(formerly the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer… changed due to Mr Campbell’s racism) an award sponsored by Analog Magazine/Dell Publishing, given annually at Worldcon
I just got an email asking if I could be free on August 15 for Canvention, the annual Canadian national science fiction convention, because I am being inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association’s Hall of Fame.
Needless to say, my answer was a VERY ENTHUSIASTIC YES.
CSFFA administers Canada’s Aurora Awards and the Hall of Fame, a juried prize that I am UNBELIEVABLY STONKED to be receiving.
I’ve written extensively about Mexico’s new copyright law, which was copypasted straight out of the US’s lawbooks without debate or consultation and is a catastrophic blow to human rights.
The law does senseless violence to the free expression rights of Mexican people, enabling both automated and deliberate censorship, as well as making it trivial to dox anyone by claiming copyright violations:
And its DRM rules are a nightmare for cybersecurity, fencing off devices that Mexicans entrust with their data and personal safety from independent security audits:
Today, I published two more articles analyzing the threats the new law poses to human rights in Mexico. The first is “Disability, Education, Repair and Health: How Mexico’s Copyright Law Hurts Self-Determination in the Internet Age.”
It explains how Mexico’s new law will prevent people with disabilities from adapting their technology without permission from a distant manufacturer who may not care to have their products altered:
And how it undermines the Right to Repair, by allowing foreign firms to monopolize repairs and unilaterally decide when a product is “beyond repair” and must be replaced, which has major implications for agriculture and public health:
And finally, how the rules on takedown, filters and DRM interfere with education, allowing for the arbitrary removal of curricular materials from the net and prohibiting educators from bypassing digital locks to integrate works into their teaching.
Nominally, the new Mexican law protects these activities, but as I explain, these protections are a fiction - in 22 years, no one in the USA has been able to invoke them, because of all the conditions they impose.
In a second article, “Mexico’s New Copyright Law Undermines Mexico’s National Sovereignty, Continuing Generations of Unfair ‘Fair Trade Deals’ Between the USA and Latin America,” I connect the new law to generations of economic colonialism.
Mexico’s new copyright law didn’t get rushed through Congress in a vacuum: it was passed as part of the USMCA, Donald Trump’s replacement for NAFTA.
Like so many trade deal-based laws, this new system doesn’t create an even footing between trade partners, but rather imposes a permanent, structural disadvantage on Mexican businesses and the Mexican people.
Under this law, Mexican firms will be bound by terms far more onerous than those of their Canadian and US counterparts, such as automated copyright filters, which cost millions to install and subject Mexicans’ communications to censorship from black-box algorithms.
Mexico’s new DRM laws do not contain even the minimal (wholly inadequate) safeguards in the US or Canadian systems, nor to do they have the 22 years’ worth of exemptions US films can rely on.
Meanwhile, the USA is likely to abandon this law, as we are suing the US government to overturn it:
Along with the DRM rules, Mexico has brought in a harsh and unremitting “notice and takedown” system tailor-made for abuse, which will allow companies to remove warnings about product defects and dox their critics.
Mexico’s Congress didn’t rush this law through without public debate because they knew we’d love it and didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
Like every dirty trade deal, this was heavily lobbied and passed without scrutiny because its backers knew it couldn’t withstand scrutiny.
Mexico’s National Commission for Human Rights has until TOMORROW to open an investigation into this law. If they do, they can overturn it. If you are in Mexico or are Mexican, here is a petition you can fill in:
Working as a grocery cashier, when I couldn’t get nitrile gloves, I started washing and reusing the ones I had. You need to turn them inside out to dry, and then back again. Trust me, it is hell.
I was trying to find somewhere to buy them (as our store pharmacy wasn’t able to get them) and someone I didn’t know gave me a box of 100 that she’d been given. (Through Facebook.)
My store provides vinyl gloves which are much less comfortable, hotter and inefficient. You can’t open a plastic bag with vinyl gloves. Nor can you get a sticker off it.
Many of the other cashiers don’t wear gloves at all. I wouldn’t either, except the constant cleaning was wreaking havock on my hands.
A customer pointed out that I should be sanitizing my hands between each customer so as not to spread covid cooties from one to the next.
Grace is a 15-year-old with ADHD and a long history of behavioral difficulties who ended up on probation after a fight with her mom led to the confiscation of her phone and her briefly stealing a classmate’s phone.
Grace is now in a juvenile facility where her life is at risk from covid because one of her probation conditions was to do her homework, and when her school in Oakland County Michigan went online only, she struggled to complete her distance education homework.
As a result, Judge Mary Ellen Brennan ignored the Michigan governor’s orders to minimize the incarceration of children and ordered Grace imprisoned…for not doing her homework.
The Propublica story on Grace and her single mother Charisse - written by Jodi S Cohen - is a heartbreaker and a half. It paints a picture of a kid whose need for extra educational attention was met by a stern and uncaring system, from caseworker to judge.
Judge Brennan does not come off well in this story. She ordered Grace to appear in person in court - the only case of the day with that requirement - and then refused a continuance when Grace’s lawyer said he would NOT come to court and risk his life to argue her case.
Brennan’s sentence was handed down after Grace’s caseworker Michelle Giroux admitted that she did not know the details of Grace’s learning disabilities and had not familiarized herself with the legally mandated supports for them that Grace had not recieved.
Brennan called Grace a “threat to the community” for missing her homework, denied Grace’s pleas for more time to adjust to homeschooling, and had her taken out of the courtroom in handcuffs.
It goes without saying that, like the majority of Michigan teens sentenced to youth detention in defiance of the governor’s orders, Grace is Black. Black children in Michigan are four times likelier to be imprisoned than their white peers.
Grace has not been permitted to see her mother, except by videoconference. Her mother’s attempts to bring her clothes and toys have been rebuffed by the facility, because of petty rules like those stipulating that underwear must be briefs, or that jeans can’t be “too tight.”
When Grace is brought out for videoconference status meetings with the court, the child is handcuffed and put in ankle shackles. She makes heartbreaking pleas to be returned to her mother. The judge has ordered her held until at least Sept 8.
