Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has a full account of what happened. Watts was returning to Canada via the Michigan border after helping a friend move house in Nebraska. After border guards asked to search his car, Watts got out of the vehicle and questioned what they were doing - and immediately was pepper sprayed, handcuffed, and placed under arrest. Witnesses in the car with him said he did nothing more than question the guards; he did not attempt to attack them. Nevertheless, he has been charged with felony assault against a federal officer.

While Watts was being detained, Doctorow called Cindy Cohn, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She called her contacts in Michigan, and luckily got help from a civil rights lawyer there who got Watts released the next day. He is safe at home now, but still faces felony charges that could land him in jail for two years, and prevent his ever crossing back into the United States again.

Doctorow explains:

Defending this charge will cost a fortune, and an inadequate defense could cost Peter his home, his livelihood and his liberty. Peter's friends are raising money for his legal defense. I just sent him CAD$1,000, because this is absolutely my biggest nightmare: imprisoned in a foreign country for a trumped-up offense against untouchable border cops. I would want my friends to help me out if it ever happened to me.

If you want to help, here's how. Watts' friend David Nickle writes:

We're going to think of something suitable in the New Year - but immediately, anyone who wants to help can do so easily. Peter's website, rifters.com, has a link to a PayPal account, whimsically named the Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund. He set it up years ago for fans of the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight and his Rifters books, to cover veterinary bills for the cats he habitually rescues from the mean streets of Toronto. Peter has made it clear that he doesn't want to use the veterinary money to cover his lawsuit. But until we can figure out a more graceful conduit for the legal fund, that's the best place to send donations for now. Just let Peter know that the donation's for his legal defense, and that's where it will go.

Here's the link to the backlist page on Peter's website, rifters.com, or you can just send a PayPal donation to donate@rifters.com.

The link to the Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund is in the middle of the page. The page also links to Creative Commons editions of all his published work, which he's made available free. Peter would approve, we think, if you downloaded one or two or all of them. Whether you make a donation to the legal fund or not.

via BoingBoing

In a paper published in Forensic Science International, Dan Frumkin, a private forensics researcher, claims that fabricating DNA evidence has become so easy that "[a]ny biology undergraduate could perform this."

Frumkin outlines two methods for fabricating DNA evidence. The first requires access to a small sample of an individual's DNA, such as a hair or a bit of saliva. The size of the sample is then increased through a common technique known as DNA amplification. Then the hopeful framer takes blood from a different individual, centrifuges it to remove the DNA-carrying white blood cells, and leaves only the red blood cells, which contain no DNA. The person then adds the amplified DNA to the blood sample, creating a handy supply of blood that could be splashed onto a crime scene to implicate the chosen target.

The second method requires no actual sample of DNA, but a person's DNA profile, which may be stored in a law enforcement database. These profiles identify variations at 13 specific spots in an individual's genome. Frumkin claims that a scientist could keep a library of a cloned snippets of DNA representing the variants at the 13 spots (he estimates 425 samples would be needed in all), and he or she could mix the snippets to create a DNA sample matching anyone's genetic profile.

Frumkin says that, at the moment, there are ways to determine whether DNA evidence has been fabricated (and his own company, Nucleix, provides such tests), but it's a step forensic labs don't normally take. Although some respondents question whether criminals will actually use these techniques to throw suspicion off themselves and onto others, Tania Simoncelli, an American Civil Liberties Union science adviser, suggests that it's time for courts to reevaluate the reliability of DNA evidence:

"DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints," she said. "We're creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology."

DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show [NY Times]

39-year-old Christopher Handley, an office worker, was brought up on charges of possessing child pornography in 2006 when customs officials seized a package for him. It contained several manga, some of which were "lolicon" that showed what officials said were children being sexually abused. There were also images of bestiality. Handley has a huge collection of manga, and only a few are lolicon. He also had absolutely no child pornography of any description in his house or on his computer.

