POSTAL 2 plays in US court - Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association

In an unprecedented legal development, the case of violence in video games has now reached the highest American court. The US Supreme Court is set to decide whether states can restrict minors from buying violent video games in the case of Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association. The decision could have serious implications on the future of First Amendment rights and children’s ’welfare. To resolve Schwarzenegger, the Justices will need to decide how much First Amendment protection should be extended to violent video games and whether minors have a greater constitutional right to violence than they do to obscenity.     

Setting the stage: Arnold Schwarzenegger and video games prepare for battle in the United States Supreme Court

Video games often feature a character that evolves into an iconic superhero. In a strange twist of fate, the video game medium will have the opportunity to become a superhero itself. The recording, comic book, and movie industries have rallied around video games as the case of Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. Entertainment Merchants Association and Entertainment Software Association reaches the Supreme Court of the United States. The case concerns a 2005 California ban on the sale of violent video games to minors. The law was later overturned by the District Court and the 9th Circuit Court on appeal. At issue is whether the law violates the First Amendment of the Constitution. Do video games deserve the full protection of the Constitution as a legitimate form of speech, or should it be limited due to its alleged effects on the psychological well-being of minors? This Article will look at the impact this case may have when it reaches the Supreme Court, an analysis of the issues that will be argued, and the history of legislation involving violent video games.     

Are Internet protocol addresses personal data? The fight against online copyright infringement

Internet Protocol addresses [IP addresses] are central for Internet electronic communications. They individualize computers and their users to make the delivery of data packets possible. IP addresses are also often used to identify websurfers for litigation purposes. In particular, they constitute a key in the fight against online copyright infringement to identify infringers. However, it is a matter of dispute to know if IP addresses are personal data. In a review of relevant case law, the present paper seeks to identify when IP addresses are - or should be - considered as personal data. It suggests a contextual approach to the concept of personal data.     

Australia's Progress Undefined: A Critical Review of Measures of Australia's Progress (MAP)

Indicator systems to report on concepts such as sustainability and progress have become a key policy response by governments to concerns over environmental degradation and social and economic instability. When developed by a national bureau, public service imperatives suggest that concepts such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘progress’ should be addressed without offending the ideology of political actors. We offer a case study of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Measures of Australia's Progress (MAP) indicator system. The ABS has chosen to avoid offering a clear definition of what progress means, or a conceptual framework linked to a definition to explain the selection of indicators. ‘Progress’, however, is a socially defined, normative concept. Such concepts cannot be understood without reference to cultural and political processes. By seeking to avoid a perception of cultural or political bias the ABS has limited MAP's capacity to measure progress. We conclude with suggestions on how MAP might be improved.     

Let's go outside: bodies,prostitutes, slaves and worker citizens

In liberal thought, slavery is imagined as reducing the human being to nothing but a body, while the free and equal political subjects of modern liberal democracies are held to be abstract, universal and disembodied individuals. In theory, bodies are also unimportant in the wage labour exchange. Though traditional models of worker citizenship insist on state and employers' duty to protect the human worth of worker citizens, they also assume the disembodied, thing-like nature of commodified labour power. Because bodies are so obviously important in the exchange between prostitute and customer, sex work is difficult to reconcile with liberal fictions of disembodiment, and one strand of feminist debate on prostitution is preoccupied by the question of whether prostitutes are like slaves or wage labourers. Protagonists on both sides of this debate often reproduce liberal understandings of labour power as a ‘thing’ that can be detached from the person. And yet labour power is also a contested commodity, and wage labour has historically been likened to slavery by activists struggling against the commodification of labour power. This article argues that stepping outside liberal fictions of disembodiment and recognising the parallels between prostitution, wage labour and slavery would allow greater scope for establishing a common political subjectivity amongst prostitutes, other wage workers and all those who have an interest in halting and reversing the current global trend towards the commodification of everything. In this way, common political ground between prostitutes and other wage workers is more visible when we step outside liberal assumptions about embodiment, slavery, work and citizenship.     

