Wow! Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens are investigating whether Papa Ratzi could be arrested on an ICC warrant when he visits the UK. Dawkins writes:

Lashing out in desperation, church spokesmen are now blaming everybody but themselves for their current dire plight, which one official spokesman likens to the worst aspects of antisemitism (what are the best ones, I wonder?). Suggested culprits include the media, the Jews, and even Satan. The church is hiding behind a seemingly endless stream of excuses for having failed in its legal and moral obligation to report serious crimes to the appropriate civil authorities. But it was Cardinal Ratzinger’s official responsibility to determine the church’s response to allegations of child sex abuse, and his letter in the Kiesle case makes the real motivation devastatingly explicit. Here are his actual words, translated from the Latin in the AP report:

“This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the universal church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.”

“The young age of the petitioner” refers to Kiesle, then aged 38, not the age of any of the boys he tied up and raped (11 and 13). It is completely clear that, together with a nod to the welfare of the “young” priest, Ratzinger’s primary concern, and the reason he refused to unfrock Kiesle (who went on to re-offend) was “the good of the universal church”.

But Papa Ratzi is a head of state — and thus surely could claim Sovereign Immunity. Geoffrey Robertson QC says “not necessarily”:

This claim could be challenged successfully in the UK and in the European Court of Human Rights. But in any event, head of state immunity provides no protection for the pope in the international criminal court (see its current indictment of President Bashir). The ICC Statute definition of a crime against humanity includes rape and sexual slavery and other similarly inhumane acts causing harm to mental or physical health, committed against civilians on a widespread or systematic scale, if condoned by a government or a de facto authority. It has been held to cover the recruitment of children as soldiers or sex slaves. If acts of sexual abuse by priests are not isolated or sporadic, but part of a wide practice both known to and unpunished by their de facto authority then they fall within the temporal jurisdiction of the ICC – if that practice continued after July 2002, when the court was established.

“At last”, writes George Monbiot, “we are waking up to what international law means. For the first time in modern history the underlying assumption of political life – that those who exercise power over us will not be judged by the same legal and moral norms as common citizens – is beginning to crack.”

If only… Somehow I can’t see Ratzi coming down the steps of his plane handcuffed to Inspector Knacker. But it’s interesting that people are beginning to think like this.

Clearly Vatican Inc. doesn’t know anything about Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes (“when you’re in one, stop digging”). Take what happened yesterday in Chile when Papa R’s leading aide did some more digging. According to the Times:

Speaking on a visit to Chile, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, said: “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and paedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia. That is true. That is the problem.”

This kind of stupidity proved too much even for the Vatican, which moved rapidly moved to distance itself today from Bertone’s comments. A spin doctor, Father Federico Lombardi, was mustered to explain that:

the remarks by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, went outside the remit of Church authorities, adding that the comments had been misunderstood.

“General assertions of a specifically psychological or medical nature” were the responsibility of specialists and not Church officials, he said in a statement.

Father Lombardi said that Cardinal Bertone had been referring only to cases of paedophilia in the clergy and not to “the world population”.

Ah! I see.

In the meantime, can I recommend this terrific lecture by Stephen Fry on why Vatican Inc. is not a force for good? Which, when you think about it, must be the understatement of the — still young — century.

The Intelligence² Debate – Stephen Fry (Unedited)
Uploaded by Xrunner17. – Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

Thanks to Ray Corrigan for the video link.

Doolin in Co. Clare is a magical place. Nice to see that The Atlantic has discovered it. Pity they’ve told everybody about it, though.

On Friday, Counterpoint, the British Council’s Thinktank held a conference in London to mark the tercentenary of the Statute of Anne, the first piece of legislation on copyright. I was one of the two opening speakers. Here’s my script on “Getting back to first principles”.

………………………….

When I think about this stuff, two images come to mind.

The first was conjured up by a fellow-countryman of mine in 1726. This is how he tells it:

“I was extremely tired, and with that, and the heat of the weather, and about half a pint of brandy that I drank as I left the ship, I found myself much inclined to sleep. I lay down on the grass, which was very short and soft, where I slept sounder than ever I remembered to have done in my life, and, as I reckoned, about nine hours; for when I awaked, it was just daylight. I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: for, as I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs. I could only look upwards; the sun began to grow hot, and the light offended my eyes. I heard a confused noise about me; but in the posture I lay, could see nothing except the sky. In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left leg, which advancing gently forward over my breast, came almost up to my chin; when, bending my eyes downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back. In the mean time, I felt at least forty more of the same kind (as I conjectured) following the first. I was in the utmost astonishment, and roared so loud, that they all ran back in a fright; and some of them, as I was afterwards told, were hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the ground.”

