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joeross.me

Lawyer interested in the collision of law and tech policy. Prone to geekery.



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    NBA player Jason Collins comes out as gay

    NBA player Jason Collins comes out as gay

    I don’t usually cover sports here, but Collins’ coming out is a very important moment in a broader and permanent change in what it means to be and to accept LGBTQ folks. It’s a well-expressed and bold piece, and I applaud him.

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    The next generation of Instapaper

    The next generation of Instapaper

    Marco Arment has turned control of his read-it-later service, Instapaper, over to incubator-turned-company-in-its-own-right Betaworks:

    I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.

    What’s really intriguing about this is that the Betaworks website includes the following teaser:

    Want early access to the new Instapaper and other products we build and invest in? Join Openbeta.

    I wonder whether the “new Instapaper” is already in the works, or this is just a clever marketing ploy to get Instapaper fans signed up for Betaworks’ Openbeta mailing list.

    All in all, Instapaper is an amazing product, and if Betaworks’ reanimation of Digg is any indication, they’re a good custodian.

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    Not a Bad Quarter

    Not a Bad Quarter

    Marco Arment, he of Instapaper, and of excellent commentary:

    If you sell a 99-cent app to just 1% of the people who bought new iOS devices in the 2012 holiday quarter alone, you’ll clear about $519,750. Not a bad quarter.

    Not bad indeed.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Philadelphia councilman introduces bill aimed at improving health insurance prospects for life partners and transgendered people

    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.

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    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.

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    Apple removes app curation app from App Store

    Apple removes app curation app from App Store

    "Yes, you can live here," Apple seems to say to developers, "but if you ever break one of our vague rules, or if we ever decide for any reason or even for no reason at all that you must go, you will be evicted. No appeal, no questions asked, no discussion."

    I wish only the best to the folks at AppGratis, but this is the danger in building your business, and your employees’ livelihoods, on something over which you have absolutely no control.

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    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.

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    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.

    1. 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) ↩

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    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.

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    Want to learn to code? Start here.

    Want to learn to code? Start here.

    Zack Shapiro offers some great advice for those interested in learning to code as a means to build something. I’m one of those people he mentions who are using Code Academy but I make it a part of my weekly routine and it’s helping.

    I wrote a post almost a year ago about how code relates to the law, and I stand by it: it’s a great way of learning to think critically. Even if you don’t learn to build what you have in mind, you’ll get some useful lessons out of the experience.

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    HBO exec laments piracy of low-quality editions of 'Game of Thrones'

    HBO exec laments piracy of low-quality editions of ‘Game of Thrones’

    HBO programming president Michael Lombardo, speaking to Entertainment Weekly's James Hibberd:

    The production values of this show are so incredible. So I’m hoping that in the purloined different generation of cuts that the show is holding up.

    More good news for those of us hoping something will change as far as non-cable TV subscription access to the massively popular show and the HBO stable in general.

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    2nd Circuit: Aereo streaming of individual over-the-air TV feeds via internet doesn't violate copyright law

    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.

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