zvi | Entries tagged with law

So, bitch has added a zine to its library called White Blackbirds, about woman who choose to be unmarried This sounds cool and fascinating (save for the queer Catholic woman who is waiting until she can get married in a Catholic church; I suspect that cool is not the adjective she would use for her story.)

However, in the comments, there are several commenters who are insisting that the idea of marriage is a completely unuseful tool of oppression that is on its way out, hooray!

And, look, here's the thing. I am 100% down with the idea that marriage (eh, let's narrow this down to USian marriage) has been, and for some relationships or legal and cultural purposes, still is a tool of the patriarchy. I also quite agree with people who think that there may be more pressing priorities for queers of all stripes (two parent adoption, ENDA, reforming the Benjamin SOC, stopping violence) than marriage.

Given all that, however, marriage basically does one really, really important thing. It makes you legally related to someone else. If you're not married to your partner, and they're not a relative, then the legal system treats them as a stranger to you. Strangers don't inherit your stuff or visit you in the hospital or get to make decisions about the welfare of your kids or pets when you get killed by a beer truck.

I…don't actually think it's a problem that the state makes you file paperwork to announce that you have, for many intents and purposes, adopted someone else as your primary relative. Your spouse shares more rights and responsibilities with you than your parents or your kids.

I think that marriage is not for everyone, and that we need to create a bigger social space for people like that. I think monogamy is not for everyone, and I wish we could have a serious discussion about a legal structure for making multiple people one's primary relatives. And life might be better if we could all start with a new word than marriage.

But marriage isn't useless, even for progressive secular humanist queers, and getting married doesn't make you a dupe or a patsy. IJS.

Applying a CC license and then saying, but really, I mean this … I think you can do it legally, but it sort of makes the whole CC scheme…broken. I mean, if you choose a no-derivs license and then say, well, except you can make fan art and write fanfiction, you appear to have chosen the wrong license. [Also, also, when you say you are cool with fanfiction but you don't want people adding chapters to the end, you are very confusing. I think (after referring to the paragraph on fan art twelve times) what he means is that he does not want people inserting fanfiction into the original or attaching it to copies of the original as if it were part of the original, but not that he is specifically forbidding fanfiction stories which take place during the time period of the novel or immediately subsequent to it.]

(

cleolinda also gets her CC license spectacularly, hilariously backwards: she whacks a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License notice on her movie reviews and then says reposting is wrong, but journal icons are OK. For those who are unaware, the license in question expressly permits copying (as all CC licenses do) but forbids work which "builds upon" the original, which makes those darn journal icons questionable.

Her note that you can use short quotes to refer back to the original? I know that the New York Publishing Cabal, the Music Publisher Syndicate, and the Film and Television Oligarchy have joined forces to try to do away with same, but in the United States, fair use actually does exist, and a short quote in order to discuss the larger work is pretty much the most classic and basic example of it in all of copyrightland. She can't grant a right you already have, dear reader. Or rather, she can grant it, but it doesn't give her the power to take away the right either.)

I wish CC would have a more sophisticated discussion of what exactly a derivative work is (I know, I know: legal questions are hard), and a licensing scheme which allowed for the licensing of some derivative works but not others. (I also, actually, wish there were CC licenses that permitted derivative works but not copying. None of the CC licenses do this. I wrote and asked.)

As I've been reading about California and gay marriage, I've seen a number of referrals to 'activist judges' and 'how on Earth can judges make the law?' and 'whadya mean interpretation; the people who wrote the original law were plain enough.'

It only occurred to me today that a lot of people don't know that the US has a common law system (a) and have no idea what that means (b).

In other words, judicial interpretation is the normal operation of the system, kids. That's how it's supposed to work. If, rather than having judicial interpretation, the legislature is forced to make all of the rules all of the time, you wind up with something like, well, France. Or Louisiana.

P.S. Our national legislature and many of our state (and even some of our local) legislatures were deliberately structured to impede the passage of laws. No joke.

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Entries tagged with law

BANGS HEAD AGAINST WALL

Creative Commons and Derivative Works: That Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

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