On Sunday, 25 March 2007, actor Sean Penn said

Let’s unite not only in stopping this war, but in holding this administration accountable.

Stopping the war

Before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, there was a very well-organized and well-publicized march across many countries. Of course, the mainstream media did their best to misrepresent the protesters, but the protesters’ message was clear: Don’t invade Iraq.

In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) campaigned for president and argued that he would manage the Iraq occupation better than Pres. George W. Bush. The American anti-war movement stopped their campaigning and supported his pro-war candidacy while simultaneously discouraging third party and independent anti-war voices from participating in the presidential race.

In 2006 the US grew more displeased with the ongoing occupation. In the mid-term elections, Americans shuffled the deck chairs of the Titanic by putting Democrats in power in both houses of Congress. In mid-May 2006 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman Brendan Daly said that impeachment would be “off the table” for Pelosi. Why? Pelosi told the Washington Post “You never know where it leads to.”.

The Democrats’ first order of Congressional business included a few non-binding time-wasters which left the occupation intact: the US is still in Iraq with no signs of leaving any time soon.

In March 2007 the Democrats voted to give Bush $124 billion to continue the war (more than he asked for) and a timetable to end the war that is so far off in the future the timetable can easily be redrafted or canceled.

Holding this administration accountable

By late March 2007 no serious organized opposition to Pres. Bush has mounted. At the rate the Democrats get around to putting up a real challenge to Bush, Bush won’t have much of his term left. Impeachment is a first step; consider this excerpt from Democracy Now! on Monday, February 23rd, 2004 (audio, video, transcript)

Amy Goodman: We interviewed Dennis Kucinich. He said that he thought this would be the stupidest thing to try to impeach him because after all it’s a Republican Congress, they wouldn’t do it, and it would gain sympathy for Bush that the highest — the way to — in a sense to impeach him is to vote him out of office for the people to impeach him.

Ralph Nader: Well, impeachment is not conviction. Impeachment basically is a very fair public hearing in the House of Representatives to determine whether he should be charged with high crimes and misdemeanor, and if he is, it goes over to the Senate for a trial. But I think that our founding fathers put this in the Constitution to hold presidents accountable between elections, and it certainly would highlight the issue, and isn’t this the president who campaigned in 2000 on responsibility and accountability, and that actions should have consequences? So, I favor the use of the impeachment powers.

It’s unlikely that Pres. Bush will face a war crimes trial after he leaves office. I don’t recall anyone caring about, say, Bill Clinton bombing the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan after his second term expired.

So how long will it take to get most people to see that neither major corporate American political party wants to end the occupation of Iraq? There are objectors in both of these parties, to be sure, but not enough to make a difference.

For example, Democratic Party anti-war Rep. Dennis Kucinich is virtually alone in asking if it’s time to impeach (local copy).

More on recent developments:

• How the media tries to trick you into believing the Democrats are on an anti-war footing
• How the Democrats pose no opposition and the anti-war activists go along with excluding anti-war candidates this early in the race

McDonalds wants “McJob” taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Boing Boing’s rebuttal is worth reading, not just for reasserting the point about McJobs—”an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector”—but why you shouldn’t fear trademark law stopping you from using “McJob”.

A mild example of one way you can help curtail corporate power; as we’re reminded in the movie The Corporation, you can still get to them.

The University of Southern California Free Culture group held an event where students were invited to speak their mind. This event was called the “Free Speech Zone” like the caged areas in which people are allowed to speak freely outside major political party rallies and other corporate-sponsored events around the world.

Students spoke about the environment, politics, art, their peers, their haircuts, what they ate for breakfast — anything that came to mind. Even more students brought sidewalk chalk with which they wrote words and drew pictures within the “Free Speech Zone” boundaries.

Usually these “zones” are well outside any route where the invited guests would be likely to see them and hear their objections.

The USC fined the Free Culture group for posting unauthorized posters ($1/poster) and charged the group an undisclosed amount for removal of sidewalk chalk.

The irony, oh the irony.

The posters read “This is Not A Free Speech Zone” because the Free Culture group was protesting USC’s policy on free expression and dissent which appears to be in opposition to “the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit“.