Nevertheless, Handley entered a guilty plea. According to Threat Level, it was simply because his attorney had exhausted all other options:

"It's probably the only law I'm aware of, if a client shows me a book or magazine or movie, and asks me if this image is illegal, I can't tell them," says Eric Chase, Handley's attorney.

Chase says he recommended the plea agreement (.pdf) to his client because he didn't think he could convince a jury to acquit him once they'd seen the images in question. The lawyer declined to describe the details. "If they can imagine it, they drew it," he says. "Use your imagination. It was there."

The manga collector faces up to 15 years in prison for possessing comic books.

Handley is the first person to be convicted under the controversial Protect Act, which makes drawings of fictional characters into potential child pornography. How did this happen?

In 2002, the Supreme Court struck down the so-called Morphing Law, which held that fictional cartoon or photoshopped images depicting minors having sex would would also be treated as obscene (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition). Under that decision, last week's conviction of Handley could not have happened. But in 2003, the Protect Law passed, which held that "a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting" showing children in sexual situations could be ruled illegal if local community standards consider it "obscene." This is particularly relevant given that Handley was tried in an area, Southern Iowa, where average community members may not be aware of the styles and content of typical manga.

In the United States, the original intent of the child pornography laws was to protect children from sexual abuse. The idea is that when actual, living children (not images of them) participate in the making of sexual images, they are harmed. The US Supreme Court heard a case in 1982 (New York v. Ferber) whose outcome, in short, made any sexual images containing minors obscene and illegal - even if those images had redeeming social value. New York v. Ferber did not cover fictional images, only photography and film which involved actual children.

The Protect Act dramatically expands the scope of laws permitted under Ferber. But will actual children be protected by sending a man to prison for collecting fictional comic books?

As Comic Book Legal Defense Fund executive director Charles Brownstein put it:

This art that this man possessed as part of a larger collection of manga … is now the basis for [a sentence] designed to protect children from abuse. The drawings are not obscene and are not tantamount to pornography. They are lines on paper.

via Threat Level

NOTE: Image above comes from the manga/anime Oh! My Goddess, a typical children's title. It is not considered Lolicon.

Diamond's article in the New Yorker was called "Vengeance Is Ours," and described a young New Guinean man, called Wemp, and his violent quest for revenge after his uncle Soll was killed by another tribe. Diamond claimed Wemp was out to destroy a tribal leader called Isum, and that to do so he went on a murderous rampage, recruiting dozens of "soldiers" to aid him, and ultimately killing 17 people as well as injuring several others grievously. One of the injured was supposedly Isum (pictured, at far right), whom Diamond describes as being in a wheelchair.

Diamond used the men's story to illustrate a story from his own life, about how his father-in-law had the opportunity to kill the man responsible for murdering his family in a Polish prison camp during World War II. Instead of killing the man, Diamond's father-in-law turned him into police, who released him a year later. Apparently Diamond's father-in-law regretted for the rest of his life that he did not take violent revenge, and it weighed on his conscience.

But the New Guineans, Diamond claims, have no such neuroses because unlike civilized European guys they exact violent revenge on each other all the time.

The problem is that Diamond's notion of tribal culture is based on a fantasy of Diamond's own - one that was propagated by the New Yorker, which never fact-checked his story with the two men it featured as main characters. Wemp killed nobody, and Isum is not in a wheelchair - as you can see from the picture above. Indeed, the two men say they have never met and Isum has suffered no injuries at all. After the story went up online, Wemp suffered tremendously: He'd been accused of heinous crimes, which the men's lawsuit says he did not commit. Other mistakes Diamond made include extremely basic facts, such as which tribes the men are associated with.

If the men's allegations turn out to be correct, it seems that Diamond cobbled together Wemp's story out of several different tales he told while driving Diamond around when Diamond visited the island for the World Wildlife Fund. Essentially, Diamond took the stories his driver told him without ever asking permission, turned them into a lesson about his own life, and published them.

And now, say Wemp and Isum, they have to pay the price for Diamond's tidy little story.

