Luis Villa's Home Page: Law Students

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Law Students Blogs

Law Students

Luis Villa's Home Page

Ramblings on law school in New York, free software, and the spaces in between.
By Luis Villa

Post Frequency: 3.7/day

Last Entry: October 31, 2009 at 04:17:21

Ranthambore

Posted on October 31, 2009
I think our visit to the tiger sanctuary in Ranthamore has gone alright… (Special thanks to Hema at Wipro for reminding me of the existence of Ranthambore, and to the great staff at Tiger Safari Resort Hotel in Sawai Madhopur for helping us through some complications along the way, like me misplacing our passports…)

trip pictures

Posted on October 15, 2009
FYI for friends, etc.: I am going to continue journaling privately for post-trip publication, probably, but rather than bore entire planets worth of people in the meantime, I’m just mentioning small things on identica (with republishing to twitter and facebook) and posting pictures on my gallery install...

london!

Posted on October 03, 2009
Law and policy nerdery ahoy: I saw the site of the traditional courts of the Common Law, the Temple Inn, and Chatham House. Soooo nerdy am I. Krissa loves me anyway, for some reason.

looking forward to filling gallery 3 with wedding and honeymoon pictures

Posted on October 01, 2009
Just a brief note here to say thanks to the gallery3 developers- they appear to have taken the lessons of wordpress and other successful open source web services to heart; the new gallery (even though still in beta) is a pleasure to set up and (more importantly) a pleasure to use...

To access blog feed reader register for free. (You will also learn about new ways to read and access the freshest law blogs.)

48, 48 houuuurs to goooooooo

Posted on September 24, 2009
A picture from last weekend, spent in the not-quite-high Sierras: Krissa and Luis on the very, very, very narrow and twisty road to Edison Lake Vows are finally written, and even printed. Have not wanted to throw my computer all day, and can even breathe on an almost-normal basis...

pathetic, part II

Posted on September 23, 2009
My system failed to functionally come back from suspend yesterday, which appears to have cost me a substantial part of what was the final draft of my wedding vows and ceremony. This is the second time in the past few months I’ve lost big chunks of important work because of a system crash...

awesomeness, part I

Posted on September 23, 2009
A kind blog reader suggested a gross hack which rescued my vows. (Cat, strings, and grep should never be a part of the process of the vows, though admittedly in my case it might seem appropriate.) Krissa may marry me (and continue to deal with my operating system) yet.

pathetic

Posted on September 21, 2009
Battery life of my HP mini with WinXP: 3-5 hours, depending on use. (I hear Win7 is better.) Battery life of my HP mini with Fedora 11: struggling to get one hour. Pathetic. [Ed. later: should have mentioned that this is having done everything powertop suggests...

contacting me in the next two and a half months

Posted on September 18, 2009
As many of you know, Krissa and I moved out of New York early this month, and we will not have a permanent home again until some time in early December. This will make contacting us before then a bit tricky. Here is everything we can tell you should you want to say hi, scream [...

today was a good day

Posted on September 15, 2009
Today was a good day, except for wordpress and gallery3 seemingly disliking me greatly: confirmed some plans for the Greek leg of the honeymoon got marriage license had my first phone call with my little sister since she left for college. Sounds like she’s having a great time, which is good since I’ll always feel partially responsible for [...

life in a nutshell right now

Posted on September 08, 2009
Some friends have admitted to some confusion as to where I am living right now. More details in later posts, but the nutshell version: 1) Krissa and I no longer live in New York. 2) tomorrow night, we sleep in our fifth bed in seven nights. It does get a little more normal from here on out, sort [...

wikitravel on android and in print

Posted on August 28, 2009
In preparation for a honeymoon in places where data access is expensive I’ve put all of wikitravel on my Android phone via the OxygenGuide project. I’m not sure how useful it will prove in practice (especially since all maps are stripped out and there is no search) but this seems to me to be an [...

making our rings

Posted on August 27, 2009
Krissa and I have mostly tried to make our upcoming wedding fairly low key. The groom will probably wear sandals; there will be very little ceremony; traditional decisions like who is taking whose name (if at all) have not been made; so on, so forth. But we’re not completely dispensing with the traditional bits, and [...

who writes the kernel^W gnome?

