In response—or at least so it seemed to me, Obama got on ABC and did this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qecdYEAby5I

Vapid, election year puffery. What serious opponent of anti-miscegenation laws would go around saying he’s in favor of mixed-race marriages, but that the states should be allowed to ban them if they want? Shameful and extremely pragmatic. Nothing more than a campaign speech. This is his “personal” “opinion” (insofar as he can be said to hold opinions of his own for any length of time) and will not translate to national policy.

In 1947, the year before the California Supreme Court struck down that State’s anti-miscegenation law as unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, 30 states (of 48) had such laws in effect: California, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Indiana, and Maryland repealed theirs between 1948 and 1967. Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Delaware had theirs struck down with Virginia’s when the US Supreme Court found the latter violated the 14th Amendment (Loving v. Virginia).

As of Tuesday, 39 States now ban same-sex marriage (as such) by one means or another, although the law is complicated in a handful of them. No Only one [see update below] State ever banned mixed-race marriages by constitutional amendment, while the majority of States with same-sex marriage bans have chosen this route. Except in North Carolina, anti-miscegenation laws weren’t put in place by popular initiatives. And no State ever reenacted a ban on mixed-race marriages after a repeal, c.f. California’s Prop 8.

So when others talk about how hopeful things look on the gay marriage front, I can’t help wonder if they’re looking at the same country I’m seeing. “A majority support gay marriage,” they say. I see no evidence of such a majority, and cannot help but question the polling methods. Frankly, the “majority support” angle is offensive to me, because it is dishonest and because it concedes the whole moral argument over democratizing these things to the opposition.

A Supreme Court ruling à la Loving at this point would be disastrous, both for how it would happen and for the reaction. Such a ruling would create both good and bad law, and the good would be wiped out by the subsequent amendment to the US Constitution. A Gay Loving would add so much fuel to the amendment-pushers, and only 38 states need to ratify. Too much of the country opposes the idea of gay marriage for a Gay Loving to work.

In sum, I am not optimistic at all about this fight on the national level. Don’t look for it to be over for a decade at least.

PS: I wrote a portion of this post in response to a thread on the OList:OHomos mailing list.

UPDATE: Trey points out that North Carolina once amended its constitution to include a ban on mixed-race marriages. Indeed, at the 1875 constitutional convention, the people in convention ratified, among 29 other alterations to the State constitution, a provision providing that

All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the third generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.

This provision remained in the North Carolina constitution until the people replaced the entire constitution with a new one in 1971, despite Loving in 1967.

Today, I present you with two videos, both of which use nearly the same soundtrack, but with different pictures. This inverts the exercise. Watch them both, then tell me how each made you feel. Don’t think too much, and don’t try to limit yourself by thinking which is better. Just watch and observe your automatic response to each.

I had very different emotional responses to these two videos. Tell me in the comments how you reacted to them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuvoSw1TiJ8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5RVSLA92r0

1. Numerous and extensive changes to the Medicare rules, including payment cuts to providers and facilities.
2. Pregnant women receiving Medicaid must not smoke or stop smoking by January 1, 2011, in order to remain Medicaid-eligible.
3. Individuals may no longer use flexible spending accounts, health reimbursement accounts, or health savings accounts to pay for over-the-counter medications.
4. Penalty for unqualified withdrawals from health savings accounts increases from %10 to %20.
5. $2.5b tax (for 2011) on brand-name pharmaceutical companies and importers, based on their relative market shares. Increases to $3b/yr in 2016, $4.2b/yr in 2018, and decreases to $2.8b/yr in 2019.
6. Businesses that purchase more than $600 in goods in one year from one seller must report the purchases to the IRS and provide the seller with a W-2. Legislatively repealed, Feb. 2011.

