by Mary
Society: OK, you can have a job, I guess.
Also society: But, the price will be that children must never be unattended again.
Also also society: How we do mourn for the resilient, free, and fierce children of yesteryear, you dreadful smothering helicopter parent you.
This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
In 2013 and 2014 there was a push to introduce legislation which incorporated fetal personhood into law in NSW: Crimes Amendment (Zoe’s Law) Bill (No. 2) 2013. See for example Julie Hamblin’s commentary at the time on how such legislation could be used to further restrict access to abortion in NSW, even when the stated purpose is to allow for abusive violence to fetuses to be punished. The bill passed the Lower House of NSW Parliament but was never put to the Upper House, and thus lapsed in November 2014 when the 55th Parliament ended. It never became law.
Leslie Cannold, speaking to a Greens forum in September 2013 (video here, not subtitled) called on NSW to not only fight a rear-guard action in defending pregnant people seeking abortions from further rights being granted to fetuses, but to follow Victoria (and later Tasmania) in decriminalising abortion entirely. And now Greens MLC Dr Mehreen Faruqi, is campaigning for the decriminalisation of abortion in NSW. Here are some of the facts about abortion access in NSW her flyer gives:
The laws surrounding access to abortion in NSW are very confusing. Abortion is currently in the Crimes Act (Sections 82-84), although court decisions have established that abortion will not be unlawful if a doctor reasonably believes it is necessary to save the woman from serious danger to her life, or mental or physical health[…]
In NSW, an abortion is unlawful unless a doctor deems that a woman’s physical, psychological and/or mental health is in serious danger. The criterion of ‘mental health’ can include economic and/or social factors[…]
Any amendments to the Crimes Act, such as those proposed by supporters of foetal personhood laws risks changing that interpretation. By removing abortion from the Crimes Act, it will no longer be a criminal offence and women and their doctors will no longer have to rely on the interpretation of the law by a court in each case in order to avoid criminal liability.
Learn more about the campaign at the Decriminalise Abortion page on Faruqi’s website. You can help by signing the online petition in support of decriminalisation or collecting signatures offline.
Featured image credit:
Pro_Choice_March-Texas_State_Capitol-2013_07_01-9378.jpg by ann harkness on Flickr.
This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
Data retention is coming to Australia very soon.
[Data retained] includes your name, address and other identifying information, your contract details, billing and payment information. In relation to each communication, it includes the date, start and finish times, and the identities of the other parties to the communication. And it includes the location data, such as the mobile cell towers or Wi-Fi hotspots you were accessing at the time…
But surely they’ve included special protections for communications between doctors and patients, and lawyers and clients? No. Never even discussed…
The Joint Committee recommended that the Act be amended to ensure that the metadata can’t be obtained by parties in civil litigation cases (I’ve mentioned before how excited litigation lawyers will be about all this lovely new data), and George Brandis said that would be fixed in the final amendments. But it isn’t there. The final Bill being bulldozed through Parliament right now contains no such protection. The fact remains that, under the Telecommunications Act, one of the situations in which a service provider cannot resist handing over stored data is when a court has required it by issuing a subpoena. In practice, that means that your ex-spouse, former business partners, suspicious insurance company or employer can get hold of a complete digital history of your movements and communications for the past two years, and use it against you in court.
Michael Bradley, Our privacy is about to be serially infringed, The Drum, March 19 2015
Noted elsewhere: all this data will be stored by various companies with varying degrees of security awareness, so in practice it will sometimes be available to some criminals too.
Elsewhere:
Image credit: Surveillance by Jonathan McIntosh, Creative Commons Atttribution-Sharealike
This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
There’s a lot going on right now in terms of trying to implement fetal personhood provisions and wind back legal abortion around Australia. Here’s the news from four states, anything we’ve missed? What actions are you taking in response?
New South Wales: Crimes Amendment (Zoe’s Law) Bill (No. 2) 2013 has passed the Lower House
Discussion of this has previously appeared on HAT. Since that post, this bill has passed the Legislative Assembly (lower house) following a conscience vote and by a large margin (63 to 26). It will be read in the Legislative Assembly (upper house) in 2014, and if passed there, will become law. Coalition and ALP MPs have been granted a conscience vote by their parties. The Greens oppose the bill. This bill is opposed by the NSW branch of the Australian Medical Association, and by the NSW Bar Association. The campaign against this bill is at Our Bodies, Our Choices.
