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
Training, by chuck_nc, used under CC-BY-SA
One of the things you can bring into the California bar exam is ‘earplugs or plastic material normally associated with the sport of swimming‘. Two things I really want right now:
1) to walk into the exam with a snorkel.
2) to know why this was put in the list. This must have made sense to someone, at some time; maybe someone with some sort of eye allergies wanted to wear goggles? Someone had a serious medical need to cover their hair with a headcap? There must be an explanation. I really, really want to know what it is…
[search engine nerdiness data point: bing has only 9 results for "plastic material normally associated with the sport of swimming", where google has 19, including one result from twitter. But unlike google, bing appears to actually find the relevant document on the calbar website. This is particularly interesting to me given that it is obvious (from searches for various NY restaurants) that bing does not search inside flash, but is the first proof I've seen that they search pdf.]
I thought I was done with law review blogging for a while, but apparently not! The International FLOSS Law Review has just published their first issue, with what looks to be a fair number of interesting articles. I look forward to seeing how it progresses.
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, 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:
The celebration, while it lasted, was pretty nice. Some things that got done this weekend with my parents in town:
So really, I can’t complain too much… now back to the grindstone.
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.
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.
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.
Dearest Toshok:
No, no it would not. Trust me. :)
–Luis (always happy to do pro bono IAAL smackdowns)
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..