According to StinkyJournalism, a watchdog site that investigated Diamond's New Yorker story:

Despite Diamond's claims, Wemp was no Handa tribal leader, nor was Henep Isum a violent leader of the Ombals. Isum isn't even an Ombal tribesman; he is a Henep, hence, his full name: Henep Isum Mandingo (tribal name, first name, last name) . . . Even though Diamond's article says the quotations by Wemp were made in 2001-2002, this was untrue. The several long and complex (and erudite) quotations attributed to Wemp-that Wemp vehemently denies saying-were apparently composited together by Diamond into a single narrative, along with bits and pieces of Wemp's stories Diamond remembered from years before . . . Diamond's many other errors range from mistakenly saying that two villages are tribes (Aralinja and Ungupi are villages) to creating an entire history of conflict between two tribes where only the smallest fragments of truth can be found and then traced back to the seeds of real events that actually took place . . . By Diamond connecting false assertions of crimes to real people-all sourced to Wemp-he has put [Wemp] in danger among tribes.

It turns out all the crimes that Diamond describes can be traced back to one outbreak of tribal violence in the early 1990s, when 4 men died. It was not an ongoing vengeance cycle, nor did it have anything to do with Wemp's uncle Soll.

It would seem that the person most interested in violent revenge is Diamond himself, on behalf of his father-in-law. Why did he need to exaggerate and fabricate a tale about tribal warfare in New Guinea to tell it?

via StinkyJournalism

The legal action brought by Fox against Warner Bros. claims that the former studio was the true owner of the movie rights to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic, and that Warners had essentially purchased non-existent rights from producer Larry Gordon. With a trial due to begin January 6th next year, both sides were pushing for U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess to render a pre-trial judgement. And then Feess decided to mess up everyone's plans; not only did he refuse to offer a judgement without trial, he also pushed the trial date out two weeks, meaning that the studios won't have their day in court until January 20th at the earliest, claiming that the argument is so complicated, only a full trial will unravel the truth behind the shenanigans.

Assuming that one or both of the studios don't flinch, that gives the courts thirty days to work out who owns the movie before its planned release on March 6th. I'd lay money on some kind of unusual settlement happening before that happens, however.

Quick Takes [LA Times]

With Indian, Chinese, and Japanese spacecraft now orbiting the moon and the US and Japan planning to build lunar bases, it’s only a matter of time before disputes arise over who has a right to build on and mine the moon and where. The UN’s so-called Moon Treaty declares that the moon is part of mankind’s common heritage, and would ban ownership of any extraterrestrial party, but the treaty has never passed and has not been ratified by any nation with a space program.

According to Virgiliu Pop, that’s all for the best, since the UN has the wrong idea. Pop is a Romanian space lawyer who has written extensively on the topic of lunar property. His latest book Who Owns the Moon? Extraterrestrial Aspects of Land and Mineral Resources, Pop explores the possibility of creating a legal framework for property and natural resources law on the moon. At the heart of this exploration is the notion that energetic individuals, rather than international coalitions, will need to claim property in order to advance the cause of extraterrestrial colonization:

"Homesteading is likely to transform the lunar desert in the same manner as it transformed the 19th Century United States," he said. "Space is indeed a new frontier calling for individualism rather than collectivism, and its challenges need to be addressed with a legal regime favorable to property rights."

He also challenges the notion that homesteading will favor citizens of wealthy nations, whose public and private enterprises have the resources and technology to travel into space:

"A refutation of the Common Heritage principle does not mean, however, that the developing world will, or should, be left behind in the space era," he said. "China, India and Brazil are living proofs that a developing country can, through its own effort, join the spacefaring club. Instead of freeloading on the efforts of the older spacefarers, the have-nots should pool their meager financial resources into a common space agency or into regional ones, and proceed at exploiting the riches of outer space for themselves."

Pop’s ultimate concern is that, without the development of a legal framework for lunar property rights, the moon will remain largely undeveloped. But, with more and more private companies looking into space travel, it may be a necessary to establish rights for private systems simply to ensure that laws are in place before the first settlers stake their claims. If the international community can develop a cohesive and enforceable framework, it could help keep the lunar frontier from descending into the wild West.

