May « 2009 « Luis Villa

May, 2009

law / personal — 13 Comments
31
May 09

two other people capture what I’m thinking perfectly

Read two posts this morning that I wanted to note because they capture what I’m thinking pretty perfectly.

Julian Sanchez on the reaction from some quarters to Sonia Sotomayor. Sanchez is a lot like me- sort of libertarian-leaning, not terribly comfortable with lefty identity politics, and not very close to his Hispanic heritage. And still, apparently, pretty damned angry over the reception Sonia Sotomayor has gotten. The whole thing is really worth reading, but the money graph is:

Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is. This is really profoundly ugly.

Perfectly encapsulates one of the prime reasons why I can’t touch the modern Republican party with a ten foot pole, even if I’m in several ways far to the ‘right’ of the center of the Democratic party.

(Tangentially, I’ve been meaning to write a post on ‘activist’ judging, and why the core accusation rings true for most people but those pushing it as a political accusation are mostly just fearmongering and quite often blatantly lying about the legal realities they are purportedly discussing. Sadly, I will not have time to do that any time soon; if you’re curious, in the meantime, I highly recommend reading the section on judges in Audacity of Hope- a fair, nuanced, intelligent discussion of the issue that doesn’t get too into the weeds of judicial interpretation but does explain the problems with the situation in pretty plain English.)

The other thing is a piece by John Scalzi on ‘being a closet introvert.’ Apparently he tells people all the time that he’s an introvert, and they don’t believe him. I’ve had the exact same experience, for reasons he lays out well. I’ll keep this bookmarked to send to people next time I have the experience. ;)

law / school / software — 6 Comments
26
May 09

ending the celebration

Law school, even when you’re done with it, has ways of beating you down. In this case, it is the lack of preparation for the bar. In the next two months, I have to learn several topics I hadn’t previously learned, and re-learn several topics about which I know a lot of theory and very little practice. I’ve also got to move at the end of this week, which already puts me behind schedule for the studying. As a result, I’ll probably not be very digitally sociable from now through August.

Two tools that are going to make that a little easier:

As usual, leechblock. Truly excellent for defining your workday. (I know I was on semi-vacation the past two weeks because I turned off leechblock.)
Anki- libre, multi-platform flashcards to help me memorize all the various stuff that I have to stuff into my head in the next two months. Includes sync and a web-based version so I can work on my phone or across multiple laptops.

The celebration, while it lasted, was pretty nice. Some things that got done this weekend with my parents in town:

lots of good food: at Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center; at Blue Hill; at the awesomely yummy yet fairly reasonable Kuma Inn; at the awesomely yummy yet totally cheap Caracas Arepa Bar.
music: Dizzy’s had music too- Bill Charlap trio. I think the music critic-approved phrase is ‘spectacular display of piano virtuosity.’ Also saw In The Heights again (first musical I’ve ever seen twice); still spectacular.
museums: went to the Museum of Art and Design to see their glass and industrial ceramics exhibitions, and to the Guggenheim to see their Frank Lloyd Wright retrospective. Both highly recommended.
walks; the weather has been terrific and we’ve been able to walk quite a bit, including some time in a gorgeous Central Park yesterday.
friends: shout out to the close friends who ended up at the impromptu hat party!

So really, I can’t complain too much… now back to the grindstone.

law / school — 14 Comments
25
May 09

a good graduation day

Besides actually graduating, it turns out that the faculty named me, along with Alex Middleton (below, the one without the beard ;) as winners of the Carroll Harper prize for excellence in intellectual property studies. A pleasant way to go out, and nice to have my family there for it.

Alex, Eben, and Luis

forfacebook / law / school — 31 Comments
20
May 09

IANALY

I am not a lawyer yet, but I am, apparently, a JD.

A degree or reasonable facsimile thereof.

Parents arriving as we speak; actual graduation tomorrow.

misc. — 6 Comments
14
May 09

UbuntuOne trademark- well, duh

Usually, I’m above saying ‘I told you so’, but sometimes… well, lets just say that it is clear that most of the people commenting in this bug about the ‘confusion’ caused by the Ubuntu One mark didn’t read my old posts on trusting open source companies or my (old, not terribly good) trademark paper. To paraphrase the paper:

Trademark licensing centralizes control with the mark “owner” instead of decentralizing control with direct contributors- i.e., the copyright holders. Th[is breaks] the community’s implicit social contract, formalized in the source’s copyright license, that control is to be decentralized…

As the paper describes in more depth, unfortunately, unlike copyright, where the default is that you have to do an assignment to lose control of your contribution, in trademark, the default is that you never have control- some central ‘source’ body does. And as a result, you get situations like this one.

Moral of the story, short version: don’t get too attached to the purity and value of a mark which neither you nor representatives you elect have control of.

[Added a few minutes later: I should point out, by the way, that Ubuntu probably has the best trademark policy of any open source project that I'm aware of- it is far and away the most respectful of fair use and non-commercial use. But at the end of the day, because the mark is owned by a body which isn't legally controlled by the community, things like this can happen, and probably should be expected to happen.]

gnome / personal — No Comments
12
May 09

LWN interview on Stormy and other subjects

This weekend Linux Weekly News interviewed me on a variety of topics, but primarily on Stormy and GNOME’s finances. It has now been posted. It is behind the LWN paywall for now, but will be available more generally in the future. (I urge everyone to subscribe to LWN; it is an excellent publication.)

