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If you’re ever looking for a warning sign that you’re on the wrong side of an argument, suing Medecins Sans Frontieres is probably a pretty good clue.

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The alternative therapy movement as a whole has demonstrated itself to be so dangerously, systemically incapable of critical self-appraisal that it cannot step up even in a case like that of Rath: in that count I include tens of thousands of practitioners, writers, administrators and more. This is how ideas go badly wrong.

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Le Parlement a rejeté, jeudi 9 avril, après un vote négatif de l’Assemblée nationale, le projet de loi création et Internet qui prévoyait de sanctionner le téléchargement illégal. A main levée, une majorité de députés ont rejeté le texte issu de la commission mixte paritaire (CMP), alors qu’il avait été voté plus tôt dans la matinée par le Sénat. La dernière fois qu’un texte issu d’une commission mixte paritaire a été rejeté lors du vote final date de 1983, rappelle Patrick Roger, journaliste au Monde.

English article:

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The French parliament on Thursday voted down an Internet piracy law, which had largely been expected to pass.

The “Creation and Internet” law, which won the preliminary approval of the parliament last week, would compel Internet service providers to take graduated actions against customers accused of illegally downloading copyrighted material. After warning a customer against such actions for a third time, an ISP could suspend the person’s Internet access for up to a year.

Because the bill was expected to pass, few members of parliament were present for the final vote on the bill, according to the Associated Press. Opponents of the legislation, led by the Socialist party, rejected the measure by a vote of 21 to 15.

That’s strike one!

In keeping with French tradition, the disgruntled music industry executives must now start a riot in the suburbs, or call a national strike blockading all the highways.

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Let’s go on up to Rupert Murdoch, who says Google’s stealing his copyright in a recent Forbes article:

“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, ” ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ “

Let me help you with that, Rupert. I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall St. Journal at all.

Oh, but you won’t do that. You want the traffic, but you also want to be like the AP and hope you can scare Google into paying you. Maybe that will work. Or maybe you’ll be like all those Belgian papers that tried the same thing and watched their traffic sadly dry up.

Perhaps all the papers should get together like Anthony Moor of the Dallas Morning News suggests in the same article:

“I wish newspapers could act together to negotiate better terms with companies like Google. Better yet, what would happen if we all turned our sites off to search engines for a week? By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do.”

Please do this, Anthony. Please get all your newspaper colleagues to agree to a national “Just say no to Google” week. I beg you, please do it. Then I can see if these things I think will happen do happen:

• Papers go “oh shit,” we really get a lot of traffic from Google for free, and we actually do earn something off those page views
   
• Papers go “oh shit,” turns out people can find news from other sources
   
• Papers go “oh shit,” being out of Google didn’t magically solve all our other problems overnight, but now we have no one else to blame.