Source: Center for Health Transformation [PDF]

1. Start of prohibition on lifetime limits on essential health benefits;
2. Start of prohibition on rescinding coverage except in instances of fraud;
3. Start of requirement that companies allow dependents up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ plan if the dependent is not eligible to enroll in an employer-sponsored health plan;
4. Companies can no longer exclude payment for treating a preexisting condition for a child under 19;
5. Companies cannot impose annual limits on essential health benefits;
6. Non-grandfathered plans must cover A– or B-graded preventive services, other preventive services, and certain immunizations;
7. Deadline for insured group health plans to meet requirements prohibiting discrimination in favor of highly compensated individuals in terms of eligibility and benefits (group health plans can’t offer better coverage to people who make more money);
8. Insurance companies must implement an internal and external appeals process for coverage determinations and claim disputes.

Source: Center for Health Transformation [PDF]

Take as granted that I have read most everything web-present Objectivists this side of ARI have written on blogs since this issue became contentious.

Please recommend anything you consider relevant to the issue.

Today the Librarian of Congress announced new rules promulgated pursuant to the Librarian’s rulemaking authority under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to exempt certain actions from the prohibition against circumvention of copyright protection systems found in 17 U.S.C. §1201. The “anti-circumvention provision” states:

No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

The Librarian is required by §1201 to make a determination every three years as to whether any exemptions from this prohibition are necessary in order to preserve access to copyrighted works. In the words of the Librarian, his task is to determine

whether the prohibition on circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works is causing or is likely to cause adverse effects on the ability of users of any particular classes of copyrighted works to make noninfringing uses of those works.

There are six new exceptions announced today:

1. Educational, documentary, and noncommercial users may now break CSS protection on DVDs in order to extract portions of motion pictures.

   This is something educators and critics have been doing for quite some time. At least, the educators at my film school did it all the time, and encouraged us as students to do so for assignments. For example, one assignment was to take a film and cut a trailer for it. I chose AI: Artificial Intelligence, which was newly released on DVD at the time, and with which I was a little obsessed, having taken part in the extraordinary, genre-defining artificial reality game promoting its theatrical release. I used DeCSS to extract the entire film, then edited together a pretty decent trailer. Did this infringe on Dreamworks’ copyright? No. Use of excerpts of copyrighted material for educational or critical use is permitted under fair use doctrine. Was it criminal at the time? Yes. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provision made it a crime to access copyrighted material for fair use purposes if that material was protected by an anti-copying technology. The DVD was protected by CSS, and the use of DeCSS to circumvent that protection was criminal, even though the underlying use of the copyrighted material was not. DeCSS’s relationship with the DMCA has been distilled into the concept of the illegal prime number: a numerical representation, in the form of a large prime, of the DeCSS method.

   This provision means that, when I finally get around to finishing my comprehensive analysis of James Cameron’s Avatar, the post will include screen grabs from the film relevant to the points I will make. Such screen grabs for use in criticism were illegal before today, despite the fact that they are not now nor have ever been a violation of any copyright.

   This rule specifically mentions only DVDs. It does not mention, and therefore does not include, circumvention of Blu-Ray copy protection schemes. Expressio unius est exclusio alterius.

2. Wireless phone users may now circumvent software protections on their phones that prevent the phone from executing software.

   This is effectively directed at Apple’s App Store for the iPhone. The new rule says only what it says, however, and what it says is that it is no longer a violation of the statute to circumvent Apple’s not-App-Store-approved software block. It does not say that doing so is no longer a breach of contract, or that Apple has to tolerate it in any way. All it says is that the government will not put someone in jail for hacking their own phone to run whatever software they want it to run.

3. Wireless phone users may now also circumvent software protections on their phones that prevent the phone from operating on a wireless network.

   Just as with number 2, the new rule merely states that it is not a crime for a wireless phone user to hack his own phone in order to let it operate with a network other than the one for which it was designed. It doesn’t say Apple has to continue to support off-network iPhones, or that T-Moble has to tolerate jailbroken iPhones on its network.

4. Users may now circumvent video game copy protection software (e.g., SecuROM) for security investigation purposes.

   I am not familiar with the real-world case to which this exemption applies. If someone knows, please share in the comments. My understanding of the provision is that it allows a computer user or computer network operator to circumvent software that prohibits game data from being accessed from outside the context of game-play, so long as the user or operator is doing so for the purpose of testing the game data for malware, and so long as the results of such investigations are maintained in a way that does not promote or facilitate improper circumvention.

   I think the non-infringing use being impaired by the anti-circumvention provision here is the use of the copyrighted game data in determining whether the game poses a threat to system or network security.

5. Users of computer software access-protected by a hardware dongle may circumvent the access-protection system when their dongle malfunctions, so long as the dongle system is obsolete and no longer supported by the manufacturer.

   If you buy some software (or a CD with music on it, or a DVD with a movie on it), you own your copy. If it interoperates with the seller’s network, the seller can dictate the terms under which that interoperation may take place, but the seller has no moral or legal right to dictate how you will use non-interoperating software (including CDs or DVDs, which don’t require ongoing communication with the publisher to continue to function). Before the Internet picked up, some software companies wanting greater control over use developed hardware dongles which, when attached to a computer system, would allow the software to operate. This allowed companies a way of enforcing the “one workstation” restrictions in their software licenses. Nowadays, this kind of functionality is done over the Internet. For example, when you install a copy of Windows 7, it has to be “activated” by contacting Microsoft’s servers over the Internet before it will fully function. Many companies that once used dongles to enforce “one workstation” licenses now use the Internet activation method, and no longer support their older dongles.

   Those companies would probably prefer that users with broken dongles be forced into buying an updated version of the software, but since these are not software products that rely on regular manufacturer interoperability, the manufacturer has no moral or legal authority to require the user to upgrade. The user is entitled by his original purchase to continue accessing the copyrighted software he purchased. If the dongle breaks and the manufacturer won’t supply him with a replacement because it is outdated, he can now circumvent the dongle and continue using his software.

   Contractually, if the license agreement anticipated a stand-alone software model, then that copy of the software is the buyer’s to use forever so long as he likes. Even if the agreement contained a provision saying “you agree not to bypass the dongle, and if your dongle ever breaks and we decide not to replace it, you will have no recourse but to upgrade,” I don’t think a court would find breach if you did bypass a broken and obsolete dongle. Morally and legally, you are still entitled to use the software you purchased. Even though I don’t think a court would find breach in such a case, I do think that you have still broken a promise in that situation. It’s just not a promise related to copyright. It’s essentially a promise to make a future purchase under certain conditions and at an undetermined price.

6. Vision-impaired eBook owners may circumvent eBook copy protection systems when those systems interfere with accessibility software.

   This one is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require any further explanation.

Now here’s what I think. I think that all of the activities now exempted from §1201 have been going on for quite some time, and that what had previously been an exercise of prosecutorial discretion has now been condensed to written rules. That is a move towards objectivity in the law, and therefore a Good Thing.

The Big Deal of the Day seems to be numbers 2 and 3 and how they apply to Apple’s iPhones, which are locked into the AT&T wireless network. But the truth is these new rules will not change anything about the jailbreaking situation. We have seen extensive, long-standing, and universal prosecutorial discretion exercised against bringing criminal charges against jailbreakers. Never once have I heard of a jailbreaker being charged under §1201, and could find no such prosecutions in my research. (If someone else has found such a prosecution, please share in the comments.) All that has changed with respect to the iPhone situation is that jailbreakers no longer need to rely on prosecutorial discretion. They now have a written rule.

Morally, a jailbreaker is still a promise-breaker. He’s not a thief, however, because he bought his phone and it is his to do with as he pleases. He can stick it in a blender [Warning: graphic content] if he so chooses, and Apple has no right to object.

Also note how 2 and 3 are different from the situation in 5. The iPhone software is not stand-alone. It interoperates. Because it has to continually communicate with Apple in order to function, Apple can, morally and legally, set the terms by which that exchange takes place. Apple can rightly refuse to interoperate with jailbroken phones. If Apple can devise a way to make its software completely shut down when a phone is jailbroken, it would be entirely within its rights to do so both under the license agreement and in terms of property rights.

Why? In the case of the iPhone, the user owns the phone, which interoperates with the producer (Apple) to provide functionality. By jailbreaking his phone, the user breaks his promise to abide by the producer’s terms of interoperability. He can keep his phone, but the producer no longer has to provide software interoperability. By jailbreaking, the promise-breaker tells the producer he no longer wants the producer’s software according to the terms of their agreement, which is just the same as saying he no longer wants the software.

§1201 is and has always been bad for property rights. Specifically, bad for the property rights of the purchasers of copyrighted works. For one, it is vague and broad. It is an attempt to criminalize activity that can have both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. The attitude behind §1201 is the same attitude that would ban bittorrent technology altogether because it can be used to violate copyright. Or that bans possession of locksmith’s tools altogether because they might be used to break into a house. Or that bans teaching of chemistry altogether because the knowledge might be used to poison someone. There are bound to be both legitimate and illegitimate uses of every kind of knowledge or technology. Banning a technology because it could be used for an improper purpose violates the rights of people who would put the technology to proper use.

§1201’s attempt to criminalize certain kinds of knowledge is a reaction to the failure of security through obscurity. Security through obscurity will always be defeated by the Streisand Effect—the more you try to suppress knowledge, the more widespread that knowledge will become. Obscurity is not a viable way to protect intellectual property anyway, because the intellectual property is itself the information that must be kept secret. If, for example, the entertainment industry wants a foolproof way of protecting their products from economically significant copying, the technology to do so has been around for decades. It is called analog, and it is still, in my opinion, the most graceful solution to piracy.

So I am not at all unhappy to see §1201 being eroded by more and bigger exceptions. I would prefer to see it disappear altogether. But the Librarian’s newest rules don’t really change anything on the jailbreaking front. They remove a minimal, hypothetical threat of prosecution for an act that, while immoral and a breach of contract, should never have been considered criminal in the first place.

The slip opinion is available at the Supreme Court’s website [direct link, PDF].

The design provided in the park is very different and probably not what many people are used to in a public play space, but the provision of features, such as natural materials, mounds, logs and blocks, encourages children to play more imaginatively and creatively.

This broader and more naturalistic approach to play provision is one that is being encouraged by all the key play and safety agencies as well as being endorsed by central and local government.

It is not intended to replace traditional play space, but rather to add to the mix of play provisions and to enrich children’s opportunities to experience a wide variety of stimulating play experiences.

Paraphrased, I think it means “kids need to get used to bland, useless, painful government-provided concrete structures early so they will passively accept the disappointment with life we’ll be forcing them to endure for the rest of their lives.”

One who would defend the [Constitution] must share his foxhole with scoundrels of every sort, but to abandon the post because of the poor company is to sell freedom cheaply. It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have often been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.

Kopf v. Skyrm, 993 F2d 374, 308 (4th Cir. 1996). Judge Hall was writing about the Fourth Amendment, but the sentiment applies most admirably to the First Amendment as well, as another 4th Circuit panel noted recently in Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F.3d 206 (4th Cir. 2009).

In that appeal, the 4th Circuit panel reversed a $5M judgment against the deplorable Fred Phelps (of Westboro Baptist Church fame) and two other members of his family-stroke-church for extremely disgusting and offensive statements made at and concerning their protest of the funeral of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew A. Snyder on March 10, 2006. The panel ruled that Phelps et al. should have prevailed at the trial court as a matter of law because their statements were protected by the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause and the Supreme Court’s New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), and Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 497 U.S. 1 (1990) lines of cases applying the Free Speech Clause’s protections to the prosecution of civil suits.