In the meantime, perhaps the best summary of the important part can be extracted from the comments, lightly edited for coherency (commenter in bold/italic, me in blockquote):

Why don’t you take a look at how KDE e.V. is run? AFAIK, they don’t pay in 6 figures to anyone and still manage to get the job done in terms of sponsorships and are not looking for a bailout.

We’ve been operating in a manner similar to KDE e.V. since our last Executive Director left, so we’re familiar with the part-time administrative assistant model of doing things. Some things work fairly well when you’re organized that way; others do not.

Goes to show the mindset of the upper echelons of the GNOME project.

I agree completely. It shows that our mindset is that we were unwilling to sit still and tread water. Our mindset was that we wanted to move aggressively forward and change how GNOME related to the outside world. I hope I was clear in the interview of all the various ways in which Stormy helps us do that.

Now, you can certainly question and say bad things about the timing and judgment of those steps. We did expect this to be financially challenging, but we misjudged how badly it would challenge us.

But I think if you want to question the mindset either I didn’t explain our proactive mindset very well in the interview (possible) or you have a very limited vision of what something like the Foundation can do for our community. Certainly I’m very proud of standing for that active, aggressive view of what the Foundation can achieve, and I think most GNOME Foundation members agree with that (though I completely understand if they are chagrined at the financial situation.)

software — 40 Comments
9
May 09

easy openoffice self-collaboration?

I’ve got an openoffice document that I need to edit on more than one machine (probably on Linux and XP; long story about why I have to use multiple machines/multiple OSs but hopefully it isn’t a long-term thing.)

I can’t use abi/abicollab or google docs because this is a very, very large document (100-150 pages, mostly in outline form, w/large auto-generated ToC), which in my experience both abi and google docs don’t do well with.

So OpenOffice it is. But is there any way to do that across the two machines more easily/efficiently than just mailing the file back and forth? Does OOo for XP support webdav, for example? Or is there a clean/easy solution to dump OOo files into proper RCS? Open to any and all suggestions, thanks.

(By the way, weave makes doing this for my moz data really pretty nice, and since it is encrypted on the server side, it avoids the problems I just posted about. I look forward to their identity solution.)

law / software — 6 Comments
9
May 09

on getting subpoena’d for participating in Zotero

So, apparently Thomson Reuters is subpoenaing everyone who has ever committed to Zotero as part of their ongoing lawsuit.

I have not looked closely at the lawsuit itself (relevant looking extracts here; James Grimmelman comments here); my sense is that given the current primacy of contract over common sense they probably have at least some legally valid claims in there, though I think that as a matter of policy it is a horribly bad idea to allow contracts that prohibit reverse engineering of this sort.

A couple quick thoughts, though, on other issues around the subpoenas:

First, it is hard to see this as anything other than pure intimidation; if there really were an issue with the relevant code they could have subpoena’d only the names/identities of those who committed the code. A purely harassing/intimidating subpoena is against the lawyer’s code of ethics, but since we also enforce it ourselves, and since there are (I suppose) thin-but-not-completely implausible arguments that this is for real informational purposes (perhaps, for example, they want to check all inboxes for discussions of the code at issue) the odds of anything happening on this front are slim to none.

Second, the real thing that you should take away here, if you’re a regular computer user, is that if you give your personal data to a third party, you have given up essentially all rights in that data in the face of a subpoena.¹ As I’m sure Zotero’s lawyers told them, there is pretty much no way Zotero could have prevented that information from getting out once Thomson Reuters decided they wanted it. Nor does Zotero have to notify you- what Zotero did here (notifying everyone whose information got subpoena’d) is actually purely polite. So bottom line: if someone else has your information, that information is available to anyone with a subpoena (or a warrant), and there is nothing you can do to stop it. That applies to things like committer information, but also your email provider or any other third party who has your data. Keep that in mind next time you give your information out even to ‘trusted’ third parties.

Really, you give up virtually all rights, period, but that is a story for a different blog post. [↩]

law — 4 Comments
7
May 09

seething animosity can be great fun, but…

Dearest Toshok:

“I wonder if this seething animosity toward the wannabe pundits/open source zealots would be enough to sustain me until I passed the bar…”

No, no it would not. Trust me. :)

–Luis (always happy to do pro bono IAAL smackdowns)

forfacebook / law / school — 5 Comments
4
May 09

you know law journals may have ruined your mind forever if…

A paper you’re editing has a not-very-useful citation for ‘the internet is faster than snail mail’. Do you:

(1) say ‘really? we need to have a citation for that at all?’ and delete the cite, because, really, ‘the internet is faster than snail mail’ needs citation only slightly more than ‘humans breath air’.

(2) spend hours (well, maybe 30 minutes) trying to find a better cite.

(3) spend hours (well, maybe 30 minutes) trying to find a better cite- while option #1 never even crosses your mind.

If you answer ’2′, you May Be A Journal Editor. If you answer ’3′, you are definitely a journal editor. Damn this has messed with my mind..

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