[Space.com]

The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi: The alien Nidu are not the most popular race on Earth, so it’s not surprising when an anti-Nidu agent stages a flatulent assassination against one of the Nidu diplomats. The Nidu are pissed, but offer Earth one chance to avoid war: obtain for them the Android’s Dream, a rare sheep used in Nidu coronation ceremonies. The ruling Nidu clan owns the patent on the sheep’s DNA, in perpetuity, and few are permitted to breed it. The problem is, someone is killing off all the sheep.
Are patents a pro or a con? Con. The ruling Nidu clan uses their ownership of the sheep to stay in power since they’re the only ones who own the sheep necessary for the coronation sacrifice. Of course, by limiting the breeding of the sheep, they screw themselves over when the sheep start dying off.

The Venetian Court by Charles Harness: Charles Harness was himself a patent attorney, and often cast patent lawyers as his heroes. Inventor Ellen Welles develops a new product called Fiber K. Unfortunately, a megacorporation that uses a supercomputer to churn out inventions has beaten her to the patent. Too bad for her, since patent infringement is a capital offense. So she hires Quentin Thomas, patent attorney extraordinaire.
Are patents a pro or a con? Con. Harness neatly exaggerates the devastation individuals and companies face when they discover they’re infringing some one else’s patent. He also foresaw the rise of patent trolls, companies that file and buy up as many patents as possible only to extort licensing fees from other businesses.

“Elimination” by John Campbell: An inventor who has discovered a way to can and transport electricity goes to his late father’s friend, an attorney, to apply for a patent. The attorney, doubtful that such a revolutionary invention should be made public, proceeds to tell the inventor about the greatest invention in the world, and how it almost destroyed its inventor.
Are patents a pro or a con? Con. At the beginning of the story, the patent attorney suggests that someone could quietly purchase the patent and destroy it, ensuring this life-saving technology never sees the light of day. In actually, the patent would make electricity in a can a matter of public record, and the owner could only hold it back from the world for 20 years.

The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis: The alien Thomas Newton comes to Earth to build a spaceship to shuttle refugees from his home planet to Earth. To raise money, he patents his race’s advanced technology and sets himself up as an entrepreneur.
Are patents a pro or a con? Actually, one of the few Pros. True, the patent system is meant for new inventions, not long-existing alien tech. But thanks to a system that gives owners exclusive rights to sell their technology, humanity gets a big technological boost.

Vatta’s War by Elizabeth Moon: In the distant future, spaceships communicate with one another via ansible. A single group owns all significant patents on communications technology and consequently functions as a de facto government.
Are patents a pro or a con? Con. With a runaway patent system and no antitrust laws, a sole organization is able to hold the universe’s trade groups hostage to its rule.

Next by Michael Crichton: After BioGen, a genetics research company, harvests cells from a cancer survivor, the company patents his cell line. The survivor sues the company, but loses when the court awards ownership of the line to BioGen.
Are patents a pro or a con? Con. As with many of the scientific experiments he depicts, Crichton envisions the law as spiraling out of control. BioGen decides that, since it owns the man’s cell line, it can harvest cells from his unwilling descendents, hunting down his daughter and grandson.

In the US, scientific evidence presented during a trial must meet the Daubert standard (or, in some jurisdictions, the Frye standard). To be admissible, an expert’s scientific testimony must be relevant to the case, and the expert must have arrived at his or her conclusions through the scientific method. If the admissibility of the evidence is challenged, a judge will consider the use of empirical testing, whether the expert’s method of drawing conclusions has been subject to peer review, whether the error rate of such conclusions is known so that it may be disclosed during trial, and whether the method and conclusions have been accepted by a significant proportion of the scientific community.