This is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, on the first of his celebrated travels.

The second image comes from Joseph Tainter’s intriguing book The Collapse of Complex Societies, in which he examined a number of sophisticated civilisations that flourished for aeons and then suddenly collapsed: these civilisations included those of the Romans, the Lowlands Maya and the Chacoans. Each of these societies had impressively complex social structures and very advanced technology, and yet, despite this, they collapsed, impoverishing and scattering their citizens and leaving little behind. How, Tainter asked, did this happen?

His answer was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, but because of it. Tainter’s account describes societies which, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, find themselves with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes each society more complex, and for a time the marginal value of this complexity is positive: each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output. But over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost. “Tainter’s thesis”, as Clay Shirky’s useful summary puts it, “is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract –and then some”.

***
What have these two images to do with intellectual property?

Well, first of all, the Internet is our Gulliver, and the pygmies crawling about him are IP lawyers and their corporate clients.

My generation was lucky enough – or maybe smart enough, it doesn’t matter — to invent something magical: a gigantic, global machine for springing surprises. Or, to put it more prosaically, a network for enabling disruptive innovation. The architecture of the TCP/IP-based Internet with its lack of central control and its neutrality towards applications has stimulated an astonishing wave of creativity in the decades since it was switched on in January 1983. Among the surprises sprung by the network to date have been: email, the World Wide Web, streaming media, peer-to-peer networking, cloud computing, VoIP, blogging, Flickr, social networking and powerful search engines. These innovations have transformed our information environment, to the point where life without them has become inconceivable.

The arrival of this unruly giant on our Lilliputian shores, however, caused panic in many quarters, particularly in those which had hitherto made a good living out of the status quo. And their response to it – as evidenced most recently, for example, in the undignified scramble to pass the Digital Economy Act in the dying hours of a Parliament – has been to attempt to immobilise the giant by binding it with billions of silken threads, woven by IP lawyers, in the hope that it can be rendered impotent and life can go back to the status quo ante.

But if we allow that to happen then we’re done for. Capitalism needs explosive innovation: that’s the source of its dynamism. It can’t get by on the cosy incrementalism of old business models. We desperately need Joseph Schumpeter’s waves of creative destruction if we’re to feed our exploding global population, provide citizens with health care and develop technologies which might arrest and eventually reverse global warming. But we’re stuck with an Intellectual Property regime that was shaped by old communications technology and the special interests that grew up around it, and is increasingly a barrier to innovation rather than an incentiviser of it.

Which brings me to Tainter, and his gloomy thesis about collapse. As many of today’s contributors have pointed out, our existing IP regime is increasingly hindering creativity rather than facilitating it. The content industries would dearly love to extend this regime to cover everything that goes on in the networked world. If they succeed it will be, in my view, the step too far that Tainter observed in the societies that he studied. And those who recommend it will find that, far from extracting even more value from the system for their shareholders, they may just choke it to death.

My fear is that this is what will, in fact happen. Our situation is now one best described by the theory of incompetent systems – that is to say systems that can’t fix themselves because the components which need to change are driven by short-term considerations and are unable to think longer-term. Global warming belongs in the same category.

***

But perhaps this is too gloomy a thought to stomach on such a bright Spring morning. So let’s make an effort to be optimistic. If, by some miracle, we actually were able to muster the collective resolve to do something about our plight before it is too late, what should we do? To what First Principles should we return?

Historically, our approach to IP is that it has been too much couched in terms of particular communications technologies – print, records, movies, broadcast, and so on. If we were to have the opportunity to redesign the system then we should escape from these shackles; we should formulate the design in terms of general principles rather than particular instantiations of transient technologies. Among other things, this would involve:

Explicit recognition that an IPR is not a presumptively absolute right but a temporary, conditional monopoly granted by society.

A default assumption that any creative product is in the public domain unless the creator explicitly asserts ownership of his or her rights.

A globally-agreed definition of ‘fair use’ that emphasises its status as a condition of the grant of a temporary grant of monopoly and not a privilege grudgingly granted by rights holders.

