‘Star Trek' franchise an homage to humanist philosophy

The cast from the original "StarTrek" television series, from left, Leonard Nimoy as Commander Spock, William Shatner as Captain Kirk, DeForest Kelley as Doctor McCoy and James Doohan as Commander Scott.

By Bronislaus B. Kush

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Susan Sackett, center, who was personal executive assistant to Trek franchise creator Gene Roddenberry, recently spoke to the Greater Worcester Humanists group.

Gene Roddenberry, in a 1987 photo, created Star Trek, which valued reason over religious dogma and the supernatural.
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If you're a big fan of the Star Trek science fiction genre, then there's a good chance that you're a humanist at heart.

That's the way that Susan Sackett, the longtime personal executive assistant to Trek franchise creator Gene Roddenberry, sees it.

Ms. Sackett, who met recently with the Greater Worcester Humanists group at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester, said Mr. Roddenberry was an admitted humanist who liberally sprinkled his out of this world stories about Capt. James Tiberius Kirk, Mr. Spock and the other Star Trek characters with the fundamentals of humanism — a non-theistic, or secular, approach, philosophy, or ideology.

Star Trek has been woven into the cultural fabric since the original television series aired on NBC TV in the mid-1960s. Many sociologists have viewed many of its episodes as morality plays set against the backdrop of space.

The genre has been incorporated into many college studies programs.

Ms. Sackett said that Star Trek, like humanism, promoted ethics, social justice and reason, and rejected religious dogma and the supernatural.

“A lot of science fiction is filled with humanism,” said Ms. Sackett. “You usually don't run across an archbishop of Alpha Centauri.”

She said Mr. Roddenberry, who lectured in Worcester in the 1990s, strived in his Star Trek ventures to affirm the dignity of all people.

“Rationality was the key. … There was no recourse to the supernatural,” she said.

Ms. Sackett said Roddenberry was so resolute about religion that he refused suggestions to add a chaplain to the crew of the starship Enterprise.

She said Star Trek was imbued with what she called the “IDIC Philosophy,” namely, infinite diversity in infinite combination.

Ms. Sackett, with the aid of film clips, said that “The Return of the Archons,” from the original series, was a good example of how Mr. Roddenberry employed elements of humanism in his works.

In that episode, a planet's population follows, in a zombie-like manner, a mysterious cult-like leader, who allows no divergent viewpoints.

The society absorbs individuals into its collective body and the world is free of hate, conflict and crime but creativity, freedom and individualism are stifled.

Ms. Sackett said that “Archons,” like other Star Trek storylines, warns how people can be controlled by religion. In the end, the viewer discovers the cult leader is actually a computer.

Ms. Sackett said that Mr. Roddenberry, a voracious reader, was upset because many rabid fans began to view Star Trek as a religion and its central characters as saints.

She added that, after Mr. Roddenberry's death, some of the Star Trek vehicles, particularly the television spin-off series “Deep Space Nine,” were permeated with religious themes, something the franchise creator would not have appreciated.

Ms. Sackett also noted that the Star Trek series' principled “prime directive,” that humans should not influence or interfere with other races and peoples, was actually a snipe at American involvement in Vietnam, something that television network censors never picked up on.

Ms. Sackett, in a tidbit offered to “trekkies” or “trekkers” in the audience, said Mr. Roddenberry saw himself more as Capt. Picard, the cool-headed commander in the “Next Generation” series, and noted that the Kirk character was modeled on Horatio Hornblower, the protagonist of the C.S. Forester novel series.

In summing up, she said both humanism and Star Trek espouse a rational philosophy that champions compassion and creativity

The two, she said, advocate open societies and participatory democracy.

Ms. Sackett, who was raised in Connecticut, began her association with Mr. Roddenberry in 1974, serving as his assistant until his death in 1991.

She also served as a production assistant on the first Star Trek movie, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” and worked closely with Mr. Roddenberry on the next five films.

Ms. Sackett, who is a member of the American Humanist Association board, also was involved with the first five seasons of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” writing two of that series' episodes, “Menage a Troi” and “The Game.”

She is the author of several books, three of them about Star Trek.

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)

By ERROL MORRIS

Existence is elsewhere.
— André Breton, “The Surrealist Manifesto”

---

1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,
SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.

At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.[1]

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. Commander Ronald Freeman assured Fuoco that Wheeler had not gone into “this thing” blindly but had performed a variety of tests prior to the robbery. Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details — “although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work.” He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn’t anywhere to be found in the image. It was like a version of Where’s Waldo with no Waldo. Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid. He came up with three possibilities:

(a) the film was bad;

(b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or

(c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.[2]

As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Officially our best-ever cease and desist

Recently we got the best-ever cease and desist letter. We're no stranger to the genre, so what could possibly make this one stand out from the rest?

First, it's 12 pages long and very well-researched (except on one point); it even includes screengrabs of the offending item from our site. And we know they're not messing around because they invested in the best and brightest legal minds.

But what makes this cease and desist so very, very special is that it's for a fake product we launched for April Fool's day.

It wasn't the iCade, or the Dharma Initiative Clock, or even the Tribbles 'n' Bits Breakfast Cereal.

No, it was the Canned Unicorn Meat.

The very special but also very real letter is from the National Pork Board, who claims we're infringing on the slogan "The Other White Meat," a slogan they're apparently thinking about phasing out anyways. A screengrab of the product page is below.

Luckily, the Sisters at Radiant Farms, where the unicorns are nursed through old age before being slaughtered, canned, and brought to market at ThinkGeek, have nothing to worry about--this kind of use is protected as a parody. (We're hoping the NPB doesn't tell the Sisters that unicorns don't actually exist; it'd break their little sparkly hearts.)

Here, in all its porky glory, is the first page of the letter:

We'd like to publicly apologize to the NPB for the confusion over unicorn and pork--and for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn't actually exist. From our press release [PDF]:

"It was never our intention to cause a national crisis and misguide American citizens regarding the differences between the pig and the unicorn," said Scott Kauffman, President and CEO of Geeknet. "In fact, ThinkGeek's canned unicorn meat is sparkly, a bit red, and not approved by any government entity."

We'd also like to extend a special discount to everyone we offended with our portrayal of Unicorn Meat as "the new white meat." For a limited time, take $10 off any order of $40 or more by using the code PORKBOARD at checkout, good until 6/30/2010 at 11:59PM ET.

Thanks, National Pork Board, for giving us yet another reason to keep the April Fool's Day tradition alive. We'll always wonder if our Canned Unicorn Meat played some small, magical part in your rethinking of your brand.

UPDATE 6/21 2:50p ET: Due to popular request, and after some interest on the intarwebz, you can now download our original press release [PDF]. It was unfortunately rejected by the newswires so you won't find it elsewhere--kinda like unicorn meat.

Accused spammer demands $135M from Spamhaus; gets $27,002

By Nate Anderson

It must have seemed like a pretty good gig at first: an e-mail marketing firm called e360—located just up the road from us here in Chicago—objected to being called a "spammer" and sued UK-based Spamhaus in federal court. When Spamhaus refused to show up for the lawsuit, a judge issued a default ruling in favor of e360 and awarded the company and its main employee, Dave Linhardt, the $11.7 million he claimed in losses without forcing him to prove said losses.

