October « 2006 « Luis Villa

October, 2006

about this school thing

When I was in Boston this weekend, I kept getting asked how school was. This made me realize I haven’t really said much about this here, except for Friday’s primal scream. So, Luis’s first-month-of-school FAQ:

The exam inducing the scream was pass-fail, and I’m pretty sure I passed. Thanks for asking. :)
I’m stressed and challenged, but not overwhelmed. So that is good, and frankly much better than I expected. (I should note that it is completely possible that I’m actually overwhelmed and so overhelmed that I just don’t know it yet.)
I’m actually enjoying lots of it. I expected my first year classes to be drudgery, but three of the four have been intellectually stimulating, with excellent professors, and the fourth isn’t that bad- I think it mostly just suffers by comparison.
I’m able to find time to blog mostly by virtue of having completely dropped off of IRC, and by being more focused and effective when I do blog.
I live near school, in university-owned housing. We’re quite happy with the housing.
Despite my posting about my first experience with Socratic method, I actually mostly like it. It demands engagement, which is great, and in the hands of an expert like Robert Scott*it can be even more educational than a lecture.
It is definitely hard work; 4-6 hours of reading a night is not at all uncommon. I am keeping myself functional on weekends by taking advantage of my light class schedule on Thursday and Friday to read ahead for Monday and Tuesday, but still, overall, a lot of work.
I’m choosing, generally, to not overextend myself, and as a result trying to limit my involvement to IP/tech-related projects, which means at the moment mostly joining the board of the Society for Law, Science, and Technology, and hoping to get a slot for IP Moot Court. But there is so much to do that it is still not easy to not saturate yourself. Today I attended a talk on building a strong independent judiciary in Argentina, for example. Interesting talk- sadly, deserves a book, so the talk just couldn’t go into the kind of detail that would have been really fascinating.
I’ve been really pleasantly pleased with my classmates- honestly, I expected lots of them to be fairly sleazy proto-lawyers, and I can’t think of anyone I’ve met who conforms to the stereotype. By and large, mostly really nice, thoughtful people. And you can’t complain about that.
Using Linux at school has been no problem. I did have to get dual-boot on my laptop in order to use it with our exam software, but that went fairly smoothly.

Anyway, I think that’s my first impressions of school after a month or so. Overall, I’m pretty pleased. Now talk to me in January and maybe things will be different… ;)

*Note to Columbia: that google basically can’t find Robert Scott’s bio on www.law.columbia.edu indicates that you’re doing something very, very wrong in terms of SEO. Here’s a nickel, go buy a book.

personal / school — 4 Comments
6
Oct 06

First exam in 35 minutes.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Tonight I drink in Boston.

That is all.

misc. — 2 Comments
4
Oct 06

Ben Mako Hill, ACM Poster Child

I’ve been a part of many lame organizations, but I’ve never been a member of a lame organization that used Ben Mako Hill as part of their membership ad campaign.
Until now.

I’m so conflicted… drop ACM like a stinky, rotten, hot potato, or click on Mako’s smiling face? I’m sure I’m going to lose sleep over this.

law / licensing / New York / software — 2 Comments
4
Oct 06

Defective By Design at Cardozo

Just got back from a talk by Gregory Heller of Defective by Design (FSF’s anti-DRM organization) at Cardozo. Some quick thoughts:

turnout was great- 55 people. I hope that at SLST can get similar or better turnout for events we do in the future. [Tangent: I'm on the SLST board as of last week; this is really exciting for me- I hope I can help it be a first-class student technology law group.]
It turns out that at Cardozo, free pizza lacks pepperoni. After about three seconds of thinking about this, it was incredibly obvious, but it did leave me surprised for those three seconds.
The talk was a solid introduction to DRM issues. Unfortunately, it failed to deal with the most common objections in the body of the talk. This allowed those objections to come up in questions, which put Greg on the defensive, and gave the objections a lot more credibility than they really deserved. (Most of them should have been easily disposed of.)
Greg had to explain what Amazon Unboxed was. This made me realize- most DRM-based systems, except iTMS, have been dismal failures, and so no one knows about them. I wonder if this is correlation or causation. My hunch is correlation (most of them have also been terrible user experiences completely independent of DRM), but I may well be wrong.

