letters to the editor
DOI: 10.1145/2018396.2018398

Justice for Jahromi

The Committee of Con- cerned Scientists, the Amer- ican Association for the Advancement of Science hu- man rights and science program, and Scholars at Risk are deeply concerned over the fate of Masaud Jahromi, chairman of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Ahlia University in Bahrain. (Jahromi earned a Ph.D. in telecommunication networking from University of Kent at Canterbury in the U.K.)

Scholars at Risk, an independent non-profit organization affiliated with New York University, has learned Jahromi was arrested and taken from his home at 2: 30 a.m., April 14, 2011, and first held in Al Galaa Prison, then transferred to the Dry Dock Prison, where he has been detained since the end of April.

Contacts in Bahrain familiar with Jahromi’s situation, as received by Scholars at Risk, report the police broke into Jahromi’s house, threatened and harassed members of his family, confiscated the family’s laptops, and beat Jahromi before taking him away to an undisclosed location. He was then denied access to his family for more than a month. Reports also indicate Jahromi is not receiving medical treatment for serious, diagnosed conditions, including Hepatitis C.

The nature of Jahromi’s arrest and subsequent detention without access to medical care and family suggests disregard for international standards of due process and fair trial and detention, as guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Bahrain has acceded. Taking into account reported arrests of scholars in Bahrain following the pro-democracy protests in February and March, Jahromi’s detention further suggests a wider attempt to intimidate intellectuals and limit academic freedom in Bahrain.

The Committee of Concerned Sci-
entists (I am its Vice-Chair, Computer
Science) urges Bahrain to uphold its
obligations under international law
with regard to Jahromi and intervene
to ensure his well-being—including
regular access to family, legal counsel
of his choosing, and medical treat-
ment—pending his earliest release.

 

His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin
Salman Al Khalifa
Prime Minister
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
P.O. Box 547,
Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain
For more on Jahromi and others to
whom you may write, please see Schol-
ars at Risk http://scholarsatrisk.nyu.

 

for copyright, Require
No Deliberate action

Though I always find Pamela Samuelson’s “Legally Speaking” Viewpoints valuable and usually agree entirely, I found myself disagreeing strongly with “Too Many Copyrights?” (July 2011). Acquiring rights to one’s own creative works should not require any kind of deliberate action. Creative works should be automatically one’s own exclusive property unless and until one deliberately waives or assigns those rights. Consider four examples of injustice that could result:

Naive. Your child publishes something notable, perhaps a poem, short story, or painting, on a social network, blog, or school bulletin board, unaware of copyright, and makes no copyright claim. Someone else appropriates the work and makes money from it, perhaps by including it in an anthology. Your child gets nothing and has no rights to the work.

Lack of knowledge. A person in, say,
rural Africa, writes and performs a
world-class song or other piece of mu-
sic. Due to the norms of the local cul-
ture, such a person lacks awareness
of even the notion of copyright and its
worldwide legal implications, making
no copyright claim. Someone else ap-
propriates the work and makes a sig-
nificant amount of money from it. The
original composer/performer earns
nothing and has no rights. Historical
examples of such appropriation by col-
lectors and publishers include taking
from composers and performers in
rural North America from the 1920s to
the 1960s.