The Eurozone Crisis as a Challenge to Democracy and Integration in Europe

This article explores how both the sovereign debt crisis and the European Union's response illustrate fundamental characteristics of contemporary European integration. In the face of an unexpected emergency, national politicians took the lead and pressed ahead with more integration. The long-term results though depend on national acceptance of not just the bailout provisions but also enforcement of debt brakes mandated by the new EU treaty. This means democratic politics at the national level will continue to have a fundamental influence on EU affairs, while the North/South split will co-exist alongside a more marked separation between countries inside and outside the Eurozone. In this context of increased political turbulence within the EU, there is likely to be only a limited window of opportunity for successful negotiation of a free-trade deal with the United States.     

Europe after the U.S. Pivot

Insofar as Europe's security and cohesion have for decades been premised upon a strong American political and strategic engagement, Washington's intention to “rebalance” to Asia casts a shadow over the sustainability of a stable and coherent geopolitical order on the continent. This article argues that as the United States seeks to rebalance strategically towards the Asia-Pacific region a number of “indigenous” geopolitical trends are becoming increasingly important in Europe: an Anglo-French entente for a “maritime” Europe, a German-French “continental” project of economic and political integration, and Russia's resurgence across Europe's East. The growing prominence of competing geopolitical visions for Europe might even call into question the cohesion and direction of the institutional expressions of the U.S.- engineered Western order in Europe, namely the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union. Increasing geopolitical and institutional contestation, we contend, pose a number of challenges for both U.S. interests and European security.     

‘Unlawful Combatants’: The West's Treatment of Irregular Fighters in the ‘War on Terror’

The West's treatment of irregular fighters in the “war on terror” was highly problematic. This article contends that we must look beyond the assumption that political and strategic considerations compromised the law and led to the “invention” of the category of the “unlawful combatant.” Rather, the law of armed conflict itself includes strong exclusionary mechanisms towards irregular fighters. These exclusionary strands in the law came to dominate the West's strategic decision-making on the treatment of irregular fighters. Moreover, the fact that irregular fighters became such a vital issue post-9/11 was not a result of the war on terror being a new kind of war, as has often been argued. Rather, this article suggests that it reflects an identity crisis of the West's regular armed forces at the start of the twenty-first century.     

Non-Western Threats and the Social Sciences

As the Department of Defense strives to take the social sciences more seriously in the face of threats emanating from the non-West, it confronts several challenges. Among them, we Westerners cannot model non-Western minds. Nor can we devise a methodology that will accurately capture contingency. We may already be doing our “scientific” best with “pattern of life” targeting. Consequently, DoD should invest more heavily in individuals who already have an affinity for, and interest in, the non-West and who show promise as future commanders and talented analysts rather than spend large sums on trying to devise more comprehensive models, methodologies, and metrics.     

A walk in to the cloud and cloudy it remains: The challenges and prospects of ‘processing’ and ‘transferring’ personal data

Cloud computing is an information technology technique that promises greater efficiency and reduced-cost to consumers, businesses and public institutions. However, to the extent it has brought better efficiency and minimal cost, the emergence of cloud computing has posed a significant regulatory challenge on the application of data protection rules particularly on the regime regulating cross-border data flow. The Data Protection Directive (DPD), which dates back to 1995, is at odds with some of the basic technological and business-related features of the cloud. As a result, it is claimed that the Directive hardly offers any help in using the legal bases to ‘process’ and ‘transfer’ data as well as to determine when a transfer to a third country occurs in cloud computing. Despite such assertions, the paper argues that the ECJ's Bodil Lindqvist decision can to a certain extent help to delineate circumstances where transfer should and should not occur in the cloud. Concomitantly, the paper demonstrates that controllers can still make the most of the available possibilities in justifying their ‘processing’ as well as ‘transferring’ of data to a third country in cloud arrangements. In doing so, the paper also portrays the challenges that arise down the road. All legal perspectives are largely drawn from EU level though examples are given from member states and other jurisdictions when relevant.