I’d write more about the talk itself, except (1) I have a feeling it would be mostly redundant to most of my readers and (2) it finally crystallized my thinking on the issue, so if I can unbury myself from school in the next few days, this means I’ll probably finally explain why Dobey is (mostly) wrong, using some of Greg’s ideas and some of my own.

work — 2 Comments
3
Oct 06

Work at the Berkman Center

Berkman is hiring for a whole slew of jobs right now- sr. developers, sr. admins, community organizers, etc. Go check out my old boss’s post on the subject. Berkman is a great place to work- great atmosphere, great people, great academia-style work benefits (holidays, insurance, etc.), and the most interesting lunch speakers anywhere. :) As a bonus, working there no longer means having to put up with me for forty hours a week. :)

licensing / misc. / paper ideas — 2 Comments
2
Oct 06

ponderings on other economies

On the same day he spoke with Chris Anderson about the implications of Long Tail for alternative means of producing IP, Lessig blogged ‘on the economies of culture‘. The fine folks over at Tech Liberation Front have posted recently on how markets don’t need money, and more recently on the gift economy.

I’d love to have coherent thoughts on this, but I don’t right at the moment. Some jotted down bits that might get refocused later:

The hybrid economy will happen on a sliding scale. Some participants (Lessig, for example, or the Grateful Dead and Phish) will be able to make money very reliably on the second-order effects (tenure for Lessig, live shows for Dead/Phish). They will, in general, opt for very liberal licensing of their first-order IP creations- books for Lessig, recorded music for the Dead/Phish. On the other end of the spectrum will be those who can’t for some reason reliably make money from second-order effects- musicians who hate performing live (or who suck at it) would be likely the most common example of this. They’ll obviously want to license as restrictively as possible. The middle ground will be occupied by, for example, RHEL, who will strictly license their trademark, but not their code, since they can reliably generate revenue as long as no one confuses the non-supported code with the officially supported version.
There will be a big business in helping people make the transition from enthusiastic volunteer to paid creator, or in surfing that boundary. We’ve already seen in free software that lots of people want to create for free; but that most of those people, given a choice, will happily take money to create full-time. So there will be services around channeling money to volunteers. Bounty programs; advertising placed on volunteer-owned websites (i.e., blogs); or professional placement specialists who help people find jobs that meet their demonstrated need- we’ll likely see more of all of these.
Editors/tastefinders will become even more important. Red Hat is already such an editor; editing and confirming quality is what people pay for RHEL for. Easy enough to imagine radio stations of CC-licensed music with paid advertising, or websites selling ads on cc-licensed pictures.
At Tech Liberation Front, I noted that as great as whuffie is, it doesn’t pay the bills. We’re not actually post-scarcity yet. I think this is a huge problem for volunteer communities. It means that whenever you feel like the rent, or retirement, or whatever $CASH_REQUIREMENT is hanging over your head, activities which don’t generate cash right now go right out the window. I think we’ll all be better off when whuffie-generating activities can also pay the bills directly- they’ll be more stable, more predictable, more useful. (And people will still be able to opt-out if they just want to have good, clean fun.)
Lessig’s meanderings are interesting, as always, but I am confused by his assumption that GPL (which defacto makes everything Free) is somehow incompatible with a hybrid economy, when the very first examples of hybrid economies that he cites- Mozilla and RH- both make their money while owning virtually none of their core IP. I respect that he is trying to push for flexibility in licensing while people experiment with hybrid business models, but it seems like in this post he unecessarily and incorrectly slammed those who disagree with him.

gnome / personal / software — 2 Comments
2
Oct 06

two quick links

The first one is for everyone, the second one just for GNOME-rs…

37 Signals on why allowing fear to irrationally infect your thinking and planning is terrible. Really good article. I’m trying to be less fearful and more optimistic myself, so this was powerful stuff to me.
Nigel Tao has an interesting mockup up, based on throwing away basically all of the desktop except a web browser. On the one hand, a good example of how to think outside the box and how to make the browser more friendly to web apps (it throws away most browser chrome, for example); on the other hand, as he points out, you still need to play local music and handle local peripherals like cameras. So we likely can’t go all-web, all-the-time, quit yet.

