#statutory declaration

[legalservices-ks]

Notary Public Services Mississauga

[saltwife]

[apostilleser]

Statutory Declaration Witnessing in the UK and Its Importance

Statutory declaration witnessing is a significant process in the UK legal system, involving the witnessing and attestation of statutory declarations by authorised individuals. A statutory declaration is a formal statement made in writing and signed in the presence of a witness, declaring the truthfulness of the contents stated within the declaration. This process holds considerable importance in various legal, administrative, and personal contexts.

The Right Way to Provide a Formal and Legally Binding Statement of Fact or Intention

One of the primary reasons why statutory declaration witnessing is crucial in the UK is to provide a formal and legally binding statement of fact or intention. Statutory declarations are often required for matters such as changes of name, declarations of identity, declarations of marital status, and affirmations of truthfulness in legal proceedings. By having a statutory declaration witnessed by an authorised individual, such as a solicitor, notary public, or commissioner for oaths, the declaration becomes a sworn statement that can be relied upon in legal proceedings.

Ensuring a Integrity and Credibility of a Declaration

Statutory declaration witnessing is essential for ensuring the integrity and credibility of the declaration. The witness, who must be authorised by law to witness statutory declarations, confirms the identity of the declarant and verifies that the declaration was made voluntarily and without duress. This helps to prevent fraud and misrepresentation and ensures that the contents of the declaration are truthful and accurate.

Protecting the Interest of All Parties Involved in Legal Transactions

Statutory declaration witnessing serves to protect the interests of all parties involved in legal transactions. By having a statutory declaration witnessed by a qualified individual, parties can be confident that the declaration is valid and legally binding, providing assurance and clarity in matters requiring a sworn statement of fact or intention.

Statutory declaration witnessing is crucial in the UK for providing a formal and legally binding statement of fact or intention, ensuring integrity and credibility, and protecting the interests of parties involved in legal transactions. Whether for personal, administrative, or legal purposes, statutory declarations play a vital role in affirming truthfulness and establishing legal rights and obligations.

[gordonandthompsonsolicitors]

Gordon and Thompson Solicitors

We are a nationwide team of Solicitors specialised in different areas of law. We provide services in personal injury, medical negligence, family, divorce, children contact, residential conveyancing, commercial conveyancing, housing, immigration, business law, crime, police, and property law. We have Legal Aid for Crime and Family.

Business hours: Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm

Address: 51 Tweedy Rd, Bromley, BR1 3NH

Phone: 02071833009

Website: https://www.gordonandthompson.com

Business Email: bromley@gordonandthompson.com

[mxactivist]

UK nonbinary legal recognition court case

Help support the court case by reblogging this post and/or contributing to the crowdfund!

Ryan Castellucci, who is nonbinary, has issued legal proceedings against the Gender Recognition Panel (GRP) and the Secretary of State for Justice arguing that the GRP breached its statutory duty to issue a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) in terms which record Ryan’s acquired gender as nonbinary, and has instead decided to issue a GRC of uncertain legal effect. Ryan is also seeking a declaration that a GRC which records Ryan’s gender as “not specified” would mean that their gender is for all purposes nonbinary.

It turns out that the Gender Recognition Act in the UK doesn't actually specify that you have to be moving from male to female or from female to male, which means there is absolutely already room within the law to allow for nonbinary genders, and obviously the government should accommodate that.

Contribute to the crowdfund here - it's currently at £2,178 pledged of £100,000, with 28 days to go, ending on 27th April 2023.

[ukrfeminism]

2 minute read

JK Rowling is founding and personally funding a new service for women survivors of sexual violence. Launched days before Nicola Sturgeon’s controversial Gender Recognition Reform Bill is expected to pass through the Scottish parliament, the Edinburgh-based centre, Beira’s Place, will be female-only.

The author, who has written about the sexual and domestic abuse she suffered in her twenties, believes there is an “unmet need” for Scottish women who want “women-centred and women-delivered care at such a vulnerable time”. She hopes Beira’s Place, which will employ professional staff to provide free one-to-one and group counselling, “will enable more women to process and recover from their trauma”.

Rowling’s board of directors are all vocal opponents of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which will permit anyone to change the legal sex on their birth certificate by making a simple statutory declaration, a process known as self-identification. Feminists, including Reem Alsalem, UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, have raised grave concerns it will open up women’s services and private spaces to abuse by male predators.