I’d love to publish transcripts of the Greens community forum on this bill (held prior to it passing in the Assembly), but am unlikely to have time to transcribe an hours worth of video for at least another week. If you’d like to help out, here’s the Amara links for subtitling: Julie Hamblin’s speech (about half subtitled to date), Philippa Ramsay’s speech (not subtitled) and Leslie Cannold’s speech (not subtitled).
South Australia: Criminal Law Consolidation (Offences against Unborn Child) Amendment Bill 2013 not passed
A bill with fetal personhood provisions in the case of grievous bodily harm to the pregnant person was recently before South Australian parliament, but was rejected. Information is being made available by Tammy Franks, Greens MLC, see Stop the Misguided Foetal Personhood Laws and the transcript of the reading in Parliament. Unlike in NSW, it appears that the ALP did not allow a conscience vote. The debate opens with Kyam Maher, government whip:
The Hon. K.J. MAHER (00:11): I will be extraordinarily brief. The government does not support this bill.
Victoria: early proposals to remove Section 8
At present, the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008 requires (in part):
SECT 8
(1) If a woman requests a registered health practitioner to advise on a proposed abortion, or to perform, direct, authorise or supervise an abortion for that woman, and the practitioner has a conscientious objection to abortion, the practitioner must—
(a) inform the woman that the practitioner has a conscientious objection to abortion; and
(b) refer the woman to another registered health practitioner in the same regulated health profession who the practitioner knows does not have a conscientious objection to abortion.
A Victorian doctor, Mark Hobart, is facing deregistration over defying these provisions, and a group of Victorian doctors and nurses called Doctors Conscience opposes Section 8 and advocates for its repeal. The Age reports that Labor MP Christine Campbell intends to table the Doctors Conscience petition in Victorian parliament. (A second Victoria doctor, Dr K. — not Mark Hobart — is discussed in the article, who not only defies Section 8 but has been quoted as expressing the opinion that women who seek abortions deserve death. This is detailed in Daniel Mathews’ blog post which provides quotations allegedly from Dr. K. Doctors Conscience has issued a press release stating that they do not advocate for or support harm to pregnant women for any reason.) The Age also reports that the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association supports the repeal of Section 8.
Today The Australian reported that premier Denis Napthine had advised independent MP Geoff Shaw on what would be involved in overturning (or perhaps substantially revising) the Abortion Law Reform Act in Victoria. The ABC reports that Napthine describes himself as having issued pro forma advice on legislative process.
Bills to repeal Section 8 or make wider changes to the Abortion Law Reform Act 2008 are yet to be proposed.
Tasmania removes abortion from the criminal code
On November 22, Tasmania removed references to abortion from the criminal code. In addition, like in Victoria, legislation now requires that doctors (and counselors) who conscientiously oppose abortion refer pregnant people to others who they believe do not have such an objection. A PDF of the Reproductive Health (Access to Abortion) Bill 2013 is available.
Bonus USA
NPR recently reported on the findings of Paltrow & Flavin, Arrests of and forced interventions on pregnant women in the United States (1973-2005) who report:
- Arrests and incarceration of women because they ended a pregnancy or expressed an intention to end a pregnancy;
- Arrests and incarceration of women who carried their pregnancies to term and gave birth to healthy babies;
- Arrests and detentions of women who suffered unintentional pregnancy losses, both early and late in their pregnancies;
- Arrests and detentions of women who could not guarantee a healthy birth outcome;
- Forced medical interventions such as blood transfusions, vaginal exams, and cesarean surgery on pregnant women;
… Analysis of the legal claims used to justify the arrests of pregnant women found that such actions relied on the same arguments underlying so called “personhood” measures – that state actors should be empowered to treat fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses as completely and legally separate from the pregnant woman. Specifically, police, prosecutors, and judges in the U.S. have relied directly and indirectly on… [f]eticide statutes that create separate rights for the unborn and which were passed under the guise of protecting pregnant women and the eggs, embryos, and fetuses they carry and sustain from third-party violence… [my emphasis]
I think this point bears repeating: provisions that were introduced allegedly for the protection of pregnant people and fetuses from third parties have been subsequently used to police the behaviour of pregnant people, including but not limited to those seeking abortion, and including forcing medical procedures on them, and confining them. Fetal personhood provisions are designed to control the bodies of pregnant people.