A return to a legislative philosophy which decides copyright duration by balancing the need to incentivise innovators with society’s need for unrestricted access to creative outputs. This implies: (i) an obligation on legislators to seek objective assessments of the public interest in the context of any requests to extend IPRs; (ii) that appropriate durations may be different for different forms of expression: (iii) that durations should be regularly reviewed and adjusted to match changing circumstances; and that lawmaking on intellectual property should be strictly evidence-based in the way that legislating on e.g. pharmaceutical products is. Rights holders petitioning for extensions of their temporary monopolies would be required to provide evidence that the proposed extensions would lead to increased innovation or some other tangible public benefit.

The copyright system should be redesigned to be efficient in the sense that it is easy to identify rights holders.

Strict liability should be abolished. Penalties for inadvertent infringement should be proportional to the actual losses suffered by rights-holders, and in the event of disputes compensation should be determined by independent arbitration.

None of this is rocket science. These principles seem to me to be patently obvious, if you’ll excuse the pun. Some of them were obvious in 1710, and many were understood – and extensively discussed — by the framers of the US Constitution in the 1780s. Yet over the intervening 300 years we appear to have forgotten many of them. It’d be nice to think that we can begin learning from our mistakes. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

… 65 years ago, FDR, the 32nd president of the United States, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Georgia at the age of 63 and was succeeded by Harry Truman. Strange: I always thought FDR was much older than that. But then I’m getting to the stage where not just policemen, but judges on the UK Supreme Court are beginning to look like youngsters to me. (I write with feeling, because I ran into one of them a few weeks ago at the funeral of a mutual friend.)

The thing that comes across time and again when watching the Catholic church’s attempt to deflect and neutralise the scandal of priestly child abuse is that members of the church hierarchy always put the interests of the Vatican Corporation above those of victims. In that sense, Papa Ratzi, CEO of said corporation, is just doing business as usual. All of which made me appreciate this nice, sharp NYTimes column by Maureen Dowd, who is herself a Catholic.

To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.

Negating women is at the heart of the church’s hideous — and criminal — indifference to the welfare of boys and girls in its priests’ care. Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek’s cover story about the danger of continuing to marginalize women in a disgraced church that has Mary at the center of its founding story:

“In the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just marriage, but intimacy with women … not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” No wonder that, having closed themselves off from women and everything maternal, they treated children as collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice to save face for Mother Church.

And the sins of the fathers just keep coming. On Friday, The Associated Press broke the latest story pointing the finger of blame directly at Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, quoting from a letter written in Latin in which he resisted pleas to defrock a California priest who had sexually molested children.

As the longtime Vatican enforcer, the archconservative Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — moved avidly to persecute dissenters. But with molesters, he was plodding and even merciful.

One of the great things — actually, just about the only good thing — about having been brought up in a devout Irish Catholic family was that it provided one with a useful lifetime immunity to religion.

Well, that’s how the NYT sees the latest Nike/Woods ad, anyway.

There are a lot of smart people out there today who ought to be ashamed of themselves. The spectacle of so many geeks surrendering to Apple’s Reality Distortion Field over the iPad has become positively nauseating. For many years I’ve been influenced by Neil Postman’s conjecture that our future would be book-ended by the insights of two authors: at one extreme is Aldous Huxley, who thought that we would be destroyed (i.e., rendered passive and happily acquiescent) by the things we love; and George Orwell, who thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.

The iPad is the latest embodiement of Huxley’s Soma. It’s a seductive, closed device designed for passive consumption of pre-approved objects. That’s why the old ‘content’ industries are slavering over it. They see it as the way to undo all the damage wrought by the openness of the Web and its TCP/IP underpinnings, a way of rounding up all those escaped couch-potatoes and getting them back into the pen. And of being able to charge them for everything they use — and collect the money via Apple’s toll-gate.

All of which is predictable. What wasn’t predictable is the way the hive-mind of geekery would check out its formidable collective intelligence at the door and go all gooey over Mr Jobs’s latest coup. A puppy lying on its back and asking to have its tummy tickled is a paragon of stern objectivity by comparison. My Twitter stream — which is largely fed by people whose intelligence and judgement I respect — has morphed into a drip-feed of drooling acquiescence that Huxley would have recognised.

Here and there I’ve found vestiges of independent thinking. Cory Doctorow, for example, has written a terrific essay likening the iPad to “the second coming of the CD-ROM “revolution” in which “content” people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products.” Quinn Norton has a moving post about the socio-economic dimension of all this:

I live a really rich intellectual life and get to do lots of things most poor people don’t, and I appreciate that it’s because almost none of my social group are poor. But sometimes my social group kind of goes crazy and forgets that while they have a lot of power, my class is a whole lot bigger than theirs. And none of them will be buying iPads.