Posted on August 19, 2009
The new ‘who writes the kernel’ paper is out; an interesting read as always. I’m still waiting for someone to take the scripts and run the same analysis for GNOME, especially since GNOME’s data is all in git now. Should be a short project for someone, I’d think, and very valuable for the community as [...

state of the art for bounties?

Posted on August 12, 2009
Is there a state of the art for free software project bounties? I’m sort of curious, because I’ve become a heavy user of a project which has an overworked maintainer and no particularly vibrant community.� I also� have no time/ability/desire to dive into that codebase, but I have two features that I’m pretty sure upstream [...

the nerd merit badges I?d make

Posted on August 11, 2009
I like the concept of nerd merit badges- I even want the inbox zero one- but the execution is a little weak. Seeing this started me pondering on what I’d do if I were going to make my own. The temptation, of course, is just to have a logo per organization- gnu, gnome, moz, fedora, etc...

thanks, friends

Posted on August 10, 2009
A few days before the bar I got a ‘wish you were here’ postcard from Gran Canaria. I promise I only choked up a little bit. :) It meant a lot to me. Thanks to everyone who signed it- I miss you guys (and gals) too :)

how do busy people deal with identica/twitter?

Posted on August 02, 2009
I’m an anti-social denter/twitterer. I publish irregularly (to, apparently, several hundred people) but read at best daily and at worst weekly, and at that, I read basically only direct replies plus (by twitter standards) a handful of people’s dents/twits...

FLOSS Law Review

Posted on July 14, 2009
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.

rome travel advice request

Posted on July 12, 2009
Now that all my European friends are back from their fun in the sun: Does anyone have a recommendation of a hotel near the train station in Rome? It will be for just one night, coming in by train the night before and leaving by plane at 10am the next morning...

10th bugiversary

Posted on June 23, 2009
Some part of me will always be a QA guy, so it is nice to note that today is the tenth anniversary of my first formal bug filing (and first formal participation in Mozilla, I believe): mozilla bugzilla bug 8749, nested <DL> tags don’t display properly...

Social Desktop contest

Posted on June 16, 2009
As I mentioned in my lwn interview a few weeks ago, I’m curious about where the Open Collaboration Services/Social Desktop is going- while I have not been able to figure out if this is the right way to do it, it is obvious that the Free desktop needs to start experimenting with and exploring this [...

hallelujah!

Posted on June 10, 2009
Apologies if I’ve seemingly been ignoring you; it isn’t personal. :/ But my vicious head cold is clearing up, and I now have home internet again. So expect slightly improved service from me in the near future. (Note that I am still studying for the bar, so I’m mostly still pretty swamped, but at least [...

useful notes on resumes and free software

Posted on June 04, 2009
Gerv Markham (of Gerv-fame) has posted some useful notes on putting Free Software experience on your resume. It is probably� most useful for people who have gotten at least somewhat involved in free software communities, but are not yet at the point of expertise where they are looking for jobs directly in those communities- in [...

internet FAIL

Posted on June 03, 2009
I moved this weekend, and as a result of some miscommunication, my sublet place has no internet. Worse, the internet provider to the place has no record of the building’s existence. So I’m pretty much AWOL from the net for probably a couple of weeks...

two other people capture what I?m thinking perfectly

Posted on May 31, 2009
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...

a good graduation day

Posted on May 25, 2009
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.

IANALY

Posted on May 20, 2009
I am not a lawyer yet, but I am, apparently, a JD. Parents arriving as we speak; actual graduation tomorrow.

UbuntuOne trademark- well, duh

Posted on May 14, 2009
Usually, I’m above saying ‘I told you so’, but sometimes… well, lets just say that it is clear that most of the people commenting in this bug about the ‘confusion’ caused by the Ubuntu One mark didn’t read my old posts on trusting open source companies or my (old, not terribly good) trademark paper...

