The 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” It could not be clearer.

The Constitution apparently does not matter to these politicians. They also do not seem to care that Arizona is earning a national reputation for intolerance and racism

Congress should establish a simple registration requirement, not when something is created but in order to maintain the copyright. So let's say 14 years after you have published something, you need to register that. And if you don't register that, then you’re signaling to the world that you don't care about the copyright and the world can treat it as if you don't care about the copyright. But if you do register it, at least we have a clear understanding of who owns what.

The second change is we need to once again think about what the balance should be between free access to culture and metered access to culture, because both extremes are mistakes, either the extreme that says everything is free because then lots of people won't create because they can't cover their cost of creating, or the regime that says everything needs to be licensed, because in that world there’s a whole range of creativity – think of kids producing stuff on YouTube – that can't begin to happen because the cost of negotiating and clearing those rights is just so extreme.

the trade group is arguing that a password-protected space on the Web is not a classroom [and thus doesn't qualify for 'fair use' for copyright purposes].

A panel of parents, teachers and administrators will meet later this week to comb the dictionary for potentially graphic words or definitions and issue a report within a month.

"They will determine the extent to which the dictionaries support the curriculum, the age appropriateness of the materials and its suitability for the age levels of the students," Cadmus said. "It's not going to be an arbitrary decision."

The dictionaries were in the reference section of the fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms.

School board President Rita Peters supports the committee but believes the district was pressured into forming it because of one unidentified but vocal parent.

"I think it's absurd that we will remove dictionaries from our library especially because these dictionaries are the same ones we use in our spelling bees," she said. "I think we are approaching censorship with this. If they ban this book, they better clean house and go through all of them. What's good for one is good for all. I think we will open a big can of worms if these books are banned. It's the dictionary after all, c'mon."

At a CALI conference a few years ago there was a presentation by a law student (U. Cincinnati, I think) who went beyond the idea of distributing outlines of his classes on-line: he took his class notes, the readings, etc., and created his own podcasts - audio files that he distributed on-line - that consisted of his own lectures/discussions of the material covered in his classes. He was essentially creating his own on-line courses based on what he was learning in class (and he said he had 50,000+ people downloading and, presumedly, listening to these podcasts). BUT, before his first year of law school started, he met with each of his professors and told them of his plans - he wasn’t asking PERMISSION because he already had a good idea of what the law in this area was - and only one of his professors had any qualms about it, and, ultimately, there were no efforts to stop him from what he was doing and by now, I think, he probably has an entire law school education’s worth of podcasts on-line.
Having these outlines on-line just changes the scale of what our students already had available to them: the internet long ago made the exchange of all manner of information and data much easier. And, yes, this is probably why more students these days may seem to anticipate your lines of discussion and questions in class but, again, its really just a change of scale from fifteen years ago when students had to physically exchange floppy discs containing course outlines that they had written or that they had obtained from upperclassmen.

Brian Huddleston

The U.S. Department of Education wants school officials to “eyeball” students who decline to state [their race] and check a box for them, reports McClatchy [News].  In order to identify racial/ethnic achievement gaps, “the agency is pressing schools to identify all students by race in 2010-11 or face penalties.

the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.

Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you.

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders.

When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event. We confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. We tell people they can't use an airplane restroom in the last 90 minutes of an international flight. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning.

If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.

Our current response to terrorism is a form of "magical thinking." It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.

Despite admonitions from judges, many jurors can't seem to keep their hands off their electronic devices, posting updates on their Facebook pages and — far more worrisome — mining the Internet during breaks in a trial. "The accused has a right to confront the accuser, and you can't cross-examine Wikipedia on the stand," says Douglas Keene, an Austin, Texas, jury consultant. He points to a recent example of outside-the-jury-box research by one juror that led to a mistrial in a case in Miami. When the judge subsequently interviewed the other jurors, he discovered that in total, nine of the 12 had been Googling after hours.

My publisher, O'Reilly, decided to try an experiment, offering one of my Windows books for sale as an unprotected PDF file.

After a year, we could compare the results with the previous year's sales.

The results? It was true. The thing was pirated to the skies. It's all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying.

The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slightly during that year.

That's not a perfect, all-variables-equal experiment, of course; any number of factors could explain the results. But for sure, it wasn't the disaster I'd feared.

Copyright should not be placed above citizens' fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

Found courtesy of George Siemens, www.elearnspace.org/blog/2009/12/04/why-we-need-to-pay-attention-to-copyright

The default position is that we ebook readers are always engaged in some form of wrongdoing.  We are charged more.  We don’t get the book at the same time.  We are constrained in how we use our books, on what devices we read them on, with whom we can share them.  We are not considered legitimate customers if we do not leave our house and buy a paper copy.

Sharing is a fundamental part of reading.  Sharing is a reader’s way of saying “try this, I think you’ll like it. There is no risk here.” It’s a way of building a relationship with another reader so that the next time you are reading a book, you can say, “get this” and that person will go and buy it, solely on your recommendation.  From one reader to another, there is no greater expression of trust than to buy on another reader’s recommendation.

Sharing is part of creating the reading community. Sharing seeds reading.  It creates and generates more interest in reading. Why is this important? Because the biggest threat to authors’ livelihood is not piracy.  It is not casual sharing.  It is a declining readership.  It is rising rates of illiteracy.  It is alternative forms of entertainment.

The world passed Washington by and Olympia didn't notice. The legislature is shocked that South Carolina will get some Boeing jobs and oblivious to the flat free-trade China-is-going-to-kick-our-ass education-is-everything global economy.

While it may not be optimal to have only one company selling digital copies of old books, it's "better than zero"

1. Accessing content. Consumers should not be limited in the content they choose to view online, as long as it's legal.

2. Using applications. Internet users should be able to run any application they want as long as they don't exceed service plan limitations or harm the provider's network.

3. Attaching personal devices. Consumers should be permitted to connect products they buy to their Internet connection, as long as the devices operate within the service plan and do not harm the network or enable theft of service.

4. Obtaining service plan information. Customers should be able to easily review their options when buying Internet service plans and learn about how those plans protect against spyware and other invasions of privacy.

5. New rule: Non-discrimination. Internet providers would be prohibited from selectively blocking or slowing Web content or applications.

6. New rule: Transparency. Providers would be required to make their network management practices clear and available to consumers.