This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
Mostly via tweeps, info on certain last minute Coalition announcements.
First, people saw the original version of The Coalition’s Policy to Enhance Online Safety for Children (original version), which read:
We will work with mobile phone companies (such as Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and their resellers) to develop online safety standards for smartphones and other devices with mobile network connectivity such as tablets, applicable to their use by children in two age groups: children up to the age of 12 years and teenagers.
As has recently been achieved in the UK, we expect these standards will involve mobilephone operators installing adult content filters on phones which will be switched on as the default unless the customer proves he or she is at least 18 years of age.
The Coalition will work with internet service providers (which provide fixed line broadband services to the home) to develop online safety standards for those services, recognising that they are very often accessed by children.
As has recently been achieved in the UK, we expect these standards will involve the major internet service providers providing home network filters for all new home broadband services, which will be switched on as the default unless the customer specifies otherwise.
This is a very different approach to the discredited compulsory filter proposal championedby the Rudd-Gillard Government, which was abandoned as unworkable.
The Coalition’s approach aims to empower parents — by giving them the choice of whetheror not to operate a filter at home, but by establishing the default setting as one which provides maximum protection.
The Coalition’s Policy to Enhance Online Safety for Children original/repudiated version, page 7
The Coalition very quickly backed away from this proposal:
Mr Turnbull quickly released a statement to clarify the Coalition’s position.
“The Coalition has never supported mandatory internet filtering. Indeed, we have a long record of opposing it,” the statement said.
Malcolm Turnbull’s statement is available in full on the Liberals’ site. The revised and/or correct version of the policy (depending on if you believe that they did accidentally make an early version public), reads:
Wewill work with mobile phone companies (such as Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and their resellers) and internet service providers (which provide fixed line broadband services to the home) to make available software which parents can choose to install on their own devices to protect their children from inappropriate material.
This is a very different approach to the discredited compulsory filter proposal championed by the Rudd-Gillard Government, which was abandoned as unworkable.
The Coalition’s Policy to Enhance Online Safety for Children current version (as linked from the Liberals’ policy listing), page 7
Moving on to last minute announcements they haven’t backed away from:
A Coalition Government, if elected, will crack down on Labor’s addiction to waste by auditing increasingly ridiculous research grants and reprioritising funding through the Australian Research Council (ARC) to deliver funds to where they’re really needed.
Some of the grants issued by the ARC in recent years have been, frankly, completely over the top.
There will be no reduction in research funding. In fact, the Coalition has announced new research into dementia and diabetes.
The Coalition would look to targeting those ridiculous research grants that leave taxpayers scratching their heads wondering just what the Government was thinking.
Taxpayer dollars have been wasted on projects that do little, if anything, to advance Australians research needs. For example:
- The quest for the ‘I’ – a$595,000 grant aimed at “reaching a better understanding of the self”;
- $160,000 on an examination of “sexuality in Islamic interpretations of reproductive health technologies in Egypt”;
- a $443,000 study into “The God of Hegel’s Post-Kantian idealism”; and
- $164,000 for a study into “how urban media art can best respond to global climate change” .
Ending More of Labor’s Waste, Liberal press release, September 5 2013
(My Honours supervisor is out there jumping for joy at the punctation used for that list, at least.)
Several research and research-affiliated groups have denounced the policy:
This is a direct attack on the academic freedom of researchers working in Australian universities. If Tony Abbott wins, independent research loses.
Specific research projects – all in the arts and social sciences – have been labeled
increasingly ridiculous. But scientists know that the flow of new knowledge is critical to the kinds ofreal wordresults that all Australians are proud of, and that the Coalition is calling for.It was CSIRO scientist John O’Sullivan’s search for exploding black holes that led to his discovery of wireless technology that has swept the world, and earned Australia $500 million in royalties with probably as much again to come.
You can also review STA’s overview of science policy for the Federal Election, if interested. The Conversation has a couple of pieces about the policy, one noting that we already have a body of expert scrutineers who reject any number of bad and merely only very good grant proposals, and we call it the Australian Research Council, and the other analysing the craftiness of the press release itself.
What else have you seen sneaking in under the radar now that the advertising blackout is in place?
Front page image credit: Election Day CC BY-SA David Morgan-Mar, from the 2007 Federal election.