LWN interview on Stormy and other subjects

Posted on May 12, 2009
This weekend Linux Weekly News interviewed me on a variety of topics, but primarily on Stormy and GNOME’s finances. It has now been posted. It is behind the LWN paywall for now, but will be available more generally in the future. (I urge everyone to subscribe to LWN; it is an excellent publication...

easy openoffice self-collaboration?

Posted on May 09, 2009
I’ve got an openoffice document that I need to edit on more than one machine (probably on Linux and XP; long story about why I have to use multiple machines/multiple OSs but hopefully it isn’t a long-term thing.) I can’t use abi/abicollab or google docs because this is a very, very large document (100-150 pages, mostly [...

on getting subpoena?d for participating in Zotero

Posted on May 09, 2009
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 [...

seething animosity can be great fun, but?

Posted on May 07, 2009
Dearest Toshok: “I wonder if this seething animosity toward the wannabe pundits/open source zealots would be enough to sustain me until I passed the bar?” No, no it would not. Trust me. :) –Luis (always happy to do pro bono IAAL smackdowns)

you know law journals may have ruined your mind forever if?

Posted on May 04, 2009
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’...

The Plan, for now

Posted on May 03, 2009
Lots and lots of friends gave me good feedback on my ‘free time’ post of a couple months ago, so I thought it would make sense to say something now that I actually have some semblance of a plan :) Specifically, among other options, Orrick oferred me a stipend to work on legal issues at [...

gourmet!

Posted on May 01, 2009
New GNOME Journal is out, and with it is a nice article on gourmet. Gourmet is a pretty awesome little piece of software and deserves more users and more love. Go check it out, and cook something yummy for yourself. :)

me on gizmodo on the realDVD case

Posted on April 30, 2009
Gizmodo says in a post today: Testing the waters with a low-stakes product isn’t a bad idea in itself, but RealDVD is the wrong low-stakes product for the job. Real claims that Facet copies DVDs to an internal HDD, but offers absolutely no means by which these files could be shared?they’re DRMed, disconnected from the outside [...

thoughtlessness in open source

Posted on April 30, 2009
I think professionalism is usually bullshit, and I like it when people have a thick skin. Making people uncomfortable can even be useful if it helps shock people into looking at problems in a new way. I’ve been fairly consistently against behavior codes in open source projects, and I know I’ve on occasion even been [...

a rumbling about X QA

Posted on April 22, 2009
As I rebooted this morning as a result of RH bug 4733471 two serious questions popped into my head: do any of the major core X contributors2 employ a full-time X QA person? As far as I know the answer is ‘no’ but I’d love to be wrong...

all the cool kids are writing about the google book search settlement

Posted on April 19, 2009
Samuelson Picker Grimmelman Perhaps some day before the case settles I’ll actually be able to read them all. In the meantime linking here so that I can find them all later.

the world needs more lawyers like this

Posted on April 09, 2009
The world needs more lawyers like this: I often explain to businesses that the main reward for a great, original product is a succesful business based on that product, and that intellectual property notwithstanding, the best way to protect most great ideas is by consistently excellent execution, high quality, responsive customer service, continued innovation and overall [...

in case you thought data in the cloud was safe

Posted on April 06, 2009
Some anecdotes on data loss in the cloud: online backup provider loses data, sues systems provider Nokia’s Ovi service loses user contacts and images ma.gnolia lost all user data A more complex case, where the provider did (mostly?) the right thing: Yahoo closing its locker service after 10 years These are not necessarily straightforward; each failure has disparate causes (too much [...

upcoming GNOME board elections

Posted on April 02, 2009
As some have noticed, my upcoming ‘free time’ suggests that I might be able to run for the board again, when I said during my last candidacy statement that I’d be running for one term and one term only. While I’ll still be available to help the Foundation out on some legal tasks, I will [...

