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the best way to know you have a mind is to change it

if you worry about what others think of you, you will be living their version of your life and not yours.

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works

The most interesting thesis is the idea that China could use international law as a weapon, or “lawfare” for short. The authors argue that citizens of democracies increasingly demand that their countries uphold international rules, particularly ones that govern human rights and the conduct of war. Governments are, therefore, constrained by regional or worldwide organizations, such as the European Union, ASEAN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the WTO and the United Nations. The authors argue that China should copy the European model of using international law to pin down the USA: “there are far-sighted big powers which have clearly already begun to borrow the power of supra-national, multinational, and non-state players to redouble and expand their own influence.” They think that China could turn the United Nations and regional organizations into an amplifier of the Chinese worldview – discouraging the USA from using its might in campaigns like the Iraq War.

Beijing has been willing to allow the Organization of Islamic States to take the lead in weakening the new Human Rights Council. This subtle diplomacy has been devastatingly effective – contributing to a massive fall in US influence: in 1995 the USA won 50.6 percent of the votes in the United Nations general assembly; by 2006, the figure had fallen to just 23.6 percent. On human rights, the results are even more dramatic: China’s win-rate has rocketed from 43 percent to 82 percent, while the USA’s has tumbled from 57 per cent to 22 percent. The New York Times’ UN correspondent James Traub has detected a paradigm shift in the United Nations’ operations: “it’s a truism that the Security Council can function only insofar as the United States lets it. The adage may soon be applied to China as well.” Traub may be right. China’s capacity to influence the United Nations is increasing, and soon we may be complaining about Chinese behavior on big policy issues

Google's top copyright man, he wrote his blog in a purely private capacity as one of the leading copyright scholars in the world.

copyright has become less and less responsive to the balance of incentives and exceptions

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works

最高人民法院院长肖扬于2003年赴闽视察，省委、省人大、省高院头目先后向他提起此问题、要求不再拖压“核准”时，中国首席大法官肖扬竟然表示“有压力，感到为难”。

《条例》出台前，也曾有法官问周汉华，能不能将“主动公开”与“依申请公开”错开时间搞，“实际上他们也是想先搞‘主动公开’，‘依申请公开’往后拖拖，这样可以多一些准备时间。”周汉华说。

许志永认为，一种理解方式是：“政府不公开信息，或者你去申请信息公开，政府不搭理你，你可以投诉，不能起诉；不过，一旦政府选择信息公开，而这些公开的信息又侵犯到相对方的合法权益，才可起诉。” “按照这种理解，最匪夷所思的地方还在于，在政府决定信息公开的情况下，申请者不能去起诉，只有相对方，那个觉得自己的‘合法权益’因为‘信息公开’遭受到侵犯的人，才可以去起诉。”许志永说。 “这种理解，包括现实生活中按照这种理解的实践，将绝大部分‘信息公开’案挡在了法院大门之外。”一位不愿具名的法官告诉记者。 “这样下去，几乎所有申请‘信息公开’的行为，都不可诉。”许志永告诉记者，之前的大部分法院，对于“信息公开”案不予以立案，几乎都是援引该款，并且以上述理解为由，告知申请人，“只能投诉，不能起诉”。

早在2007年5月20日的《政府信息公开条例》培训会上，时任国务院信息化办公室副主任杨学山就有提及：“ 在信息公开的救济上，通常是先行政救济……并力求把冲突和矛盾化解在行政系统内部，尽量避免与公民、法人或其他组织对簿公堂，这样一方面可以减少法院的压力，另一方面有利于维护政府的形象。”

Proposals for a central database of all mobile phone and internet traffic have been condemned as "Orwellian".

But the Lib Dems slammed the idea as "incompatible with a free country", while the Tories called on the government to justify its plans.

"Ministers claim the database will only be used in terrorist cases, but there is now a long list of cases, from the arrest of Walter Wolfgang for heckling at a Labour conference to the freezing of Icelandic assets, where anti-terrorism law has been used for purposes for which it was not intended."