Beira’s board comprises Rhona Hotchkiss, a former prison governor, who has opposed the Scottish government’s policy of moving trans-identified male sex offenders to women’s jails; Johann Lamont, a former leader of the Scottish Labour Party and a lawyer; Dr Margaret McCartney, an academic, broadcaster and Glasgow GP; and Susan Smith, director of For Women Scotland, a grassroots feminist group founded to fight the gender reform bill. Beira’s chief executive is Isabelle Kerr, a former manager of Glasgow Rape Crisis who received an MBE in 2020 for her work supporting British citizens who had been raped overseas.

The provision of single-sex services has been a key battleground of the gender reform bill. Already in Scotland, most domestic violence refuges and rape support services are “trans inclusive” and accept referrals from both sexes. In recent years councils have removed grants from women-only refuges in favour of generic organisations. Monklands Women’s Aid in North Lanarkshire, which was set up more than 40 years ago, had its council funding withdrawn in favour of a social justice charity which also helps men.

Most controversial is Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre whose chief executive, Mridul Wadhwa, a trans woman, told the Guilty Feminist podcast that women sexual assault victims who request female-only care will be “challenged on your prejudices” and told to “reframe your trauma”.

Yet in her recent book Defending Women’s Spaces, veteran campaigner Karen Ingala Smith, the chief executive of Nia, a domestic abuse charity in London, describes how women traumatised by male violence fare better and feel safer in female therapeutic spaces.

Beira’s Place is legally permitted to exclude males under the exemptions of the 2010 Equality Act, which allows single-sex services if they are “a proportionate means to achieve a legitimate end”.

It is named after Beira, the Scottish goddess of winter. JK Rowling said: “Beira rules over the dark part of the year, handing over to her sister, Bride, when summer comes again. Beira represents female wisdom, power, and regeneration. Hers is a strength that endures during the difficult times, but her myth contains the promise that they will not last for ever.”

The service is not a charity, but privately funded by Rowling, a noted philanthropist. The amount she will donate to set up and run Beira’s Place has not been disclosed.

[decolonize-the-everything]

The War Powers Resolution

It provides that the president can send the U.S. Armed Forces into action abroad only by declaration of war by Congress, "statutory authorization", or in case of "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces".

The Constitution

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11: [The Congress shall have Power...] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

For the second week in a row, Republicans in state legislatures are making the interesting choice of fighting for child marriage. In Missouri, where children 16 or older can marry with parental permission, a bill to prohibit anyone under age 18 from getting a marriage license easily cleared the Republican-controlled Senate 31 to one last month. But now, the bill can’t get out of committee in the state House because seven out of 14 committee members are House Republicans who oppose the bill.

Those opponents include Rep. Hardy Billington (R), who insists without any evidence or logic whatsoever that banning child marriage will lead to a spike in abortions, even as abortion is totally banned in the state. “My opinion is that if someone [wants to] get married at 17, and they’re going to have a baby and they cannot get married, then chances of abortion are extremely high,” he told the Kansas City Star this week. Earlier this week, I also had to write about a different Republican lawmaker in New Hampshire who used the same argument against a bill to ban child marriage. This doesn’t make sense—if someone of any age is pregnant and doesn’t want to be, they’ll probably seek abortion care; this actually has nothing to do with marriage.

Another opponent of the bill, Rep. Dean Van Schoiack (R), told the Star that he opposes the bill because he knows someone who got married as a 17-year-old girl and is still married. “Why is the government getting involved in people’s lives like this?” Van Schoiak said.

Of course, if we’re bringing anecdotes and lived experience into this, I think I trust state Sen. Holly Thompson Rehder (R), who introduced the bill, a little more than Van Schoiack. “As a child that did get married, I would say I have a lot more insight to this issue than what he does,” Rehder said of Van Schoiack. Per the Star, Rehder got married at 15 to a 21-year-old, while her sister at 16 married her 39-year-old drug dealer. “The government does tell people when they can get married because we do have an age limit right now. The fact that [Van Schoiack] feels that it’s OK for a parent to make a decision for a child, that is a lifetime decision, is offensive.”

