If you’ve ever used a peer-to-peer network and swapped copyrighted files, chances are pretty good you’re guilty of a federal felony. While the RIAA and MPAA have been using lawsuits to drive P2P filesharing websites like Napster, Audiogalaxy, and now (they are hoping) KaZaa out of business, a law already on the books, the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, already provides severe penalties for endusers making use of such services. According to this article by Declan McCullogh, it is only a matter of time before the Feds start actually prosecuting P2P filesharing users under this act…
Continue reading “The No Electronic Theft Act”
Category: Politics
Intersex Recognized
Australia has–the first time this has happened anywhere in the world, as far as I know–officially recognized a person as being intersexed. (Via Eszter’s Blog). Alex McFarlane has XXY chromosomes (rather than the male XY or the female XX), and e refuses to consider emself as either male or female (to use the Spivak pronouns, for the first time since my MOOing days).Good for Alex! And good for all of us to remember that our bodies are–our biology is–much more multifarious and flexible than we usually realize. It’s not that, as fatuous conservatives love to say, our culture has to recognize and come to terms with the limits imposed on us by nature; but rather the opposite–that all too often it’s cultural constraints and presuppositions and prejudices that limit and blight our bodily potentialities. (See Anne Fausto-Sterling, whom I already mentioned the other day, for more on intergender issues). Or as Spinoza said, in a line that Gilles Deleuze loved to quote: “We do not yet know what our bodies can do.”