For my friends in the Chi:
Bruce Elliott has gone one step further than most. He’s taken off her clothes.
Elliott, whose wife, Tobin Mitchen, owns the Old Town Ale House on Chicago’s North Side, painted a nude portrait of the Republican vice presidential nominee and hung it above the bar.
…
“I find her bizarrely fascinating, even though I pretty much despise everything she stands for.”
But because no story about Palin would be complete without a profoundly unsettling detail…
His daughter, who looks a little like Palin and does a great impression of her, served as model for the governor’s body.
Discuss.
Link: Chicago tavern hangs nude Sarah Palin portrait (the BS)
posted on September 30, 2008
Some more news on the McCain/Palin juggernaut.
This quote from the Ed Schultz Show gets the ball rolling…
Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin.
The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as “disastrous.” One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, “What are we going to do?” The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is “clueless.”
Read the full post »
posted on September 29, 2008
The RIAA’s witch hunt suffered another loss today, as a Minnesota court concluded that making music files available in a shared folder doesn’t violate copyright law, and rejected the RIAA’s asinine attempt to redefine copyright infringement.
From the judgment:
The plain meaning of the term “distribution” does not including making available and, instead, requires actual dissemination.
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If simply making a copyrighted work available to the public constituted a distribution, even if no member of the public ever accessed that work, copyright owners would be able to make an end run around the standards for assessing contributor copyright infringement.
What I’d forgotten, but still remains mind-boggling, is the punishment assessed in the original trial:
The damages awarded in this case are wholly disproportionate to the damages suffered by Plaintiffs. Thomas allegedly infringed on the copyrights of 24 songs—the equivalent of approximately three CDs, costing less than $54, and yet the total damages awarded is $222,000—more than five hundred times the cost of buying 24 separate CDs and more than four thousand times the cost of three CDs.
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Thomas acted like countless other Internet users. Her alleged acts were illegal, but common. Her status as a consumer who was not seeking to harm her competitors or make a profit does not excuse her behavior. But it does make the award of hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages unprecedented and oppressive.
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The Court would be remiss if it did not take this opportunity to implore Congress to amend the Copyright Act to address liability and damages in peer-to-peer network cases such as the one currently before this Court.
The EFF has the rest of the story here.
posted on September 25, 2008