Currently, brain scans can be entered into evidence, but they are generally used by defendants to mitigate culpability. Scans can show that a defendant suffers from brain damage, a tumor, or a neurological defect that impairs their judgment, perception, ability to control their actions, or sense of right and wrong. In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, which famously held that it is unconstitutional to execute individuals for crimes they committed as a minor, the Supreme Court admitted fMRI readings into evidence of the biological differences between adolescent and adult brains.

This indicates that the court system does put stock in these tests under certain circumstance. But, for courts to start admitting brain scans as evidence of criminal activity, they would have to pass the Daubert standard. Unfortunately for defendants, some legal scholars have deemed Daubert “near irrelevant,” as certain judges err on the side of including too much evidence, and defendants are unlikely to win Daubert challenges against the prosecution. And this can prove problematic when the evidence is presented to CSI-loving jurors who are more likely than judges to view scientific testimony as infallible.

But even if courts accept the scientific methodology behind this use of brain scans, there are still constitutional issues to consider. The Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution states that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” And courts will have to determine whether the use of brain scans by the prosecution presents an unlawful compulsion of testimony from the defendant.

A defendant’s physical body can be used as evidence against him in certain circumstances. For example, the state can compel a criminal suspect to provide a DNA sample, and can even take blood from an unconscious suspect to determine whether there are drugs or alcohol in the defendant’s system and later enter the results into evidence. But unlike brain scans, these are not communicative acts and they do not reveal the content of the mind.

The closest analogy we have to brain scan lie detectors is the polygraph. Like brain scans, polygraphs purport to offer a glimpse into a suspect’s mind. Although the Supreme Court has never ruled on the introduction of a defendant’s polygraph by a prosecutor, it alluded to the problem of polygraphs in Schmerber v. California. The case, which upheld the admissibility of a blood test taken without a defendant’s consent, distinguished taking this type of evidence from measuring physiological responses”

Some tests seemingly directed to obtain "physical evidence," for example, lie detector tests measuring changes in body function during interrogation, may actually be directed to eliciting responses which are essentially testimonial. To compel a person to submit to testing in which an effort will be made to determine his guilt or innocence on the basis of physiological responses, whether willed or not, is to evoke the spirit and history of the Fifth Amendment. Such situations call to mind the principle that the protection of the privilege "is as broad as the mischief against which it seeks to guard." Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U. S. 547, 142 U. S. 562.

However, polygraphs have been successfully introduced by prosecutors during sentencing proceedings. In the 2006 case United States v. Johnson, the 2nd Circuit upheld the introduction of Jeffrey Johnson’s polygraph results, whose introduction he had stipulated to prior to taking the test, stating that it did not violate his Fifth Amendment rights. And even if brain scan evidence is never successfully introduced in court, it could still be used the same way polygraphs are today: to coerce suspects who fail the tests into making a confession.

Complex brain imaging is making waves in court [SF Gate]

Prosecution offices in India have set up labs to examine suspects who submit to the test. When areas of the brain associated with memory, such as those dealing with smell and sound, light up during the description of a crime, prosecutors see that as evidence of the subject's commission of the crime:

Ms. Sharma, 24, agreed to take a BEOS test in Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra. (Suspects may be tested only with their consent, but forensic investigators say many agree because they assume it will spare them an aggressive police interrogation.)

After placing 32 electrodes on Ms. Sharma's head, investigators said, they read aloud their version of events, speaking in the first person (“I bought arsenic”; “I met Udit at McDonald's”), along with neutral statements like “The sky is blue,” which help the software distinguish memories from normal cognition.

For an hour, Ms. Sharma said nothing. But the relevant nooks of her brain where memories are thought to be stored buzzed when the crime was recounted, according to Mr. Joseph, the state investigator. The judge endorsed Mr. Joseph's assertion that the scans were proof of “experiential knowledge” of having committed the murder, rather than just having heard about it.

