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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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Why I Chose Temple Law

I originally posted this to one of my old blogs, The Rotten Word, in April 2009. I wanted to publish it here as well because I plan to write a follow-up soon, having graduated in January of this year. Many thanks to Philadelphia litigator Max Kennerly for his advice and kind words about this post when it first ran. Also, this post by my Temple law classmate and friend Kishwer Vikaas Barrica was humbling, so thanks to her too!

In the Beginning…

It’s not a choice easily made. First of all, just the decision to take the LSAT is a journey in itself. It requires research, asking the right questions of the right people, preparing for failure and, perhaps most importantly, preparing for success. It’s the success that can be most confusing. After all, if you do poorly on the test the first time, you resolve that you probably didn’t take it seriously enough, or that it was just a bad day. There’s a “choose your own adventure” feel to it. The first time I took the LSAT, my score was embarrassing. The only saving grace was that the average friend and family member has never had any reason to learn the how the test is scored, so they don’t know how poorly I did.

I could have gotten off the train right there. I almost did. I almost decided that maybe it isn’t meant to be. But then I thought about it, and remembered that I don’t think anything is meant to be. That’s the great liberating foundation of my personal moral value system: freedom at the cost of accountability. Things happen to me because (a) I have made a decision that caused them or (b) someone else has made a decision that caused them. Thus, I can decide that I’m not cut out for lawyering, or I can decide that I am, and then act.

So I took it again. And I did better. Much better. Suffice it to say that I am no longer embarrassed, even by my first score, because my second vindicated me. I studied harder, focused more deliberately, and made executive decisions about which questions I could answer well and which ones I could not.

But getting a score you can respect yourself for is only the beginning.

Decisions, Decisions

Will you devote all of your time to your studies, subsidizing your living expenses as well as the cost of your education? Or will you retain your current employment, making the (in my opinion) far more daunting commitment to maintain your financial standing and continue to accrue work experience while you submit to the rigor of a legal education?

On the one hand, going to school full time looks like the most sensible decision. Everything you have heard about law school is true: it’s hard. It’s not an afterthought, or a hobby. It’s at least as mentally stressful as your job, and probably more. Like any graduate school, every hour of class time requires at least an hour outside the classroom. So, the ability to go to class all day and devote your evenings to study and work is a precious resource.

On the other hand, the economy is (still) bad, and even if previously borrowed loans are deferred while you are in graduate school, there are bills and rent to be paid, not to mention food and (dare I say) the occasional drink. Borrowing money for these expenditures is inadvisable at best. Working through law school is difficult, but, since the evening division is a part-time program, credit requirements are flexible: you must complete a certain amount, but you have summer sessions during which you can earn credit, as well. You can keep earning money, and producing promotable deliverables. But you’ll be spending a few hours a night, a few nights a week, in a classroom. And that’s before you even start your homework. It may be a part-time education, but it’s a second full-time job.

So why did I choose Temple Law?

Well, even taking into account the (generous) aid package Drexel offered me, I would have had to borrow more money to cover living expenses than I’ll likely need to borrow to go to Temple. Also, my 401(k) account makes me smile, and cutting it off for a few years would mean less smiles. Finally, I’ve got a good thing going at my current job: good work, good people, good benefits. These are not things to be taken lightly in today’s job market. For every lawyer making $80k right out of school, there are three more at the unemployment office. And we’re talking partners here. People with experience.

I made the commitment to work and go to school at the same time. I want to be confident about it, even arrogant. But the truth is that it’s terrifying. After all, I might not be able to do it. Then what? I don’t know. But I know that it’s what I want, and people do it every day. People with more stressful jobs, people with children. There are really no excuses.

Classes are technically from 6pm to 10pm. I’m going to be in danger of succumbing to my burgeoning caffeine addiction. I’m going to be in danger of burning out. I’m going to be in danger of driving the girlfriend (more) insane (than usual).

But maybe I’ll quit caffeine and start meditating. Or running. Maybe I’ll apply my work ethic to my studies, and develop a schedule that includes class time, study time, and mental stability time. Maybe I’ll do well.

Closing Argument

This absurdly long post has served primarily as a “thinking out loud” session for me, in which I’ve tried to express what has been going on in my head as I near the next and most important part of my journey: actually going to law school. But this is the tip of the iceberg. This stuff takes me away mid-conversation at work, puts blank stares on my face while Meg’s talking to me, and keeps me wide awake in bed. It worries me, aggravates me, scares me. This is the stuff I always thought adults had to deal with, the stuff that I got to watch other people figure out while I wrote stories or played my guitar.