When a Chicago law firm offered to represent Spamhaus free of charge and took the case to the Court of Appeals, the appellate judge was appalled; e360 had to prove damages, not just state them.

So a trial began at the District Court level, and Linhardt seems to have had stars in eyes. If getting an $11.7 million judgment was so easy, and if Spamhaus wasn't doing much to contest the case, why not go for more?

Here's how the trial judge described what happened next:

The parties then engaged in discovery as to damages. Linhardt and e360 were slow to provide information requested by Spamhaus. Several deadlines were missed without explanation, and eventually a court order commanded disclosure by a date certain. The date came and went without compliance, and Spamhaus requested dismissal of the case as a sanction. A month later, when Linhardt and e360 supplied the requested information, they claimed that the proper amount of damages was in excess of $135 million, rather than the $11.7 million that had been stated earlier. Because of the extremely tardy provision of these new numbers, any amounts stated in the discovery responses in excess of $11.7 million were stricken...

Commencing on March 16, 2010, a bench trial was held as to the amount of damages to which Linhardt and e360 are entitled as a result of Spamhaus’s conduct. On the eve of trial, Linhardt produced additional documentation, designated at Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 5(a), in support of a damage amount of $122,271,346. By the time the evidence phase of the trial was completed three days later, Plaintiffs shifted the number again, this time to $30 million. In view of e360’s termination of operations in the interim, injunctive relief was no longer a relevant consideration.

Did you follow that? After asking for $11.7 million the first time around, Lindhardt then suggested his damages should be $135 million. This number was later reduced to $122 million. During the final arguments at the damages trial, it dropped back to $30 million.

The judge was incredulous. His opinion, issued a few days ago, was noted by The Register. The opinion says that "the unreliability of Linhardt’s approaches is unmistakably demonstrated by the profound differences in claimed damages proffered at various points during these proceedings. Finally, it strains credulity that a company that made only a fraction of the profits Linhardt asks for over the course of its five-year lifespan would have garnered profits in the amounts Linhardt set out in his testimony or documentary evidence."

e360's "overall profits" were listed at $332,000—and it turned out that even this number was a conflation of several Linhardt businesses.

In his decision, the judge embarked upon pages of discussion about Linhardt's calculations, all devoted to showing just how daft each one was. In the end, the judge tossed all of them. ("None of the above amounts can be relied on or be a reasonable basis upon which to base a damage award.")

Instead, Linhardt got $27,000 on one claim and a nominal $1 on two others.

Not that Spamhaus plans to pay. The site has routinely argued that as a British company, jurisdiction was never proper, that Linhardt is indeed a spammer, and that the US justice system stinks worse than a crock of month-old blood pudding.

"The Illinois ruling shows how spammers can game US courts with ease, as no proof or due process is required in US courts in order to obtain default judgments over clearly foreign entities with no ties to the US," said Spamhaus previously. The UK, it notes, does not enforce default judgments from other jurisdictions.

As for Linhardt, his e360 is out of business. Back before it went under, Linhardt complained that "Spamhaus.org is a fanatical, vigilante organization that operates in the United States with blatant disregard for US law."

File-sharing has weakened copyright—and helped society

By Nate Anderson

Has file-sharing helped society? Looked at from the narrow perspective of existing record labels, the question must seem absurd; profits have dropped sharply in the years since tools like Napster first appeared. But a pair of well-known academics argue peer-to-peer file sharing has weakened copyright in the US... and managed to benefit all of us at the same time.

"Consumer welfare increased substantially due to new technology," write Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas. "Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society."

Weaker is stronger?

Peer-to-peer file-sharing on the Internet has certainly weakened copyright, but that's not necessarily a bad thing unless one equates "stronger copyright" with "better copyright." According to the US Constitution, copyright is about promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts"; it's not about enriching authors, except as a means of promoting said "Progress."

When we think about copyright, the most pertinent question to ask is not whether some change would produce less money for rightsholders, but whether some change would remove incentives to create. Has file-sharing reduced creators' incentives?

Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf presented a recent paper at a music business conference in Vienna that tried to answer this question empirically. By charting the production of new books, new music albums, and new feature films over the last decade, the authors tried to see whether creative output went up or down in correlation with file-sharing.

“Data on the supply of new works are consistent with our argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers,” they write in their paper, “File-sharing and Copyright" (PDF).

"The publication of new books rose by 66 percent over the 2002-2007 period. Since 2000, the annual release of new music albums has more than doubled, and worldwide feature film production is up by more than 30 percent since 2003... In our reading of the evidence there is little to suggest that the new technology has discouraged artistic production. Weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society.”

The authors don't claim (anymore) that file-sharing has no effect on industries like recorded music. Though both authors also collaborated on a now-famous paper from 2007 which argued that file-sharing had no appreciable impact on music sales, they are willing to concede now that it might be a small part of the industry's problems.

Indeed, they round up a host of studies from the past few years suggesting that, on average, one-fifth of declining music sales might be chalked up to piracy. (The rise of new entertainment options like video game has also hurt the business, and consumers finally stopped "re-buying" old albums on CD by the mid-2000s.)

But looking at such declines provides only a narrow view. Looked at more broadly, the music industry "has grown considerably" in the last few years. When concert revenue is added to recorded music revenue, the authors note that the overall industry grew more than 5 percent between 1997 and 2007.

That's in large part because consumers' willingness to pay for "complements" like concerts and merchandise goes up as the price of music and movies falls, and because consumers are exposed to many more artists when prices are low or nonexistent.

Even if the music industry was shrinking, though, the authors point out that creativity has not declined—which suggests that weaker copyright can still promote the "Progress" sought by the Founders.

“We do not yet have a full understanding of the mechanisms by which file-sharing may have altered the incentives to produce entertainment,” conclude the authors. “However, in the industry with the largest purported impact—music—consumer access to recordings has vastly improved since the advent of file-sharing. Since 2000, the number of recordings produced has more than doubled. In our view, this makes it difficult to argue that weaker copyright protection has had a negative impact on artists' incentives to be creative.”

Unconvinced

The music industry doesn't buy the argument. According to international trade group IFPI, "Live performance earnings are generally more to the benefit of veteran, established acts, while it is the younger developing acts, without lucrative live careers, who do not have the chance to develop their reputation through recorded music sales." Thus, recorded music sales remain important.

And IFPI's 2010 "Digital Music Report" (PDF) makes the case that artists are producing less in states with high piracy rates. "In France, there has been a striking fall in the number of local repertoire albums released in recent years," says the report. "In the first half of 2009, 107 French-repertoire albums were released, 60 per cent down on the 271 in the same period of 2003." (This number appears to involve only major labels, however, and cheap digital tools mean that much of the music production today is done without a major label.)

Even Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf admit that their findings aren't clear. It could be that, thanks to all these cheap digital tools, even more recordings would have been produced in the US were it not for file-sharing. But when the same trend holds true among book publishers, filmmakers, and musicians—the 2000s were about ever-increasing content—perhaps P2P isn't "disincentivizing" anyone at all.

And if it's not, the entire paper asks by implication, why don't politicians even consider weakening US copyright law?

Rafting Guide Arrested for Rescuing Girl T

A rafting guide in Colorado was arrested after swimming across a raging creek to aid one of his young customers who had taken a swim and become stranded. He was charged with obstructing government operations, according to the local sheriff.

