have known for decades that whistleblowing is tantamount to career suicide.  Even in cases where their need is obvious, such as the Enron scandal, literally every such story has the tale of one or a few whistleblowers who tried to stop the carnage and protect the public, only to wind up unemployed, blacklisted, and homeless, which puts them at increased risk for everything up to and including disease and death, due to poor survival resources.  This plays into the hands of the criminals, who can simply let nature do what would be illegal for them to do themselves.  As Ghandi warned, the "silence of our friends" inflicts the most damage of all, as many "good" people either stand down in the face of retailation against a whistleblower, or take active steps to harm them by refusing to hire them as well, not wanting to take a chance on even hiring a known snitch.

With an environment such as this, it is no surprise that don't-snitch has caught on.  Human beings have too strong a self-preservation instinct for it not to. 

Ray Gordon is an internet publisher and write-in candidate for every open office in the United States.  Whistleblower Cental appears every Monday.

2008 Spotlight: One Dollar/One Vote?

Part of my universal, write-in, protest candidacy is to take a swipe at the increasing focus on campaign finance as the dominant election factor, in an era where the opposite should be occuring due to the nominal cost of getting one's message out.  When I read about Obama's campaign celebrating the $32.7 million he just raised, or John Edwards supposedly losing momentum because he raised "only" $9 million in the same period, I have to wonder when the law of diminishing returns is going to kick in.  We've had stock market bubbles and real estate bubbles, but it looks like now we have a political bubble.  With so many candidates raising so much money, not only will a record number of dollars be spent on campaign contributions, but a record number of dollars devoted to losing campaigns will also go down the drain.  At what point will the "inevstors" (i.e., the public) pull back, if not to save the country, to avoid the negative yields.

The same media that decries the focus on money in politics are the ones feeding at the advertising trough, so don't expect reform to come from there.  By equating money with popularity, the media is also ensuring that the candidates with the most to spend stay in the race long enough to spend it.  Edwards' lack of funds is hardly a threat to his strong field presence in Iowa, where elections are won door-to-door, and all indications are he's going to win this primary with his pitch-a-tent strategy.  That he won't spend the $50-100 million that the frontrunners in his party can afford will be a tragedy only to those who would sell the airtime, the same media that invented the crisis for his campaign. 

In an era of two-way media, expensive propaganda in the form of one-way advertising should lose all influence at the polls.  There is nothing stopping any candidate from putting up his own MySpace page, his own blog, and his own YouTube channel, without the aid of interns, staffers, advisors, or anyone else.  None of the candidates does this, since they don't think the voters will reward it, but the closest I've seen so far is John Edwards' MySpace Page, which allows users to post comments that are not moderated prior to posting.  Any candidate who would allow that level of free speech on his own internet page deserves respect.  This is one of the reasons I'm endorsing John Edwards in the Democratic Primary (I'm a registered Republican so I can't vote in that race).

Another very telling sign that the financial shark has been jumped is that several candidates have waived their claim on millions of dollars in federal matching funds, because accepting them would reduce what they could spend on their campaign.   If this race stays protracted in both primaries, it's possible we could see the first billion-dollar election in our country, especially if Bloomberg runs as an independent.  I do not believe in campaign finance reform, because it is up to the voters to punish overspending.  In this election, they may not punish it, but they definitely cannot reward every candidate who is trying to buy their way into office.  We've yet to see the internet yield a low-budget candidate, but that may occur in the minor elections that are more easily tilted.

John Edwards' campaign will be a good measure of how well one can compete against the megabucks candidates with a strong message and a reasonable campaign budget.  As a result, for now, the hotbed for campaign finance reform is the 2008 Iowa Caucuses.  The better Edwards performs in Iowa, the more we can conclude that the influence of campaign money has its limits. 

Elections of Interest appears every Friday.  Ray Gordon can be reached at LeModernCaveman@aol.com.  He urges frustrated voters in any election to vote for him as a write-in candidate.