Archive for August 5, 2008

I Can Haz Intellectual Property? How ICanHasCheezburger.com Stole our Idea for a Satellite Site

If this isn’t the first time you’ve ever visited a site on the internet, I assume you’ve heard of icanhascheezburger (ICHC), and the meme it popularized, “lolcats.” If this is your first internet destination ever, I’m supremely honored.

Anyways, I’m a big lolcat fan, and so is my law school friend, who we’ll call Elvis (using her cat’s name for the purposes of anonymity). In late January, we decided to take the lolcat meme to the next level, and started a blog (“Pollcats” – get it?) using lolcaptions and political figures to make hilarious political points. Example to the right. The site did tolerably well, but not very well. So, on February 11th, we decided to e-mail the folks at ICHC to ask if they’d put a link to our site on theirs, owing to the unity of our missions. The e-mail follows.

Re: a lol* site we’d like you to see!
From: Ames <xxxx@nyu.edu>
Date: February 11, 2008 10:06:00 AM EST
To: lol@icanhascheezburger.com
Cc: **********@gmail.com

My friend [Elvis] and I are long time fans of your site, and we’ve started a lol* spinoff site for making fun of political candidates. It’s http://pollcats.blogspot.com/, and we think it’s pretty awesome… and we’re pretty sure you’ll agree :-). What we were wondering is, since we’re a brand-new site, would you mind giving us a plug on your site some day? Or do you have any advice for us on how to garner traffic? We think we’re deserving…

The proprietors of ICHC never responded. At least, not directly. But, on March 18th, five weeks after our e-mail and almost two months after we launched our site, they launched their own version of our exact idea, titled “PunditKitchen” (link to first ever entry). While I can’t guarantee they ever read our e-mail… I have to wonder, especially given the month lagtime.

Of course, this may be an innocent case of two people coming up with the same idea at the same time, a la Newton & Leibniz. I call it fluxions, you call it “the calculus”; I call it “Pollcats,” you call it “Pundit Kitchen.” Even assuming the worst, Elvis and I lacked the resources to popularize the idea, as we’d clearly indicated, and especially because you can’t copyright an idea as general as ours, ICHC’s owners were within their rights to take the idea and run. Especially when the site they’ve ended up developing from the idea is, in fact, superb.

But a little credit would have been nice…

Happy Birthday, Barack: Democrats Out-Register Republicans

With the McCain campaign continuing its descent into mudslinging, and otherwise persisting in distracting America from any issues of substance, it’s been a bad week for the Democrats. But, there’s good news on the horizon: voter registration records show Democrats out-registering Republicans, and the makeup of key states changing from Republican locks to plausible swing-states. With polls showing Obama within 5% of McCain in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and North Carolina, Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy and Obama’s ridiculous financial edge continue to promise a stunning victory. Happy birthday indeed, Senator Obama.

John McCain, Dick Cheney, and Getting Past the Bush Years

One of my favorite bloggers has asked me to say something nice about John McCain, and I’ll say this: John McCain is an American hero, and had McCain been the Republican nominee in 2000, the 2000 Election would’ve been a win/win for America. John McCain of 2000 was a principled man who wasn’t afraid to speak his beliefs candidly, and take heat from his opponents for the same. Alas for the recent Republican rightward vector, which has driven McCain to become the waffling, ideologically comprised, adrift candidate he is today. By building a culture built on one question – “are you with us, or against us?” – Bush made McCain’s kind of politician, the kind that gleefully answered, “none of the above,” obsolete, to the detriment of America. McCain’s greatest failing is that he let this happen to him, and happen to us.

While I mourn the loss of that rare commodity – the good politician – I nonetheless congratulate the Democratic Party for not letting America forget John McCain’s complicity in the betrayal of the American people over the last eight years. The Democrats’ latest push has taken the form of associating McCain – and McCain’s potential VP picks – with the current, ridiculously unpopular vice president. Needless to say, this is not an association that McCain relishes, and he’s been doing everything in his power to ditch the association. It’s bad enough to have to speak after George W. Bush at your party’s convention – while two other conventions are going on simultaneously – but to have to publicly endorse Dick Cheney? That’s too much.

I think the “McCain is Bush” talking point is a useful one, and I’m glad to hear the Democrats (and third parties) using it. If McCain started the Bush years as a good man, he did nothing to arrest America’s decline -

- and his unexplained promises to fix America ring hollow, and suggest more of the same, without further explication. McCain should be forced to pay the price for standing by while America needed him.

