You keep bringing up the mantra fuck the police. I agree that the police can and do abuse their power and that reform should be an ongoing and continuous process. I also agree that the police are forced to enforce unjust laws that have led to an overcrowded and unsustainable prison system….
COKE TALK THROWS DOWN
Meet ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Get familiar with this bill and spread this to as many people as you can. I can’t stress how important of a subject matter this is.
FUCK
The FDA declares that pizza is a vegetable. The White House passes it. The FDA pushes for emergency contraception to be more widely available to people. The White House is scared of all the NOT pregnant teens resulting from its accessibility, and rejects it. Maybe if we PRETEND teens don’t have sex then they’ll just NOT have sex! Just like if we PRETEND pizza is a vegetable then… It just IS! Pure sorcery.
NB: Is there a relationship between copyleft ideologies and feminism?
EK: Yeah, totally. I think that copyright is based on ownership and it’s based on rights over someone or something else, and I think that copyright law is inherently patriarchal. It totally mimics the system and the structure of ownership and oppression – there’s a whole discourse on it and a whole section of copyright law and feminism that speaks to why copyright law is inherently patriarchal. If you just Google feminism plus fair use or feminism plus copyright law, you’ll see some of those articles, and they’re great and they’re really interesting.
I mean, I’ve said this before, I think I’m not sick of women telling people how they want their work to be used. I think that’s great and incredible, I think women should tell people how they want their work to be used and not stolen or not reproduced or whatever it is. I also do think, though, that in the end respecting peoples’ creative times and the work that they’ve done, you shouldn’t distinguish between gender for that, and in the end I do think that copyleftist policies are probably a little bit more fulfilling for creators on both ends of things.
(Definition of copyleft here.)
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (1898 – 1989) achieved a lot of firsts in her life.
She was the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in the United States, the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the first African American woman to be admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar, and was the first national president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.
State legislators approved a bill Saturday that requires employers to provide paid sick leave for its employees, making Connecticut the first state in the nation to do so. Governor Dannell Malloy is set to sign the bill that allows employees to earn up to five paid sick days per year. San Francisco and the District of Columbia already require employers to give paid sick days to all workers, and similar measures are pending in Philadelphia, Seattle, Denver, and New York City.
This would be FANTASTIC if passed in New York. You go, Connecticut!
Protection for Creative Works
The First Amendment and the laws of many states also protect your use of someone’s name or likeness in creative works and other forms of entertainment. Included in this category are things like novels that include mention of real-life figures, historical fiction, movies based loosely on real-life events, “docudramas,” works of art that incorporate an individual’s photo or image, and acts of parody directed at an individual. Some state statutes explicitly exempt these kinds of work from liability for misappropriation or violation of the right of publicity. See, e.g.,42 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 8316(e)(2) (link is to entire code; you need to click through to title 42, part VII, chapter 83, subchapter A, and then choose the specific provision); Wash Rev. Code § 63.60.070(1). In other states, the courts look at the creative or artistic work in question and decide on a case-by-case basis whether the First Amendment values at stake trump the plaintiff’s rights of privacy and publicity. See State Law: Right of Publicity and Misappropriation for details.
As a general matter, you will not be held liable for using someone’s name or likeness in a creative, entertaining, or artistic work that is transformative, meaning that you add some substantial creative element over and above the mere depiction of the person. In other words, the First Amendment ordinarily protects you if you use someone’s name or likeness to create something new that is recognizably your own, rather than something that just evokes and exploits the person’s identity.
For instance, in one case an artist created and sold t-shirts that contained a realistic depiction of The Three Stooges, and the company which owns the publicity rights sued. The California Supreme Court recognized that the First Amendment generally protects artistic and creative works, but found that the t-shirts in question were not sufficiently transformative because “the artist’s skill and talent [was] manifestly subordinated to the overall goal of creating a conventional portrait of a celebrity so as to commercially exploit his or her fame.” Comedy III Prods., Inc. v. Gary Saderup, Inc., 21 P.3d 797, 810 (Cal. 2001). In another case, the artistBarbara Kruger created an untitled work that incorporated a photograph of Charlotte Dabny holding a large magnifying glass over her right eye (which itself was a famous photograph by German photographer Thomas Hoepker). Kruger cropped and enlarged the photographic image, transferred it to silkscreen and superimposed three large red blocks containing the sentence “It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it.” A New York court held that Dabny could not recover for misappropriation because Kruger’s artistic work was protected by the First Amendment because Kruger had added sufficiently transformative elements. See Hoepker v. Kruger, 200 F. Supp.2d 340 (S.D.N.Y. 2002).
Sponsored by Rep. Charles Van Zant, R-Palatka, HB 1097 would criminalize most abortions now allowed under state and federal law.
Among the bill’s major provisions:
- Makes induced abortions illegal and punishable by up to life in prison
- Allows doctors and hospital to refuse to provide abortion services.
- Continues judicial bypass that allows minors to seek a judge’s order instead of telling a parent or guardian.
- Prohibits abortions resulting from pregnancies involving rape or incest.
- Requires a second physician to sign-off on the procedure when a doctor believes an abortion was medically necessary to save the life of the mother.
- Requires women to receive information on adoption as an abortion alternative
I VOTE NO, NO, and GODDAMMIT NO. Not in my home state.
And of course, this tool is from Palatka. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Seems like we still can’t get the concept of equal work, equal pay down.
A year ago today, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law. While this was an important step for restoring women’s protections against pay discrimination, it’s not enough. We still need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which tripped through the House alongside the Fair Pay Act, then got stuck in the Senate.
As Roxann has posted previously, “Ledbetter gave women the ability to challenge discrimination; the next logical step was to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a law designed to prevent it from happening in the first place.” The Paycheck Fairness Act would put the onus on employers to demonstrate that any significant wage gaps were based on factors unrelated to sex, which could make significant inroads toward narrowing the 33 cent gap on the dollar between what men and women are paid.
The bill further requires courts to provide the same remedies for sex discrimination as they would for workers cheated out of a fair wage due to race or national original. And it lets employers know that taking revenge against an employee (or, in their mindset, “rabble-rouser”) who makes wage inquiries to hold them accountable for paying everybody what they deserve.
No doubt this concept of equal pay for equal work is still seen a very controversial in the (very male) Senate. And it doesn’t help that the Supreme Court just last week gave corporations free reign to buy as many politicians as they can afford. Well, tough. Send your senator a message that you’re the one who votes him in or out, and you want paycheck fairness now.
Pretty pretty please? With a cherry on top? Before I burn down every establishment that has cheated me out of my money?