Previously, Indian courts had accepted BEOS results only as corroborating evidence, not proof in itself of criminal activity. Citing the seriousness of the outcome (Sharma received a life sentence), many neuroscientists and bioethicists in the US have stated that the technology, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, has entered the legal system far too soon. But even if these supposed mind-reading technologies never meet the evidentiary standards of courts outside of India, other possible public and private uses exist:

No Lie MRI, a company in California, promises on its Web site to use the scans to help with developing interpersonal trust and military intelligence, among other tasks. In August, a committee of the National Research Council in Washington predicted that, with greater research, brain scans could eventually aid “the acquisition of intelligence from captured unlawful combatants” and “the screening of terrorism suspects at checkpoints.”

Image from Bioedge.

India's Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated [NY Times]

Artificial Intelligence and Transhuman Law: When Zoe-R comes online, the legal profession is gong to have to ask a lot of hard questions. Is she the same person as Zoe Graystone? Is she a person at all? Can Daniel Graystone hold intellectual property rights in a sentient being? Is he her owner or her parent? And, if she goes on to commit genocide against humanity, is Daniel legally culpable?

Who is working on it: The Terasem Movement, founded by lawyer and satellite communications entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, explores practical and philosophical issues surrounding nanotechnology and cyberconsciousness. It publishes two journals to that end, The Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology and The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, and this December, Terasem will hold its Fourth Annual Colloquium on the Law of Futuristic Persons.

Mental Privacy: Sure, you’ll want to keep the details of your genome safe from insurance companies and future employers, but the next battlefield of personal privacy may be your mind. Researchers are working to develop remote EEGs and other brainwave detectors that could one day be used as stealth lie detectors or a new layer of airport security. Brain fingerprinting technology, which tests whether suspects have knowledge of a specific crime, is currently admissible in court. And with mind-wiping drugs, psychotropic weapons, and skull-directed advertising entering the arena, your brain may soon need its own attorney.

Who is working on it: The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, headed by UC Davis professor Wrye Sententia, investigates the impact of new technology on mental liberty and aims to develop policies that will preserve privacy, autonomy, and choice with regard to thought, memory, and cognitive development. And certainly there are firms whose associates are busily researching legal ways to get inside your head.

Extraterrestrial Property: For several decades, the field of space law was focused on the extraplanetary actions of governments and the placement of satellites in orbit. But as private enterprises turn their sights on the stars, legal scholars have been forced to ponder just who will own the final frontier.

Who is working on it: Virgiliu Pop, a researcher at the Romanian Space Agency who once jokingly claimed ownership of the sun, has written extensively on the perils of allowing individuals to stake extraterrestrial claims without the recognition of the entire international community. Others, like Space Settlement Institute executives Alan Wasser and Douglas Jobes, have written about approaching a real estate framework from a perspective of colonization.

Cryonic Trusts and Estates: Sure, you could wake up from cryostasis like Philip J. Fry did, with a waiting job and a thousand years of interest in your savings account. But you might also end up like Transmetropolitan’s Revivals, cast at your most mentally fragile upon an uncaring society. Don’t take any chances. Before you step into that freezer, set up a cryonic trust to ensure that you’re still rich once you’ve thawed out.

Who is working on it: If you’re planning on going into deep-freeze, there are attorneys prepared to do your cryonic and personal revival estate planning. Travel along the Beltway to contract the services of John Dedon at Odin, Feldman & Pittleman in Fairfax, Virginia, or Christopher Sega at DC firm Venable.

Interspecies Family Law: When first contact happens without a condom and ends in a shotgun wedding, you and your multigenetic kin might find yourselves in murky legal waters. What do you do when your sweetie’s marriage laws require a third partner and your state won’t budge past the binary? Will you have to participate in those pesky father-son rituals that involve male bonding through meditative pain? And do you duke out the inevitable divorce in court, or fend off alimony claims in far more humane hand-to-hand combat?

Who is working on it: We’re sure that many big and famous law firms are hard at work on the hypotheticals of intergalactic jurisprudence. For now, we will forward all otherworldly complaints to the attorneys at Crane, Constable, McNeil & Montero, the law offices of Sebben & Sebben, and the senior partners of Wolfram & Hart.