misc. — 15 Comments
2
Oct 06

for my friends in the marijuana-smoking, gay-marriage wing of the Republican Party

Markos Moulitsas* has a really interesting piece on why ‘libertarian Democrat’ is not a contradiction in terms. Definitely recommended reading for anyone interested in politics. He makes one interesting point, one obvious point, and one totally broken assumption:

Interesting: the argument that in our modern economy, even doctrinal libertarians should be as afraid, or perhaps even more afraid, of corporate power than of government power; government being relatively much more constrained than corporations at this point, and in many meaningful ways, directly controlled by said corporations.
Obvious: the observation that the modern Republican party, as led by Rove and Cheney, has been the biggest threat to the rights libertarians claim to cherish we’ve seen in generations. [Left mostly unsaid is that this is not a temporary problem- a GOP structurally indebted to the religious right will always choose meddling in private lives over libertarian principles; a GOP structurally indebted to our largest corporations will always choose corporate welfare over actual efficiency and rationality.]
Broken: the assumption that corporate/religion-wary libertarians who want to flee the GOP (as they should) would necessarily want to (or need to) flee to the Democrats. While I tend to agree that the insane far right is at this point much more powerful and more dangerous to libertarian values than the insane far left, that doesn’t mean that the insane far left is not powerful enough to paralyze the Democratic party and prevent it from actually doing anything constructive and useful. Kos, as one of the more publicly partisan people on the planet, probably can’t see this, but I do think that there is a place for a strong third party in this country- one without unpayable debts to the religious right and gigantic corporations, or to those who are instinctively anti-capitalist and pro-government.

Anyway, a challenging and interesting read, no matter where on the spectrum- far left or far right- that you fall.

*yes, sadly, the often nearly unhinged Kos of Daily Kos.

law / school — 4 Comments
2
Oct 06

my first time (sort of ;)

I’ve somehow managed to make it through something like a month of class without really getting called on in any of my classes. (For those not familiar with how American law schools operate, they lie and call it the ‘Socratic’ method; it is really closer to state-sanctioned mental abuse. ;) Anyway… I’d escaped. Until today. So a brief note on that, for my kids to read and laugh at some day ;)

First off: I have a big note on the top of my ‘notes about note taking’ that says ‘read the relevant statutes, not just the cases.’ Which I mostly ignored this weekend. I paid for that not once but twice today. Not good to be frantically flipping through your notes trying to figure out what the professor wants, and have him writing the number of the statute on the board. If I’d merely said ‘section 71′ I would have been fine; instead I looked like an idiot. Oops.
Second off: I have feared since day one of this class that I’d get caught thinking about one thing while the professor was asking me about another. It of course happened today- I was so sure he was going to ask about X that when he said ‘what about Y’, I pretty much heard it as X and racked my brain for X when, if I’d thought about Y, the answer would have been obvious. Again, oops. I think this one will get better with exposure and time (I was pretty nervous) but still Not Fun.

The third one just isn’t avoidable. After this weekend’s reading, I had one big question about the reading. I had in my notes ‘ask Prof. Scott about X.’* And instead of getting to ask him about it after class, he announced ‘lets engage in a little brainstorming about X. The whole class will participate.’ He then asked me questions about X for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably 4-5 minutes. Admittedly, he’s so good at doing this (mostly by asking questions that are leading, but not too leading) that I did feel like I almost had an understanding of X after those 4-5 minutes were done. Still… not fun.

So… it is over, I guess, until next time. :) Phew.

* For what it is worth, X is why it appears to be virtually impossible under US common law to make a gratuitous promise enforceable under contract law. Or to put it in more plain english: if I make you a promise to do something, and you give me nothing in return, by default, US law makes it impossible to enforce that. [If you give me something in return, it is a contract, and enforceable.] Under British common law, if I write that same promise down and put a wax seal on it, then the courts will enforce the promise. There is no replacement for the wax seal in the US- no good way to say ‘pretty please enforce it I really really really want it enforced.’ Why there was no equivalent troubled me Saturday when I did the reading, and it was the question I was asked in class. Oww.

Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.