This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
Continuing on my theme of finally becoming the voter who actually reviews policies, today we go a bit more niche: state surveillance, anti-terror provisions and similar, specifically whether anti-terror is used as an excuse to infringe on civil liberties and political organising. I’m going into this expecting it to be fairly short — it’s a bigger issue in the United States and the UK than here (or perhaps I know more activists there than here), where “border protection” serves some of the same rhetorical and political roles — although there are minor parties more interested in these issues.
As with other posts in this series, if there’s a lack of commentary in the post, make up for it in the comments. For media coverage, spin and personality issues — or general news! — head to the latest Media Circus thread instead.)
The Liberal’s Real Solutions has no mention of ‘surveillance’ or ‘privacy’. Their terrorism statement is that they will increase measures, focussing on security of ports: We will deliver improved counter-terrorism and domestic security measures in Australia and secure our ports and airports.
.They mention increased CCTV rollouts in their crime section (pg 42), none of which suggests that privacy and surveillance issues are a big issue for them. They also seem inclined to use the threat of terrorist immigration as an anti-refugee tactic, see eg this June press release.
In June 2013, Malcolm Turnbull issued a statement expressing some concern about the NSA’s PRISM program, particularly its implications for commercial interests, presumably Australian businesses hosting data on US servers. (I note incidentally that Real Solutions is hosted on Amazon Web Services. It’s just a curio since Real Solutions is public information, but I wonder if political parties host their donor databases and such on Australian servers?) If you search for the text of that statement on technical news sites, incidentally, the advertisements may encourage you to apply for a job with ASIO.
It’s difficult to find ALP information. They assert a right to privacy (National Platform, items 41 and 42, pages 186–187), largely centered around privacy of data held by the government, especially health information and credit information. They assert that [Labor will] ensure that personal information of Australians transferred overseas is protected
which I find difficult to interpret (if nothing else, the phrasing is rather ambiguous between personal information being sent overseas and Australians themselves being sent!). Elsewhere in the National Platform, they write:
Labor refuses to manipulate fear or racism for political gain in response to terror. Australia needs tough laws to deal with terrorism but, just as importantly, we need well-balanced laws that target the terrorists, not innocent citizens. We need strong safeguards to protect the civil and human rights that are fundamental to our freedoms. Labor is committed to finalising the review of the Anti-Terrorism Legislation.
item 132, page 209
I don’t see that translated into policy for the present campaign anywhere.
The Greens have a specific surveillance policy generally affirming a right to privacy. They seek to bring telecommunications surveillance back under the control of normal judicial warrants, and subject to Freedom of Information requests; they want intelligence sharing with the “5 Eyes” countries (the other four are the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand) overhauled; and they oppose proposals for data retention concerning Australian’s Internet use.
See also Electronic Frontiers Australia Election 2013 scorecard.
From a slightly haphazard collection on Monday, I focus today on minor parties that I know to have some interest in civil liberties and/or digital rights.
Privacy is listed as one of the four major civil liberties they value. They oppose both the proposed 2 year retention of Australian’s Internet use data, and denounse PRISM and PRISM-like programs.
As one would expect, this is a prominent issue in their campaign platform:
… the WikiLeaks Party will be fearless in its opposition to the creeping surveillance state, driven by globalised data collection and spying agencies, both state and corporate controlled. We will demand that all information on data seizure and storage of citizens’ data by government agencies and allied corporations be made public.
In addition, there’s a specific Surveillance and your privacy policy requiring that agencies seek a warrant to spy on your Internet usage; a twice-yearly tabling of aggregate figures related to such surveillance; and ASIO and anyone else cooperating with overseas agencies to report such cooperation publicly.
Front page image credit: Election Day CC BY-SA David Morgan-Mar, from the 2007 Federal election.
This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
In theory I am committed to the idea that if I want election coverage to talk about policy more in the lead-up to elections, it can’t hurt to be someone who is aware of and considers policy in the lead-up to elections. Even if some elections make it VERY VERY HARD FOR ME NOT MENTIONING ANY NAMES FEDERAL ELECTION 2013.
Thus, before the 2010 Federal election, I got one policy into a plan to review various party policies before getting sick from some childcare-acquired illness. I cannot promise to do better this time, but I can try. There’s five days before the Federal election; what do various parties have to say about anti-discrimination?
I haven’t included a lot of commentary on the policy positions I summarise here, but that’s what the comments are intended for! (Note that if you’re interested more in media coverage, spin and personality issues — or general news! — you probably want to comment at the latest Media Circus thread instead.)