“He was told not to go in the water, and he jumped in and swam over to the victim and jeopardized the rescue operation,” said Krueger, noting that his office was deciding whether to file similar charges against another guide who was at the scene just downstream of Kermitts Roadhouse on U.S. 6.

Duke Bradford, owner of Arkansas Valley Adventures, said Snodgrass did the right thing by contacting the 13-year-old Texas girl immediately and not waiting for the county’s search and rescue team to assemble ropes, rafts and rescuers.

“When you have someone in sight who has taken a long swim, you need to make contact immediately,” said Bradford, a 15-year rafting guide and ski patroller from Summit County. “This is just silly. Ryan Snodgrass acted entirely appropriately.

So he jeopardized the rescue operation by rescuing the girl before the sheriff could? Knowing absolutely nothing about what actually happened, I’ll go ahead and make a snap judgment - I’d bet that some big egos were getting roughed up on both sides of the rescue operation. Either that or river guides and small town sheriffs are just natural enemies.

Neda Soltan and the power of human rights video

A year ago this weekend, Tehran erupted in protest at the disputed results of Iran’s tenth presidential election. In the severe government crackdown that followed, documented on cameras and uploaded by citizens to YouTube, no moment has been seen more than the death of Neda Agha Soltan, a young musician whose brutal killing by a sniper became the rallying cry for Iran’s opposition Green Movement. The anonymous videos of her death even won a prestigious George Polk award for journalism last year.

Today on the YouTube homepage, we're featuring a documentary from director Antony Thomas and HBO, entitled "For Neda". The film highlights how citizen reporting has become so important to human rights that even world leaders are paying attention to it. For example, as you’ll see in “For Neda,” President Obama talks about watching the video of Neda’s death, calling it “heartbreaking” and “unjust.”



We’re also taking this opportunity to begin a series of blog posts in partnership with WITNESS, an international human rights organization that supports people using video to document and expose human rights violations, to explore these issues.

How has video become such an important part of human rights advocacy worldwide? At its heart, human rights video is about making something visible that was not visible before. Seeing human rights abuses with our own eyes is very different than reading about the same abuses in a story or a blog post or a Tweet. In the past, we mainly saw these kinds of images in the nightly news or in documentaries -- and even then only occasionally. But now that camera usage and access to the Internet is much more widespread (including in many developing countries), we encounter human rights images much more directly. For example, Burma, Tibet and Iran are places where it’s difficult for local or international media to report, so when mass protests were met with violent force, it falls on ordinary people to try to get images out.

Human rights video is about more than capturing images of abuse as they happen, however. Direct testimony from victims or local activists can provide powerful and compelling evidence of human rights violations. Testimonies like that of "Mary," a Zimbabwean political activist who was abducted, raped and beaten in a secret torture center after the disputed 2008 presidential elections in Zimbabwe, have unique power to help us see what those who have suffered human rights abuses see, to feel what they feel, and to hear what they want to happen.

Videos alone aren’t usually enough; in order to make an impact, activists organize around the content. Sometimes organization is required simply to ensure the content finds an audience: in Iran, it was a networked web of activists who organized proxy servers and emailed footage to a diaspora outside of the country to ensure the videos got around the government's block of YouTube. Other times, coordinated campaigns ensure that citizens are called to action in courts, public squares or parliaments, as has happened in Brazil, Kenya, India or in the International Criminal Court. This isn't a phenomenon confined to developing countries or repressive regimes; it’s also happening in the U.S. Testimony as part of a campaign against elder abuse across the U.S. has helped expose stories that would otherwise go untold, and to pass legislation that improves the lives of millions of citizens. In our next post, we'll talk more specifically about what you can do to make sure videos you've uploaded or care about can have maximum impact for human rights.

As online spaces become more and more important for sharing and accessing information, we believe that access to the Internet itself is becoming a key factor in human rights in the 21st century. To make that a reality, governments, businesses, activists and citizens need to take a collective stand to ensure that video can shine a light into the darkest corners of human society, providing paths to justice to those who need it most. Both at WITNESS and at YouTube we're committed to helping build a global movement for human rights video that does just that.

Accused of file-sharing? The EFF can point you to help

By Nate Anderson

If you're one of the 14,000+ US citizens targeted by the US Copyright Group for allegedly sharing movies with BitTorrent, a letter has already arrived or will do so shortly. That letter will contain a polite request: pay us around $1,500 within the next few weeks or run of the risk of a federal copyright lawsuit, where lawyers will demand the maximum $150,000 penalty.

We've heard from many readers in this position, most confused about how to proceed (and many claiming bafflement and total ignorance of the charges). Should they try to quash the initial subpoena? If so, what should they say? Do they need to hire a lawyer? And can the lawyer be local, or does she need to practice in Washington, DC, where these cases have all been filed?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has tried to help those in this situation by organizing willing groups of local lawyers around the country. The EFF made that list public today; if you need help, this is a good place to start. Be aware, though, that the lawyers aren't offering free services.

"Because so many people need legal help, and usually on a very short time frame, the following attorneys have offered to assist those targeted to understand their options and may, if necessary, file a motion to quash or litigate on their behalf," wrote Eva Galperin of the EFF. "The attorneys on this list are not affiliated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in any way and by offering their names EFF does not intend to give any individual endorsement of them. Fees are negotiable on a case by case basis."

None of these cases have yet proceeded to trial; many ISPs are still in the process of looking up IP addresses and turning them over to the plaintiffs. Those who have sought to quash these subpoenas have, almost without exception, filed badly argued, hand-crafted legal documents that are routinely denied (we've seen only one successful Motion to Quash, and it was based on a technicality that looks unlikely to be repeated).

But the EFF's most important work may not focus on individuals at all. The group joined forces with Public Citizen and the American Civil Liberties Union to file a "friend of the court" brief in several of these cases recently that goes right to the heart of the plaintiffs' litigation strategy. EFF asked the court to "sever" these lawsuits into hundreds or thousands of individual cases, making them much more difficult and expensive to bring in bulk; one federal judge has already demanded that the plaintiffs respond to this argument.

India Comes Out Swinging Against ACTA at WTO

The Government of India came out forcefully against ACTA this week in an intervention at the World Trade Organization. The India position, which may well reflect the views of other ACTA-excluded countries, demonstrates that ACTA is emerging as a contentious political issue that extends well beyond civil society and business groups concerned with the agreement. Countries excluded from the ACTA process have to come to recognize the serious threat it represents both substantively as well as for the future of multilateral organizations.

This growing concern from countries such as India represents a major new pressure point on the ACTA discussions. The notion that ACTA countries could negotiate an agreement that would ultimately be used to pressure non-ACTA countries to conform without attracting opposition from those very countries was always unrealistic. If the April ACTA round of talks was marked by the mounting pressure for greater transparency, the late June ACTA round of talks will undoubtedly have developing country opposition as its core concern.

India's intervention includes the following comments:

ACTA could short-change legal process, impede legitimate competition and shift the escalated costs of enforcing private commercial rights to governments, consumers and taxpayers. They also represent a systemic threat to the rights of legitimate traders and producers of goods, and fundamental rights of due process of individuals.

