Pseudolaw

The ABC today features reportage about pseudolaw orders from the Nmdaka Dalai Australis group that appears to be an idiosyncratic mix of sovereign citizen and Indigenous 'suvereignty' and 'aniuima' [sic] rhetoric. 

In Luca v Eckert & Anor [2024] SASC 77 Stanley J dismissed an appeal that featured a Nmdaka Dalai claim. 

The Court states 

Mr Luca announced at the commencement of the hearing that he had just been served with a document that had the effect of removing the matter into a higher court. 

Mr Luca provided the document to me. On its face the document appeared to be an Interim Intervention Order and Summons issued by the ‘Superior Court of the People of Nmdaka Dalai Australis’ (the Superior Court) on the application of the First Lore Chief Prosecutor against Alexandra and Christopher Eckert pursuant to Section 21(3)(c)(a) of the Public Peace and Intervention Lore 2019 for the protection of Ammun Luca and Dr Kathleen Anne Maros to address domestic abuse violence concern. 

Mr Luca contended that in these circumstances he felt unable to proceed with the appeals listed before me. He contended that the subject matter of the appeals were now to be determined by the Superior Court. 

I indicated to Mr Luca that I had a different view of the law and the effect of the service of this document upon him. I informed him that he had invoked the jurisdiction of the Court and I was sitting this day to hear the matter. I warned him that if he did not proceed with his appeals I anticipated that there may be an application made to dismiss his appeals for want of prosecution and a further application for the costs of the appeals to be ordered against him. ... 

In the circumstances I am satisfied that the appeals should be dismissed for want of prosecution. 

The document supposedly served on Mr Luca shortly before the appeals were called on is, of course, bogus and a nonsense. As I pointed out to Mr Luca, it has no legal effect. I urged him to proceed with his appeals and warned him of the risk that if he did not do so, I anticipated that an application for the appeals to be dismissed with costs would be made. Notwithstanding that he understood this to be the position, he proceeded nonetheless to indicate that he felt unable to prosecute his appeals. He did not pursue the appeals. Neither did he seek an adjournment, although, in all the circumstances, I would not have been disposed to grant one. 

As a result of his failure to prosecute his appeals, the Court’s time and resources have been wasted. Other litigants have been kept out of the opportunity to have their matter heard. Moreover, the respondents to the appeal have incurred the cost of instructing lawyers and the preparation of the argument resisting the appeals, and the costs thrown away of the time set down for the hearing of the appeals.

Nmdaka claims to be 'A land of Free Living Souls' ... 

 The purported Australian Government (inc. the Commonwealth of Australia) is NOT abiding by Lore of the Land. 

Nmdaka Dalai Australis is about creating choice for good men and women on our aniuima to come together in Peace within a Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) Proclamation made by the Senior Lore/Law Elders (Bench/Circle) and being upheld by the Provost Marshal 

The “Australian Government” is functus officio and has been Ordered to stand down. 

Nmdaka Dalai Australis is extending an invitation to peacefully walk with the original Suveran bloodline descendants of this lands in your own sovereign capacity… under the Lore/Law of Lo go nama (Do no harm) 

The only lawful Authority on these lands unofficially labelled as ‘Australia’ is Customary Tribal Lore. 

Nmdaka Dalai Australis is for anyone who is ready to stand in their own Divine Authority, in Truth, Peace and Unity, as self-governing men and women, in unity and harmony, inside Ancestors’ Ancient Lore with the original bloodline descendants of this aniuima  

Dalai Australis is now operating the first formalised Land Lore/Law Court – the Superior Court of the People of Nmdaka Dalai Australis that adjudicates sitting in circle with Senior Lore/Law Elders of these lands.

Its call for volunteers to generate documentation (inc its own number plates and sheriff appointment) includes 

Are you a masseur? Energy Healer? Sound Bath Technician? Meditation Guide? Are you someone who can cook and create wholesome meals for anywhere from five to ten people? 

Do you have skills that can be offered as a gift to those who are committed to the ongoing wellbeing of Nmdaka Dalai Australis, and spend up to eighteen hours a day at times creating documents and ensuring the ongoing safety of the children and their guardians?

