I am sorry to inform all interested parties that Red Rose Stories is a DEAD site.

The FBI has suceeded in closing me down.

I am being charged with 'OBSCENITIES' and face charges for having posted fantasy stories.

They are trying to say fantasy stories are illegal.

The men in black (FBI) took ALL of my computer equipment, and many of my diskettes,
and have access to ALL my files and site information. They came when I was NOT home and seized my belongings, I had no choice, and no recourse.

BoingBoing seems to be providing coverage of a number of cases. My understanding is that the stories on this site were, ehm, perhaps a bit over the top. Certainly not the sort of writing one would recommend in polite company, or even, perhaps, in impolite company.

Nevertheless, they are just stories. They aren't pictures. They aren't movies. They are written stories. They are someone's thoughts. If it can be a crime to publish these stories then the only appropriate name for that sort of crime is thoughtcrime. This person's house has been raided for sharing inappropriate thoughts.

The owner of NowThatsFuckedUp is also feeling the heat and has been charged with 300 misdemeanors and one felony. He's in jail on more than $150K bail. The site is basically a discussion board where people are encouraged to post links to pictures and video of amateur porn. In this situation, the web site administrator was encouraging people to send pictures from Iraq in exchange for free access to paid sections of the site.

Ask your Republican friends who claim to advocate a strict constructionalist jurisprudence to explain how this is consistent with a literal reading of the first amendment.

The Bush Administration's porn war has begun

The United States and Europe clashed here Thursday in one of their sharpest public disagreements in months, after European Union negotiators proposed stripping the Americans of their effective control of the Internet.

These people are silly. Threatening to leave the DNS system just because you don't think you have enough influence? What do you want them to do differently? Have you made reasonable proposals that have been ignored? Don't you realize that if you can leave the DNS system so can I, and so your influence cannot be coercive?

It is inevitable that the DNS system is going to fragment... I'm all for it. We ought to start talking about what kinds of tools we need to support multiple roots on one computer, and put an end to this government puffery as well as vile sitefinder once and for all.

No doubt, the naming situation is going to get more complex. I think we are going to see innovation that stretches beyond the DNS system as it is today. Think AOL keywords. Google Names?

But will it be better? It will probably get worse before it gets better...

EU Tries to Unblock Internet Impasse

He's somewhat pleased that the court's decision to send the case back to the Ninth Circuit court in effect upheld an earlier Sony decision involving the Betamax VCR, which declined to hold manufacturers liable for illegal acts by their users. But Lessig contends the Supreme Court's decision will chill innovation by introducing a new level of uncertainty about whether a technology creator had an intent to allow copyright infringement.

I don't have such a dire view of this as Lessig. Sure, Sony did market the Betamax in a way that would have snagged the hook set in the Grokster case, but that case did not exist at the time. I don't think that's cause for concern.

If you have a p2p tool, don't market it for infringing uses. That's pretty straightforward and easy to do. The bar has been set, and its an easy one to get over.

However, his larger point is still valid. Litigation chills innovation. That point would still be valid regardless of the outcome of this case. As long as courts exist to handle civil matters between companies, they are going to be used in ways we don't like to protect someone's business model.

Lessig on Grokster

A divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for private development in a decision anxiously awaited in communities where economic growth often is at war with individual property rights.

In a bitter dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the majority had created an ominous precedent. "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property," she wrote. "Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."

"Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private property, but the fallout from this decision will not be random," she wrote. "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.

"As for the victims," Justice O'Connor went on, "the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result."

Justice Stevens was joined in the majority by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Justice O'Connor's fellow dissenters were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Justices, 5-4, Back Seizure of Property for Development - New York Times

We show that network theory, combined with the analysis of roll-call votes using singular value decomposition, successfully uncovers political and organizational correlations between committees in the House.

A network analysis of committees in the US House of Representatives [PDF]

] The FBI ran a sting where they posed as a electronic
] recycling company eager to get state law changed to
] funnel business their way.

A similar sting was under consideration in New Jersey, until the FBI realized there would be no state government left afterward.

Tennessee Senators arrested by the FBI!

] William McCardle was arrested by federal authorities in
] 1867 for writing and publishing a series of editorials in
] his Mississippi newspaper. The editorials were sharply
] critical of Reconstruction. McCardle sought a writ of
] habeas corpus on the ground that the Reconstruction Acts
] under which he was arrested were unconstitutional.
] McCardle appealed to the Supreme Court under an 1867
] congressional statute that conferred jurisdiction on
] appeal to the High Court. After hearing arguments in the
] case, but prior to announcing a decision, the Congress
] withdrew its 1867 act conferring jurisdiction.

Ex parte McCardle (1869) []

] "We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon
] international law, not the Constitution of the United
] States. That's just outrageous, and not only that, he
] said in session that he does his own research on the
] Internet. That is just incredibly outrageous," DeLay said
] in the interview.

Tom Delay death spiral watch. This is Fox news. Fox news closed with a quote from a Democrat saying that they need to get Delay out of the public sphere for a little while and let him cool off. Fox news.

How dare judges attempt to research questions that are presented to them! Delay's position is that judges shouldn't be interested in the truth, per say. They shouldn't seek out objective perspectives on matters they need to consider. Rather they should be beholden to the power and money that drives the "democratic" government.

Delay wants to use the "good behavior" text in Article III Section I to bring all federal judges under fine grained political control.

He seems to be operating under the perception that the American people don't realize that the legislature is corrupt, or that politicians are bought and sold, or that people think that judges ought to live in a bubble. He is wrong on all counts, and he is starting to sound like a fool.

FOXNews.com - Politics - DeLay Calls Justice Kennedy 'Outrageous'

The FCC under Martin is likely to be more active on indecency than under Powell.

Coming soon: More bullshit enforcement of a specific set of cultural values on what should be a free environment for all culture.

American puritan values, new and improved. Next time a culture decides to escape westward to a new land, to practice their own values, it will require building an artificial continent in the Pacific. No fear, there is still space.

Washington needs to concern itself with managing the allocation and usage of the spectrum, not the content passed therein. The engineer should be limited to approved application of craft within the spectrum, but the purveyors of art and culture should not be limited in their ability to use the spectrum to share the products of their craft.

A grey line was already passed in regard to the broadcast flag. Now we are approaching the fine black lines. There is no level of momentum that can pierce the brick wall on the other side of those lines.

FCC's New Standards-Bearer

] In common parlance, left is clearly code for "feckless,
] pseudo-intellectual wiener," while right is code for
] "winner" and "the people who are actually running
] things while you assholes are reading James Joyce."
] Left also emphatically stands for "wrong side of
] history," while right is explicitly understood to mean
] the only remaining legitimate vision for future social
] organization.

In other words, the US has gone so far to the right it has no idea where the center is.

Right Wing, Left Wing, Chicken Wing