Another systemic concern is that IPR negotiations in RTAs and plurilateral processes like ACTA completely bypass the existing multilateral processes.

A systemic impact Members should be aware of is that even if some Members are not a party to plurilateral initiatives like ACTA, they could still have to enforce ACTA provisions due to cross referencing.

The released ACTA text shows a general shift in the locus of enforcement which enhances the power of IPRs holders beyond reasonable measure.

The intervention also focused on the specific substantive concerns with the border measure provisions:

Let me now turn Members specific attention to ACTA provisions relating to transit which are now public knowledge. We are aware that several provisions are still in square brackets, which actually means that their inclusion is well within the realm of possibility. The ACTA text requires that countries provide procedures for the customs seizure of goods “suspected” of infringing trademarks, copyrights and other IPRs against goods “in-transit”. According to the ACTA text, “In-transit” includes “customs transit” and “transhipment”. Seizures would be allowed even where there is a mere “prima facie” case of IPR infringement. In view of the recent seizures of generic drug consignments, provisions relating to ‘in-transit’ in all likelihood would create barriers to access to essential generic medicines, as well as access to critical climate change technologies. These provisions could concretise the legal framework the European Union has already instituted through its Council Regulation 1383/2003, which has been responsible for empowering customs and border officials to seize legitimate generic medicines exported by India to several developing countries, including LDCs. Let me remind Members that the EU has so far not provided us any legally satisfactory solution to recurring drug seizures leaving us with no option but to request for consultations under the WTO DSM on 11th May.

Turning to how the draft ACTA provisions can constrain TRIPS flexibilities, let me give an example. India's right to exercise flexibilities, such as granting compulsory licenses, would be interfered with by the mandatory application of border measures to goods in transit. Indian exporters could be constrained from shipping goods produced under its own exception to countries where there is no applicable IPRs protection because transit may be blocked by an intervening transit country’s application of domestic IPRs. Similarly, under the draft ACTA data exclusivity could be invoked by a transit country’s customs authorities as a basis for seizing pharmaceutical products in transit, even if there is no data exclusivity in the exporting and importing countries. This would obviously act as a significant constraint on exporting countries such as India.

The intervention concludes by emphasizing the need for multilateral approaches to addressing these issues and for greater involvement of the WTO.

Let me conclude by saying that these are not the concerns of India or the developing countries alone. Politicians, civil society and IP experts in ACTA members countries, have expressed concern regarding the substance and modus operandi of ACTA negotiations. It is a well known fact that 633 Members of European Parliament supported a Resolution in the European Parliament (Mar 10, 2010) deploring ACTA negotiations for bypassing the multilateral framework provided by the WTO and WIPO. Several such MEPs have written to DG, WTO and DG, WIPO requesting an impact assessment of the extent to which ACTA, as proposed, exceeds obligations in the current IP instruments and excludes flexibilities and exceptions contained in them. Even the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has recently raised serious questions concerning the data that has been relied on by proponents of the ACTA to support the effort. IPR experts are increasingly challenging the concept of minimum standards concept and calling for setting maximum standards or ceilings so that there is (i) legal security and predictability about the boundaries of IP protection, (ii) protection of user’s rights and (iii) free movement of goods, services and information.

While India is committed to dealing with IPR enforcement issues in line with its TRIPS obligations, the introduction of intrusive IPRs enforcement rules applicable to goods and services in international trade does not represent a reasonable or realistic response. A response, if required, has to emerge from a multilateral and transparent process, as is available in the WTO TRIPS Council, and should fully conform to the objectives and principles (Art 7, 8 ) of TRIPS agreement and the balance of rights and obligations enshrined in the Agreement. As goods and services of developing countries are becoming competitive with those of developed country producers, TRIPS plus measures, like the ACTA, seek to introduce a new set of "non-tariff" barriers to trade that will preponderantly hinder developing country exporters. We urge developed country Members to keep these concerns in mind while dealing with IPR enforcement issues. Agreements such as ACTA have the portents to completely upset the balance of rights and obligations of the TRIPS Agreement. WTO cannot remain a silent observer to such a development. It is important that the issue is deliberated in this Council in detail.

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Energy Generating Soccer Ball Brings Power to Developing Nations

by Yuka Yoneda


As millions of fans await the World Cup tournament, a group of Harvard alums has unveiled an ingenious soccer ball that can store energy generated by play! Dubbed the sOccket, this smart toy was invented with kids in developing nations in mind and lets them use the energy captured in the ball from playing an after school game of soccer to power their lamps at night when they get home!

New terrorist tactic: Suspicious bags?

Tim Fleischer

NEW YORK (WABC) -- You've probably heard the slogan "See Something, Say Something." Now it appears potential terrorists hope that you do, just to see the response.

Suspicious bags, some provoking a cautious response, were checked out in large numbers in the weeks after the failed Times Square bombing attempt.

Now as large numbers of tourists flood into New York City and the nation's capital, the FBI is warning of a new terror tactic.

Citing an FBI informational document, ABC News reports a so called "battle of suspicious bags" is being encouraged on a jihadist website.

Bomb expert Kevin Barry with 20 years experience in the NYPD says the bags could be filled not with bombs, but with innocuous items like water bottles or socks.

The potential terrorists would be watching the response.

"How they evacuate. The standoff distances. How long it takes additional emergency services to come to the scene," Barry said.

While not giving away details, police do have numerous ways of responding to these types of incidents.

The report says no evidence of a suspicious bag campaign has been found so far in New York City or Washington.

"After every major incident there will be a spike in calls because people become more nervous and there is more reporting of suspicious items," Barry said.

Putting more emphasis, security experts say, on the slogan "see something, say something."

"People are becoming more suspicious, more vigilant and that results in more calls. We understand that happens and we are prepared to respond," police commissioner Ray Kelly said.

Publishing Locations Of Pirate Movies Is The Same As Hosting Them Written

by enigmax

A movie studio has won a lawsuit against Dutch Usenet community FTD. In a surprising decision, a court reasoned that by allowing the publication of the location of pirate movie stored on Usenet, FTD was effectively publishing the movie as if they had actually hosted it on their own servers.

Earlier, Dutch movie studio Eyeworks applied for a court injunction to stop Usenet community FTD from “making available to the public” their movie Komt een vrouw bij de dokter (A Woman At The Doctor).

In this case the “making available” wasn’t hosting or storing the movie, nor was it offering torrent or NZB links to it either. FTD allows users to report (or ’spot’) the locations of files which exist on Usenet. It is the publication of this information which Eyeworks was seeking to stop, an activity it believes is tantamount to publishing the movie itself.

In early May the case was heard at a court in The Hague. FTD lost the case and the court issued an ‘ex parte injunction’ (one handed down without any FTD involvement) which banned the site from ’spotting’ the Eyeworks movie.

Through its lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, FTD filed an objection on the basis that the provisional measure should not have been issued under Dutch law. That objection was heard and the decision was delivered yesterday – FTD lost again.

“I am flabbergasted by the court’s reasoning,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak. “It is established caselaw that publishing hyperlinks or torrents (Mininova, Pirate Bay) is *not* the same as a publication. FTD does *less* than what Mininova or Pirate Bay does, but according to the court we are more liable than they are?”