For this analysis, I am largely relying on National Foundation for Australian Women (NAFW), Anti-discrimination and women’s human rights: policies of the major parties, July 2013. If I don’t cite policy specifically, I am using that analysis.
The NAFW summary notes the ALP’s consultations on consolidating federal anti-discrimination acts, and the drafting of Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill (2012), which has not however been implemented and is under review. Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Bill 2013 passed in June, providing additional protections on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status. The ALP in their own materials also notes their recent commissionin gof an inquiry into workplace discrimination against pregnant people or parents returning to work. (Labor is for Fairness) The Greens supported the passed bill and support the draft bill, and have advocated for the addition of domestic violence (presumably, victims of) as a category of illegal discrimination. They would also like the default religious exemptions replaced by case-by-case assessments, and for “family responsibilities” language to be expanded to caring responsibilities. The Coalition oppose the draft bill outright, to the point of not seeking amendments to it.
On marriage equality, the ALP’s National Platform presently reads Labor will amend the Marriage Act to ensure equal access to marriage under statute for all adult couples irrespective of sex who have a mutual commitment to a shared life.
(National Platform, item 126, page 168) and they have a specific “It’s Time for Marriage Equality” campaign. I cannot find a mention of marriage equality in the Liberal’s Real Solutions. The Greens go short-n-simple on their policy: The Greens want to legalise same-sex marriage in Australia and recognise same-sex marriages from overseas.
(Marriage Equality)
The Liberal policy states that We will support freedom of speech, particularly in relation to anti-discrimination legislation. Prohibitions on inciting racial hatred or intimidation of particular groups should be focused on offences of incitement and causing fear but not a prohibition on causing offence.
(Real Solutions, pg 44)
On disability, NAFW observes in their disability paper in most policy areas, across the three parties, disability is seldom specifically mentioned. Women with disabilities are not mentioned at all.
They observe that while the ALP is committed to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, they have not established the required targeted measures for women with disabilities specifically. Commitment to DisabilityCare (which the Coalition would call NDIS again) funding appears to have major party support until 2019. The ALP’s national platform is focussed on people with disabilities who can work, although it briefly acknowledges the existance of those who can’t, albeit only as a source of budget “pressure” (Labor has undertaken significant reform of the Disability Support Pension (DSP) to reward effort and initiative for those who can work, and to ease the pressure on the system which supports those who can’t
, National Platform, item 52, page 98).
Discrimination on the grounds of disability, as with grounds other than gender (ALP) or any grounds at all (Liberal), does not seem to be a focus of either ALP or Liberal policy except insofar as the Liberals distance themselves from racial vilification prohibitions. The Greens mention discrimination on the grounds of disability prominently in their policy.
Central policy sites:
This is limited to a small selection on the NSW ballot paper that I found interesting. Feel free to list and discuss other minor party policies in comments!
Policy overview can be found at the platform wiki page authored by their National Council.
Many uses of “discrimination” in their platform refer to the net neutrality issue, which concerns whether Internet providers can provide unequal access to different sources of information. When it comes to discrimination against protected groups, the party opposes legislative against racial vilification in favour of free speech rights:
While laws which criminalise “offensive” or “insulting” speech may be well-intentioned, mechanisms such as section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act impose dangerous subjectivity into our legal system. The perpetual risk in criminalising offensiveness is that almost any form of difference or disagreement can be viewed as offensive to someone, and nations such as the UK and Canada have experienced significant abuse of such laws. Even where protections technically exist, the mere threat of legal sanction may be sufficient to chill dialogue and speech, and recent events demonstrate that restrictions on one type of speech spread all too easily to include wider categories.
They support marriage equality in the sense of making it a private (not state-controlled) act. Their platform calls for the abolition of the Marriage Act in favour of a Civil Unions Act open to all consenting adult couples. (See also their detailed marriage policy.)
Policy overview can be found at Australian Sex Party – Federal Equality Policy.
They support large extensions to the existing anti-discrimination framework, including making discrimination based on occupation illegal, focussing on the effect of discrimination against sex workers; making political parties (and presumably their selection of candidates) subject to anti-discrimination law on the principle that this will improve gender equality in Parliament; ensuring equal access to assisted reproduction to LGBTIQ people; supplying appropriate documentation to sex and gender diverse people with names and pronouns; improving accessibility of sexual resources (such as adult shops) to disabled people; facilitating sexual services for disabled people; and providing specific sexual education for disabled people. In a separate policy they support sex worker access to work visas.
