Again, let’s kill this one dead and stomp on it until we’re sure:

“If Think Secret prevails in its legal efforts, NDLs will be dead. No company will be willing to enter into an agreement in which the other party can use the free speech loophole to violate the agreement.”

Apple never entered into a Non-Disclosure Agreement with Think Secret. It entered into an NDA with unknown second parties who breached the agreement to leak a story to Think Secret. Apple has legally enforceable claims against those second parties if it can find out who they are. It has no claims whatever against Think Secret, which never made any agreement not to broadcast whatever information came into its grubby little hands and has not violated any terms that it ever agreed to.

Apple has no right to enforce the terms of a contract on people who never signed it. They are using this suit as an intimidation tactic to try to force Think Secret to disclose the second parties who leaked the information. Since they have no case, this is nothing more than using the force of the law as an implement of bullying. Thank goodness someone is standing up for Think Secret’s right not to be victimized by frivolous legal intimidation.

A couple further questions:

1. Why marginalize or abandon Robin Morgan? Of course, everyone has a mind of their own and people shouldn’t have to answer for every wack thing that another person who shares their political convictions says, but it would be a serious mistake to suggest that Morgan—who played an instrumental role in founding New York Radical Women and WITCH, putting on the Miss America protests, organized abortion speak-outs and put together Sisterhood is Powerful, and has been a formative influence on outlets such as Ms. Magazine—is some kind of nutty fringe figure. She’s a radical figure, yes, but “radical” isn’t necessarily a term of criticism, and radical feminism has always been an absolutely essential part of Second Wave feminist theory and practice. Any story of the movement that doesn’t centrally involve her in her role as an organizer, writer, and editor has got to be a seriously distorted one.

   And—let’s put the cards on the table after all—I can’t think of a single quote by Robin Morgan that the Men’s Rights bully-boys drag out that actually has anything at all objectionable in it. What specifically is the point on which she shouldn’t be defended against her accusers?

2. While we’re at it, what is supposed to be wrong with man-hating, anyway? If some feminists do hate men, would that mean that there is something wrong with their position?

   I, for one, hate men. Not all of them, but lots of them. And I hate them precisely because they act like men are supposed to act. I.E. because they are controlling, exploitative, rude, callous, and/or violent, just like they were brought up to be. I hate men who act like that and I hate myself when I realize that I’ve acted that way. I don’t think it’s because I’m a neurotic bundle of self-loathing or because I’m aiming to become one; it’s because I think that all of us men have a long way to go to break ourselves out of habits and beliefs that keep us from acting like decent human beings as often as we should. We grow up thinking that we have the right to do a lot of fucked up stuff and then we usually go on to do it at some point or another. Often at many points throughout our lives.

   There are many men that I love and mostly trust but I love them and mostly trust them for the demonstrable steps they’ve taken away from the way that men are normally expected to act. And I’m doing what I can to help the efforts to change those expectations and those actions—in myself, and in others when I can reach them—but I can’t say I blame a woman at all if she doesn’t like most men or doesn’t necessarily trust our motives straight off the bat.

   That doesn’t strike me as unreasoned bigotry; it strikes me as a rational response to the empirical evidence.

Citizen 382-22-0666:

In fact, though feminism was one of the most important influences on my intellectual development, I no longer identify myself as a feminist. I was told in graduate school—repeatedly and vehemently, by women active in feminist causes and scholarship—that males could not be feminists.

Since I wasn’t there when you had the conversation with these people, I can hardly be positive, but usually when feminists say things like this they aren’t claiming that you as a man can’t support the feminist political programme. They are telling you that they don’t want you to cash out that support by calling yourself a “feminist,” and would prefer a term more like “pro-feminist man.” Roughly, because feminism isn’t just some set of abstract policy positions that anyone can sign on to; it involves some policy positions but it’s mainly something that you live, and as a man you (and I) necessarily stand in a very different position to the movement and to the living of feminism than women do. One reason they worry about this is because of how, historically, feminism has been co-opted and marginalized by liberal and Leftist in the name of an allegedly “broader” program (as if women’s liberation weren’t good enough on its own)?

I think it’s a pretty compelling argument. But whether it’s compelling or it’s complete nonsense, it’s not, as you have portrayed it, any kind of argument against boys helping out in the movement. What it is is an argument about how boys who do support feminism should act, how they should identify themselves, and how they should think of themselves in relation to feminist activism. It’s a call for humility, something which I’ve found, frankly, to be in sadly short supply amongst white Leftist boys. In any case, the fact that the argument is compelling doesn’t mean that there might not be other compelling reasons to reconsider the conclusion (I’ve tried to take up some of these issues and explain why I usually identify myself as a feminist anyway in That Feminist Boy Thing); but I can’t for the life of me find “It hurts my fee-fees when they yell at me for calling myself a feminist” among them. The fact that you as a man may not enjoy a practice, or that it might “alienate” men who are otherwise sympathetic to the movement, is no argument at all for feminists to forswear it. If feminists never did anything that didn’t hack some of the boys who claimed to be their allies off, there never would have been a feminist movement at all.

