Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

With a guilty verdict delivered last week against Peter Watts, a Canadian writer, adds something unexpected and dangerous to any journey out of the United States, and particularly so to exiting the country by car.

First, US border guards now do exit searches — which is to say that your car might be searched on the way out of the United States. I have no idea why the United States is worried about you transporting things out of their country and into Canada — traditionally, that would be Canada’s problem — nor do I have the first clue regarding what they might be looking for. But they’re looking for something. Maybe trouble.

Second, while they are supposed to inform you that they are searching your vehicle, apparently they did not in this case. You might suddenly find border guards going through your things.

Third, if you dare to ask questions about this, you might get punched in the face. That certainly happened to Mr. Watts.

Finally, if, after getting punched in the face, you take to long to obey a border guard’s instructions, you can be convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison for two years. For simply failing to obey an instruction quickly enough.

All of the above are what happened to Peter Watts — you can find his initial take on the verdict here, with further information in this follow-up post.

The most amazing part is a quote from a juror, taken from the Times-Herald:

As a member of the jury that convicted Mr. Watts today, I have a few comments to make. The jury’s task was not to decide who we liked better. The job of the jury was to decide whether Mr. Watts “obstructed/resisted” the custom officials. Assault was not one of the charges. What it boiled down to was Mr. Watts did not follow the instructions of the customs agents. Period. He was not violent, he was not intimidating, he was not stopping them from searching his car. He did, however, refuse to follow the commands by his non compliance. He’s not a bad man by any stretch of the imagination. The customs agents escalated the situation with sarcasm and miscommunication. Unfortunately, we were not asked to convict those agents with a crime, although, in my opinion, they did commit offenses against Mr. Watts. Two wrongs don’t make a right, so we had to follow the instructions as set forth to us by the judge.

And from another juror:

He was found guilty of obstructing/resisting, and that was due to the time that transpired between him being ordered to do something and him actually complying with the order. We were forced to decide what was a reasonable amount of time for him to comply with an order. Mr. Watts, in my opinion, was treated unfairly by Customs and Border Protection. But, unfortunately, they were not on trial.

In other words, beware of border crossings.

The Guardian writes that “Noah’s Ark was circular”, which is a pretty moronic headline for a somewhat interesting article about the translation of a new source of the Noah’s Ark story. A funny reaction is that of the Institute for Creation Research, attempting to debunk the new translation and reaffirm the biblical version as “fact”. The intellectual dishonesty is so blatant that it’s … well, funny.

(Gunpowder art by Cai Guo-Qiang)

Town and village courts in New York State sound very frightening. The article includes an example of a judge who responded to a request for a restraining order from a battered woman with the comment: “Every woman needs a good pounding every now and then.”

Are cupcakes better without frills? The Butch Bakery thinks so.

When it comes to copyright, the world simply seems to have gone insane.

The UK music industry thinks it loses £200 million each year to piracy. So the UK government is now trying to push through a new set of regulations that would cost £500 million to implement. Which not only does not meet the most basic of cost-benefit analyses, but also would force an estimated 40,000 people offline due to the additional costs that would be passed on to consumers.

Meanwhile, my ISP has promised to start to spy on everything that I download. I cannot recall agreeing to allow them to do this.

But copyright issues in music are old news; the new battle is in books. Book publishers have now realized that many avid readers are now e-book readers, with more to follow on the iPad — now they are beginning to jump into the copyright act. Using the same sorts of measurements that the music and movie industries use, they are claiming to lose $3 billion a year to online piracy. A more interesting analysis takes the same methodology and applies it to libraries, finding that American libraries “cost” the publishing industry nearly $1 trillion every year.

This, of course, demonstrates how silly the claims are. Once one takes into account that those who violate copyright by downloading music, books, or movies are also the industry’s biggest customers, expenditures like those being made in the UK are revealed for being complete farces — rather than protecting profits, it takes away the ability for customers to discover the material in the first place.

There are interesting and sane views out there. Go To Hellman outlines the benefits of library sharing of books. Cory Doctorow discusses the possibility of creating an intelligent copyright system, rather than a one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t work.

None of that intelligent thinking is likely to be finding its way into the Anti-Conterfeiting Trade Agreement, however. The public, of course, is not allowed in on the multilateral negotiations — but big business is. What is sure to emerge are a set of rules to make the demise of the pre-Internet model as painful as possible for consumers and new start-ups, rather than a set of rules that still make sense given the technology available.

And yes, almost all of this has happened during the first 31 days of 2010. And there is no sign that anybody will adopt a system that has any chance of working anytime soon.

(Image from 917press)