Law
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The caption for the case in question is In Re Google Inc.’s Petition to Set Aside Legal Process, 13-80063, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco) ↩
MIT wants pre-release review of Secret Service file on Aaron Swartz
MIT wants pre-release review of Secret Service file on Aaron Swartz
Kevin Poulsen, at Wired's Threat Level blog:
MIT argues that those people might face threats and harassment if their names become public. But it’s worth noting that names of third parties are already redacted from documents produced under FOIA.
MIT has screwed up repeatedly throughout this ordeal, and this is not a sign of improvement. If anything, their interference itself might prompt anonymous hackers to launch new salvos against their networks or dox their personnel.
German railroad mulling anti-graffiti drones
German railroad mulling anti-graffiti drones
With US authorities pushing for easier backdoors into electronic communications systems, a network of anti-graffiti drones looks like a good front for general state-wide surveillance. The German privacy ethic runs deep, but it may provide an interesting model for US authorities to consider in the long-term.
Minnesota governor signs same-sex marriage bill into law
Minnesota governor signs same-sex marriage bill into law
Number twelve and counting; this looks to be a big year for marriage equality in the United States.
Delaware becomes eleventh state to approve same-sex marriage
Delaware becomes eleventh state to approve same-sex marriage
And the steady march continues, as Delaware joins their ten predecessors in granting gay couples the basic American right to marry.
Obama May Back F.B.I. Plan to Wiretap Web Users
Obama May Back F.B.I. Plan to Wiretap Web Users
Charlie Savage of The New York Times:
the new proposal focuses on strengthening wiretap orders issued by judges. Currently, such orders instruct recipients to provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, leaving wiggle room for companies to say they tried but could not make the technology work. Under the new proposal, providers could be ordered to comply, and judges could impose fines if they did not.
Concerns that this would prompt similar measures from repressive governments abroad are not overblown. If we expect foreign companies to submit to these procedures, their governments will expect US companies to do the same. I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention anything about what the Obama administration’s diplomats and international law folks think about all of this.
Air Force sexual assault prevention officer charged with sexual battery
Air Force sexual assault prevention officer charged with sexual battery
Disgusting. Anything less than dishonorable discharge and jail time will be an insult to victims and to this country.
Now you can 3D-print a gun.
Andy Greenberg at Forbes:
Once the file is online, anyone will be able to download and print the gun in the privacy of their garage, legally or not, with no serial number, background check, or other regulatory hurdles. “You can print a lethal device,” Wilson told me last summer. “It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.”
Law student Cody Wilson has added some steel to make it detectable and lawful, and gotten the appropriate firearms manufacturing license. But that doesn’t mean the world at large will do the same when Wilson uploads the files needed to print the gun to the internet.
I often write about how technology has made the cost of copying trivial, while the laws on the books still hail from a time when the cost of copying was non-trivial. When it comes to audio and video copyright, that triviality can be economically disruptive at best, and can disturb entire industries at worst. But when it comes to weapons, that triviality to copy is downright dangerous.
Rhode Island legalizes same-sex marriage
Rhode Island legalizes same-sex marriage
The inexorable march of time sees a tenth state grant gay and lesbian people the statutory right to marry.
Those states who have yet to get on board would do well to hurry: you’re quickly running out of time to look like you were ahead of the curve in the common sense of twenty-first century civil rights.
Dr. Kermit Gosnell: Philadelphia's "Abortion" Monster
Dr. Kermit Gosnell: Philadelphia’s “Abortion” Monster
The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf quoting the grand jury report (PDF) on Philadelphia “abortion” monster Kermit Gosnell:
The Department of State, through its Board of Medicine, licenses and oversees individual physicians… Almost a decade ago, a former employee of Gosnell presented the Board of Medicine with a complaint that laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion patients; even the over-prescribing of tramadol pain pills with high resale value on the street. The department assigned an investigator, whose investigation consisted primarily of an offsite interview with Gosnell. The investigator never inspected the facility, questioned other employees, or reviewed any records. Department attorneys chose to accept this incomplete investigation, and dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.