Brad:

(1) Neither my actions nor my beliefs imply anything about those of “Copyfighters.” I am a reader of Copyfight; I’m not an author here and my beliefs are actually substantially different from those of the people who are. If you want to infer something about “how Copyfighters behave” from issues you have with me, you can do so, but you can hardly expect other people to take htat seriously.

(2) I described you as a priggish busybody because that’s what your comments expressed. There are lots of reasons that people might worry about the intersection of digital technology and 20th century business models for books, film, songs, etc. There may be perfectly good arguments to raise against Gigi Sohn’s claims about how, e.g., the film and music industry have responded to these concerns hurts consumers. But “other people are too cheap and it makes me mad” is not among those concerns and it is not one of those arguments. You might think they’re skinflints; you might think they’re classless or ungrateful to the people who make the things they enjoy possible. That’s fine. But why should you expect anyone else to care about the resentments you nurse on this question? And what in the world has it got to do with whether or not Gigi Sohn is right about consumers’ interests? Merely pointing out that you disagree with her conclusion is not a counter-argument. And claiming that she doesn’t “represent” you as a consumer isn’t either. The question is whether her arguments are cogent or uncogent, not how you feel about other music consumers.

(3) In the follow-up you remark that it might surprise me that many small-time professional copyright holders cheer on the legal actions of industry behemoths. It doesn’t; I’m already well aware of that (I have relatives trying to make their way in the lower end of the music business). That said, I can’t imagine why you think it’s relevant. The fact that someone has a small business rather than a large one is not a sign of moral superiority, and I don’t see any reason to think that the legally-enforced business model of small musicians, authors, etc. would be any more in tune with consumers’ interests than the legally-enforced business model of the big-time money-men who represent the bulkier end of the industry. I may like small independents a lot more than I like sanctimonious corporate money-men, but that doesn’t make a bit of difference to how their use of legal coercion and technological crippling affects me.

(4) As for commercial viability: I’m well aware of how modern sharing technology poses a challenge to the commercial viability of traditional business models of copyright holders, and perhaps especially those without the legal resources to try to take up the issue through the government. The question is what one thinks should be done about it. It’s not that I don’t want small copyright holders’ businesses to be commercially viable; it’s that I don’t care whether they are or not. The world does not owe you or anyone else a living, and those who today try to live as professional copyright holders have had to figure out ways to make do without rigid “intellectual property” protectionism for several thousand years of human history. If the only way to sustain the business model of the late 19th and 20th century is through escalating an already intense regime of legal coercion against consumers, then I can’t see any reason not to let it die.

Mark Fulwiler:

“I’m afraid democracy doesn’t “work” well anyplace—-it always end up as “mob rule” to some degree.”

“Here’s the bottom line: Once the majority figures out that they can use the ballot box and democracy to loot and oppress other people, they always do it. Always. And a written Constitution doesn’t offer much of a defense. Constitutions can be ignored or amended.”

I agree with you, Mark, that a rights-violating government doesn’t magically become OK just because there is popular input into it, and that the idea that protection of individual rights appears magically through the hocus-pocus of a plebiscite is silly. But the direction of critique here is a bit odd. It’s true that democracies can end in corruption and majoritarian looting of the minority. But how does that make them any different from any other political constitution? Certainly monarchies and oligarchies pretty quickly figured out that they could use minority rule to loot from the majority—and that written Constitutions were never much of a defense against them.

In fact, it’s true of any conceivable constitutional form that it could be corrupted and those with control over the guns could turn them on others. It’s even true of idealized anarcho-capitalist enforcement agencies. The will is free and people may end up choosing to do evil. The question is which constitutions are comparatively better and more resistant to encroachments on rights, and which ones are comparatively worse.

Is there any reason to think that rule by the many is comparatively worse than rule by the few, and more prone to rights-violating “mob rule” than rule by the few is prone to rights-violating cabal rule?

Or is this just a general complaint against the State as such, being applied to the limitations of democracy in this particular case? In that case, it’s a fair enough complaint, but it would be odd to suggest the other plausible alternatives for Iraq’s near future (e.g. a military colony headed by a U.S. proconsul or a tyranny run by some suitable client such as Allawi) are better, or even that they aren’t any worse.

The Military History Guy. There’s one of them in every history class.

Not to be picky, but what’s wrong with being an ugly bald man-hating miliant? Some of my best friends are bald man-hating militants. I don’t think they’re ugly, but I don’t think that anything should turn on the judgment that someone makes of your appearance.

