Uninspected Sausages

No USDA inspections... not that the government could competently inspect much of anything on the 'net anyway.

• Copyright Office fees are changing on 01 Aug 2009 — mostly up. Copyright registration is one of those self-perpetuating little annoyances: Once the system is in place, it's awfully hard to keep it from becoming more expensive over time, and there's really no longer a justification for it but for the government jobs it provides. Bluntly, it doesn't even serve the same purpose as a title registration system for either automobiles or real property, although you can read the more-formal notice in the Federal Register (PDF) and see if you can spot the difference.
• Electronic religion and pastopreneurship. It's not quite as honest as Richard Pryor was thirty years ago, though.
• Obama as philosopher in chief. The mind boggles.
• Some musings on the cultural construct called "freedom" that don't, unfortunately, reflect much thought about field and boundary conditions.
• Sleaze journalism isn't just limited to the celebrity-tabloids one finds at the supermarket checkout counter. Whether the UK equivalents have a better reputation is a murky question; they are, however, treated legally as "newspapers" more than as "entertainment" — which is going to have interesting repercussions for Rupert Murdoch, whose NewsCorp owns two of the worst of them. The story in the Grauniad, however, doesn't reach the most disturbing issue: Was there a parallel corporate policy in the US? That could be important because the UK statute establishes only civil liability (there's an additional "specific intent" element to reach criminal liability)... but the corresponding US (federal) statute establishes criminal liability without regard to specific intent.
• In the department of "It's called 'irony,' you morons," the RIAA is trying to stop a law professor — who teaches evidence law! — from posting recordings of depositions on the 'net... in a case about downloading of sound recordings off the 'net.