today

What's the remedy ?

Copyright report calls for more consumer rights. Outdated copyright laws unfairly penalise consumers says think-tank "Giving people a legal ‘private right to copy’ would allow them to copy their own CDs and DVDs onto their home computers, laptops or phones without breaking the law. Current UK copyright laws unfairly criminalise consumers and must be changed according to a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
Something wrong if "big brother" tells us whether we can copy CDs we have bought and paid for. There should be no need to return a right that was ours from the start.

But this is part of a disturbing trend in the direction of forbidding people to do what they want to the benefit of corrupt police forces, judges, and especially big business.

There are examples everywhere and it is only necessary for an innocent party to have spent time in an English court room to see that something is amiss. I leave aside the DNA database matter, which is currently attracting attention and study. But consider just the Court system. Innocent until proven guilty ? NO WAY. Easy say the cops, just appoint a nincompoop corrupt judge to say "guilty". What then ? Without giving details, the poor innocent person can appeal, and "naturally" will normally get his appeal turned down. More taxpayer's money needlessly spent on useless 'jobsworths'. After going along the appeal trail (and normally innocent people can forget the even more corrupt EU judgements) we can see there is one recourse. Going to Osama bin Laden and offering to blow up the Law court. And that is a recourse, but is it the one most people want ? Possibly not. The obvious answer is more of an inquisitorial system, which no-one in the UK seems to want. Descartes rather than Abelard and Heloise makes some sense philosophically and historically but there are big problems, the first being that anyone brought before a criminal court is in effect taken to be besmirched with guilt for that very reason.

Now all this suggests that computer linguistics should be able to sort out the problem by removing tha original assumption of guilt in the first place. This should not mean a mere codification of matters. In Sydney, Australia at some courts, when people were asked who they were they would answer either "businessman" or "laborer" and then would routinely be given either "fine or jail" or alternatively "Broughton Hall" (which was at the time a lunatic asylum). If you knew the Stipendiary Magistrate you might be let off. That has limited sense but is basically overcodification. What may be really needed is a series of computerised tests, some of which might be intrusional, a confidential profile and ALSO the consideration of the background of the courts and the reasons for their involvement in the first place. Look, in civil law, at the introduction and start of "Winfield on Torts". It looks like an introduction to a textbook on how to be corrupt, which in a way it is. But we need, in civil cases, to consider sensibly the work of Thomas Szasz. The word "sensibly" needs stressing. Sure, we are all guilty, but to paraphrase Orwell "Some are more guilty than others". So the matter can become something more like "How can we help you and ourselves" rather than "You may be a criminal and we want to try you, preferably adversarially".

Now I will mention another example of how UK justice has gone insane. Recently the UK courts found half of the entire male population of a small country guilty of a social offense and are jailing them at a cost far larger than the countries' entire GNP. I will not say that under the adversarial system this was anything other than reasonable. But aren't we glad half the map of the world is not still colored pink ? Better than colored with Old Glory of course, and far easier on the cartographers. Still, with Old Glory we could just have given half the male population of the country "Ol' Sparky" at considerably less cost, as is effectively being done in Iraq.