failures of the legal academy

Posted on April 01, 2009
Because of this blog, I get an email every other month or so asking about law school- should I go? where should I go? etc. My responses are usually, frankly, fairly negative- I’ve had a fairly decent experience, but I think that is in large part for fairly unusual and idiosyncratic reasons...

the unanticipated positive consequences of technology, Andrew Sullivan edition

Posted on March 31, 2009
Andrew Sullivan, yesterday: GPS and Google Earth make travel exponentially more interesting, even if that serendipitous wandering around I love so much becomes rarer and rarer. Me, quoted as ‘a reader’ in Sullivan today: I actually find that I do more serendipitous wandering now, since I now know that whenever I get tired, bored, or just really, really [...

?engineering a better town hall?

Posted on March 31, 2009
Gene Koo has a more nuanced/less whiny piece along the same lines as my ‘deliberative nirvana’ rant from Saturday.

BarCamp for PMs

Posted on March 30, 2009
I had no idea there was such a thing, but a friend in Durham is helping organize ProductCampRTP- a sort of barcamp for product management and product marketing. Seems like an interesting idea and possibly worth going to. If you know a PM in the triangle, give them a poke and let them know about [...

deliberative nirvana and software design myopia, Mar. 2009 edition

Posted on March 28, 2009
Ages ago, I tried to write a senior thesis about the potentials and pitfalls of bringing deliberative democracy to the internet. The thesis failed, badly. There were a lot of reasons for that failure1 but in the end the biggest reason was that I let the perfect be the enemy of the good...

lwn event calendar

Posted on March 27, 2009
I had no idea there was an LWN events calendar, but there is, and it is pretty sweet. And yes, I just submitted GNOME.asia 2009- which I really hope to go to.

realism comes to ATL

Posted on February 12, 2009
Via madisonian.net, I found this line at The Faculty Lounge: Once upon a time, a big firm had to be coy about layoffs -�it didn’t want to gain a reputation as an unstable workplace.� But in a startling real-world example of social norm shifts, the stigma around layoffs appears to be crumbling...

sudoku!

Posted on February 10, 2009
I’m not sure when this happened, exactly, but GNOME sudoku got a heck of a lot better at one point. It was always functional, but the new(?) start screen, color highlighting of rows, and multiple printing are all quite nice. And the post-win colors are only minorly seizure-inducing...

Stimulus Watch

Posted on February 02, 2009
Last year my journal published a paper by Jerry Brito, arguing for greater government transparency through web-based data sharing, mashing, etc. Jerry is putting some of that in practice with his Stimulus Watch project, which uses a data set from the US Conference of Mayors to allow individuals to review and discuss various ’shovel ready’ [...

bad/good, paper-writing edition

Posted on February 01, 2009
bad: I’m hating writing this paper, tentatively titled “Access Remedies after Open Standards: Can An ?Open? Technology Be Successfully Regulated?” good: I got to write the following very satisfying footnote: “Indeed, their work is valuable primarily for the thorough and exemplary historical research presented in it; the conclusions drawn about software development processes reflect a remarkable [...

?grandpa, where were you when Obama was sworn in??

Posted on January 22, 2009
“Grandpa, where were you when Obama was sworn in?” I was fulfilling my civic duty, listening to a closing summation by a defense attorney. We could hear the screams of joy from the street through the courtroom windows on the 15th floor. If I had to miss the moment, I’m glad this was why; it [...

open(ish?) design

Posted on January 22, 2009
I talked recently about the need for the development of sustainable design best practices that work in a “bazaar” context. Looks like buglabs and IDEO are possibly making a stab in that direction. I look forward to following the project and seeing what comes of it.

how I spent my last weekend in florida

Posted on January 14, 2009
Why yes, that is a swamp buggy. Besides driving it, I spent some quality time with family, some time getting bitten by mosquitoes, and some time in canoes. Good weekend all around. Probably not coincidence that this was the first time I’ve flown into New York since I moved here and not been excited about getting [...

crowdsourcing evidence collection

Posted on January 13, 2009
Charlie Nesson asks is there any evidence that any members of congress knew at the time they passed the 1999 Digital Theft Deterrence Act that the recording industry was intending to use the statute as a basis for suing its music fans is there any evidence that riaa and company were intending to so use the statute [...

jury duty through end of January

Posted on January 12, 2009
For those who haven’t heard, I’ve been seated on a criminal jury, in a fairly complex case that may last through the last week of January. On the down side, this is wreaking havoc on the beginning of my semester, but on the plus side I’m fulfilling a civic duty that I do strongly believe [...