At this point, I would like to note that Rehder, who is currently running for lieutenant governor, might be right about this one thing, but is wrong about… pretty much everything else. Rehder supports the state’s total abortion ban and campaigned on a pledge to promote “the Trump Agenda” in her district in Southeast Missouri.

Nonetheless, if her bill doesn’t make it to a vote before the end of the legislative session on May 17, Rehder, who’s currently running for lieutenant governor, said she plans to introduce it as an amendment attached to another bill. She told the Star she’s confident that brought to the floor for a vote, the bill would have a majority…but right now, it’s simply being held up by its Republican opponents on committee.

Rehder’s bill comes after Missouri lawmakers in 2018 raised the state’s minimum marriage age to 16 with parental approval following backlash at the time over how many 15-year-olds in the state were being married. Currently, Missouri prohibits marriage between a minor and someone who is 21 or older, similar to the state’s statutory rape laws that prohibit sexual intercourse between someone 21 and older and someone under 17. This is all pretty needlessly confusing, but what isn’t confusing is that this is part of a pattern of Republican lawmakers going to bat for child marriage—from the state representative in New Hampshire who insisted that “ripe” and “fertile” teens should be able to marry, to a different Missouri lawmaker who last year declared that 12-year-olds should be able to get married because he personally knew someone who married at 12 (I mean, I hope they’re doing well today, but somehow, I, err, have my doubts…).

Experts and advocates against child trafficking have long pointed to how laws that permit child marriage put them at greater risk. The bill in Missouri’s legislature is notably part of a bipartisan effort, introduced by Rehder and Democrat Lauren Arthur. But despite Rehder’s best efforts, their bill is being blocked by members of her own party, even as Republican politicians have spent the better part of the last few years escalating their baseless and fearmongering smears of queer people as child sexual predators. As it turns out based on the political affiliations of every lawmaker fighting tooth-and-nail for child marriage (and, consequently, adult predators’ ability to marry children), the call might just be coming from inside the house—the Missouri state House, specifically.

[candela888]

Right to change legal gender around the world (as of April 2023)

Some more information:

Gender self-determination: Started in Argentina, Gender self-identification is the concept that a person's legal sex or gender should be determined by their gender identity without any medical requirements, such as via statutory declaration. (Found in much of the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and Pakistan)

Prohibitive requirements: Right to change legal gender without surgery, but a court order, physician/clinical recommendation, therapy, or medical record requirements might be necessary. (Found in the Americas, most of Europe, Southern Africa, parts of Asia, and Oceania)

Sex-reassignment surgery required: Must get a sex change/surgery in order to change legal gender. (Found in Eastern Europe, Asia, Middle East, Oceania, Namibia, several US States, and Panama)

Potential legislation pending: Law currently pending to legalize gender identity change or upgrade to gender self-determination. (El Salvador, Peru, Scotland, Sweden, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines)

No legal gender identity change: Can't change legal gender, other laws and views on transgender people vary by country. (Most of Africa, and some parts of the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Asia)

[euniexenoblade]

my long distance nesting partner to be and I registered our relationship as de facto to support their visa application.

One of the statutory declarations we had to make both for the registration and for the visa application was that our relationship was exclusive to the exclusion of all others.

Basically whenever we go on dates or sleep with anyone else we are committing a crime 😎 (which is both really funny and really sad)

:( thats fucked up i knew laws around that fucking sucked but i didnt know that this specifically was a thing

[macrotiis]

Very cool how the coming of that one British TERF has began to unravel the hard fought for rights for trans people in NewZealand.

The Ministry of Health removed information on puberty blockers as a form of gender affirmation for children last month, then putting it back up with the claim of puberty blockers being “safe & reversible” removed from the page. Causing right wing orgs like the Christian fundamentalist Family First org to celebrate.

And today, the government has gone back on its promise of creating an official document for gender recognition for transgender people born outside NewZealand to go alongside the BDMRR bill of 2021 which allows citizens to legally change their gender on birth certificates via statutory declaration.

We need to mobilise now, we need to fight now to stop this. We will not become the US or UK on this.

Trans rights ARE human rights.

[kp777]

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

June 28, 2023

Leading the effort is Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, an ally of the fossil fuel industry and recipient of Big Oil campaign cash.

Senate Republicans introduced legislation earlier this week that would prohibit President Joe Biden from declaring a national climate emergency as millions across the U.S. shelter indoors to escape scorching heat and toxic pollution from Canadian wildfires, which have been fueled by runaway warming.

Led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.)—a fossil fuel industry ally and the ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee—the GOP bill would "prohibit the president from using the three primary statutory authorities available (the National Emergencies Act, the Stafford Act, and section 319 of the Public Health Service Act) to declare a national emergency solely on the basis of climate change," according to a summary released by the Republican senator's office.

Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), another friend of the oil and gas industry, is leading companion legislation in the House.

The updated version of the bill, first introduced last year, comes as Biden is facing mounting pressure from environmental groups to use all of the power at his disposal to fight the climate crisis as it intensifies extreme weather across the U.S. and around the world.

A climate emergency declaration would unlock sweeping executive powers that would allow the president to halt crude oil exports, block oil and gas drilling, expand renewable energy systems, and more.

"What will it take for Biden and the Dems to stop supporting the profits of fossil fuel executives and finally declare a climate emergency? How bad will all this need to get?"

While Biden reportedly considered declaring a climate emergency amid a devastating heatwave last year, he ultimately decided against it to the dismay of environmentalists.

But the impacts of Canada's record-shattering wildfires, which are likely to get worse in the coming weeks, have sparked another round of calls for Biden to follow in the footsteps of jurisdictions in more than 40 countries and declare climate change a national emergency.

"What will it take for Biden and the Dems to stop supporting the profits of fossil fuel executives and finally declare a climate emergency? How bad will all this need to get?" asked climate scientist Peter Kalmus. "These days ticking by are absolutely critical."

Pointing to the horrendous air quality that major U.S. cities are experiencing due to Canada's wildfires, the youth-led Sunrise Movement sent a simple message to Biden on Thursday: "Declare a climate emergency."

Capito's legislation is unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster in the narrowly Democratic U.S. Senate, but her attempt to bar the president from declaring a climate emergency has previously gained bipartisan support.

Last May, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Mark Kelley (D-Ariz.) joined Republicans in approving a nonbinding motion stating that the president "cannot use climate change as a basis for declaring an 'emergency' or 'national disaster.'"

[apostilleser]

Statutory Declaration Witnessing for Legal Authenticity

A statutory declaration is a formal written statement of fact that is signed in the presence of a witness. The process of statutory declaration witnessing is crucial in various legal contexts, ensuring the authenticity and truthfulness of the declared information. This practice is common in legal systems around the world. When someone makes a statutory declaration, they are affirming the truth of the statement under penalty of perjury.

The role of a witness in this process is vital. The witness, often a person of integrity and not involved in the content of the declaration, verifies that the declaring understands the gravity of the statement and is making it voluntarily. The witness's responsibilities include confirming the identity of the declaring, ensuring they comprehend the content of the declaration, and attesting to the signing process. Typically, witnesses must be over a certain age, not related to the declaring, and possess no personal interest in the declaration.

Statutory declarations are used in a variety of legal matters, including immigration, finance, and family law. They serve as a substitute for sworn affidavits and are accepted as a truthful account of facts. In some jurisdictions, specific guidelines dictate who can act as a witness, emphasizing the importance of impartiality. By having witnesses involved in statutory declarations, legal systems aim to maintain the integrity of the process, discouraging false statements and ensuring that the declarations hold legal weight.

This practice safeguards the credibility of the legal system by relying on the honesty and integrity of both the declarant and the witness.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Flickr to copyleft trolls: drop dead

Today’s a big day for users of Creative Commons images: Flickr has declared zero tolerance for copyleft trolls, predators who exploit a bug in out-of-date versions of the CC licenses in order to threaten good-faith users of CC images who make minor errors in the way they credit the images.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/01/pixsynnussija#pilkunnussija

First things first: Flickr’s new community guidelines prohibit copyleft trolling: “Failure to allow a good faith reuser the opportunity to correct errors is against the intent of the license and not in line with the values of our community, and can result in your account being removed.”

https://www.flickr.com/help/guidelines

If you are targeted by a copyleft troll who demands that you pay them because of minor errors in your Creative Commons attribution, here’s how to report them and get them kicked off Flickr forever:

https://www.flickrhelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404057906068-How-to-report-Community-Guidelines-violations

Now, some background. Early versions of the Creative Commons licenses have a bug, a clause that says that the permissions conferred by CC licenses “terminate automatically upon any breach” — that is, if you violate any term of the license, it ceases to be in effect:

https://doctorow.medium.com/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator-5f6360713299

Core to the CC licenses is the idea of attribution. When you use a Creative Commons image, you must name the creator and link to the original, and name the license and link to it. Many CC users don’t understand this; they use an image and add something like “Image: Cory Doctorow/Creative Commons” with no links or specific licenses.

Under the pre-4.0 versions of the license, this can be construed as a “breach” which “terminates” the CC license. That’s where the copyleft trolls come in.

Copyleft trolls post CC-licensed stock art and then wait for a naive person to make a minor attribution error, and then they pounce, sending a legal threat and a speculative invoice demanding hundreds or thousands of dollars, under the threat of a $150,000 statutory damages award.

This is deeply unethical conduct. As I wrote when I was targeted by one of these creeps:

If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use. If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.

Unethical as this conduct is, it’s also big business. One company, Pixsy, is responsible for a long-running shakedown campaign, working with scammy photographers to send out demand letters to unsuspecting Creative Commons users.

And many of those photographers rely on Flickr to bait their traps.

There’s a reason for this. Flickr’s early years were a period of enormous innovation. Flickr was the first mobile photo-sharing site, and it invented numerous community features that turned it into a thriving hub for photographers, amateur and professional alike. Flickr was also an interoperability pioneer, offering an API that let any user move their photos to a rival service — a tacit pledge to keep your business by being better than the rest, not by locking you in.

I know all this because I was an early advisor to Flickr, and because, in a weird way, I am partially responsible for Flickr. You see, before Flickr, I was carrying on a long-distance relationship from San Francisco with a woman in London, and we were both alpha testers for a social game called GameNeverending.

One day over breakfast with GNE’s founder Stewart Butterfield, he asked me how things were going in my romantic life. I answered that things were great, but mentioned that my girlfriend and I were struggling to share the pictures we took in our daily lives with one another. Stewart said, “Well, there’s a photo-sharing feature for GNE on the roadmap — why don’t I bump it up and we’ll see if other people use it, too?”

They did. In fact, the feature was so popular that within a few months, GNE relaunched as Flickr, jettisoning the game entirely and focusing on just that one feature. I stayed on the advisory, and one of the things I encouraged was the plan to roll out Creative Commons licenses for Flickr images — and I made sure everyone knew about it when Flickr became the first CC-enabled image site.

(I also married the woman I was carrying on that long-distance relationship with and today we have a 15 year old daughter!)

But after Flickr was sold to Yahoo, it joined Yahoo’s haunted armada of Web 2.0 ghost-ships, tossed back and forth in the storms created by the dueling princelings of Yahoo’s bloated management layer, who spent more time sabotaging one another than they did making anything anyone else wanted to use. Yahoo eventually sold off all of those holdings at fire-sale prices to Verizon, who neglected them still further.

An abandoned ship is easy picking for the rats that live in its bilges. Pixsy and its photographers actually became official Flickr partners, pitching themselves as a way for photographers who didn’t want their images shared to hunt down infringers — even as they facilitated a revolting campaign of copyleft trolling that depended on Flickr as their base of operations.

The depravity of copyleft trolls is truly boundless. Take Marco Verch, a prolific copyleft troll who hosts nearly 47,000 photos on Flickr. Verch hires low-waged gig work photographers through platforms like Upwork to take photos, then harasses people who make minor attribution errors:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252488167/Automated-image-recognition-How-using-free-photos-on-the-internet-can-lead-to-lawsuits-and-fines

Verch boasts that his predation lets him work for four hours a week, leaving him with ample time to focus on his hobby, running. Verch is a truly prolific predator, and his attacks have made untold numbers of victims miserable — including the small Dutch charity that was forced to shut down after paying his ransom demand. Pixsy has been Verch’s US counsel and filed dozens of suits on his behalf.

Back in 2021, I got hit by Pixsy on behalf of a photographer named Nenad Stojkovic, with a claim that I had failed to attribute his image correctly. The email threat was truly vicious, calculated to strike terror into the recipient’s heart and prompt swift payment of $600, for using a freely licensed image whose market value had been set by its creator at $0.00.

There was just one problem: I hadn’t flubbed the attribution string. I helped with the launch of Creative Commons. I was CC’s first European director. What’s more, I have decades of experience fighting bullies and trolls and I knew their threat was bullshit — no court would award them the damages they were seeking.

So I wrote about it, publishing the text of my correspondence with Pixsy’s staff and management, and calling on Flickr to make changes to prevent their tools from being abused to victimize innocent people, like forcing users with CC 2.0-licensed images to relicense them as CC 4.0, which guarantees users the right to 30 days to fix attribution strings.

The reason I thought Flickr might take this in hand is that it is finally under decent, responsive leadership — since 2018, Flickr has been owned by Smugmug, a family-owned business that really cares about photographers and the open internet.

Flickr hasn’t taken all of my suggestions yet — my understanding is that they are laboring under enormous technological debt thanks to years of neglect by Yahoo and Verizon, and even small changes require weeks of all-hands technological work.

But what they have done is modify their policies to create a de facto CC 4.0 environment for their users, by promising to terminate the accounts of any user who repeatedly threatens legal action over bad attribution strings without first offering a 30-day grace period.

Flickr’s done more than that, actually. For one thing, they ditched Pixsy, severing their relationship with the company (Pixsy still lists them on its “partner” page). They also created the Flickr Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to providing long-term, responsible stewardship for their CC and public domain image respositories:

https://www.flickr.org/

For its part, Creative Commons published an excellent “Statement of Enforcement Principles” for its licenses that unequivocally rejected the way that Pixsy and other copyleft trolls abuse the bug in its older licenses:

https://creativecommons.org/license-enforcement/enforcement-principles/

In the months since I published my article detailing Pixsy’s attempt to shake me down, two things happened. First, I got a legal threat from Kain Jones, Pixsy’s CEO, who demanded that I get on the phone with him, the the alternative being “escalating things legally”:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats-5dfc54558f2c

Jones also falsely claimed that naming the employees who’d threatened me violated the GDPR, which is extremely on-brand for this whole mess. While I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest expert on GDPR, I did lobby in Brussels for it, and I do have German specialist lawyers on tap who are happy to explain that Jones’s threat is absolute nonsense.

As I noted in my followup to Jones, he seems incapable of interacting with the public or his critics without making legal threats — and not just any legal threats, but legal threats that are grounded in an unhinged, and, in my opinion, deliberately deceptive theories of the law.

Pixsy continued to rattle its sabers for a while after this, tweeting that I’d made errors in my description of its business operations but declining to correct those records in response to my and others’ requests for further detail. It is my opinion that Pixsy failed to correct the record because my accusations were and are substantively correct.

But even after I stopped hearing from Pixsy, I continued to hear from its victims. I routinely receive distraught emails from everyday people who thought they were doing the right thing by using Creative Commons-licensed images in their work, and who now face a remorseless onslaught of threats from Pixsy’s team. Some of these people have been targeted on behalf of Nenad Stojkovic, just as I was.

These people beg me for advice — will Pixsy sue? Can they ignore Pixsy’s demands? I give them my condolences and tell them that I can’t promise them that a company as vindictive, greedy and morally bankrupt as Pixsy won’t bring a lawsuit. Every time, I wish I could offer them more.

Well, now I can: if you are targeted by a copyleft troll for using a Flickr-hosted image, narc them the fuck out. Tell Flickr about them. Flickr no longer tolerates copyleft trolling, and they will terminate repeat offenders’ accounts.

As I wrote this today, I went back and revisted Pixsy CEO Kain Jones’s letter to me and I was struck again by its absolute rank hypocrisy, the sheer sociopathic lack of self-awareness it displays. Jones presides over an empire of bulk legal threats, carefully drafted to frighten blameless people into sending him money they can’t afford and don’t owe. In this correspondence, his company tells its victims that they are liable “regardless of knowledge or intent.” Victims are told that correcting their error will not suffice, because it “does not resolve the period of unlicensed use.”

And yet, in this letter, Jones calls on me to show understanding because “people occasionally make mistakes.” He scolds me for my “vitriol” in my naming and shaming a senior executive who boasts on Pixsy’s website of having “overseen over 140,000 cases” — that is, who sent these outrageous letters to more than one hundred and forty thousand people and organizations.

Unlike Kain Jones, I am a working artist. I make my living from the sale of my creative works, not from tricking people who’ve made innocent, trivial legal errors into sending me hundreds or thousands of dollars. Unlike Marco Verch, I don’t pay anonymous randos small sums to create new works, slap my name on them, and then threaten blameless people in the name of defending artists’ rights.

And I sometimes have to police my copyrights. The world is full of quick-buck scammers who rip off my work, including my Creative Commons-licensed works, often with the assistance of some of the world’s largest corporations:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

These people are engaged in what Douglas Rushkoff calls “Going Meta.” They don’t do anything useful, but rather, they create a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

This is the passive-income brainworm — a parasitic, end-stage capitalist hustle that cloaks itself in high-minded rhetoric even though it is the very lowest of bottom-feeders. Pixsy claims that it is primarily an artists’ defense tool, but the company conspicuously refused to tell me what share of its income comes from real copyright defense, and what share comes from copyleft trolling.

Whenever I think back on Kain Jones and his outrageous legal threats to me — first the one that falsely claimed I had violated a Creative Commons license, and then the one that insinuated that calling him out broke the law — the thing that outrages me most is his assertion that he is a defender of artists’ rights.

What an outrageous and grotesque claim that is. A man who presides over a powerful corporation that devotes its considerable energy to tormenting people who used Creative Commons licenses as they were intended to be used sends a legal threat to a working artist and he styles himself a champion of the arts? If I wrote that into one of my bestselling novels — which generate revenue by making people happy through artistic expression, and not by terrorizing people with deceptive and unethical legal threats — I’d be accused of absurd, overbroad parody.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[[Image ID: John Milton's 'Fall of Lucifer,' modified so that God's light emanating from heaven is coming out of the Flickr blue-and-red-balls logo.]]

[docheatherhosler]

Hi Everyone,

I wish I didn’t feel that I needed to write this post, and it contains discussion of: transphobia, including from the state; suicide; and domestic abuse. 

However, it is necessary to fight back against the Conservative government’s latest attack on trans people, this time coming after trans kids. They recently released “Gender Questioning Children Non-statutory guidance for schools and colleges in England”. It is full of transphobia in the form of Gender Critical ideas and, if schools follow this ‘guidance’, it will cost many lives of trans kids. Gender Critical beliefs include the belief that sex is biological and immutable, people cannot change their sex and sex is distinct from gender-identity. This is fundamentally transphobic by denying the very existence of transgender people at all. Before diving into details, I ask that you read at least the summary and then use talking points from my template response at the end to write to your MP, school, and also contact the government's consultation on this guidance. The official consultation finishes near the start of March 2024 so please submit a response soon.

TL;DR: The main problems with this guidance are:

That schools do not have a “general duty to allow a child to socially transition”, by for example changing a child’s name and/or pronouns used.

“Parents should not be excluded from decisions taken by a school or college relating to requests for a child to socially transition”.

Throughout the guidance, there are a lot of Gender Critical opinions being stated, using language such as “ has been linked to gender identity ideology, the belief that a person can have a ‘gender’, , that is different to their biological sex. This is a contested belief.” This language is trying to suggest that the basic existence of transgender people is a contested belief.

The Truth.

Social transition, where adults close to the child/youth affirm their gender is known to be hugely beneficial, even acceptance & use of correct pronouns from one significant adult resulted in 39% lower odds of attempting suicide.

Across the population, transgender adolescents reported abuse rates nearly double that of their comparable cisgender heterosexual peers. Forcing the school to ‘out’ transgender adolescents to their parents drastically increases that child’s chances of being subjected to abuse.

It is well understood by most leading scientists in relevant fields that gender exists, and is separate to biological sex. Plus, biological sex is not a binary, and is not immutable, many aspects of it can be changed with medical intervention. This intervention has also proven to be very effective in helping people with gender dysphoria.

Letter Template

The following template letter is intended for parents to send to the head teachers of their children’s schools. Of course, you are free to modify it however you would like and it is only provided as a suggestion. Please remove or change parts in angle brackets <> as these are intended for things specific to you.

Dear <head teacher's name>,

I am writing to express my concern about the recent government guidance for schools on “gender questioning” children. The guidance is transphobic all the way through and will cost lives. Transgender children deserve to be affirmed and treated with respect, enabling them to learn and grow just like any other child.

Specifically, there are two particularly dangerous parts to the guidance. The forced outing of transgender children to their parents, and the declaration that schools do not have a general duty to “allow” a child to socially transition.

Firstly, affirming a child during their social transition by using their pronouns is suicide prevention. Studies have shown reduced rates of suicide attempts in transgender young people when they are affirmed in their gender. If a young person has their pronouns respected by even one significant adult in their life attempted suicide rates are reduced by 39%. (ref: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/blog/acceptance-of-transgender-and-nonbinary-youth-from-adults-and-peers-associated-with-significantly-lower-rates-of-attempting-suicide/). For many transgender children with unsupportive or transphobic families, school is often the only place that can provide this affirmation of their identity.

The school’s duty of care to children and young people includes taking reasonable steps to protect them from foreseeable risks, including physical and emotional harm. Clearly these suicide statistics constitute foreseeable risks of actual harm to children if their gender identity is not respected and correct pronouns are not used. People at the school using the correct pronouns would be considered “reasonable steps” to prevent this harm. Please ensure your school never contributes to these preventable deaths of young people. You must reject this government guidance.

Secondly, the guidance takes a “parent first” approach. It should be obvious that the main person needing protection is the child themselves. Forcibly outing anyone to anyone else is never ok. Especially when that person is a child and you're outing them to those who have the most power to hurt the child. 

In a study, 43% of transgender and non-binary people have suffered abuse from family members (ref: https://galop.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Galop-LGBT-Experiences-of-Abuse-from-Family-Members.pdf ). Often the only way to keep safe is for the transgender or non-binary young person to remain closeted and keep their identity a secret from the rest of their family.

Transgender adolescents reported abuse rates of nearly double that of their cisgender heterosexual peers. (ref: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8344346/ ). These rates are for the general transgender population, the abuse itself will be very skewed towards parents who are transphobic abusing their transgender adolescents.

The decision of when and how the young person wants to inform their parents, must stay with the child, for their safety. Please ensure your school remains a safe place for all our children and doesn't subject them to the cruel and dangerous practice of forcibly outing them. Taking child-first approach would be more in line with the guidance regarding teenage pregnancy: schools are not obliged to report a pregnancy to the young person’s parents but rather the young person is encouraged to inform their parents themselves (https://www.pathwayslearningcentre.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Teenage-Pregnancy-Guidance-for-Schools.pdf)

The government has an open consultation on this guidance that ends soon, at the beginning of March. Please add your response in the consultation as to why your school will not be following the guidance, specifically that it will cost lives and subject children to abuse that could have been prevented. It can be found at https://consult.education.gov.uk/equalities-political-impartiality-anti-bullying-team/gender-questioning-children-proposed-guidance/

<optional extra paragraph, only include if you are willing to discuss further with the head teacher>

If you would like to discuss this matter further, or look at the other problematic areas of the guidance, please let me know and I will be happy to provide further information and evidence, either in person or in writing.

<end extra paragraph>

I hope for a future where all children are provided equal opportunities to learn and grow no matter their gender identity.

Respectfully,

<Sign your name here>

Links

Guidance document itself: Gender Questioning Children - non-statutory guidance

Gov consultation: https://consult.education.gov.uk/equalities-political-impartiality-anti-bullying-team/gender-questioning-children-proposed-guidance/

Gov press release: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/parent-first-approach-at-the-core-of-new-guidance-on-gender-questioning-children

Stonewall advice for fighting this guidance: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/our-work/campaigns/support-trans-youth-respond-government-consultation

[ukftm]

Hello! So bc of all the recent nhs and cass report nonsense I'm looking to get a GRC, and was wondering if anyone knew the best way for getting the statutory declaration signed/witnessed? I've never had to have an actual legal person involved in paperwork before and have no idea where to start ;; That and getting a copy of my birth certificate comfirmed/certified, so if anyone knows how and/or the price solicitors may charge for all this, it'd be much appreciated!

Hi Anon,

If you have a look through our GRC and name change posts, you will find all of the information you need, along with links.