C-SPAN has promised to relicense the Congressional and federal agency footage under a more amenable license: (emphasis theirs)

C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency– about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks–which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.

So many of the salient details are left out, I’ll hold my thanks to C-SPAN until I learn precisely what they’re distributing and under what license. License choice, quality of source material, reliability of footage stamping (it’s routine for C-SPAN to stick an “All Rights Reserved” at the end of their footage), and more will all have to be addressed. It’s not clear if they’ll make high-quality footage available through their website, through a willing carrier (like The Internet Archive), or leave it up to the public to digitize a relatively poor signal and upload it to others.

They say Creative Commons somehow inspired them to do this (The new C-SPAN policy borrows from the approach to copyright known in the online community as “Creative Commons.”). But I suspect something else is going on. Carl Malamud recently put pointed questions to C-SPAN essentially asking them to justify their restrictions when the American cable-subscribing public covers most if not all of C-SPAN’s bills.

Therefore I have to wonder: if we’re covering their costs (at least), why aren’t we getting completely unfettered access to all of C-SPAN’s works even for commercial use?

C-SPAN’s announcement gives examples of what we will and won’t get increased access to:

Examples of events included under C-SPAN’s new expanded policy include all congressional hearings and press briefings, federal agency hearings, and presidential events at the White House. C-SPAN’s copyright policy will not change for the network’s studio productions, all non-federal events, campaign and political event coverage, and the network’s feature programming, such as Book TV and original history series.

Why are these works copyrightable at all? I’m bothered by this because it means that this situation could change; later on this copyright license can be discontinued or altered to take away the freedoms we are being promised in these works. Thus works licensed under the revised license are less advantageous to us. I’m also curious why we’re not getting the freedom to distribute derivative works. A practical side-effect of this is that C-SPAN can challenge our fair use by calling it copyright infringement.

According to Kurt Hanson, webstreaming audio tracks whose copyright is held by clients of the Recording Industry Association of America (what I’ll call “RIAA tracks”) just became a lot more expensive.

In a new fee schedule (effective retroactively to the start of 2006), online radio stations playing RIAA tracks now have to pay $0.0011 per song-per listener (also known as a “performance”). This means that the RIAA track webcaster has to figure out how many downloads of the song there were and pay that times $0.0011 every month this year. Next year and every year through 2010 this fee will go up, according to the current fee schedule:

And no RIAA track webcaster pays less than $500/month; that’s the new minimum payment in this scheme.

I’m not sure if this is in addition to or a replacement for the content restrictions which prevent playing songs from the same artist more than a certain number of times in a row, or in a 3-hour period, and so on. But perhaps that doesn’t matter—it’s not hard to see how the new fee schedule makes webcasting RIAA tracks completely unaffordable. Just run some sample calculations out to 1 year and watch the fees add up beyond what small stations (individuals and small volunteer outfits) can afford to pay.

And then there’s the question raised any time webcasting with the RIAA comes up: Webcasters should take on all of this complexity, cost, and hassle so they can do business with an organization that treats people so shabbily?

I know that many artists don’t see the harm in signing with an RIAA client. They think it will be their path to riches even though it’s far more likely they’ll have to make albums just to pay off the label/loan shark. This fee schedule, written at the behest of the RIAA, does not benefit artists. Read the definition of “performance” closely and you’ll see the incentive to play fewer RIAA tracks and webcast to fewer people. I suggest that artists record and distribute their own work online, and retain the copyright to their songs as well as their recordings. Artists are often less popular than they’d like to be, so it’s better to retain copyright power than to sign it over to a label. Artists who still want to work with the RIAA through their label should advocate for a small uniform fee anyone can pay the RIAA in exchange for distribution rights in any medium. If the fee is small it will encourage compliance and more fees will be paid to the RIAA (I’ll be surprised if a dime of this money goes to any but the most popular artists who need the money the least, but more exposure is an indirect benefit). I’m guessing this is where things are headed and once again we’ll (as Cory Doctorow once put it) drag the RIAA “kicking and screaming to the money tree”.