I realise this is a touchy subject for some, but let me just present some examples of my thinking that have come out of a discussion.
Let us first think of a man, who is drunk, and he has sex with a woman who is not without her consent. Presumably everything thinks of this as rape, although some might suggest that the drunken state suggests that he might not really have been fully concious of his behaviour in that situation. Is his blame is mitigated somewhat, or should he simply have not been so drunk in the first place?
Let us now think of a man who is not drunk, who has sex with a woman who is drunk, without her consent, but in a situation where she could have refused had she been sober. Clearly she has been raped (and taken advantage of at that), but should she share any of the blame for having been drunk, afterall, the earlier man had little choice in the matter but he shouldn’t have been drunk and hence is fully blamed, but maybe this woman also should not have been drunk?
Let us now think of a third situation, a man sleeps with a drunken woman, with only her mumbled drunken consent. Is this rape? Does the fact that she gave consent mean is it not rape, or is it anyway because she was taken advantage of in her drunken state?
Do people have a duty to protect themselves? If men have a duty to refrain from being drunk if there is a chance they might rape a woman, do women also not have a duty to refrain from being drunk if there is a chance they might give consent and then regret having done so in the morning? Given that it is hard to prove whether consent was given or not, where should the law fall?
My own opinion on this is that the final situation was not rape (if not exactly right) and that the courts should fall on the side of caution when prosecuting. Given a situation of rape, the woman might have been mentally damaged, that this is possible is not doubted, but it has already happened so can effectively be ignored as the equivilent of a financial sunk cost. The balance therefore is between sentencing a man who might be innocent (and therefore ruining his life) and the risk of his repeat offending if not convicted. This balance can be argued either way, but it certainly isn’t definitively in favour of prospective victims and hence it is in no way definitive that presumed accuracy of a rape report is at all reasonable.
Rooney’s tangled web
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006I am not a great lover of football, and particularly of the overpaid crowd at the top of the “profession”, however having had this pointed out to me I feel it is something worth discussing in a general sense.
Quoting from the BBC:
Soccer star Wayne Rooney has begun legal action against a Welsh TV actor for the ownership of two websites in the player’s name.
Huw Marshall registered WayneRooney.com and WayneRooney.co.uk in April 2002, when the striker was just 16.
The case has been taken to the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland.
Just because Rooney’s name is what it is, and that he is famous, should he have the right to demand the discussed domain names? Should any individual or organisation have an automatic right to any device that could be used as a trademark, merely because it is similar to some other way in which they identify themselves?
This issue has come up before with people who have registered domains based on their own names, but with a similarity to the name of a famous person (possibly purely coincidentally). It is not at all clear that the right to own the domain should automatically be assigned to the more well known party, and in fact it could be argued that this is an unreasonable abuse of fame.
However, we must also consider the other problem, common in the world of domain names, of cyber squatting. This is the situation in which people buy domains with no intention to use them, rather the intent is merely to sell the domain to a famous person or company at some later point in time, or (worse?) to rake in the advertising revenue when people visit the site while looking for information about their idol.
To me this situation is fairly clear at a moral level, but it is hard to define in practice. Fair use should be the abiding principle. If someone owns a domain name such as, for example, waynerooney.co.uk, is called Wayne Rooney, has created a personal website there and has no adverts, then there would be no question. If someone has created a website that consists purely of adverts, has owned the domain for a long period of time (the expectation being then that they have no intention of ever putting any real content up) or has a domain that is obviously designed to catch typos then this is wrong and the trademark “owner” would have a quite reasonable case to argue that this is simply abuse of the trademark by a third party.
The problem lies in defining the cut off point, but with clear guidelines it might be expected that a properly informed judge could make a judgement on the issue quickly, easily and (most importantly in cases that are, in effect, fairly trivial) cheaply.
Posted in Comment on the News, Deeply perceptive (!) | 1 Comment »