In coming to its decision, the court drew heavily on the earlier Newzbin case.

“They say that FTD is doing the same thing, and since the English courts held Newzbin liable for infringement, FTD must be liable too,” Engelfriet explains. “This completely ignores the technical differences between Newzbin and FTD. Newzbin is an NZB search engine through which you find codes to directly download from Usenet. FTD is a forum where people ’spot’ movies using messages in ordinary Dutch.”

FTD had argued that it was not guilty of “making available” because copyrighted files on Usenet are not under its control – it does not control the servers and it has no influence over potential downloaders. The court decided that this is irrelevant. What is important, it said, is “whether the behavior of FTD allows users to download copyrighted files (in an easier manner) and thus makes such files available to the public.” The court ruled that it did.

“This is a collaboration between FTD and its users where they knowingly provide access to unauthorized files,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a comment. “It’s clear that this is more than just talking about files like FTD wants people to believe.“

In October this year FTD will face another court case. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN says that FTD “organizes and promotes” Usenet content, most of which is illegal, and wants the entire site shut down.

Publishing Locations Of Pirate Movies Is The Same As Hosting Them Written

by enigmax

A movie studio has won a lawsuit against Dutch Usenet community FTD. In a surprising decision, a court reasoned that by allowing the publication of the location of pirate movie stored on Usenet, FTD was effectively publishing the movie as if they had actually hosted it on their own servers.

Earlier, Dutch movie studio Eyeworks applied for a court injunction to stop Usenet community FTD from “making available to the public” their movie Komt een vrouw bij de dokter (A Woman At The Doctor).

In this case the “making available” wasn’t hosting or storing the movie, nor was it offering torrent or NZB links to it either. FTD allows users to report (or ’spot’) the locations of files which exist on Usenet. It is the publication of this information which Eyeworks was seeking to stop, an activity it believes is tantamount to publishing the movie itself.

In early May the case was heard at a court in The Hague. FTD lost the case and the court issued an ‘ex parte injunction’ (one handed down without any FTD involvement) which banned the site from ’spotting’ the Eyeworks movie.

Through its lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet, FTD filed an objection on the basis that the provisional measure should not have been issued under Dutch law. That objection was heard and the decision was delivered yesterday – FTD lost again.

“I am flabbergasted by the court’s reasoning,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak. “It is established caselaw that publishing hyperlinks or torrents (Mininova, Pirate Bay) is *not* the same as a publication. FTD does *less* than what Mininova or Pirate Bay does, but according to the court we are more liable than they are?”

In coming to its decision, the court drew heavily on the earlier Newzbin case.

“They say that FTD is doing the same thing, and since the English courts held Newzbin liable for infringement, FTD must be liable too,” Engelfriet explains. “This completely ignores the technical differences between Newzbin and FTD. Newzbin is an NZB search engine through which you find codes to directly download from Usenet. FTD is a forum where people ’spot’ movies using messages in ordinary Dutch.”

FTD had argued that it was not guilty of “making available” because copyrighted files on Usenet are not under its control – it does not control the servers and it has no influence over potential downloaders. The court decided that this is irrelevant. What is important, it said, is “whether the behavior of FTD allows users to download copyrighted files (in an easier manner) and thus makes such files available to the public.” The court ruled that it did.

“This is a collaboration between FTD and its users where they knowingly provide access to unauthorized files,” BREIN director Tim Kuik said in a comment. “It’s clear that this is more than just talking about files like FTD wants people to believe.“

In October this year FTD will face another court case. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN says that FTD “organizes and promotes” Usenet content, most of which is illegal, and wants the entire site shut down.

US Border Patrol union rep: It's okay to shoot Mexican kids who throw stones

Xeni Jardin

After listening to this NPR News piece on a Border Patrol agent shooting a 14-year-old Mexican child near the Juarez/El Paso border, Boing Boing pal Drew Carey noted on Twitter, "I agree the Border Patrol has a tough job, but shooting rock-throwers should be a no-go. Find a non-lethal way to handle it."

Couldn't agree more, and I say that as someone who's aware of what a dangerous and chaotic place that part of the border is. I've spent a lot of time around the border, and on both sides of it, in California/Baja.

According to the NPR News piece, the union rep for Border Patrol agents says it is alright for agents to shoot Mexican children who throw rocks at them.

"There are so many non-lethal weapons available to law enforcement." Drew tweeted, "Has the Border Patrol even considered them?"

The child's body was found on the Ciudad Juarez side of the fence. By all accounts available at the time of this blog post, he never crossed over on to the US side, and was not attempting to do so. He was unarmed, and he was shot in the head. Sergio Adrian Hernández was his name. Related reports at CNN, WSJ, BBC en Español, and El Diario Digital / Juarez (graphic content warning: contains image of Mexican police standing by the dead body).

Thumbnail: that's the slain kid's mom.

Copenhagen Adopts a Mandatory Green Roof Policy

by Philip Proefrock

As part of its overall strategy to become a carbon neutral city by 2025, Copenhagen has become the first Scandanavian city to adopt a policy that requires green roofs for all new buildings with roof slopes of less than 30 degrees. Copenhagen presently has 20,000 square meters (over 215,000 square feet) of flat roofs. It is hoped that as much as 5,000 square meters of new development each year will be covered with vegetation.

Vegetated roofs, or green roofs, provide several benefits for buildings and their surroundings. They can absorb as much as 80% of rainfall, helping to reduce stress on stormwater systems. They help reduce urban temperatures (the “heat island effect“). And, they protect roof membranes from the sun’s UV rays and the greatest temperature swings, such that roof membrane life is extended as much as double that of an unprotected membrane.

Songs of Innocence: accused P2P users speak out

By Nate Anderson

Let's say it right up front: some large percentage of those targeted in the recent wave of P2P movie lawsuits are no doubt liable for their piratical behavior. But those who "didn't do it" face an agonizing choice—pay $1,500 to $2,500 to settle the lawsuits brought by Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, or pay even more money for a lawyer to plead one's innocence.

And innocent or not, a case that goes to court always runs the risk of ending in a $150,000 fine. The sheer size of the penalties for online infringement would give anyone pause, and we've heard recently from several of those currently wrestling with what to do.

All claim innocence, much like the woman we profiled two weeks back, and we cannot evaluate the truth of any particular claim. But if you want to know just who these 14,000 P2P lawsuits have snared so far, here are several glimpses of how a lawsuit can affect a life.

"A good citizen should fight it"

Imagine that you're on the receiving end of a settlement letter. You've never heard of the film mentioned. You have only a hazy notion about BitTorrent. How do you react?

"It disrupted my work and life for several days," said one father who contacted me after receiving a Far Cry settlement letter. "I talked to many people about this and overwhelming reaction was that this is a scam. Just a few said that maybe it will be less headache if I will pay $1,500. One said that a good citizen should fight it, not pay...

"I asked everybody [in my family], and everybody said 'I did not download it.' I do not have little kids who will just get scared, hide in the closet, and deny everything. Such conversations went on for a number of days. We talked about risks and potential cost of the lawsuit, and if there is a slight chance that one of us shared that movie, it will be cheaper to pay the settlement."

But he decided not to pay.