Fakes

'Truths and Tales: Understanding Online Fake News Networks in South Korea' by Benedict Sheehy, Sujin Choi, Md Irfanuzzaman Khan, Bruce Baer Arnold, Yoonmo Sang and Jae-Jin Lee in (2024) Journal of Asian and African Studies comments 

This study investigates the features of fake news networks and how they spread during the 2020 South Korean election. Using actor–network theory (ANT), we assessed the network’s central players and how they are connected. Results reveal the characteristics of the videoclips and channel networks responsible for the propagation of fake news. Analysis of the videoclip network reveals a high number of detected fake news videos and a high density of connections among users. Assessment of news videoclips on both actual and fake news networks reveals that the real news network is more concentrated. However, the scale of the network may play a role in these variations. Statistics for network centralization reveal that users are spread out over the network, pointing to its decentralized character. A closer look at the real and fake news networks inside videos and channels reveals similar trends. We find that the density of the real news videoclip network is higher than that of the fake news network, whereas the fake news channel networks are denser than their real news counterparts, which may indicate greater activity and interconnectedness in their transmission. We also found that fake news videoclips had more likes than real news videoclips, whereas real news videoclips had more dislikes than fake news videoclips. These findings strongly suggest that fake news videoclips are more accepted when people watch them on YouTube. In addition, we used semantic networks and automated content analysis to uncover common language patterns in fake news, which helps us better understand the structure and dynamics of the networks involved in the dissemination of fake news. The findings reported here provide important insights on how fake news spread via social networks during the South Korean election of 2020. The results of this study have important implications for the campaign against fake news and ensuring factual coverage.

Feedback

'What’s the use of being nice? Characteristics of feedback comments that students intend to use in improving their work' by David Playfoot, Ruth Horry and Aimee E Pink in (2024) Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education comments 

Feedback is an integral part of the learning process for students (Hyland 2013). Providing feedback on student work is time-consuming for teaching staff (Gibbs and Simpson 2004) and a lot of effort is expended in trying to provide high-quality feedback (e.g. Pitt and Norton 2017; Brooks et al. 2021). In spite of this, students in the UK rate feedback as one of the aspects of their university experience with which they are the least satisfied on the National Student Survey (Bell and Brooks 2017). It should be noted that the fact that students are the least satisfied with this aspect of their course does not indicate that the majority of students are dissatisfied just that satisfaction scores are lower than for other areas. Similar patterns are also seen in the Course Experience Questionnaire used to gauge student satisfaction in Australia (Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching 2023). Research has also shown that students often do not act upon the feedback that they are given because they do not consider it to be useful (McGrath, Taylor, and Pychyl 2011). As a consequence, a key goal of research in recent years has been to examine what affects the likelihood that feedback comments are perceived positively by the students that receive them. The current paper outlines three studies which have attempted to determine the characteristics of comments that students believe that they would use to further develop their work. 

The existing literature considers a variety of factors that may contribute to feedback being useful. There are already several excellent reviews and meta-analyses related to feedback practices (e.g. Wiliam 2018; Wisniewski, Zierer, and Hattie  2019; Van der Kleij and Lipnevich 2021; Winstone and Nash 2023). Despite this, there is still no clear consensus as to the characteristics of effective feedback – the effect sizes revealed by the meta-analyses are widely variable from paper to paper (Wiliam 2018). Part of the problem is likely to be that assessment and feedback practices are heavily constrained by the policies of the university in which a study is conducted, by the principles of assessment and programme design, and by individual differences between the students who receive the feedback (Price, Handley, and Millar 2011; Evans 2013; Ajjawi et al. 2022). This has led to claims that there can be no overarching ‘gold standard’ of feedback because the contextual factors are so influential (Krause-Jensen 2010). Nevertheless, we argue that there are likely to be underlying principles that apply to effective feedback; the implementation of these principles may be moderated by institutional influences or specific student populations, but they will provide a good foundation on which to build. In what follows, we outline the key characteristics of effective feedback identified in the literature and investigated in our own studies. To simplify our discussions, we will consider potential characteristics of feedback under umbrella categories, offering examples of the way that these categories have been operationalised in previous studies. 

The first broad category can be referred to as ‘usability’ which subsumes feedback which is clear (Hattie and Timperley 2007; Ferguson 2011; Price, Handley, and Millar 2011; Li and De Luca 2012; Fong et al. 2018) and constructive (Lizzio and Wilson 2008; Dawson et al. 2019; Henderson et al. 2019). Ferguson’s (2011) study, for example, surveyed 566 students at an Australian university and reported that good feedback should be clear and unambiguous as well as having an explicit connection to the marking criteria for the assignment. Dawson et al. (2019) study identified that clarity and constructiveness (and indeed ‘usability’) were key themes among their 400 student participants. This is not surprising – for feedback to be effective, it must be acted upon (Boud and Molloy 2013); and in order to act upon it, the student must understand what they are supposed to do, and it must be actionable (Ryan et al. 2021). In a similar vein, adopting the Transparency in Learning and Teaching framework (TILT e.g. Winkelmes 2023) has been shown to result in improvements across a variety of metrics of the student experience. TILT aims to make communication between students and teachers clear, and can be applied to all aspects of teaching practice (see https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources for examples). Transparency as to why students are undertaking tasks and how their work is to be graded, has been shown to improve student perceptions of assignments and feedback, as well as improving the quality of the work (Winkelmes et al. 2015). 