Policy overview can be found at Human rights and anti-discrimination.
Their policies are focussed around areas where they feel law is influenced by faith considerations and support the end of religious exemption clauses in anti-discrimination legislation. They support marriage equality. They support the enacting of a Bill of Rights and they ask that Australia legislate for the rights in UN International Convention on the Rights of the Child. They support bans on “identity hiding-garments or other items, including burqas and motorcycle helmets, in public places where there are legitimate security and/or safety concerns, or where personal identification is required” [my emphasis]
Front page image credit: Election Day CC BY-SA David Morgan-Mar, from the 2007 Federal election.
This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
People who support a reasonable balance between encouraging creation of artistic works by allowing creators to profit from them, and the interests of wider society in benefiting from the free availability of creative works (or even of facts) aren’t having a good day.
Skud has covered this over at Save Aussie Music:
Today EMI Australia lost their High Court appeal against Larrikin Music in the Kookaburra/Land Down Under case…
Leaving aside the problems with the copyright system, let’s just take a moment to look at Larrikin, the folk music label that holds the rights to “Kookaburra”. Larrikin was founded in 1974 by Warren Fahey, and sold to Festival Records in 1995. Festival, owned by Murdoch, was shut down and its assets sold to Warner Music Australia in 2005, for a mere $12 million.
Larrikin was home to a number of Australian artists, among them Kev Carmody, Eric Bogle, and Redgum
Kev Carmody, one of Australia’s foremost indigenous musicians, released four albums on Larrikin and Festival between 1988 and 1995, none of which are available on iTunes nor readily available as CDs (based on a search of online retailers). …
Warner bought Larrikin Records’ assets — two decades of Australian music — not because they want to share the music with the public, but to bolster their intellectual property portfolio, in the hope that one day they’ll be able to sue someone for using a riff or a line of lyrics that sounds somewhat like something Redgum or Kev Carmody once wrote. They do this at the expense of Australian music, history, and culture.
Lauredhel covered the case earlier at Hoyden too, focussing on whether the claim of infringement stands up to a legal layperson’s listen test and musical analysis: You better run, you better take cover.
Have you ever selected your timezone from a list which lists them like this: “Australia/Sydney”, “Europe/London”? Then you’ve used the zoneinfo database.
Timezones are complicated. You can’t work out what timezone someone is in based purely on their longitude, have a look at this map to see why. Timezones are highly dependent on political boundaries. On top of that, daylight savings transitions are all over the map (as it were). Some countries transition in an unpredictable fashion set by their legislature each year. Sometimes a sufficiently large event (such as the Sydney Olympics in 2000) causes a local daylight savings transition to happen earlier or later than that government’s usually predictable algorithm.
Therefore computer programs rely heavily on having a giant lookup table of timezones and daylight saving transitions. Data is needed both for the present, so that your clock can be updated, and for the past, so that the time of events ranging from blog entries to bank transactions can be correctly reported.
A great deal of software, including almost all open source software, relies on the freely available database variously called the tz database, the zoneinfo database or the Olson database.
Arthur David Olson (the “Olson” in “Olson database”) announced yesterday:
A civil suit was filed on September 30 in federal court in Boston; I’m a defendant; the case involves the time zone database.
The ftp server at elsie.nci.nih.gov has been shut down.
The mailing list will be shut down after this message.
The basis of the suit is that the zoneinfo database credits The American Atlas as a source of data, and The American Atlas has been purchased by astrology company Astrolabe Inc, who assert that the use of the data is an infringement of their copyright. Whether this is true is apparently highly arguable (in the US it seems to hinge on whether it’s a list of facts, which aren’t copyrightable) but in the meantime the central distribution point of the data is gone. And it could be a long meantime.
Now, people still have copies of the database (if you run Linux you probably do yourself). However, the source of updates has been removed, which means it will be out of date within a few weeks, and the community that created the updates has been fractured. Various people are doing various things, including a defence fund, a fork of the mailing list, and discussions about re-creating or resurrecting the data in other places. All a great waste of many creative people’s time and money, gain to society from Astrolabe’s action yet to be shown.
More information:
On 14th October the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which manages key Internet resources (notably, the global pool of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) on behalf of the US government, put out a press release (PDF) announcing that they were taking over the zoneinfo database:
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today took over operation of an Internet Time Zone Database that is used by a number of major computer systems.