A few of them do have iPhones, because phones are one of those durable goods we need to survive and that’s most of their meager disposable income. A few probably have iPod touches that they got as gifts, hand-me-downs, or because that was their one nice thing they wanted. But the iPad does absolutely nothing vital, and nothing a cheaper piece of electronics doesn’t already do well enough to get by. I’m pretty sure Apple knows this, and couldn’t care less. Poor people do buy iPods, sometimes even new, but they’ve never bought anything else Apple has ever made. And that’s fine. I’ve never felt the urge to get me some Tiffany, and they’ve never felt the need to try to get my money. Similarly, Apple’s just not a brand very open to the poor. But why does this mean anything to the political arguments? Because other vendors out there do want to take our money. We don’t have much, but there’s a lot of us, and unlike the other classes, we’re getting a lot bigger.

And Aaron Schwartz is characteristically thoughtful about the brouhaha:

A lot of people have argued that requiring Apple to approve every application for the iPhone OS is some kind of “mistake”, something they’ll remedy as soon as they realize how bad things have gotten. But recent events — Phil Schiller’s personal interventions, comments on their call to analysts, etc. — have made it clear it’s not a mistake at all. It’s their plan.

The iPad is their attempt to extend this total control to what’s traditionally been thought of as the computer space. This is just the first step, but it’s not hard to imagine Apple doing their best to phase out the Macintosh in the next decade, just as they phased out OS 9. In their ideal world, all computing will be done on the iPhone OS.

And the iPhone OS will only run software that they specifically approve. No Flash or other alternate runtimes, no one-off apps or open source customizations. Just total control by Apple. It’s a frightening future.

There are doubtless some more signs of independent thinking out there, but they are exceptions that prove the rule that the tech-savvy community has succumbed to mob hysteria. In the newspaper business a recognised way of stopping journalists from becoming too enamoured of their own importance was to remind them that the brilliant story they had just filed (and of which they were so proud) would be tomorrow’s fish-wrapping. Perhaps the geek community should be reminded that Mr Jobs’s shiny new wonder will be eWaste in a couple of years?

From this morning’s NYTimes.

Not many people in the computer world remembered H. Edward Roberts, not after he walked away from the industry more than three decades ago to become a country doctor in Georgia. Bill Gates remembered him, though.

As Dr. Roberts lay dying last week in a hospital in Macon, Ga., suffering from pneumonia, Mr. Gates flew down to be at his bedside.

Mr. Gates knew what many had forgotten: that Dr. Roberts had made an early and enduring contribution to modern computing. He created the MITS Altair, the first inexpensive general-purpose microcomputer, a device that could be programmed to do all manner of tasks. For that achievement, some historians say Dr. Roberts deserves to be recognized as the inventor of the personal computer.

For Mr. Gates, the connection to Dr. Roberts was also personal. It was writing software for the MITS Altair that gave Mr. Gates, a student at Harvard at the time, and his Microsoft partner, Paul G. Allen, their start. Later, they moved to Albuquerque, where Dr. Roberts had set up shop.

Dr. Roberts died Thursday at the Medical Center of Middle Georgia, his son Martin said. He was 68.

This is touching, because Gates and Roberts were famous for not getting on. Wikipedia entry for Roberts is here.

LATER: Just noticed that Steven Johnson found a way of linking his Wired piece about the iPad to news of Roberts’s death:

I was pretty much sold on the idea that the time was right for an iPad-like tablet to bring us to the next step in computing, and using the actual iPad has only strengthened my view.

Despite what looks like a big initial wave of buyers, this shift won’t happen overnight. Lots of people will balk at paying between $500 and $830 for something that they think is an unnecessary complement to what they already have.

But eventually, as prices come down, power and connectivity increase and developers create unexpected and wonderful apps, I think this format will find its way into people’s hands as ubiquitously as smartphones. And though Apple has thrust itself into an early lead, there will be competition for the Third Way, and we’ll all be better for it.

Back in 1975, Ed Roberts’s Altair cost $397, only a bit less than the iPad does today. But it had no screen, no web, no apps and you had to assemble it yourself. We’ve come a long way since then. And as of Saturday, we’re a little way further.

Some nice ones here and there in TechCrunch’s list. I particularly like the Guardian story about ferrets being used to deliver broadband to rural areas.