Lynn Hershman Leeson recently released a film about Kurtz' arrest called Strange Culture. Tilda Swinton played Kurtz' wife (pictured), largely because the Academy Award-winning actor wanted to help call attention to the artist's plight.

Luckily, the court seemed to think the charges, which included mail fraud for receiving biological samples in the mail, were absurd. According to Artvoice:

U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara ruled that criminal charges brought against him by federal prosecutors were "insufficient on[their] face."

Kurtz is Cleared [Artvoice]

In a series of three excellent posts, Trexler explains just what last week's ruling in favor of the Siegel family actually means... and doesn't mean:

Even in regard to the Siegels' interest in Action Comics #1 and works derived from it, the Siegel heirs are at best co-owners with DC (the Shuster situation is explained in brief here). Each holder of copyright interest must account to any others for any profits gained from exploiting the copyright, and no partial copyright holder can transfer exclusive rights without consent of the others holding a copyright interest. In addition, as the court rules (pp. 63-66), under the law the Siegel heirs regain an interest only in domestic—not foreign—profits.

But wait, there's more! A number of elements in the Superman "universe" (see pp. 13-14) did not appear in the first issue of Action Comics. Kryptonite, Lex Luthor, Metropolis, Beppo the Super-Monkey—none of these appear in the issue. Superman could not fly, nor does he have super-breath, heat vision or a Fortress of Solitude with an interplanetary zoo and the Bottle City of Kandor. The extent to which the Siegels' profit distribution will be affected by subsequent additions to the original material is yet unresolved.

The situation gets far more complex when deciding what constitutes a derivative work from Action #1. Given how much of the current character is distinct from the material in that story, the amount that the Siegels should receive from new material (i.e., from April 16, 1999 onward) is open to debate.

Making this more difficult is the relation of the Action Comics #1 material to Superman trademarks. Superman trademarks include elements from the relevant copyrighted material, from aspects of Superman's uniform to certain characters to the logo, which reflects the classic Ira Schnapp design "based on Joe Shuster's concept." This is cutting-edge unresolved intellectual property law, with ramifications far beyond the comic book community. Anyone looking for an easy and immediate answer will, alas, be disappointed... Even if the cases didn't settle and the Shusters prevailed, the termination only applies to domestic U.S. copyright. The retention of trademark and foreign copyright by DC & co., as you can imagine, creates a far more complex situation, as does the fact that so much of the current character does not appear in the Action Comics #1 material. I'm not saying it would be easy, but there are things that Time Warner could do without a license, just as there are opportunities the creators' families couldn't exploit without dealing with Time Warner.

Instead of worrying about DC folding up, expect a settlement with both the Siegel and Shuster families, albeit perhaps one that is more favorable to them in terms of finances and the creators' recognition than might have otherwise been obtained.

The Siegel-Superman decision, A Siegel Superman copyright decision FAQ Copyright, trademark and the death of Superman [Uncivil Society]

What was it in the novel that made Bush change the course of the nation's scientific research, putting the U.S. several years behind Europe and Asia? Apparently Bush adviser Jay Lefkowitz read the President a passage from the novel about genetically-engineered babies being grown in womb factories and Bush got really quiet and upset. He seemed to think there was a direct connection between stem cell research and wholesale government control of future generations' genetic code. What he didn't realize was that the genome hacking in Brave New World is actually done to prevent the need for welfare and other pesky social programs that Bush hates — all the working class people are designed to be strong, stupid, and enjoy manual labor so they never get annoyed by working at McDonalds. And they never demand libraries or healthcare.

Just goes to show that you can write a leftist scifi critique of government authoritarianism, and still wind up inspiring the very authoritarians you hoped to undermine. Maybe Huxley will have the last laugh, though. By retarding our progress in medical science so much, Bush has probably done more to make the U.S. irrelevant to the future than any other leader has. (Except perhaps Reagan, whose military policies were inspired by Star Wars.)

Dystopian Scifi Shapes White House Stem Cell Policy [via Carpetbagger Report]