law « Luis Villa

law

forfacebook / law — 3 Comments
13
Apr 10

a quick vent about the structure of online agreements

I completely understand why many startups have terms of service with terrible content- providing terms of service whose content is fair to the user is incredibly risky and/or expensive (though it isn’t unheard of).

But there is just no excuse for terms of service with terrible organization, especially when you’re trying to sell services to real companies who might (gasp) actually have someone read the damn things. Having a well written document doesn’t cost you anything. If it should be two separate documents, make it two separate documents, and not one (which is what set me off on this rant). If it should be five documents… wait, it should never be five documents.

So please, think of the lawyers. Write your terms of service in a comprehensible, sane structure today.

This has been a public service announcement; we now return you to your regularly scheduled kvetching.

law / licensing — 12 Comments
25
Mar 10

patent 101

[Disclaimer: I'm not saying this on behalf of my employer, I have no exposure to MPEG-LA's licensing agreements, and I'm not making a broader claim about the h264/ogg debate; I just want to clarify one specific point of law.]

“If some patent troll decides H.264 violates a patent, they must go to court with MPEG LA, not individual licensees.” — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Let this be a friendly public service announcement: patent law says that anyone who uses a patent, not just the manufacturer or licensor of the patent-infringing good, can potentially be dragged into court on a charge of patent infringement. (This is not the first installment of this reminder.) This misunderstanding of how patent law functions gives people a false sense of security- they think they are safe because they are ‘just’ using, when in fact patent trolls are known to go around to small individual consumers of ‘infringing’ software and extort settlements from them in order to build their war chests for later, larger suits. Or in other, more specific words: there is certainly nothing in patent law that says that an H264 patent troll ‘must’ go after MPEG-LA and can’t go after individual licensees.

Of course, going after users is rare. Furthermore, it is certainly possible that MPEG-LA might (for political reasons) try to enter into a court fight on the side of someone being attacked by an H264-related troll; it is even possible that the licensing agreement requires such entry if the defendant is an MPEG-LA licensee. (If the latter is what Gruber was getting at, that would be interesting to know.) Even entry by MPEG-LA on your sideis not likely to completely protect you; even if they were to promise to cover all costs and settlements, the engineers and businessfolks who made the decision would still likely be hauled into court to testify as to whether the infringement was done on purpose, how it was done, etc.

Bottom line: there may be contractual obligations at play here, and if so, I’d love to hear clarification, but as far as statute goes, what Gruber says about who can sue whom is mistaken.

law / licensing / mozilla / work — 10 Comments
11
Mar 10

Updating the MPL

Yesterday Mozilla announced that we will be updating the MPL, with the aim of making the license simpler, easier to use, and more robust. Mitchell’s post captures what we want to do in more depth; if you’re interested in the process, you should go read it and our full website at mpl.mozilla.org.

I have the privilege of being heavily involved in this project. I use the word ‘privilege’ because, since right around the time I went to law school, my home page has said something to the effect of ‘Luis’s goal is to help innovators do their thing with minimal interference from and maximum assistance from lawyers.’ ‘Helping innovators do their thing’ is exactly what this project is all about, so I’m excited to be part of the process.

Firefox Cupcake, by M i x y, used under CC-BY

We’re looking to involve the Mozilla community, of course, and we’re also looking to involve people who aren’t normally part of the Mozilla community, like licensing lawyers. So the process will involve a lot of very smart, experienced, and often opinionated people, some of whom will have been working with the license for a decade. I will get the luxury of being the project manager/cat-herder: working on this much of the day, encouraging involvement, organizing feedback, sifting it for gems, and collating all of it into the starting points we’ll use for further discussion and improvement. I’m just the organizer, though- Mitchell (as original author and tentative module owner) has the final say on the text, and the voice of the community will be the community themselves- we’re looking for broad involvement from anyone who has something valuable to say about the license or their experiences with it. If you’re interested in helping out in any way, check out our participate page for more information.

The day-to-day work that this huge community of volunteers does to produce software actively chosen by 100 million people is much more important than the legalese that binds them. But the legalese does matter- it communicates our values and helps structure how we work with each other. So improving this legalese is important for the community, and a great opportunity for me to help out, and I’m excited to get started on it.

law — 7 Comments
1
Mar 10

looking for locomotives

I got some nice birthday gifts (mostly the ability to be around family) but possibly the best gift I got was this Wondermark strip:

I will henceforth refer to reading a contract as ‘looking for locomotives.’