According to the panel, the statements made by the church members (which I will not repeat here, but which can be found in the panel’s opinion here [PDF]) were either general statements of public concern that a reasonable person would not presume to refer specifically to any member of the Snyder family, or were statements so hyperbolic and contextually related to the church’s broader protests that a reasonable person could not conclude that they made any statements of objectively verifiable fact.

The panel’s reasoning based on existing case law is sound, and I think that this is legally and morally the correct outcome, given the unfortunate context (discussed below). Mr. Snyder has appealed to the Supreme Court, and the Court granted certiorari earlier this month.

Today, Drudge Report links an Associated Press article in the Wichita Eagle (here) reporting that the 4th Circuit has also ordered costs of the appeal to the 4th Circuit to be paid by appellee, Mr. Snyder. The article states that the brief opinion did not give reasons why Mr. Snyder is being required to pay the costs of an appeal initiated (and eventually won) by Phelps. But this assessment of costs against appellee is not all that mysterious. The Fourth Circuit’s Local Rule 39(a)(3) states that “if a judgment is reversed, costs are taxed against the appellee.” (Here.) Note that costs do not include attorney’s fees. This is not a fee-shifting rule, but a cost-assessing rule, and a typical one at that. The AP article reports on an ordinary and expected consequence of losing an appeal, not on something inexplicable or even controversial. What the AP article (and other misinterpretations of this ruling) does reflect are the sympathy the public feels for Mr. Snyder and the vague sense that there is something unjust going on in this case.

It seems unfair that Phelps should be able to harangue the family members of dead soldiers at their loved ones’ funerals and be protected from suit by the First Amendment, so it seems additionally unfair that the family members might have to pay money to Phelps as a result. But the law here is correct and moral within the context of the current public property situation. And Mr. Snyder is not required to pay Phelps’ lawyer. He must pay for his own, and for the court costs incurred in arguing the appeal.

This would have never happened if the government didn’t own the streets and sidewalks near St. John’s Catholic Church in Westminster, Maryland. If such property were privately owned, Phelps would be stuck spewing his nauseating bile from his own property back in Kansas. Rational people would decline to permit him to use their property for his pontificating (a word I’m sure he’d never use himself, given its papal reference). But since the government owns the roads and sidewalks, it must make the rules necessary for their use, and those rules must comport as closely as possible with the protection of individual rights. In the context of speech from public property, this means that government can only place reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech. This has led many (40, according to the 4th Circuit panel) states to attempt to enact restrictions on picketing near funerals (specifically to combat Phelps), and Phelps has been successful in having some of these statutes thrown out where they were not drafted properly and discriminated on the basis of content.

[Sidebar: In a recent podcast, Dr. Leonard Peikoff addressed the question of the propriety of permitting the government to regulate the display of pornographic material on private property in such a way that it is prominently visible from public property. After making it clear that this would not be a problem if all property were privately owned, Dr. Peikoff suggested that the government would have to make the rules, and that it could legitimately prohibit conduct or displays that would “raise objective question” or would be “objectively taken to raise fear in people as to what’s coming next.” I’m not sure exactly what the standard Dr. Peikoff would use is, based on these statements. Perhaps I will ask him to clarify.]

Phelps’ behavior is disgusting and, in a civilized society, he would be shunned and denounced as an idiot. In a capitalist society, he would have no platform from which to speak except that which he could earn for himself. But in our mixed society, where the government controls the roads, what is the proper limit placed on speech in and around public property?

Dear Resident:

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail. When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly.

Your response is important. Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community get its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities, and many other programs you and your neighbors need. Without a complete, accurate census, your community may not receive its fair share.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely,

Robert M. Groves
Director, U.S. Census Bureau

This letter literally made me throw up a little in my mouth. Gone is even the pretense that the census will only be used for its proper, constitutional purpose. If filling out the census form means I’ll be helping my community get its “fair share” of stolen loot, then I won’t be filling it out at all.