Truly horrifying.
While it’s a loaded topic that deserves more space than I have time these days to give it, suffice it to say that I am against any outright ban on abortion. Note that I placed the word abortion in quotes because the late-term procedures Gosnell did were not what legally can be considered abotions under any current law or jurisprudence: they were murders.
Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime
Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime
Richard A. Oppel Jr. reports at the New York Times:
But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.
This is abhorrent.
Philadelphia councilman introduces bill aimed at improving health insurance prospects for life partners and transgendered people
This is an encouraging development. The bill introduced by Councilmen James Kenney and W. Wilson Goode would establish a:
6 percent tax credit for businesses that did not previously provide online pharmacy health care to transgendered employees or life partners[. This] is a key aspect of this bill and would be the first credit of its kind in America.
The ordinance would also require gender-neutral restrooms in city building and protect the right to dress as appropriate to one’s self-identified gender.
While the article also quotes law professor Kermit Roosevelt’s sense that the law may not survive if challenged in state court, it’s heartening to see my home city championing legislation to improve the resources available to LGBT employees. Even more heartening is the focus on transgender rights, which are often lost in the much louder debates about homosexuality.
California law school grads suing schools; neither party has a good point
California law school grads suing schools; neither party has a good point
Attorney Michael C. Sullivan, representing California schools in a spate of fraud suits brought by students over shady job-placement numbers:
"What I find most ironic is that those individuals advertised themselves to law schools as great critical thinkers," Sullivan said of the law-grads-turned-litigants. "Now they say they never considered the possibility that employment might include part-time jobs."
Mr. Sullivan’s statement is ludicrous. The students pay, so the schools market. His clients, if the allegations prove true, marketed themselves as producers of very employable law graduates. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that when a law school shares post-graduation employment rates, the law school is referring to legal employment.
My incredulity at Mr. Sullivan’s absurd position does not mean that I’m ignorant of the fact that many students didn’t try very hard to get a job, or didn’t like the jobs they got, or should have known the market for legal jobs is, to put it mildly, in dire straits, and has been for some time now.
In fact, I have little sympathy for people swindled by Mr. Sullivan’s clients’ number games. Just search "legal job market" or "should I go to law school?".
I knew when I signed up for law school in 2009 that things were not going well for recent graduates, and that they were not expected to recover before I graduated. I went anyway because I want to be an attorney. Never do something that requires years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars without doing your research.
Due diligence is too strong a phrase for it: it’s common sense.
Select YouTube partners exempt from fair use policy
Select YouTube partners exempt from fair use policy
YouTube’s well within their rights to refuse to leave a video up, or to re-post it after fair use has been reasonably well-defended. But it’s another reminder that when stuff is free for consumers, the interests of the producers providing the content will always take precedence.
Google fighting National Security Letter
Google fighting National Security Letter
The letters, issued by federal authorities investigating national security concerns, prohibit recipients from disclosing that they have received them, let alone what they’re asking for. The Judge in Google’s case1 struck down the law’s gag order provision as violative of the First Amendment, but has stayed the effect of that decision while the government pursues an appeal.
I should note that I essentially paraphrased the Wikipedia article for that second sentence, as my knowledge of NSLs is limited. I look forward to reading more on them, and I’m glad to see a company with the clout and caliber of attorneys that Google has questioning the legality of the NSL framework.
At first glance, it may seem odd that a company that siphons so much data about its users would be so protective of it when the government is asking for it.
But it makes sense for Google to defend user information: it needs that information to make its advertising products more relevant, Many accept the trade of having their documents and emails scanned and anonymized by Google in exchange for exceptional and free services. If Google fails to protect that information from surveillance via legal tools of questionable constitutionality, the balance of that trade may tip too far for many users.
Thus, this is one of those rare cases where corporate goals and user concerns are aligned.
The trolls are now trolling themselves
The trolls are now trolling themselves
This great post by Seattle attorney John Whitaker sums up the state of affairs in the absurd debacle that is Prenda Law’s trainwreck porn-infringement trolling.