As a bonus, and related to my recent post about plain english in the law, Wondermark is apparently working with the Center for Plain Language on a contest to reward plain (and terrible) use of plain English in communication. That is terrific to hear, and I wish them great luck with it. I only wish I had some appropriate examples to submit to the contest.

law / work — 6 Comments
23
Feb 10

what writing a contract feels like

Alex Macgillivray, late of google and now of twitter, has a good post just now that might help hackers understand what transactional attorneys (aka corporate attorneys, aka ‘the people who write contracts rather than sue over contracts’, aka ‘me right now’) actually do on a day to day basis:

To put it in computer terms, imagine the contract as a computer program. In each the object is to be able to interpret the words and have that interpretation drive a result. Now imagine that there is no compiler for your program and that you can’t run any tests. All debugging must be done only theoretically and in your head. Imagine that you are coding with another person that is likely to be trying to develop a program that does something significantly different from what you want it to do. You and the other programmer may have different time constraints and, even though you are trying to do different things, you have to be on good terms with the other person because she could just as easily decide to stop working on your project. You and the other person take turns editing the code but without a common coding environment or standard tools to figure out whether the other person (or you) goofed it up. Then imagine that the code you are writing has a high probability of only ever being “run” through two different interpreters with significantly conflicting points of view about desirable outcomes and you likely won’t get to see the result of any of these “runs.” … Include a small chance that your code will be “run” by a relatively unbiased interpreter but the outcome of that one interpretation will be at extremely high stakes, often millions of dollars. Finally, know that you will likely get little credit for writing good code but will be crucified if the one time your code is run it doesn’t work flawlessly. Now you are beginning to understand how hard the job of a good transactional attorney is.

But as they say, read the whole thing.

law — 9 Comments
4
Feb 10

Telling numbers

I’m currently reading a book on modern legal drafting (read: ‘plain english for dummies, I mean, lawyers’). It is very good so far, but I think this is a telling stat about lawyers: 127 pages are devoted to why clear, modern english is a good idea. That is 22 pages more than are devoted to how to write clear, modern english.

Modern Legal Drafting, by Peter Butt and Richard Castle

This imbalance isn’t as insane as it sounds at first; there are some not-crazy reasons to re-use old language in legal documents, and explaining why they aren’t actually correct is a useful service. Still… given that some of the complaints about legalese cited by the book are over 200 years old, you would think the profession might at least by now realize that much legalese is a bad idea, even if we haven’t yet learned how to get rid of it…

(Favorite sentence from the book: “My client has discussed your proposal to fill the ditch with his partners.“)

forfacebook / law / privacy / software — 16 Comments
12
Jan 10

Credit where credit is due (more Google tea leaves to read)

One of the very first things that made me skeptical about Google was their approach to censorship in China, which I thought deeply compromised their supposed ‘don’t be evil’ approach to the world. It struck me that their position- summarized as “the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results” bespoke a fair amount of arrogance about the value of Google and a discounting of the value of uncensored information. I didn’t mention that issue in my recent post about Google and reading their tea leaves, but it certainly is one of the big tea leaves to be read.

And so they’ve added another layer to the tea leaves with this announcement that Google will be backing out of censorship in China and possibly abandoning China altogether. Go read it.

It is hard to imagine any other American company having the cojones to make a public statement like it, and I have to applaud them for it. Google is different; anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t understand them very well. The question we must continually ask is ‘how different, and for how long will they remain different?’ Schmidt’s quotes the other day suggest they are becoming more like others, and that is troubling, and worth writing about and reflecting on (not least by people within Google.) But to even post this is a reminder that they are still very different from most of their peer large corporations. I suppose for those of us who continue to read the tea leaves the followthrough after this post will say a lot as well.

law / work — 2 Comments
5
Jan 10

job satisfaction

Some of the legal stuff I do at Mozilla¹ is fairly dull, painstaking contract work. What makes it worthwhile (besides the paycheck) is seeing that something good came out of it. So it was nice to see this blog post – I only played a small part in getting the new data center up and running (at most a couple workdays rather than months of my life), but it still gives me a nice warm fuzzy feeling inside to know I helped out.

really, much of the legal work most lawyers do [↩]

forfacebook / law / mozilla / personal — 9 Comments
10
Dec 09

starting fresh with mozilla

After some bumps in the road which delayed my start by a week, I started today in the legal department at Mozilla. Last night I lost a little sleep worrying if this was the right thing for me, but after a day around the office (during an all-hands meeting, no less) I’m pretty much glowing. The projects I’ve already been charged with are interesting and important (more on those very soon, I expect); the other things going on are relevant (as someone said ‘we get to change the world every day, though some days more than others’); and the energy and enthusiasm are infectious. And of course it doesn’t hurt to be able to work with old friends.

Albino Alligator 2008 by Mila Zinkova, used under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license

Also, there are reports that my boss wrestled an albino alligator after dinner; reports were conflicting over whether he bested the beast with his bare hands or if he merely threatened to subpoena it. So yeah… things are interesting.

Weird moment of the day: get introduced at a meeting. Guy across table: ‘wait, are you the Luis Villa?’ me: ‘probably?’ Meeting then starts immediately. Turns out a sure-fire way to make a meeting seem very long is to leave a statement like that unexplained and hanging over your head the whole meeting… :) Led to a great conversation later, though, as did basically everything else all day.

law / software — 4 Comments
30
Nov 09

software freedom rainmaking

A little over a year ago, I formally introduced John Resig of jquery fame to Brad Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I was therefore very pleased to see today that jquery has joined the Conservancy.

Rain Making on me and Krissa in Tongariro

Sadly no one gives me a partnership cut of this rainmaking but I will feel very good about it tonight nevertheless.

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

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