It’s worth demanding that people realize how diverse feminists are, but let’s not do it at the expense of women whose attitude or appearance might come too close to the stereotypes our critics use to bait us.

Kennedy: “It’s also possible that he did not contract away his IP rights to inventions.”

Except that he doesn’t have any natural rights to demand tribute for the use of the invention—unless his employer made some kind of contract with him agreeing to give him exclusionary control over their use of things he made while he was working for them.

Maybe they did make such a contract, but there isn’t any evidence of that in the story, and it would certainly make the court case much more open-and-shut than it seems to have been, since the issue wouldn’t have been “IP” but rather breach of contract. Broadly speaking, if I’m paying you to show me how to make things, and I go on to make the things that you show me, the amount that you negotiated for your job up-front is precisely what you should have the right to demand. I may like brilliant inventors a lot more than I like the sanctimonious money-men who drive most of the intellectual enclosure movement these days, but that doesn’t make putting the fences up on other people’s rightly acquired property any less odious.

Brad Hutchings on folks who get their music for free over file-sharing networks: “They are kinda like people who cut in line or cut you off on the freeway.”

The difference, Brad, is that people who cut in line or cut you off on the freeway are annoying because, by being jerks, they interfere with your ability to make use of a shared resource. But whether or not someone downloading an MP3 and paying only for the bandwidth is doing something wrong, what they are doing neither interferes with your ability to enjoy your own music nor endangers your safety. In fact the worst you seem to be able to say about them is this:

‘For example, I am a “consumer” of Apple iTunes. It pisses me off to no end that other “consumers” are too cheap to pony up a few bucks a week for music they enjoy, instead leaching it from P2P networks.’

So other people don’t put their money into the same things that you do. Good Lord what a priggish busybody you are. Haven’t you got anything better to fume about?

Robert is comparing “Set A” (people who have sex exclusively with members of the same sex) with “Set B” (Roman Catholics). The contrast is supposed to show that there is some relevant sense in which Catholic people are grouped together in a way that gay people are not. Unfortunately, I find the putative contrasts confusing. I also don’t understand what they have to do with the context in which Robert brought the comparison up. So let’s look a bit closer at it. Here are some different types of contrasts that Robert makes, a bit out of order:

1. The group (does/does not) have a formal history of existence as a defined group:

Set B has an extensive formal history of existence as a defined group. Set A could aspire to such a history and may achieve it in the future, but does not have it at this point in time.

I’m not entirely sure what Robert means here. The idea that there is a distinct group of people—the gay ones—goes back at least to the late 18th century, and the modern language of homosexuality was firmly in place more than 100 years ago (unfortunately, not in the context we might like; it was used to pick out people falsely believed to have a common psychosexual disorder). That’s at least as good a stretch of history as, say, “Americans” (there weren’t any until 1788) or “Christian fundamentalists” (early 20th century) have. Since sexual orientation, as a notion, has been around, and been an important part of how people talk about themselves for several generations now I don’t see any salient differences between the two. It’s not like “gay” was a neologism we just made up last Thursday.

2. Membership is/is not centrally coordinated:

Membership in set B is expressed in group terms. A person who says I am a Catholic means that they are a member of the organization. Membership in set A is expressed in individual terms. A person who says I am gay is describing their individual self.

I don’t know what you mean here. It’s true that a person who identifies herself as a Catholic is, inter alia, saying something about a formal organization (that she is a member of it). And it’s true that who and who is not a member of that organization is coordinated by a central authority, or by a centralized structure of authority. But that’s certainly not all that she’s doing—she’s also, as you said, stating that, inter alia, she personally adheres to the articles of the Catholic faith, participates in the sacraments of the Church, etc. Which of these two descriptions is the primary function of the statement “I am a Catholic”? Well, I don’t know. I imagine it depends on the context in which it’s uttered. (If you say, “I’m a Catholic, so of course I believe that abortion is wrong,” I imagine that the second function is more important; if you say, “I’m a Catholic, so I need to be at Mass on Sunday and can’t go with you to the picnic” then I imagine that the first function is more important.)

It’s true that a person who says “I am gay” is only saying something of the latter sort, not anything of the former sort—there isn’t any centralized organization to appeal to. But so what? What follows from this? It’s true of Catholics, but that doesn’t extend even to other denominations or religions (there is no central institutional structure for Pentacostals, or Christians, or Muslims, or Jews). Surely the particular bureaucratic details of how the Roman Catholic Church works are not a significant issue here.

3. Membership (does/does not) derive from adherence to a common framework of beliefs and practices:

Set B has a common philosophy. There is some disagreement within the set about the philosophy – debate and dissent, etc. – but all adult members of the group are passingly familiar with the philosophy. Set A does not have a common philosophy.