"After all these talks I cannot just say, 'You are all liars, I do not trust you and I will just pay $1,500.' I decided that the trust in our family is more important than the money and headache of the lawsuit, I feel I am doing [the] right thing."

He searched for files named "Far Cry" on his PC but found nothing. But an Internet connection is tough to lock down completely—friends come over, relatives stay the night, a neighbor might leech WiFi.

"So I cannot be 100 percent sure that there was no BitTorrent traffic from my IP," he concluded. "The best I can do is to trust what my family says: nobody ever downloaded this film. Even if file has ever passed through my router, nobody in my family knowingly gave command or authorization to do it, and this is the best I can tell."

He then raised an unpleasant scenario: the prospect of "Internet insurance" that would pay out if a connection is used for anything illegal.

"I also realized that since I cannot fully control computers, and IF I am legally responsible for all the traffic through my router, then I should cancel my home internet access, it's too risky. Or since risk can be addressed by an insurance, I already see internet liability insurance that covers such lawsuits."

"Paycheck by paycheck"

Another reader e-mailed in frustration to say that he had until June 15 to settle for allegedly sharing the film Far Cry (according to the settlement letter he received), but that he still didn't know what to do. Settling would be a huge financial hardship, but hiring a lawyer to help fight the claim would likely cost more.

"Originally we got a letter from our ISP stating they have a subpoena for our name and address. We literally had 2 business days to research and try to find legal counsel on this matter. I called a local ISP lawyer here in [state redacted]. His advice was to contact a lawyer over where this lawsuit originated (Washington, DC). Well, we do not have the monetary means or time to try and fight this...

"I am disabled and along with my wife, we live with my parents. My father is also disabled. So there is only two incomes coming in for our family and as you know the standard of living in [state redacted] is bad enough. We live paycheck by paycheck, so to speak."

"A movie I never heard of"

A tech-savvy reader e-mailed in outrage over being subpoenaed in the Far Cry case.

"Here is a quick overview of my situation; I received a subpoena notice from [ISP redacted] on May 4, with a deadline of May 7 for response. It included NO INFORMATION as to what the subpoena was about so I immediately tried to contact the sender of the notice. After countless e-mails & phone calls, I finally reached an informed, live person by calling [ISP's] corporate line (which I found online and was NOT included in the notice).

"I was finally provided a copy of the subpoena itself and I recognized the date that I was accused of downloading Far Cry (a movie I never heard of) as a period when I was having internet connection and wireless router issues. I suspect my neighbors may have been using my connection without my permission and my ISP should have record of my support calls...

"Unfortunately, I tried to hire an attorney that could help me with this and I was repeatedly told there was little I could do without further information from [ISP], and certainly nothing I could do in the very short period before the subpoena deadline. I did all this in the span of only a few days and STILL DIDN’T GET ANYWHERE. I assume my identity has been sent to the plaintiff and I can only imagine what others are going through trying to figure out what is going on here."

"Way above our abilities to deal with"

Other readers took the situation into their own hands, writing letters to the DC District Court that look nothing like actual legal briefs. But the federal judges overseeing the cases generally allow even the worst hand-scrawled into the record and rule on them as a "Motion to Quash" the subpoenas already issued.

Some of these personal notes, stripped as they are of the bloodless legal language of the courts, let people's humanity show through. On June 1, for instance, the court accepted a letter written by one William Wright of Oregon. Wright was objecting to the release of his information in the subpoena process, but in doing so sent a letter containing his name, his address, his e-mail address, his phone number, and his signature.

As the lawyers for Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver would point out to the court a few days later, "Mr. Wright’s motion actually divulges the very information sought by Plaintiff through the subpoena - his name and address as an alleged infringer, along with his IP address - thereby undermining any argument that this information is privileged. Had Mr. Wright truly deemed this information to be privileged, he could have provided it to the court and requested it be sealed, and he would have redacted the information from the documents filed in the public record in this case. However, Mr. Wright did not do that and basically has mooted his own motion to quash."

One suspects that, despite the letter's implication that this should have been obvious to anyone, Wright had no knowledge of court procedures, of sealing and redaction. In any event, the two-paragraph note is touching but likely doomed to failure.

"My wife and I are both 69 years of age and the only occupants of this location," wrote Wright. "Charter personnel installed the high speed equipment for our internet connection and we have made no modifications to it. If it had any features that made it vulnerable to 'hacking,' we had no knowledge of that. The technology is way above our abilities to deal with."

But these are substantive issues of the facts in the case; they aren't properly dealt with in a motion to quash, and the judge lacks any evidence upon which to assess such a claim. As the plaintiff's lawyers note, "The merits of the case, or Mr. Wright’s defenses, are not at issue at this stage of the case."

True enough, but letters like Wright's are now sprinkled throughout the various P2P dockets in the DC District Court. Through what they leave out, such letters make a single eloquent case: the authors don't know the law, and they don't have the resources to hire a lawyer to deal with some court case 3,000 miles away.

Another such letter insists that John Doe #4 "has no knowledge of any such downloading of a copy of the film The Gray Man. The Defendant, John Doe also contends he does not have any understanding of the process of downloading this film and therefore is unaware of any 'torrent' infringement as stated in the plaintiffs [sic] motion."

And then there's this, from yet another letter to the court: "At no time was my computer used to download neither [sic] the item in question nor any other unlawful download. My computer IP address and MAC codes were not used for such actions and they do not match those provided. Beyond this I do not have internet access through Charter."

Judges to the rescue?

Such motions have been routinely denied so far this year, but for those who feel "shaken down" by the process and believe in their own innocence, some (free) relief might in fact be coming soon.

Federal judges haven't been too keen to see P2P cases resolved this way. Remember, only two cases in the RIAA legal campaign proceeded all the way to trial and verdict. In the first, Judge Michael Davis has twice ruled in favor of the defendant after juries found her liable. First, he granted her a complete retrial, and when that concluded, slashed the jury damage award from $1.92 million to $54,000.

He noted the difference between what Jammie Thomas-Rasset did and the commercial infringement the statutory damage laws were written to stop. "In the case of individuals who infringe by using peer‐to‐peer networks, the potential gain from infringement is access to free music, not the possibility of hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of dollars in profits," he wrote. "The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music."

In the second case, that of Joel Tenenbaum in Massachusetts, Judge Nancy Gertner went even further in trashing the RIAA legal campaign.

"I've said this before in open court," she said. "There is a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources. The law is also overwhelmingly on their side. They bring cases against individuals, individuals who don't have lawyers and don't have access to lawyers and who don't understand their legal rights. Some category of individuals are defaulted because they read the summons, and they haven't the foggiest idea what it means and don't know where to go, so they're defaulted, and they owe money anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 as a result of these defaults...

"I can't say this is a situation that is a good situation or a fair situation. It is, however, the situation."

In two of the cases brought by Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, Judge Rosemary Collyer has just given the lawyers two weeks to convince her that the lawsuit shouldn't be broken up into individual cases, with all but one defendant "dismissed for misjoinder."

Federal judges, if they believe that the process has become abusive, may well intervene in the interests of fairness; Gernter even helped Tenenbaum find free legal representation in Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson.

Note, though, that Davis and Gertner both allowed the cases to proceed and both oversaw "liable" verdicts. Those who claim innocence need more than faith in the federal judiciary; they need a backup plan should these cases proceed to trial.

