American Bar Association - 1 click patents

[Tim May]

At 6:11 PM -0500 2/28/01, Adam Shostack wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 02:48:07PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
>|
>| At 2:08 PM -0500 2/28/01, Adam Shostack wrote:
>| >So, this web page doesn't work without javascript.  I find that
>| >somewhat ironic, because you'd think that the ABA would be aware of
>| >the Americans With Disabilities act, which requires a reasonable
>| >accomodation; in this case that accomodation would be one less line of
>| >html (the meta-equiv refresh line)
>|
>| The ADA does not require writers, whether lawyers or novelists or
>| whatever, to write their material in ways that the blind can read,
>| that retarded persons can understand, or that the Java-less can
>| process.
>|
>| (Though I admit that many of these rent-seeking vipers would of
>| course _like_ the ADA to be extended to cover such things, if only to
>| increase the rent they can collect in thousands of lawsuits.)
>
>Actually, if they can do so with reasonable accommodation, I think it
>does.  (Note that its not writers, but publishers, who I think may
>have the "reasonable accommodation" requirement.)

Nope. Some books are published with Braille versions, but the vast 
majority are not. Ditto for large print editions, editions printed 
with letters reversed so that lysdexics can read them, etc. (This 
latter point was a joke...)

There have been some cases where government documents, including 
ballots, were ordered to be in Braille. (It came out during the 
Florida voting news cycle that a case in Florida had resulted in 
"assistance to blind voters" being acceptable over Braille ballots.)

A requirement that a book publisher generate specific forms of a book 
would, of course, be a slam dunk violation of the First.

Note that some blind folks are now complaining that the Web-based 
world is leaving them behind, but they are not going after Web 
publishers to get HTML and graphical uses changed. Rather, they are 
seeking to get gubment to force _employers_  (of them) to hire 
full-time readers for them and other nonsensical, anti-liberty things.

(I hire people to do a job. I don't hire two people, one to help the 
other do the job...not unless they're both willing to do the job for 
a combined salary equal to what the one person would be paid. Less 
some amount for the increased overhead in having two of them in an 
office. I have no problem with some employer choosing to do this, or 
finding some good way to use blind programmers, etc. But having the 
gubment tell an employer whom he must hire and how he must 
accommodate them is, of course, profoundly anti-liberty. The more the 
ADA spreads to encompass such things, the more alternative Net 
solutions will bypass the situation.)

>
>I'm not saying that thats a good thing, but given that the ABA
>is a nest of those rent-seekers, having them on the receiving side
>carries a certain poetry that I'm suprised you don't see.
>

Oh, I see it all right. I just don't _ever_ support bad laws, no 
matter how much the application is "just desserts."

And should this interpretation be applied to the ABA, application to 
everyone else would follow swiftly.


--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns