#COMCom

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Antiusurpation and the road to disenshittification

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'll be in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Nineties kids had a good reason to be excited about the internet's promise of disintermediation: the gatekeepers who controlled our access to culture, politics, and opportunity were crooked as hell, and besides, they sucked.

For a second there, we really did get a lot of disintermediation, which created a big, weird, diverse pluralistic space for all kinds of voices, ideas, identities, hobbies, businesses and movements. Lots of these were either deeply objectionable or really stupid, or both, but there was also so much cool stuff on the old, good internet.

Then, after about ten seconds of sheer joy, we got all-new gatekeepers, who were at least as bad, and even more powerful, than the old ones. The net became Tom Eastman's "Five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." Culture, politics, finance, news, and especially power have been gathered into the hands of unaccountable, greedy, and often cruel intermediaries.

Oh, also, we had an election.

This isn't an election post. I have many thoughts about the election, but they're still these big, unformed blobs of anger, fear and sorrow. Experience teaches me that the only way to get past this is to just let all that bad stuff sit for a while and offgas its most noxious compounds, so that I can handle it safely and figure out what to do with it.

While I wait that out, I'm just getting the job done. Chop wood, carry water. I've got a book to write, Enshittification, for Farar, Straus, Giroux's MCD Books, and it's very nearly done:

https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adoctorow+%23dailywords&src=typed_query&f=live

Compartmentalizing my anxieties and plowing that energy into productive work isn't necessarily the healthiest coping strategy, but it's not the worst, either. It's how I wrote nine books during the covid lockdowns.

And sometimes, when you're not staring directly at something, you get past the tunnel vision that makes it impossible to see its edges, fracture lines, and weak points.

So I'm working on the book. It's a book about platforms, because enshittification is a phenomenon that is most visible and toxic on platforms. Platforms are intermediaries, who connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, workers and employers, politicians and voters, activists and crowds, as well as families, communities, and would-be romantic partners.

There's a reason we keep reinventing these intermediaries: they're useful. Like, it's technically possible for a writer to also be their own editor, printer, distributor, promoter and sales-force:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

But without middlemen, those are the only writers we'll get. The set of all writers who have something to say that I want to read is much larger than the set of all writers who are capable of running their own publishing operation.

The problem isn't middlemen: the problem is powerful middlemen. When an intermediary gets powerful enough to usurp the relationship between the parties on either side of the transaction, everything turns to shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

A dating service that faces pressure from competition, regulation, interoperability and a committed workforce will try as hard as it can to help you find Your Person. A dating service that buys up all its competitors, cows its workforce, captures its regulators and harnesses IP law to block interoperators will redesign its service so that you keep paying forever, and never find love:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/02/13/1228749143/the-dating-app-paradox-why-dating-apps-may-be-worse-than-ever

Multiply this a millionfold, in every sector of our complex, high-tech world where we necessarily rely on skilled intermediaries to handle technical aspects of our lives that we can't – or shouldn't – manage ourselves. That world is beholden to predators who screw us and screw us and screw us, jacking up our rents:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/yes-there-are-antitrust-voters-in

Cranking up the price of food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And everything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

(Maybe this is a post about the election after all?)

The difference between a helpmeet and a parasite is power. If we want to enjoy the benefits of intermediaries without the risks, we need policies that keep middlemen weak. That's the opposite of the system we have now.

Take interoperability and IP law. Interoperability (basically, plugging new things into existing things) is a really powerful check against powerful middlemen. If you rely on an ad-exchange to fund your newsgathering and they start ripping you off, then an interoperable system that lets you use a different exchange will not only end the rip off – it'll make it less likely to happen in the first place because the ad-tech platform will be afraid of losing your business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Interoperability means that when a printer company gouges you on ink, you can buy cheap third party ink cartridges and escape their grasp forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Interoperability means that when Amazon rips off audiobook authors to the tune of $100m, those authors can pull their books from Amazon and sell them elsewhere and know that their listeners can move their libraries over to a different app:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

But interoperability has been in retreat for 40 years, as IP law has expanded to criminalize otherwise normal activities, so that middlemen can use IP rights to protect themselves from their end-users and business customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

That's what I mean when I say that "IP" is "any law that lets a business reach beyond its own walls and control the actions of its customers, competitors and critics."

For example, there's a pernicious law 1998 US law that I write about all the time, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the "anticircumvention law." This is a law that felonizes tampering with copyright locks, even if you are the creator of the undelying work.

So Amazon – the owner of the monopoly audiobook platform Audible – puts a mandatory copyright lock around every audiobook they sell. I, as an author who writes, finances and narrates the audiobook, can't provide you, my customer, with a tool to remove that lock. If I do so, I face criminal sanctions: a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense:

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

In other words: if I let you take my own copyrighted work out of Amazon's app, I commit a felony, with penalties that are far stiffer than the penalties you would face if you were to simply pirate that audiobook. The penalties for you shoplifting the audiobook on CD at a truck-stop are lower than the penalties the author and publisher of the book would face if they simply gave you a tool to de-Amazon the file. Indeed, even if you hijacked the truck that delivered the CDs, you'd probably be looking at a shorter sentence.

This is a law that is purpose-built to encourage intermediaries to usurp the relationship between buyers and sellers, creators and audiences. It's a charter for parasitism and predation.

But as bad as that is, there's another aspect of DMCA 1201 that's even worse: the exemptions process.

You might have read recently about the Copyright Office "freeing the McFlurry" by granting a DMCA 1201 exemption for companies that want to reverse-engineer the error-codes from McDonald's finicky, unreliable frozen custard machines:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Under DMCA 1201, the Copyright Office hears petitions for these exemptions every three years. If they judge that anticircumvention law is interfering with some legitimate activity, the statute empowers them to grant an exemption.

When the DMCA passed in 1998 (and when the US Trade Rep pressured other world governments into passing nearly identical laws in the decades that followed), this exemptions process was billed as a "pressure valve" that would prevent abuses of anticircumvention law.

But this was a cynical trick. The way the law is structured, the Copyright Office can only grant "use" exemptions, but not "tools" exemptions. So if you are granted the right to move Audible audiobooks into a third-party app, you are personally required to figure out how to do that. You have to dump the machine code of the Audible app, decompile it, scan it for vulnerabilities, and bootstrap your own jailbreaking program to take Audible wrapper off the file.

No one is allowed to help you with this. You aren't allowed to discuss any of this publicly, or share a tool that you make with anyone else. Doing any of this is a potential felony.

In other words, DMCA 1201 gives intermediaries power over you, but bans you from asking an intermediary to help you escape another abusive middleman.

This is the exact opposite of how intermediary law should work. We should have rules that ban intermediaries from exercising undue power over the parties they serve, and we should have rules empowering intermediaries to erode the advantage of powerful intermediaries.

The fact that the Copyright Office grants you an exemption to anticircumvention law means nothing unless you can delegate that right to an intermediary who can exercise it on your behalf.

A world without publishing intermediaries is one in which the only writers who thrive are the ones capable of being publishers, too, and that's a tiny fraction of all the writers with something to say.

A world without interoperability intermediaries is one in which the only platform users who thrive are also skilled reverse-engineering ninja hackers – and that's an infinitesimal fraction of the platform users who would benefit from interoperabilty.

Let this be your north star in evaluating platform regulation proposals. Platform regulation should weaken intermediaries' powers over their users, and strengthen their power over other middlemen.

Put in this light, it's easy to see why the ill-informed calls to abolish Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which makes platform users, not platforms, responsible for most unlawful speech) are so misguided:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

If we require platforms to surveil all user speech and block anything that might violate any law, we give the largest, most powerful platforms a permanent advantage over smaller, better platforms, run by co-ops, hobbyists, nonprofits local governments, and startups. The big platforms have the capital to rig up massive, automated surveillance and censorship systems, and the only alternatives that can spring up have to be just as big and powerful as the Big Tech platforms we're so desperate to escape:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

This is especially grave given the current political current, where fascist politicians are threatening platforms with brutal punishments for failing to censor disfavored political views.

Anyone who tells you that "it's only censorship when the government does it" is badly confused. It's only a First Amendment violation when the government does it, sure – but censorship has always relied on intermediaries. From the Inquisition to the Comics Code, government censors were only able to do their jobs because powerful middlemen, fearing state punishments, blocked anything that might cross the line, censoring far beyond the material actually prohibited by the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/22/self-censorship/#hugos

We live in a world of powerful, corrupt middlemen. From payments to real-estate, from job-search to romance, there's a legion of parasites masquerading as helpmeets, burying their greedy mouthparts into our tender flesh:

https://www.capitalisnt.com/episodes/visas-hidden-tax-on-americans

But intermediaries aren't the problem. You shouldn't have to stand up your own payment processor, or learn the ins and outs of real-estate law, or start your own single's bar. The problem is power, not intermediation.

As we set out to build a new, good internet (with a lot less help from the US government than seemed likely as recently as last week), let's remember that lesson: the point isn't disintermediation, it's weak intermediation.

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/2024/11/07/usurpers-helpmeets/#disreintermediation

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

[azspot]

Governments can — and should — have rules about interoperability in their procurement policies. They should require companies hoping to receive public money to supply the schematics, error codes, keys and other technical matter needed to maintain and improve the things they sell and provide to our public institutions.

Freeing Ourselves From The Clutches Of Big Tech

[abyssmalice]

(why do i have these pictures again)

[apocalypse-alert]

ssoda

-☄ (Comet, I jsut don't have another blog for her,,)

SODAAA!!!!

[dsfa265162]

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[apocalypse-alert]

yuh huhhh…

ew

- @apocalypse-alert

nuh uh...

[francaistoutsimplement]

7 bâchées en vélo à qui il a fallu quand même 5 heures de cours pour chevaucher le destrier offert avec vos impôts (5h pour apprendre à freiner sans se vautrer... ?) Rendez-vous aux Champs-Montants, pour assister au spectacle des bâches prises dans les rayons....! Passons!

Le maire d'Audincourt lui, n'est autre que Martial Bourquin, ancien communiste, puis ancien communiste dissident pour naturellement finir socialiste; maire, conseiller comcom, conseiller rgional puis Sénateur, socialiste, copain de Moscovici puis suppléant du même, roi de la gamelle, vieux cheval de retour de la gauche locale, un peu mis en examen 2022 pour "violation du secret de la correspondance" pour une histoire mettant en cause une autre élue de gauche dans le marigot local....! Il est vrai que la gôche étant tellement irréprochable qu'aux législatives de juillet 2024, une inconnue candidate RN a été élue député avec 55% des voix.... No comment!

Ah!! que les électeurs sont ingrats dirait micron...!

[sandmans-plattform]

Siblings ❤️ ❤️ TomSturridge #actors #Actor #thesandmanofficial #Netflix #netflixseries #neilgaiman #comicbooks #comiclover #mazikeen #amazing #lordmorpheusedit #lordofdreams #Morpheus #follow4followback #followformore #likeforlikeback #likesforlikesback #liketime #waitingfornewseason #season2 #threewayjunction #comcom #kainandabel #lucienne #kain #abel #sweetbitter

Follow new WhatsApp chanel:

https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaGGg9cFsn0YjxsZ6L3

Link in bio

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Here's a thing I listened to this week that I won't stop thinking about for some time. It was written by Gill Adams, who's Lucy Beaumont's mother, and performed by Lucy Beaumont. I's the first thing Lucy Beaumont ever did in showbusiness. It aired on BBC Radio 4 in 2000, long before Lucy Beaumont started stand-up.

It is, I must warn any Lucy Beaumont fans who click on this, definitely not a comedy show. It's a one-woman radio play, a fictional script about a pregnant teenager, played by Lucy. There's a lot of soundscape stuff in the audio drama, but Lucy's the only voice actor, and she does an amazing job.

I said early on that this feels like an Alan Bennett thing to me, with Lucy listing off the quaint things he teenage character likes to do in the wintertime. However, it takes a sharp turn away from Alan Bennett and into being very fucking dark.

I found this article very interesting:

but I'm glad I didn't read it until after I'd listened to the radio show, because it has a lot of spoilers. I got genuinely caught up in the drama of the radio play, wanting to know what would happen as it got increasingly intense, and I'm glad I didn't get that spoiled before I listened to it. So if anyone is interested, I recommend listening to the radio show first, but then reading that spoiler-heavy Guardian article. It gives interesting context to why Gill Adams wrote it, and how her relationship with her daughter/performer informed it.

I still find Lucy Beaumont interesting, the puzzle of how much her comedy persona is or isn't a character. The question that I once worried was misogynistic, since everyone asked this question when she was on Taskmaster even though she sat right next to Sam Campbell and no one doubted that he was acting daft on purpose, so why not give a woman credit for that too? Until I heard her ComCom episode in which she swore up and down that she genuinely believes some ludicrous things. Then I heard the Perfect Brains episode with her mother and decided... okay, I don't think it is a character. I think she's just had the type of wild up-bringing that can make someone very intelligent, very competent and savvy at quite a few things, and also be as messed up as someone would have to be to talk the way Lucy Beaumont does while not being a character. That's interesting. I'm not super into her stand-up, but I'd love to read her autobiography.

This radio play is not, in any way, her autobiography, to be clear. Her mother explains in the Guardian article about why she wrote it, in response to dehumanizing headlines about pregnant teenagers. But this play is a hell of a thing for someone to be able to perform as well as Lucy Beaumont did, while being as young as she was - I think she was 17 or 18 when she recorded this. That's a lot of talent, from her and from her mother for writing it.

Anyway, I won't get too into describing the show itself, because I think people should listen to it and I don't want to spoil it. I'll just say, trigger warning for a fair bit of fucked up stuff set to 90s music.

[imqueerandadeer]

big things comcoming up for the ARG stay tuned!

[status-updates]

ntntoice: therehs's somsoemthing in One's calaleldner calledled "Sisyphean Saturday" comcoming uppu nenenxx weeke?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform

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/2024/11/23/hack-the-class-war/#robo-boss

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1385565737167724545?lang=en

The reason for their newfound popularity is obvious: the rise and rise of algorithmic management tools, in which your boss is an app. That IBM slide is right: turning an app into your boss allows your actual boss to create an "accountability sink" in which there is no obvious way to blame a human or even a company for your maltreatment:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

App-based management-by-bossware treats the bug identified by the unknown author of that IBM slide into a feature. When an app is your boss, it can force you to scab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

Or it can steal your wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But tech giveth and tech taketh away. Digital technology is infinitely flexible: the program that spies on you can be defeated by another program that defeats spying. Every time your algorithmic boss hacks you, you can hack your boss back:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Technologists and labor organizers need one another. Even the most precarious and abused workers can team up with hackers to disenshittify their robo-bosses:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For every abuse technology brings to the workplace, there is a liberating use of technology that workers unleash by seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

One tech-savvy group on the cutting edge of dismantling the Torment Nexus is Algorithms Exposed, a tiny, scrappy group of EU hacker/academics who recruit volunteers to reverse engineer and modify the algorithms that rule our lives as workers and as customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Algorithms Exposed have an admirable supply of seemingly boundless energy. Every time I check in with them, I learn that they've spun out yet another special-purpose subgroup. Today, I learned about Reversing Works, a hacking team that reverse engineers gig work apps, revealing corporate wrongdoing that leads to multimillion euro fines for especially sleazy companies.

One such company is Foodinho, an Italian subsidiary of the Spanish food delivery company Glovo. Foodinho/Glovo has been in the crosshairs of Italian labor enforcers since before the pandemic, racking up millions in fines – first for failing to file the proper privacy paperwork disclosing the nature of the data processing in the app that Foodinho riders use to book jobs. Then, after the Italian data commission investigated Foodinho, the company attracted new, much larger fines for its out-of-control surveillance conduct.

As all of this was underway, Reversing Works was conducting its own research into Glovo/Foodinho's app, running it on a simulated Android handset inside a PC so they could peer into app's data collection and processing. They discovered a nightmarish world of pervasive, illegal worker surveillance, and published their findings a year ago in November, 2023:

https://www.etui.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/Exercising%20workers%20rights%20in%20algorithmic%20management%20systems_Lessons%20learned%20from%20the%20Glovo-Foodinho%20digital%20labour%20platform%20case_2023.pdf

That report reveals all kinds of extremely illegal behavior. Glovo/Foodinho makes its riders' data accessible across national borders, so Glovo managers outside of Italy can access fine-grained surveillance information and sensitive personal information – a major data protection no-no.

Worse, Glovo's app embeds trackers from a huge number of other tech platforms (for chat, analytics, and more), making it impossible for the company to account for all the ways that its riders' data is collected – again, a requirement under Italian and EU data protection law.

All this data collection continues even when riders have clocked out for the day – its as though your boss followed you home after quitting time and spied on you.

The research also revealed evidence of a secretive worker scoring system that ranked workers based on undisclosed criteria and reserved the best jobs for workers with high scores. This kind of thing is pervasive in algorithmic management, from gig work to Youtube and Tiktok, where performers' videos are routinely suppressed because they crossed some undisclosed line. When an app is your boss, your every paycheck is docked because you violated a policy you're not allowed to know about, because if you knew why your boss was giving you shitty jobs, or refusing to show the video you spent thousands of dollars making to the subscribers who asked to see it, then maybe you could figure out how to keep your boss from detecting your rulebreaking next time.

All this data-collection and processing is bad enough, but what makes it all a thousand times worse is Glovo's data retention policy – they're storing this data on their workers for four years after the worker leaves their employ. That means that mountains of sensitive, potentially ruinous data on gig workers is just lying around, waiting to be stolen by the next hacker that breaks into the company's servers.

Reversing Works's report made quite a splash. A year after its publication, the Italian data protection agency fined Glovo another 5 million euros and ordered them to cut this shit out:

https://reversing.works/posts/2024/11/press-release-reversing.works-investigation-exposes-glovos-data-privacy-violations-marking-a-milestone-for-worker-rights-and-technology-accountability/

As the report points out, Italy is extremely well set up to defend workers' rights from this kind of bossware abuse. Not only do Italian enforcers have all the privacy tools created by the GDPR, the EU's flagship privacy regulation – they also have the benefit of Italy's 1970 Workers' Statute. The Workers Statute is a visionary piece of legislation that protects workers from automated management practices. Combined with later privacy regulation, it gave Italy's data regulators sweeping powers to defend Italian workers, like Glovo's riders.

Italy is also a leader in recognizing gig workers as de facto employees, despite the tissue-thin pretense that adding an app to your employment means that you aren't entitled to any labor protections. In the case of Glovo, the fine-grained surveillance and reputation scoring were deemed proof that Glovo was employer to its riders.

Reversing Works' report is a fascinating read, especially the sections detailing how the researchers recruited a Glovo rider who allowed them to log in to Glovo's platform on their account.

As Reversing Works points out, this bottom-up approach – where apps are subjected to technical analysis – has real potential for labor organizations seeking to protect workers. Their report established multiple grounds on which a union could seek to hold an abusive employer to account.

But this bottom-up approach also holds out the potential for developing direct-action tools that let workers flex their power, by modifying apps, or coordinating their actions to wring concessions out of their bosses.

After all, the whole reason for the gig economy is to slash wage-bills, by transforming workers into contractors, and by eliminating managers in favor of algorithms. This leaves companies extremely vulnerable, because when workers come together to exercise power, their employer can't rely on middle managers to pressure workers, deal with irate customers, or step in to fill the gap themselves:

https://projects.itforchange.net/state-of-big-tech/changing-dynamics-of-labor-and-capital/

Only by seizing the means of computation, workers and organized labor can turn the tables on bossware – both by directly altering the conditions of their employment, and by producing the evidence and tools that regulators can use to force employers to make those alterations permanent.

Image: EFF (modified) https://www.eff.org/files/issues/eu-flag-11_1.png

CC BY 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

[thecirclecalls]

COMEBACKCOMEBACKCOMEBACKCOMEBACKCOMEBACKCOME BA ACK COMEB ACK COME BACK COMEBACK DONT COME BACK DONT COME BACK COME BACK DONT DONT DONT COMEBACK COME BACK COME BACK DONT COME BA DONT COME BACK DONT COME BACK COME B A CK COMEBACK COMCOME CCOEM BACK BACK BACK DONT DO NT COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK COME BACKCKCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK D o NT t c o me b a ck

[abyssmalice]

(me somehow Just realising that latest tonitoni comcom can be New Icon........)

[daphenominchief]

The People of the Philippine Islands vs. Josefina Bandian G.R. No. 45186, September 30, 1936

FACTS:

Josefina Bandian was charged with infanticide for the death of her newborn child.

The trial court convicted her and sentenced her to reclusión perpetua.

Bandian's neighbor, Valentin Aguilar, saw her enter a thicket, commonly used by people to respond to calls of nature, near her house.

Aguilar then saw Bandian emerge from the thicket with blood-stained clothes, staggering and appearing weak and dizzy.

Aguilar helped Bandian to her house and bed, she only said she was dizzy.

Another neighbor, Adriano Comcom, was called to help. He found the body of a newborn baby near the path by the thicket.

Bandian confirmed that the baby was hers when asked.

Dr. Emilio Nepomuceno, the sanitary division president, examined Bandian at her home. He concluded that Bandian gave birth in her house, then threw her child in the thicket to hide her dishonor.

Dr. Nepomuceno claimed Bandian admitted to killing her child, though this was contradicted by Bandian and other witnesses.

The child's wounds were determined to be from animal bites, not from a human.

Bandian had been experiencing fever, weakness, and dizziness. She was 23 years old and a first-time mother.

Bandian was in a relationship with Luis Kirol, who knew she was pregnant and believed the child was his. They were both waiting for the baby's birth.

Bandian and Kirol had been living together for a year.

ISSUES:

Was Josefina Bandian guilty of infanticide or abandonment of a minor?

Was Bandian criminally liable, considering her physical and mental state at the time of the incident?

RULING:

Answer: The Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision, acquitting Josefina Bandian of the crime of infanticide. The Court found she was exempt from criminal liability.

Legal Basis:

Criminal Liability: For infanticide or abandonment of a minor to be punishable, the act must be committed willfully, consciously, or as a result of a voluntary, conscious and free act or omission. Even if committed through imprudence, the person must be in full enjoyment of their mental faculties.

Exempting Circumstances: The law exempts a person from criminal liability if they act under circumstances where severe dizziness and extreme debility caused them to unintentionally cause harm, without any fault or intention on their part. The fourth and seventh exempting circumstances of Article 12 of the Revised Penal Code apply to her.

Fourth Exempting Circumstance: "Any person who, while performing a lawful act with due care, causes an injury by mere accident without fault or intention of causing it."

Seventh Exempting Circumstance: The failure to perform an act required by law, when prevented by some lawful or insuperable cause.

Acts Punishable by Law: According to Article 3 of the Revised Penal Code, acts and omissions punishable by law are felonies, which may be committed through deceit (dolo) or fault (culpa). Deceit is when the act is performed with deliberate intent, and fault is when the wrongful act results from imprudence, negligence, lack of foresight, or lack of skill.

Application:

The court determined that Bandian did not willfully or consciously cause her child’s death or abandon it. She went to the thicket to respond to a call of nature while already weakened by fever.

She was not aware that she was giving birth due to being a first-time mother and her physical condition. Her extreme debility and dizziness, coupled with inexperience, prevented her from realizing she had given birth and from taking care of her child.

Bandian's actions were deemed accidental, without fault or intention. She did not have a motive to harm the child because her partner was aware of her pregnancy and was eagerly awaiting the child's birth.

Because she was unaware of her delivery, she could not have deliberately intended to leave her child to die, or be considered negligent.

The court concluded that her act of going to the thicket was lawful, and the subsequent birth and abandonment of the child was due to her extreme physical state and lack of awareness, which constitutes a lawful or insuperable cause, and thus, she had no criminal intent.

Justice Villa-Real concurred, asserting that Bandian did not commit a criminal act or omission, emphasizing her unconscious delivery and the accidental nature of the child’s death.

Conclusion: The Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision, acquitting Josefina Bandian. The Court held that Bandian’s actions were not criminal as she was not aware of her delivery and did not have the intention to harm or abandon her child. She was overcome by dizziness and debility, which were exempting circumstances.

DOCTRINE OF THE CASE:

Unconscious Delivery: A primipara (first-time mother) may experience an unconscious, precipitate, or sudden delivery without being aware that she is giving birth, particularly when responding to a call of nature.

Exempting Circumstance: A person who commits a wrong due to severe dizziness and extreme debility, without any fault or intention, is exempt from criminal liability.

Criminal Intent: For a crime to exist, it requires either deliberate intent (deceit) or fault resulting from imprudence, negligence, lack of foresight, or lack of skill. If a person is unaware that they committed an act, there is no criminal intent to be found.

[dijonbeaune]

Comcom Gevrey-Nuits : quels projets pour le cinéma Le Nuiton ?

Le 1er juillet dernier, la comcom Gevrey-Chambertin & Nuits-Saint-Georges a repris la gestion du cinéma Le Nuiton à Nuits-Saint-Georges, confiée depuis 1984 à la MJC locale. Pascal Bortot, vice-président en charge de la Culture, détaille le projet de la collectivité. Le cinéma Le Nuiton est désormais géré par la communauté de communes de Gevrey-Chambertin & Nuits-Saint-Georges. © D.R. Une page…