Now I’m one of those people. I have a job, investments, credit cards, an actual (and good) credit score. I don’t think I could afford to work a side job and go to school. So it might take me longer to finish, while I take fewer classes. But my sense of financial security is young and, with the exception of some indinspensable help (for which I’ll always be grateful), largely self-wrought. Risking it doesn’t seem right. So wish me luck.

I’m going to need it.

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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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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.

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Amazon acquiring Goodreads

Amazon acquiring Goodreads

Makes sense.

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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.

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Make Feedly look more like Reader

Make Feedly look more like Reader

If you like Feedly but prefer Reader’s white space and width, grab this handy script. Chrome users like me should install Tampermonkey first.

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OUYA and Emulation

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.

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Yahoo: The Marissa Mayer Turnaround

Yahoo: The Marissa Mayer Turnaround

Jean-Louis Gassée consistently provides insight and, perhaps even more importantly in today’s tech-writing landscape, truly elegant prose. This is a great write-up, but I recommend you make Monday Note one of your weekly reads. He and Frédéric Filloux are often voices of reason among the din of unqualified opinion.

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HBO CEO wants to bundle HBO GO with your internet subscription

HBO CEO wants to bundle HBO GO with your internet subscription

This is progress, although MG Siegler is right to doubt whether cable companies, many of whom are also internet service providers, would even consider such a deal.

At least HBO recognizes that the math won’t hold up against a la carte models forever.

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Titles are Toxic

Titles are Toxic

Michael Lopp on the anachronism and true uselessness of titles:

When a company is small, everyone does a little bit of everything, so titles make no sense. My first title at Netscape was “Bitsifter”. Sure, there were some titles, but they were titles of convenience so external parties could apply their antiquated title frameworks to folks on our team during meetings. “Oh, I see, you’re the VP of Product… how very impressive.”

I give no one any respect whatsoever based on their title: they have to earn it. This can be done through genuine conversation, viable work product, or explicit demonstrations of effective leadership. There is no other way.

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Google Keep isn't an Evernote killer

Evernote will be just fine, despite Google’s recent announcement of a new note-taking app called Google Keep, currently available for the web and Android. Keep allows for text, audio, and images to be added to a single notebook and synced between the web and Android devices. You can even add stuff via Google Now. It’s neat, but it’s no Evernote killer.

The two products cater to very different use cases, and Keep will not be able to replace Evernote for its core customers. Evernote had 1.5 million premium subscribers in November 2012. At 45$/year, that’s around $67 million annually, and the number of subscribers has been rising for years.

It doesn’t make them profitable, at least at the moment, but it helps. Coupled with Business accounts and other endeavors, Evernote isn’t worried. For those premium users, who pay because they make the most of Evernote’s vast feature set, Keep won’t be good enough. And I suspect that even if every user of Evernote’s free tier left the product, Evernote would hardly notice from an operational standpoint (if anything, operational costs would decrease).

Instead, makers of task management apps should be concerned. Google Tasks is as neglected as Google Reader was, and we all know what happened to Reader. Keep looks like an elegant upgrade to Google Tasks, and while Evernote has hinted at its own task management solution, I don’t think the future of their business will depend on it.

It’s worth remembering: there just aren’t as many zero-sum games in the apps and services spaces as many, especially in the tech press, would have us believe. Design, feature set nuance, and adaptability to users’ current workflow all allow for multiple apps to be successful in the same space. The Keep/Evernote dichotomy is no different.

This article was adapted from a comment I left on The Next Web’s post about Keep.

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Google and Experimentation

Google and Experimentation

This is a great article, especially if you don’t know much about the history of Android. However, Adrianne Jeffries of The Verge ends her article with a silly quote from Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg. Perhaps analysts have a legitimate role to play in the consumer electronics industry, but this statement doesn’t support that thesis:

"I think Google doesn’t necessarily know what it’s going to do until Google has done it," said Gartenberg, the Gartner analyst. "I’m sure there’s going to be some experimentation here."

Google, the data-driven engineer’s paradise knows what it’s doing before it has done it. Experimentation is not, in Google’s world, akin to musical improvisation. Experiments in any setting are, if done right, rigorously planned and researched, and then executed with careful precision.

Google will heed the data, and the market climate, and the reaction to rumors about a commingled Android/Chrome OS, and myriad other factors. And they will definitely know what they’re doing before they do it.