ICANN agreed to manage the database after receiving a request from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
The database contains time zone code and data that computer programs and operating systems such as Unix, Linux, Java, and Oracle rely on to determine the correct time for a given location. Modifications to the database occur frequently throughout the year…
“The Time Zone Database provides an essential service on the Internet and keeping it operational falls within ICANN’s mission of maintaining a stable and dependable Internet,” said Akram Atallah, ICANN’s Chief Operating Officer.
I wonder if ICANN’s not-for-profit status is useful here. Just as Project Gutenberg can make United States public domain texts available globally, even though texts published prior to 1923 are not public domain world-wide, ICANN may present a less tempting target for lawsuits than other possible homes for the zoneinfo database.
This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
Via the Australian Breastfeeding Association on Twitter, this press release from the Federal Attorney-General:
Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Minister for the Status of Women Kate Ellis today welcomed the passage through Parliament of the Sex and Age Discrimination Legislation Amendment Bill 2010.
The new law will provide greater protections by… establishing breastfeeding as a separate ground of discrimination, and allowing measures to be taken to accommodate the needs of breastfeeding mothers…
Here’s the text of a Senate review of the Bill as regards breastfeeding:
Creating a separate ground of discrimination for breastfeeding
2.9 Item 17 of Schedule 1 of the Bill would insert a separate ground of discrimination in relation to breastfeeding into the Sex Discrimination Act, to implement Recommendation 12 of the Senate Report. The Senate Report recommended that a separate ground be created because:
…the intent of the Act is to protect women from discrimination based upon them breastfeeding. This is achieved by providing in subsection 5(1A) that breastfeeding is a characteristic that appertains generally to women. This seems a somewhat circuitous path. It would be desirable for the Act to provide for specific protection against discrimination on the ground of breastfeeding.[17]
2.10 The separate ground of discrimination, provided for in proposed new section 7AA, only applies to women who are breastfeeding. ‘Breastfeeding’ would be defined as ‘the act of expressing milk’; ‘an act of breastfeeding’; and ‘breastfeeding over a period of time’. The inclusion of a reference to ‘breastfeeding over a period of time’ would ensure that a respondent cannot claim that a discriminatory act was lawful because the complainant was not actually breastfeeding at the time the act occurred.
2.11 The protections against discrimination on the ground of breastfeeding would be extended to both direct discrimination and indirect discrimination, under proposed subsections 7AA(1) and (2) respectively. Under subsection 7AA(1), direct discrimination would occur if a person treats a woman less favourably than someone else, ‘in circumstances that are the same or not materially different’, by reason of:
…the woman’s breastfeeding; or
…a characteristic that appertains generally to women who are breastfeeding; or…that is generally imputed to women who are breastfeeding.
2.12 The EM also provides an example of both direct and indirect discrimination in relation to breastfeeding:
- direct discrimination would occur where an employer refuses to hire any woman who is breastfeeding, or a restaurateur declined to serve a breastfeeding patron; and
- indirect discrimination would occur where an employer imposes a requirement on employees that they ‘must not take any breaks for set periods during the day under any circumstances’, which would have the effect of disadvantaging women who ‘need to express milk’.
2.13 The Bill provides that discrimination on the grounds of breastfeeding is also prohibited in the following areas of public life (subject to certain exemptions in Division 4 of the Sex Discrimination Act):
- education;
- goods, services and facilities;
- accommodation;
- land;
- clubs; and
- the administration of Commonwealth laws and programs.
2.14 Item 60 of Schedule 1 would prevent a man from bringing a complaint of unlawful sexual discrimination on the basis that a person grants to a woman rights or privileges related to the fact that they are breastfeeding. This amendment recognises that breastfeeding may ‘give rise to special needs, such as for private areas for breastfeeding, or hygienic areas for storage of expressed milk’, which should not be subject to complaints of discrimination.
I am assuming that the wording that regards all people lactating and feeding a baby as women is a pretty pervasive problem in this area? Otherwise this seems like very good news on a number of fronts.
The bill also has provisions about discrimination on the basis of family responsibilities, and increased protection for students who are harassed, including provisions about the harassment of a student by others from a different institution (I’m recalling now the University of Sydney strengthening their internal provisions regarding their residential colleges), and harassment of students under the age of 16.