Set B has a common spiritual culture. Set A does not have a common spiritual culture.

Set B believes in the transmission of membership in the set to descendants. A member of set B with offspring generally attempts to instill the tenets of set B membership into the offspring. Set A members do not attempt to transmit membership to the next generation.

Set B believes in the evangelization of membership to non-members. Set A does not believe in the evangelization of membership.

Sure; this is indeed a point of contrast between Catholics and gay people. But see the discussion below.

4. Membership is/is not defined in behavioral terms:

Membership in set B is defined in nonbehavioral terms. Membership in set A is defined in behavioral terms. A single change in behavior is not generally sufficient to disenroll someone from set B; it is sufficient to disenroll someone from set A.

I think this, actually, has got to be false. It is in direct contradiction, in particular, to the contrasts made under heading 1. Being a Catholic essentially involves facts about your behavior: for example, if you stop believing in God, you are no longer a Catholic; if you convert to Islam you are no longer a Catholic; if you withdraw from all Church sacraments, you are no longer a Catholic. (If you take one common interpretation of canon 1398, then if you have or procure an abortion you are also by that very fact no longer a Catholic.)

So what hinges on this question, anyway? Well, Robert will have to say more about his purposes in giving the list of contrasts before I can say anything definitively—and if what I say here does not represent Robert’s views, then I look forward to being corrected—but one reason that people commonly make a distinction like this is to argue something like: “Look, homophobia is importantly different from common examples of politicized hatred such as racism or misogyny because whether homophobic attitudes are wrong or not, you can avoid homophobia just by not sleeping with members of your own sex.” That is true and it is important, but it’s not a point of difference between Catholicism and homosexuality: Catholics have always been able to escape persecution just by converting to a different denomination or different religion. (I don’t think, incidentally, that any important ethical consequences follow from this distinction. Religious persecution and homophobia are both wrong, and just as wrong as racism and misogyny are. The difference is only important to understanding the differing nature of the oppression, not its oppressiveness.) In this respect, members of persecuted religious groups and gay people are more alike one another than either is like victims of racism or misogyny: we could avoid it, by denying an absolutely essential part of our lives in order to pass and so pacify the bashers. But why in the hell should we have to?

On the other hand, Robert might have wanted to stick with Type 3 differences—even though his (false) claim of the Type 4 differences contradicts it—because of another conventional tack he might try to take: the status of people-who-only-have-sex-with-people-of-the-same-sex as a group is hard to pin down because those people, unlike “Catholics,” don’t necessarily have anything intellectually or culturally in common with one another, and don’t participate in any kind of common formal organization as in the Type 2 contrasts. True; but so what? “Black people” (or even a more restricted grouping such as “African-Americans”) certainly are not defined as a group by adherence to any common beliefs or spiritual culture (they don’t evangelize, and the fact that they transmit membership to their children has nothing to do with their intent in the matter). There is no formal Black organization and no centralized coordination of membership. But no-one could reasonably argue that, for example, Black people in America don’t constitute a single group that have something importantly in common. What they have in common, if nothing else, is how they are (have been) treated. Racism just means making race politically relevant; even though most everything racists say about Black people’s alleged common traits is false, the legacy of racist political power in the United States is such that Black people do have something importantly in common with each other—they were all treated as niggers. In this respect, gay people are more like victims of racism and misogyny than they are like victims of religious persecution: what we have in common is, mainly, that we are all treated like fags and dykes. Our commonalities as a group are defined more by the attitudes and practices of the people around us than by anything positive attribute that we all have on our own. But so what? Why in the world would anyone think that groupings mainly imposed by outside pressures are somehow less real or less politically relevant than groupings that come from commonalities we bring to the table ourselves? Certainly this isn’t true in the case of race; why would it be true in the case of sexuality?

(N.B.: I actually reject the definition, stipulated at the beginning of this discussion, of “gay” as meaning “a person who only has sex with members of the same gender”. In fact, exclusive sexual contact with members of the same gender is neither necessary nor sufficient for being gay: for one, you can be gay and a virgin; for two, you can be gay and closeted and have heterosexual sexual contact; for three, for the same reasons, you could be heterosexual and due to unusual circumstances end up only having sexual contact with members of the same sex. Further, I think it’s actually a mistake to define bisexual people out of being “gay”; certainly, as a bisexual man, I am treated like a faggot by homophobes regardless of the fact that I also am sexually and romantically attracted to women. But I’ve set that aside here; I don’t think that much important hinges on the differences between “gay men and lesbians” as a class and “men and women who only have sexual contact with members of the same gender” as a class, and this was a stipulative definition that Robert agreed to, not something that he insisted on, anyway.)