Thank goodness for laws

Men At Work, the awesome 80s band from Australia, has been found guilty of plagiarizing "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree." I'm not kidding.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Men at Work’s No.1 hit Down Under reproduced a “substantial part” of the children’s folk tune Kookaburra Sits In the Old Gum Tree , infringing copyright in the song, a Federal Court judge found today…Larrikin Music, which owns the copyright to the song Kookaburra , is now entitled to recover damages – potentially a huge sum – from band members and their record company….Larrikin alleged that the band’s famous flute riff came from the children’s tune, written in 1934 by school teacher Marion Sinclair.

Via The Daily Swarm, who includes videos.

I find the similarity to be pretty minimal, a couple notes at best. In fact, there's really no need for a flute in this song at all. It's not like they ripped off the chorus.

ReJoyce

Stephen Joyce should never have gone done this road with a professor at a university with such a good law school.

As Stanford University reported a couple of days ago and Inside Higher Ed noted, the estate of James Joyce, headed up by James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, has lost a lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss and must pay her legal fees and costs of nearly a quarter-million dollars.

This finding appears to end the almost two-decade battle with the estate by Shloss, and to represent relief for other Joyce scholars who’ve felt the estate to be unfair and unreasonable in the number of demands and limitations imposed on them. [...]

Shloss, the author of Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003), had been forced to remove supporting research from her revisionist book on James Joyce’s daughter, which led to mixed reviews. [...]

In the intervening years since the original publication of the expurgated biography, Shloss has already won in suit the right to “domestic online publication of the supportive scholarship” and the right to republish the book in the U.S. with the missing material restored. Now she’ll be reimbursed for her expenses too, which will clearly make her lawyers—Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, Keker & Van Nest, and Doerner, Saunders, Daniel & Anderson, as well as the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project—yes, rejoice.

I met Schloss a couple of years ago, and I gather that the well-publicized legal aspects of this case only barely gesture at what a jerk Stephen Joyce actually is. Every time someone finds an unknown Joyce letter in an archive somewhere, they have to grovel before this guy just to get permission to publish something nobody living today knew existed.

Thanks to Gerry for the link.

Suck on that, Taser Inc.

Good news on the taser front--for once:

A San Jose, California, jury yesterday said Taser had failed to warn police in Salinas, California, that prolonged exposure to electric shock from the device could cause a risk of cardiac arrest. The jury awarded $1 million in compensatory damages and $5.2 million in punitive damages to the estate of Robert Heston, 40, and his parents. The jury cleared the police officers of any liability.

...``I think Taser’s going to have to rethink its litigation strategy and its warning policies,’’ Burton said. The jury awarded $5 million in punitive damages to Heston’s parents and $200,000 in punitives to his estate.

Heston died on Feb. 20, 2005, after his father had called Salinas police because his son was ``acting strangely,’’ and seemed to be on drugs, according to the lawsuit complaint. Salinas police shot Heston multiple times with the stun-gun, continuing to discharge their Tasers into him until he stopped moving, the lawsuit claims.

Heston went into cardiac arrest and died, his family said.

Maybe NYC will rethink it's fire-away taser policy.

Via Pandagon.

Damages

Jared Massey, who was tasered in Utah during a routine traffic stop in September, has been awarded $40,000 in damages, according to the Associated Press. This after the cop car dash camera showed him shocked twice before being told he was under arrest.

The crazies are not going to be happy about this.

Tuesday Links

Three nice links today from Harper's Weekly.

This week:

• President Bush pardoned 29 criminals, including carjackers, drug dealers, an election-laws violator, and a moonshiner.
• the American Bar Association named Attorney General Alberto Gonzales lawyer of the year.
• Vífill Atlason, a 16-year-old Icelandic high school student, was taken into custody by the police and questioned after he dialed President Bush's private number and, claiming to be the President of Iceland, asked to “chat” with Bush. “I don't see,” Atlason said, “how calling the White House is a crime.” [Bush, you just got punked!]
  
• And apparently Venezuela, constrained by temporal conformity, has permanently set its clock back half an hour, creating a country-specific time zone.

Gitmo

The absolute best/worst part of this article is the rhetoric from the military that suggests that suicide is the prisoners' form of a public relations war against America. Clearly.
Stay classy, Gitmo. Via, again, Harpers.

'Fingernail slash' at Guantanamo

An inmate at the US detention centre in Guantanamo Bay slashed his throat with a sharpened fingernail, US officials have confirmed.

The prisoner, described by his lawyer as an Algerian held for six years, required several stitches and spent a week under psychiatric observation.

US officials characterised the incident as an act of "self-harm" rather than a suicide attempt.

There are just over 300 prisoners still being held in the base in Cuba.

Detention ruling

The latest incident reportedly took place last month in a shower.

US Navy Cmdr Andrew Haynes said there was "an impressive effusion of blood" but the prisoner was treated by guards and taken to the prison clinic.

Officials would give no details of the man but lawyer Zachary Katznelson said the inmate had been held without charge for nearly six years.

Cmdr Haynes said "self-harm" incidents were a tactic to discredit US forces.

There have been four suicides at the camp.

Two Saudis and a Yemeni prisoner were found hanged in June last year.

This May another Saudi was found not breathing in his cell and attempts to revive him failed.

Co-ordinated suicide attempts last May involving hoarded medicine led to tighter rules on the dispensation of pills.

On Wednesday the US Supreme Court is to hold a hearing on whether the inmates at Guantanamo Bay have the right to contest their detention in US civilian courts.

Documentation

Two nice stories today from the domain of antiquarian relics.

• The BBC is reporting that Michelangelo's last sketch, depicting the stone work for St. Peter's Bascillica, has been found in a Vatican archive.
• The NYT is reporting that the Magna Carta is for sale. Apparently they mean a copy of the early British law, not the law itself. There's a cool feature where you can look at a high resolution image of the actual document. Although owning such a document would be pretty sweet, I am told that the Magna Carta was deemed important only retroactively, after it had been rediscovered. In other words, it's a pure fiction that the document is a "foundational" text of modern democracy. But, hey, if Sotheby's thinks it "forever changed the relationship between the monarchy and those it governed," that's just great. But it's a lie. Bid away!