Three of the circumvention tools — DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix — used most widely to get around China’s Great Firewall are tracking and selling the individual web browsing histories of their users. Data about aggregate usage of users of the tools is published freely. You can see, for example, that the three sites most visited by users of these circumvention tools are live.com, google.com, and secretchina.com. Aggregate data like this is a terrific resource for those of us interested in researching circumvention tool usage, and not much of a privacy risk for the circumventing users if it is only stored (as well as displayed) in the aggregate.

国家信访局开黑监狱，真是一个国家的悲哀。

Giles Ji Ungpakorn, 54, arrived in England at the weekend after being charged under the laws. He had been due to present himself to the police in Bangkok today and could have faced 15 years in jail if found guilty.

Wikileaks has released nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress. Frontpage of sample CRS report, RL31555: China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles: Policy Issues, dated January 7, 2009. A full listing of reports is available here.

The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to the financial collapse.

The Federation of American Scientists, in pushing for the reports to be made public, stated that the "CRS is Congress' Brain and it's useful for the public to be plugged into it,"[2]. While Wired magazine called their concealment "The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age"[3]. Although all CRS reports are legally in the public domain, they are quasi-secret because the CRS, as a matter of policy, makes the reports available only to members of Congress, Congressional committees and select sister agencies such as the GAO.

The games have been billed as China's "coming out party" to the world. They are far more significant than that. These Olympics are the coming out party for a disturbingly efficient way of organizing society, one that China has perfected over the past three decades, and is finally ready to show off. It is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarianism communism -- central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance -- harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Some call it "authoritarian capitalism," others "market Stalinism," personally I prefer "McCommunism."

By next year, the Chinese internal security market is set to be worth $33-billion. Several of the larger Chinese players in the field have recently taken their stocks public on U.S. exchanges, hoping to cash in the fact that, in volatile times, security and defense stocks are seen as the safe bets. China Information Security Technology, for instance, is now listed on the NASDAQ and China Security and Surveillance is on the NYSE. A small clique of U.S. hedge funds has been floating these ventures, investing more than $150-million in the past two years. The returns have been striking. Between October 2006 and October 2007, China Security and Surveillance's stock went up 306 percent.

Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, U.S. companies have been barred from selling police equipment and technology to China, since lawmakers feared it would be directed, once again, at peaceful demonstrators. That law has been completely disregarded in the lead up to the Olympics, when, in the name of safety for athletes and VIPs (including George W. Bush), no new toy has been denied the Chinese state.

As a key element of the revival of Chairman Mao Zedong's "people's warfare," Beijing and a number of other cities have revived the vigilante and spying functions of neighborhood committees. Municipal administrations along the coast -- and in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang -- have recently earmarked additional budget to maintain the "spying" functions of neighborhood committees and similar vigilante outfits after the Olympics. Moreover, the Politburo's Central Political and Legal Commission, China's highest law-enforcement agency, has urged the courts and prosecutors to do more in fulfilling the party's priority task of thwarting anti-Beijing conspiracies and upholding sociopolitical stability. That the courts will comply in this is evident from a just-released article by the President of the Supreme People's Court, Wang Shengjun. Writing in this week's edition of the official Seeking Truth journal, Mr. Wang said: "We must pay more attention to maintaining state security and social stability. . . We must boost our consciousness of [safeguarding] the power of the regime . . . and fully develop our functions as a department for [proletarian] dictatorship."

    全国大法官“大学习、大讨论”研讨班8月27日进行大会发言。最高人民法院党组副书记、副院长张军在大会发言时指出，审判机关和广大法官应始终坚持全面贯彻、完整体现“三个至上”指导思想，审判工作中既要讲法治也要讲政治。法官既要养成法律思维，更要培育政治智慧，必须具有综合的、真正高水平的司法能力。

全国大法官“大学习、大讨论”研讨班8月27日进行大会发言。最高人民法院党组副书记、副院长张军在大会发言时指出，审判机关和广大法官应始终坚持全面贯彻、完整体现“三个至上”指导思想，审判工作中既要讲法治也要讲政治。法官既要养成法律思维，更要培育政治智慧，必须具有综合的、真正高水平的司法能力。