Both clarity and constructiveness were therefore characteristics of effective feedback that we considered in the current study. In addition, we included ‘helpfulness’ in our examination of feedback. This was motivated by the fact that large-scale student satisfaction metrics used to rank universities in the UK (the National Student Survey) ask final-year undergraduates to indicate whether the feedback that they received during their courses was helpful. Helpfulness could be considered as conceptually similar to constructiveness or usability, but to our knowledge there is no empirical evidence to support or refute this interpretation as it pertains to student perceptions of assignment feedback. We sought to gain this evidence as part of the current study. 

A second umbrella category of feedback characteristics can be referred to as ‘niceness’. A large body of research has identified that students prefer to receive feedback that is supportive (Xu and Carless 017; Carless and Winstone 2023), encouraging (Abramowitz, O’Leary, and Rosén 1987; Lizzio and Wilson 2008), motivating (Henderson et al.  2019) and has a positive tone (Winstone et al. 2016; Dawson et al.  2019). Tone, in this case, refers to whether the feedback is framed in a positive or a negative manner. Dawson et al. (2019) demonstrated that feedback that appears overly critical can demotivate students and is unlikely to be used, while Winstone et al. (2016) reported that positively framed feedback is more likely to be acted upon. All of these characteristics of feedback reflect the fact that receiving comments on assignments can have an emotional impact on students (Weaver 2006; Parker and Winstone 2016). Ultimately, students will be less likely to engage with feedback that makes them feel demotivated (Ball et al. 2009) and thus the feedback will not achieve the desired effect. 

In the current work, we asked participants to rate real feedback comments (received by other students in previous academic years) for clarity, constructiveness, helpfulness, encouragement, supportiveness, motivational value and tone to explore the interrelation of these characteristics. Previous studies have considered these factors but not all at the same time and hence it is possible that they are not distinct. Understanding the interrelations between these perceptions might help to understand some of the inconsistencies of previous findings and meta-analyses. Further, as outlined briefly above, there are multiple factors that may influence the effectiveness of a feedback comment. In all cases, though, the effectiveness of a feedback comment is contingent on the recipient engaging with the feedback and acting upon it. For this reason, we asked our participants to rate their ‘intention to use’ each of the feedback comments, imagining that they had received them on their own work. Previous studies have examined student preferences relating to feedback or changes in attainment following feedback (Winstone and Nash 2023). We argue that what students prefer is important information for instructors, but that preference does not guarantee that feedback will foster improvement in future assignments (Jonsson 2013). For example, feedback which is effusive is likely to be well-received but will not be likely to include the necessary information to allow the student to capitalise on what they did well or to correct what they did not (Holmes and Papageorgiou 2009). Thus, knowing the characteristics of feedback comments which are likely to be acted upon is key.

Social Media TOC overreach

Social networking sites' licensing terms: A cause of worry for users?' by Phalguni Mahapatra and Anindya Sircar in (2024) The Journal of World Intellectual Property comments 

Terms of service (ToS) for social networking sites (SNS) like Instagram, Meta, X, and so on, is a clickwrap agreement that establishes a legal relationship between platform owners and users, yet probably it is the most overlooked legal agreement. The users of these sites often overlook the ToS while registering themselves on these sites and even if users (especially those with no legal background) are attempting to read them, it is difficult for them to understand because of the legal jargon. As a result, they end up signing away legal rights about which they are unaware. According to these sites' ToS, though the ownership of the user-generated content is bestowed upon the user but the users grant to these sites “a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferrable, sub-licensable, worldwide license” and this license can be used “to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate and create derivative works of user's content.” These sites even bestow on themselves the right to modify the content which poses challenges to the right-holders' moral rights. The fact that these platforms can sublicense the user's work creates complexities when a user intends to grant an exclusive license of his work. There is no clarity on the language of the terms like the manner of exploiting the user's content, what happens if the sublicensing is for a wrongful purpose? The problem magnifies as there is neither explicit indication about the duration of the license nor about the territorial extent. This would suggest that these sites can get a perpetual license on the content of the users. These SNS have consumers spread worldwide but in their ToS, they have forum selection clauses that list out the courts and districts in California. This means users will be discouraged to bring a copyright suit due to the lack of an option to file a claim in their home country. The US case Agence France Presse (AFP) v. Morel helps us conclude twofold mainly there is a hope that SNS will not take ToS to shield themselves from further use of the user's work and strengthen the idea that these platforms may choose to license to their partners. Further, in 2018, the Paris Tribunal declared most clauses of Twitter “null and void” due to the nature of the license and also, because it was not in compliance with French Intellectual Property Code. This gives a faint hope for a positive shift in the legal treatment of user-generated content. Though these sites claim to retain the sublicensing right to run their sites smoothly but the licensing is very broad and carries the possibility of many usages of the content that too without paying compensation to the user. Therefore, this paper aims to highlight and give insight into the unfair licensing terms of the most often used social networking sites and its implications.