However, this talking point evokes little clash between the candidates, and does not play into Obama’s main need going forward: the need to prove himself, and prove his ideas. The Democrats could best serve the Obama candidacy by criticizing McCain’s ideas head-on, and blunting his perceived strengths.

Continuing to equate McCain to Bush, while McCain persists in his slapdash negative ads, amounts to the rhetorical equivalent of the two campaigns sailing past each other in the night. One can only land so many salvos in that scenario. The Democrats have little to lose from a head on confrontation, so let’s get to it already.

I apologize for the odd posting schedule lately: I’m dealing with a sick cat. Expect an article later today detailing the “inflated tires” debacle, a joint piece by Ames & Matt, and then a return to normalcy.

Framing Offshore Drilling

We’re willing to grant that, if drilling can be done responsibly, in an environmentally sound manner, without false promises, and as part of a comprehensive energy solution, it might be a tolerable prospect.  Conservatives, however, continue to frame drilling as a one-stop solution and mock Obama’s calls for energy responsibility.  Although it’s delightful to see the “party of personal responsibility” calling for government handouts, it’s bad for American’s national debate.

Phyllis Schlafly: Benefit of the Doubt to Wife-Beaters

Not to dwell on the Schlaflys, but according to Phyllis Schlafly, men accused of domestic violence should be given the benefit of the doubt, especially when the right to own a gun is on the line.  Schlafly’s idea of the law seems to contemplate a finger always on the scales of justice, to tip the right way according to politics: in favor of conviction, for an alleged terrorist, and in favor of exculpation for a gun-owning white male.  Leave it to the fringes of the religious right to stand up for a man’s right to take a shot at his wife.

The Cowardice of Guantanamo Bay

You may have noticed, in a development covered in the “sideblog” – those little micro-stories to the far right – that American conservatives continue to take exception to the extension of habeas corpus rights to indefinite detainees at Guantanamo bay, styling detainees, inter alia, as “inmate terrorists,” as if judgment has been passed by the mere act of an individual’s apprehension. Obviously, detention is not a proxy for guilt: our national paranoia has given us the idea that terrorism is so omnipresent that “jail them all now, let God sort them out” is the right – and indeed the only – answer. Even regardless of overinflated fears of further terrorism, “guilty until innocent” is never the proper rubric of culpability for a democracy committed to the rule of law. Setting aside the vital betrayal of our national spirit that Guantanamo represents, even more fundamentally, the act of jailing suspects without trial is an act of cowardice.

Our justice system – much like the first amendment – strikes a balance between the rights of the accused, and the rights of society, that deliberately places the burden on the state to prove guilt. No doubt proving guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” is difficult. Indeed, that’s the point. American justice rests on the assumption that, all things being equal, the truth will always “out.” The guilty will be convicted, and the innocent freed, given a fair chance to present all evidence bearing on the crime. Guilty men and women may go free at times, but only when objective reality cannot be assessed clearly enough to justify the potentially erroneous deprivation of an individual’s liberty. Our moral calculus values the right of the individual to freedom, and the ripple effect this respect has on our society by inculcating a respect for the impartial law, over the state’s need to wholly eradicate crime. A citizen’s right to live without fear of the government stands on equal footing with the citizen’s right to live in an ordered society, without crime. Such is the compromise of democracy: in most cases, the truth will out, and where the pursuit of truth fails to successfully recognize and punish crime, the danger of erroneous exculpation is outweighed by the societal importance of perceived justice.

Abandoning this framework in the case of terrorism suggests that, where the stakes are higher, the ordered pursuit of justice through rational debate is somehow inadequate to the task: it suggests that, where more lives are on the line, the scales must be weighted, because we’re too afraid to leave crime and terrorism to the impartial facts.  This cowardly abandonment of our own national commitment to impartiality fails on its face.  Justice is not altered by convenience.  That more lives are on the line does not alter the moral calculus.  If the ramifications of erroneous exculpation are worse, the ramifications of erroneous inculpation are higher, too, as they inhere not just to the individual, but to the society as a whole, through the degradation of the respect for law.  American democracy requires us to tolerate a certain amount of risk, as the price of living in a free society.  Those concerns only deepen during wartime.

We can’t be so afraid of what the trial of suspected terrorists would yield – as in, potential innocence – that we run from impartiality at the first sign of trouble.  If we do, we let terrorism strike a serious blow to the American spirit.

Andy Schlafly Requires a Down Payment to Debate

In his latest attempt to defray the prospect of liberals debating him on neutral ground – and therefore winning – Schlafly demands that liberal debaters put up a “down payment” before the event. Charging for debate hasn’t been a viable means of silencing dissent since the poll tax. Apparently Andy hasn’t gotten the memo.