Ku Klux Klan

The Jena Six Case or why justice is not served when we need to ask for permission to be black

Imagine your son coming from school and telling you that he had to ask permission to the school principal to sit during recess under the "white's only" tree, which happens to be the only tree in the schoolyard. Then imagine your son coming back from school telling you that he could sit under that tree but now there were lynching nooses covering it.

Then imagine that word spreads. People of all ages and races talk about the incident. Some white and black kids get into an altercation and the rumble. One of the white kids draw a gun on 6 of the brawlers, but they're able to rumble harder with one of the white guy's friends.

Now, imagine you are the mother of one of those guys. The white kid that got his ass kick luckily is fine. He even goes to school and to an event the next day.

Now imagine being the mother of one of the 6 brawlers. While the white instigators threatened to kill the black teenagers with a gun, there's a police officer knocking on your door with a warrant for your son's arrest. The crime? Attempted murder. Not disorderly conduct or assault and battery, which would have been possible valid reasons to take your son to the police station. No. Your son is going to jail for attempted murder of a guy who walked away with some cuts and bruises.

That's what The Jena Six Case is all about.

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Words to live by

So the recent struggles about network neutrality have led me to recognize something I hadn't quite seen before. And that something in turn makes more puzzling the debates that have been raised around network neutrality. The something to recognize is that in a fundamental sense, fair use (FU) and network neutrality (NN) are the same thing. They are both state enforced limits on the property rights of others. In both cases, the limits are slight --the vast range of uses granted a copyright holder are only slightly restricted by FU; the vast range of uses allowed a network owner are only slightly restricted by NN. And in both cases, the line defining the limits is uncertain. But in both cases, those who support each say that the limits imposed on the property right are necessary for some important social end (admittedly, different in each case), and that the costs of enforcing those limits are outweighed by the benefits of protecting that social end. So from this perspective, it is easy to understand those who reject FU and NN (who are they?). And it is easy to understand those who embrace FU and NN. What gets difficult is understanding those who embrace one while rejecting the other --at least when that rejection is articulated in terms of "government regulation".

—

Lawrence Lessig