The dangers of “Protect-IP” in a nutshell

Protect-IP is an abysmal idea. No one likes it except for well-monied content providers. It would, if construed broadly by the courts, hinder the ability of ordinary folks to organize in order to promote higher profits for the entertainment industry, which already has plenty of ways to protect its IP. This is too high a price to pay.

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

How flawed are the approaches now being considered by Congress? Consider these reasons.

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How to destroy a perfectly good real estate recording system.

What would you think if an outside enemy systematically attacked hundreds of U.S. county real estate recording offices, making it impossible for most of us to know who owns what legal rights regarding real estate anymore.   Imagine that our courts, from coast to coast, have slowed to a crawl because the enemy had nefariously dismantled a system that had worked quite well for centuries. Imagine that, also for centuries, the filing fees paid for recording real estate interests had funded numerous important local government functions, but that the outside enemy destroyed this source of income, causing many government functions to flounder. Image that this enemy then set up its own real estate "information" offices that gave lots of incomplete information, often refusing to provide any information at all, and did so with reprehensible customer service. Imagine one more thing:  This has all really happened, but it was not caused by an outside enemy. Rather, all of this has happened regarding 60% of all home mortgages, and the entities doing the damage are America's banks, who have conspired to create an entity called MERS, designed to circumvent government real estate recording offices, at a high cost to everyone who relies on the integrity of our real estate recording system. If you want to know the specifics, here is a terrific article by law professor Chris Peterson: "Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registry System's Land Title Theory." This damage to our recording system is relatively new--it's been happening for a bit more than ten years, but the theme is now familiar to many of us: Corporate players taking over government functions and, in the process, rigging the playing field against the interests of ordinary Americans. The challenge now is to see whether the courts across America can recognize MERS for what it is, a despicable scam that has clouded the real estate titles of millions of people in an effort to rev up private corporate profits.   The courts are now clogged with many cases attempting to deal with the problems caused by MERS; you'll want to keep your eye on this story to see whether the courts will slap down the banks.

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Anonymous corporation brings suit

We have now moved from the absurd to the surreal. An anonymous corporation has brought suit against the CPSC to keep an incident report in the CPSC database confidential.  Even without suits like this secret suit, the public does not have full access to the CSPC database: SaferProducts.gov.

A report issued by the Government Accountability Office in October found that 5,464 complaints had been filed by consumers through SaferProducts.org as of July 7. Only 1,847 were published to the database; many reports weren’t published because they were deemed incomplete, or involved products or services outside the agency’s jurisdiction.
"Incomplete?" What does THAT mean? I'd sure like to know more about those rejected reports--two out of every three being filed--that are not being made public, and "trust us" doesn't give me any confidence that they are being rejected for valid reasons. But it all got even more concerning when an anonymous corporation brought its sealed suit attempting to keep a CPSC complaint against it confidential.

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Julian Assange loses extradition appeal

As reported by MSNBC, Julian Assange has lost his appeal to London's High Court, and is once again facing extradition to Sweden. His lawyers have indicated that they plan an appeal to Britain's Supreme Court. Assange has steered supporters to a website titled Sweden vs. Assange for details and updates.

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Unaccountable billions

What kind of idea is this: Let's send $40 billion in paper cash to Iraq on military airplanes and then quickly lose track of how it is being used. What do you think of this idea? Here's the beginning of this surreal story, as reported by Common Dreams.

“Wait, one person?” Shays asked. “One person received $40 billion?” Asked what he thinks about that, Shays said, “It just blows you away.” The enormous undertaking of moving the billions began in the heavily guarded Federal Reserve compound on 100 Orchard Street in East Rutherford, NJ. There, carefully screened employees loaded pallets of cash into tractor-trailers for their journey down I-95 toward Washington, DC. The money came from an account held at the New York Fed called the “Development Fund for Iraq” which was made up of billions of dollars in Saddam Hussein’s financial assets that had been frozen under various US and global sanctions regimes. They weren’t taxpayer dollars, but the US government was responsible for making sure they got where they were going. A typical pallet held 640 bundles, which the handlers called “bricks,” with a thousand bills in each bundle. Each pallet weighed 1,500 pounds, and they were separated by color. Gold seals were used for $100 bills, brown seals held $50 bills, purple seals $20, and so on.

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