Students at UC Berkeley are up in arms. The cause du jour? They might have to cover their own political expenditures when they participate in state or local political activities. The SF Chronicle, obviously sympathetic to the students, titles the article "UC officials want student governments politically neutral."
Could the Chronicle headline really be true? I was pretty surprised to see it. While I wouldn't put it past CA's intrusive governmental bodies to silence someone's speech, this seemed to be going over the line. In fact, the headline is extremely misleading - if you read the whole article, you'll discover that the issue emerged when UC Berkeley set aside $35,000 of mandatory student fees to re-imburse students for their campaign against Prop 54. What's at issue here is not whether students are free to speak their minds on any topic at any time. The issue is whether or not other students should be forced to pay for the state and local political activities and campaigns of student government officials.
I've never been a fan of union political activity when membership in a union is mandatory or virtually so. If some union members want to form a political group and support certain candidates, that's their perogative. But union members who are in the union because it's necessary for their job should not be spending money to support candidates with whom or policies with which they disagree. And neither should public university students.
I couldn't resist reposting this from BoingBoing:
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Judge Noonan, one of the Ninth Circuit judges who listened to the Morpheus case in which the legality of building a tool without the entertainment industry's permission -- and hence the future of the Internet -- is being decided directed this blast at Ramos, the attorney arguing the music publishers' side:
"Let me say what I think your problem is. You can use these harsh terms ["piracy," "theft"], but you are dealing with something new, and the question is, does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that something new. And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it 'theft.' You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem. Address that if you would. And curtail the use of abusive language."
EFF is now hosting the entire argument in the case as an MP3, which is in the public domain.
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The use of the terms 'piracy' and 'theft' to describe copying digital content without compensating rightsholders has long been one of my pet peeves. Pirates rape and pillage - none of that going on here. Nice to see a federal judge with very similar sentiments.