US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents

Nanette Gartrell, MD^a,b,c, Henny Bos, PhD^c

^aCenter of Excellence in Women's Health, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California;
^bWilliams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Los Angeles, California;
^cGraduate School of Pedagogical and Educational Sciences, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Objectives The objective of this study was to document the psychological adjustment of adolescents who were conceived through donor insemination by lesbian mothers who enrolled before these offspring were born in the largest, longest running, prospective, longitudinal study of same-sex–parented families.

Methods Between 1986 and 1992, 154 prospective lesbian mothers volunteered for a study that was designed to follow planned lesbian families from the index children's conception until they reached adulthood. Data for the current report were gathered through interviews and questionnaires that were completed by 78 index offspring when they were 10 and 17 years old and through interviews and Child Behavior Checklists that were completed by their mothers at corresponding times. The study is ongoing, with a 93% retention rate to date.

Results According to their mothers' reports, the 17-year-old daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were rated significantly higher in social, school/academic, and total competence and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggressive, and externalizing problem behavior than their age-matched counterparts in Achenbach's normative sample of American youth. Within the lesbian family sample, no Child Behavior Checklist differences were found among adolescent offspring who were conceived by known, as-yet-unknown, and permanently unknown donors or between offspring whose mothers were still together and offspring whose mothers had separated.

Conclusions Adolescents who have been reared in lesbian-mother families since birth demonstrate healthy psychological adjustment. These findings have implications for the clinical care of adolescents and for pediatricians who are consulted on matters that pertain to same-sex parenting.

For women in Senegal, it pays to be (a little) neurotic

By Kate Shaw

Is there a prime personality for reproduction? A new study in PNAS investigates the links between personality and reproductive success in Senegalese men and women. In the four rural communities where the study was conducted, polygyny is commonplace, families have many children, and mortality is very high. These conditions are thought to be similar to those in humans’ distant past, so the authors believe that the selective processes at work here may mimic those that have acted on personality traits over our evolutionary history.

To assess extraversion and neuroticism, 64 husbands and their wives were given a 27-question personality assessment. The body mass index (BMI) and mid upper arm circumference (MUAC) were measured for children in each family, providing an approximation of their physical health and well-being. On average, each female had 5 children.

Neurotic women—those who were frequently anxious, depressive, and/or moody—had 12 percent more children than women scoring low on the neuroticism spectrum. However, these children tended to be less healthy, on average, than the children of less neurotic women. Especially in the lowest social class, kids born to neurotic women had lower BMIs and MUACs than those born to more relaxed moms, suggesting poorer health and a lower probability of survival. Overall, females with intermediate neuroticism ratings enjoyed the greatest reproductive success, indicating that natural selection is working against ladies on either end of the spectrum.

The results for males were more straightforward: extraverted men tended to have more children than shyer men did. However, this effect was confounded by two other characteristics; extraverted men were more likely to belong to a high socio-economic class and to engage in polygyny, increasing their chances to father an army of kids. Among males, there was no effect of neuroticism on either the quality or quantity of children, and extraversion didn’t affect either measure of reproductive success in females.

These results differ from those of previous studies, which show that, in industrialized nations, high neuroticism in females is correlated with a smaller number of children. The authors suggest that, in cultures where men have multiple wives, neurotic women may be particularly likely to be jealous of her husband's other wives and try to outcompete them by bearing more children.

Judge may dismiss 4,576 of 4,577 P2P defendants from lawsuit

By Nate Anderson

Federal judge Rosemary Collyer sits on the DC District Court, where several of the recent US Copyright Group lawsuits against alleged P2P users have been filed. A few of those lawsuits ended up on Judge Collyer's calendar, one of them filed against over 4,000 anonymous "John Does" at once.

This week, Judge Collyer issued a terse demand to the lawyers behind these cases: convince me within two weeks that jamming 4,577 people into a single lawsuit is a proper use of the court system.

Judge Rosemary Collyer

A brief entry in the official court docket lays out the order. "MINUTE ORDER requiring Plaintiff to show cause in writing no later than June 21, 2010 why Doe Defendants 2 through 2000 should not be dismissed for misjoinder under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 20," wrote the judge in The Steam Experiment case. The same order was repeated in a separate case targeting 4,577 users alleged to have shared the film Far Cry.

The judge's order came only days after the ACLU and EFF joined forces to file a friend of the court brief in these cases. In that brief, the civil rights groups complained about the improper "joinder" of so many defendants from across the country in a single case in a far-off DC courthouse.

According to Rule 20, which Judge Collyer referenced in her order, plaintiffs may only join defendants in a lawsuit if:

• They assert any right to relief jointly, severally, or in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the same transaction, occurrence, or series of transactions or occurrences; and
• Any question of law or fact common to all plaintiffs will arise in the action.

But were the alleged distributions all part of the same "transaction or occurrence"? According to the ACLU and EFF, they were not, and these P2P lawsuits should be "severed" and each defendant sued individually.

"Plaintiff's joinder of more than 4,500 defendants in a single action is improper and runs the tremendous risk of creating unfairness and denying individual justice to the suit," they wrote. "Mass joinder of individuals has been disapproved by federal courts in both the RIAA cases and elsewhere."

The judge appears interested in at least debating this argument. I checked in with EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry, who worked on the brief, and she was pleased by the order.

"Of course, we don't know yet how the judge is going to rule, but this order suggests that she is taking the issue seriously," she said. "That is a very good thing; parties in any litigation should be required to follow the rules, but given the number of lawsuits (with more promised) and the thousands of individuals under threat, it's particularly crucial here."

Should the judge sever the lawsuits, each would have to be filed separately, with a separate filing fee and separate paperwork, making mass lawsuits much more difficult and expensive.

Living in denial: Why sensible people reject the truth

by Debora MacKenzie

HEARD the latest? The swine flu pandemic was a hoax: scientists, governments and the World Health Organization cooked it up in a vast conspiracy so that vaccine companies could make money.

Never mind that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic, that thousands died, or that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now doing the rounds even in educated circles.

This depressing tale is the latest incarnation of denialism, the systematic rejection of a body of science in favour of make-believe. There's a lot of it about, attacking evolution, global warming, tobacco research, HIV, vaccines - and now, it seems, flu. But why does it happen? What motivates people to retreat from the real world into denial?

Here's a hypothesis: denial is largely a product of the way normal people think. Most denialists are simply ordinary people doing what they believe is right. If this seems discouraging, take heart. There are good reasons for thinking that denialism can be tackled by condemning it a little less and understanding it a little more.

Whatever they are denying, denial movements have much in common with one another, not least the use of similar tactics (see "How to be a denialist"). All set themselves up as courageous underdogs fighting a corrupt elite engaged in a conspiracy to suppress the truth or foist a malicious lie on ordinary people. This conspiracy is usually claimed to be promoting a sinister agenda: the nanny state, takeover of the world economy, government power over individuals, financial gain, atheism.

All denialists see themselves as underdogs fighting a corrupt elite

This common ground tells us a great deal about the underlying causes of denialism. The first thing to note is that denial finds its most fertile ground in areas where the science must be taken on trust. There is no denial of antibiotics, which visibly work. But there is denial of vaccines, which we are merely told will prevent diseases - diseases, moreover, which most of us have never seen, ironically because the vaccines work.

