Strange Interlude

Eww...what did I just step in?

Let's put the politics aside for a second.  Mickey Kaus approvingly links to a Maureen Dowd column, only the link doesn't lead to the New York Times, where Dowd's column has disappeared behind a paid archive, but to the Free Republic, where the full thing is reprinted, copyright be damned. Now, I've got mixed opinions about the copyright law in general, and I'm not a fan of the Times new policy of locking everything up after a week. But this isn't some small blogger sharing a column he liked (and I run across very few blogs that reprint an entire column, or link to unauthorized copies of them) this is a writer at the largest Web magazine on the planet, and an employee of the Washington Post, the major competitor with the Times for the position of the national newspaper, and, not too long ago, the plaintiff (together with the Times) in a lawsuit against the Free Republic for reprinting the entirety of the Post's articles. That's a different kind of copyright evasion, and though it will never be prosecuted, under a strict interpretation of the law, such that is applied to humble bloggers, it's equivalent to the Post reprinting the entirety of Dowd's column within its Op-Ed section. Does the Post's legal counsel know of this? Not that a lawsuit's coming, of course, the big guys never sue the other big guys over this stuff.

And not that Kaus did it as a "The Information Wants To Be Free" ("The Man Can't Stop Our Maureen?") act. He did it to evoke  the icky feeling I got in suddenly being in the Free Republic in all liberal readers who unwittingly click on his link. And for the arch-conservative readers, it's there for the same reason he links approvingly to Lucianne Goldberg and Ann Coulter, a way of saying that he agrees with their most extreme comments without actually coming out and saying it. Which is why ultimately I respect Kaus much less than any of them-- he's a passive aggressive little shit.

Berkeley Laptop Thief: The rest of the story

This Boing-Boing post about a Berkeley Professor who had his laptop stolen and gave a blood-curdling story to his class about the "transponders" hidden in the device, and the amount of sensitive corporate and government research on said laptop, and on how many government agencies would be soon breaking into the student's home like the cops from Minority Report, has been linked on a couple of very prominent blogs, including Engadget, and is making the e-mail rounds. But there's something else going on with regards to the story that isn't mentioned in the original post.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about either genetically modified food or the tenure process at Berkeley. I do know 90% of what the Rine says in the clip is technologically implausible at best.

I googled the Professor's name (Jasper Rine), and I found that he is  indeed, as he says, working with some very prominent businesses. But that's the source of quite a bit of controversy, particularly for a tenure decision that he played a part in. It's alleged that his financial ties to the biotech company Novartis constituted a conflict of interest in denying tenure to Ignacio Chapela, who is very critical of the biotech industry. Chapela wrote a paper, published in Nature, and then essentially retracted by the magazine about Genetically Modified food contaminating other crops in Mexico. The ensuing controversy over the ties between corporations and academia was enough to make the cover of the Atlantic Monthly. And Chapela just this Monday filed a lawsuit against the University of California Regents over this matter. Assuming there is any information on the laptop about this dispute (say incriminating e-mails), it would obviously be legally inadmissable, but it could be very embarrassing for both him and the corporations he works for. It might been motive for an activist, but I'm just speculating here. I will say, technical plausibilty aside, he seems a bad person to steal stuff from.

Post edited for grammar so bad it would make my high school English teacher weep.

4/22/05: Post edited again to clarify who retracted the article from Nature.