2nd Circuit: Aereo streaming of individual over-the-air TV feeds via internet doesn't violate copyright law
The Second Circuit has held in WNET v Aereo (PDF) that sending a unique stream of over-the-air TV signal to customers via the internet isn’t a copyright violation.
Aereo assign each of its subscribers their own personal antenna and stream to comply with a previous Second Circuit decision. In other words, Aereo could provide its service with one antenna, but it needs to use one for every subscriber. The use of one antenna for all subscribers, as the Second Circuit held in its 2008 Cablevision opinion, would likely constitute an unlawful public performance.
Judge Chin says in his dissent that he isn’t pleased by this technique:
Aereo’s “technology platform” is, however, a sham. The system employs thousands of individual dime-sized antennas, but there is no technologically sound reason to use a multitude of tiny individual antennas rather than one central antenna; indeed, the system is a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law.
Aereo’s technology isn’t an attempt to avoid the reach of the Act. It’s an attempt to comply with the Second Circuit’s own characterization of the Act’s meaning and purpose. The absurdity of the situation arises not from Aereo’s attempt at a “sham,” but from the outdated Copyright Act itself.
A quick glance at the rest of Judge Chen’s dissent suggests he may make some reasonable points distinguishing Aereo from the DVR service at issue in Cablevision, so I’ll withhold my own final thoughts on this case until I’ve read the Aereo opinion through.
But copyright law needs fixing. It was written during a time when the cost of copying was non-trivial, and copies were typically finite and controlled centrally by the rightsholder. There is no longer any non-trivial cost to copying. Whether between servers or from a server to your computer, the internet is nothing more or less than a giant copy-making machine. This doesn’t mean we need to weaken copyright law (although shorter terms would be more in line with copyright’s Constitutional imperative), but we do need to adapt it to the modern world.
Professor David Post, whose copyright class I took at Temple Law, signed an amicus curiae brief in this case late last year—here’s my post about it.
China is very serious about cyberespionage
China is very serious about cyberespionage
Google apologists like myself often answer concerns that the search-and-advertising giant can scan your email with something like “yes, but they’re doing it with robots and scrubbing it clean of all identifying information.”
China, however, is not so concerned with your privacy or its own image. In fact, monitoring otherwise-harmless civilians probably proves valuable to the renegade nation by illustrating the best means of tricking US netizens into installing backdoor viruses on their systems.
The most important point this article makes, in my view, is that China is playing the long game on cyberespionage efforts. As David Feith reports in the Wall Street Journal piece linked to above:
The essence of China’s thinking about cyber warfare is the concept of shi, he says, first introduced in Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” about 2,500 years ago. The concept’s English translation is debated, but Mr. Thomas subscribes to the rendering of Chinese Gen. Tao Hanzhang, who defines shi as “the strategically advantageous posture before a battle.”
They’re not going to take down any infrastructure any time soon, but if and when they want to, their current efforts will probably go a long way to helping them learn how to do it.
This stuff is not just a headline: it’s been happening for some time, is still happening, and is likely only to increase. Mr. Feith’s article at the Journal is well worth reading.
Abortion's inevitable return to the Supreme Court
Abortion’s inevitable return to the Supreme Court
Above the Law’s Elie Mystal is right: thanks to medical technology and laws that ignore their own consequences, abortion is going to return the Supreme Court. I hope it’s sooner than later.
OUYA and Emulation
Darrell Etherington, reporting at TechCrunch:
OUYA forum admin and owner Ed Krassenstein said in a post on his site that EMUya, a NES emulator, has been submitted to OUYA for review and should definitely be available at launch, and a couple of SNES emulation options are confirmed, including the SuperGNES and the Mupen64Plus Nintendo 64 emulators. The Mupen64Plus project is also said to be available at launch, with the developer behind it posting that it has already been approved by OUYA for inclusion in the official store.
OUYA would do well to backtrack on this, and fast. If they mean to make themselves a legitimate part of the console landscape, the encouragement of unlicensed emulation, which amounts to copyright infringement, is not the way to go.