Similarly, global warming, evolution and the link between tobacco and cancer must be taken on trust, usually on the word of scientists, doctors and other technical experts who many non-scientists see as arrogant and alien.

Many people see this as a threat to important aspects of their lives. In Texas last year, a member of a state committee who was trying to get creationism added to school science standards almost said as much when he proclaimed "somebody's got to stand up to experts".

It is this sense of loss of control that really matters. In such situations, many people prefer to reject expert evidence in favour of alternative explanations that promise to hand control back to them, even if those explanations are not supported by evidence (see "Giving life to a lie").

All denialisms appear to be attempts like this to regain a sense of agency over uncaring nature: blaming autism on vaccines rather than an unknown natural cause, insisting that humans were made by divine plan, rejecting the idea that actions we thought were okay, such as smoking and burning coal, have turned out to be dangerous.

This is not necessarily malicious, or even explicitly anti-science. Indeed, the alternative explanations are usually portrayed as scientific. Nor is it willfully dishonest. It only requires people to think the way most people do: in terms of anecdote, emotion and cognitive short cuts. Denialist explanations may be couched in sciency language, but they rest on anecdotal evidence and the emotional appeal of regaining control.

Anecdote and emotion

Greg Poland, head of vaccines at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and editor in chief of the journal Vaccine, often speaks out against vaccine denial. He calls his opponents "the innumerate" because they are unable to grasp concepts like probability. Instead, they reason based on anecdote and emotion. "People use mental short cuts - 'My kid got autism after he got his shots, so the vaccine must have caused it,'" he says. One emotive story about a vaccine's alleged harm trumps endless safety statistics.

Seth Kalichman, a social psychologist at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, understands this better than most: he spent a year infiltrating HIV denialist groups. Many of the people he met were ordinary and sincere. "Denialism fills some need," he says. "For people with HIV, it is a coping strategy," albeit a maladaptive one.

Kalichman, however, feels that everyday reasoning alone is not enough to make someone a denialist. "There is some fragility in their thinking that draws them to believe people who are easily exposed as frauds," he says. "Most of us don't believe what they say, even if we want to. Understanding why some do may help us find solutions."

He believes the instigators of denialist movements have more serious psychological problems than most of their followers. "They display all the features of paranoid personality disorder", he says, including anger, intolerance of criticism, and what psychiatrists call a grandiose sense of their own importance. "Ultimately, their denialism is a mental health problem. That is why these movements all have the same features, especially the underlying conspiracy theory."

Neither the ringleaders nor rank-and-file denialists are lying in the conventional sense, Kalichman says: they are trapped in what classic studies of neurosis call "suspicious thinking". "The cognitive style of the denialist represents a warped sense of reality, which is why arguing with them gets you nowhere," he says. "All people fit the world into their own sense of reality, but the suspicious person distorts reality with uncommon rigidity."

It is not only similar tactics and psychology that unite denial in its many guises: there are also formal connections between the various movements.

Many denialist movements originate as cynical efforts by corporations to cast doubt on findings that threaten their bottom line. Big Tobacco started it in the 1970s, recruiting scientists willing to produce favourable data and bankrolling ostensibly independent think tanks and bogus grass-roots movements (see "Manufacturing doubt"). One such think tank was The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), set up in 1993 by tobacco company Philip Morris (American Journal of Public Health, vol 91, p 1749). TASSC didn't confine itself to tobacco for long. After getting funds from Exxon, it started casting doubt on climate science.

Such links between denial movements are not unusual. A number of think tanks in the US and elsewhere have been funded by both the oil and tobacco industries and have taken denialist positions on smoking and warming.

TASSC folded when its true identity became widely known, but its successor, JunkScience, still rubbishes tobacco and climate research and warns people not to believe any scientist who says something "might be" true or uses statistics - which pretty much covers all scientists.

Perhaps it is no surprise that some industries are prepared to distort reality to protect their markets. But the tentacles of organised denial reach beyond narrow financial interests. For example, some prominent backers of climate denial also deny evolution. Prominent creationists return the favour both in the US and elsewhere. Recent legislative efforts to get creationism taught in US schools have been joined by calls to "teach the controversy" on warming as well.

These positions align neatly with the concerns of the US political and religious right, and denial is often driven by an overtly political agenda. Some creationists have explicitly argued that the science of both climate and evolution involve "a left-wing ideology that promotes statism, nanny-state moralism and... materialism".

People who buy into one denialism may support others for this reason. Dan Kahan at Yale Law School has found that people's views on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage predict their position on climate science too. This, he argues, is because social conservatives tend to be pro-business and resist the idea that it is damaging the planet (Nature, vol 436, p 296).

But other denialisms suggest psychology, not just ideology, is crucial. There is no obvious connection between conservatism and vaccine or AIDS denial, and flu denial was promulgated by a left-leaning group suspicious of the vaccine industry.

Common ground

Nevertheless, some connections exist that hint at a wider agenda. For example, there is considerable overlap in membership between the vaccine and HIV deniers, says John Moore, an AIDS researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Both movements have massive but mysterious funding.

Consider, too, the journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a lobbying group for private medicine. It showcases nearly all denialist causes. In the past two years it has published articles claiming that HIV tests do not detect HIV, second-hand smoke does little harm, smoking bans do not reduce heart attacks, global warming presents little health threat and proposals for a US vaccination registry are "not really about vaccines but about establishing a computer infrastructure... that can be used for other purposes later". It repeatedly published discredited assertions that vaccines cause autism.

It is tempting to wonder if activists sympathetic to climate and evolution denial might be grasping opportunities to discredit science in general by spreading vaccine and HIV denialism.

The conservative character of much denial may also explain its success at winning hearts and minds.

George Lakoff, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that conservatives have been better than progressives at exploiting anecdote and emotion to win arguments. Progressives tend to think that giving people the facts and figures will inevitably lead them to the right conclusions. They see anecdotes as inadmissible evidence, and appeals to emotion as wrong.

The same is true of scientists. But against emotion and anecdote, dry statements of evidence have little power. To make matters worse, scientists usually react to denial with anger and disdain, which makes them seem even more arrogant.

Poland has reached a similar conclusion. He has experimented a few times with using anecdote and appeals to emotion when speaking to lay audiences. "I get very positive responses - except from numerates, who see it as emotionally manipulative," he says.

There are lessons here for other scientists who engage with denial. They can only win by learning to speak to the "innumerates", who are otherwise likely prey for denialists.

The stakes are high - and sometimes even personal. Like many vaccine developers, Poland has received death threats. "I get phone messages saying 'I hope your kids are safe'," he says. So has Faye Flam, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who has written in support of climate science.

I get phone messages saying 'I hope your kids are safe'

Denialism has already killed. AIDS denial has killed an estimated 330,000 South Africans. Tobacco denial delayed action to prevent smoking-related deaths. Vaccine denial has given a new lease of life to killer diseases like measles and polio. Meanwhile, climate change denial delays action to prevent warming. The backlash against efforts to fight the flu pandemic could discourage preparations for the next, potentially a more deadly one.

If science is the best way to understand the world and its dangers, and acting on that understanding requires popular support, then denial movements threaten us all.