Law Firm 2.0

Posted on January 07, 2009
Not sure how I had missed this previously, but VC guy and ex-lawyer Jason Mendelson has a great series of posts on ‘Law Firm 2.0′- issues like compensation, retention, and cost structures, and how all of those are badly broken from the perspective of a client...

quick customer service appreciation post

Posted on December 17, 2008
Three good customer service experiences I’ve had of late: lenovo: I bought an X41 tablet not long after Lenovo bought the Thinkpad brand. I was a little worried about the impact the purchase would have on customer service, but in my first interaction with them (yesterday, 2 1/2 years after the purchase) their service was prompt, [...

vicious legal-ese

Posted on December 12, 2008
From the Vermont corporations statute: (26)� ?Meeting? means any structured communications conducted by participants in person or through the use of electronic or telecommunications medium permitting simultaneous or sequentially structured communications for the purpose of reaching a collective agreement...

why I?m not a big fan of OOo, part 53240

Posted on December 10, 2008
I was asked after the Deep Fried Bytes podcast why I said on the podcast that I pretty much like Office 2007’s user experience and hate OOo. I could go on at length, but here is a short version of the most important part of it. Three full years ago Microsoft shipped a beta build of [...

things I did not expect to do Friday

Posted on December 07, 2008
things I did not expect to do Friday: buy an album because I saw a music video. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that, even when I went through an MTV-watching period in my teens. (Tangent: how come I didn’t know there was a last.fm creative commons station?)

slight innovation followup

Posted on December 06, 2008
Dan: my goal in ranting is to increase the amount of innovation being delivered to users. So if the idea is 30 years old, but I can’t use it because I’m not part of this ‘bunch’, please carry on ;) More seriously, I do hope the process of producting a new gnome-shell provides an innovation model [...

the linux desktop?s change problem

Posted on December 05, 2008
[NB: this could easily have been titled 'the software industry's innovation problem', since the problem applies broadly to all sorts of software development, and what I'm talking about as 'change' is often referred to as 'innovation', a word that has been twisted almost beyond recognition...

what the Berkman Center got right

Posted on December 03, 2008
Of late, I’ve been reading my friend Dave’s regular Berkman Lunch transcripts with a certain wistfulness. Ironically, his last lunch post was about a Columbia law prof.1 I’ve always cited the lunches as the best part of Berkman, but the further I get from it, the more I realize that the lunches were just one [...

when news and law collide, puffery edition

Posted on December 03, 2008
Lots of the tech news sites are up in arms this morning about this Wired story, (1)(2), reporting that ‘Apple says you’re a fool to believe our ads’ (to paraphrase the title.) While not strictly incorrect, this post really deserves some context...

playing with Sugar

Posted on December 02, 2008
Following Greg’s recent posts on Sugar, I’m playing with running it a bit; might even try to use it as my dominant platform for a while. Some thoughts, all written from within Sugar: The journal is not perfect yet but is a much more useful primary interface than the stock win3...

epic airline fail

Posted on November 30, 2008
Any one of these is a bad sign for your airline: won’t offer even a cup of water for less than $2 has ads on the tray tables has discontinued all in-flight entertainment If you’re doing all three, you’re US Airways. Seriously… is there a companion to seatguru...

nycinfolaw

Posted on November 15, 2008
If you live in or around New York, and you’re interested in info/tech/’cyber’ law events, you should check out nycinfolaw.org. What was a drunken brainstorm about a year ago has turned into a calendar and mailing list- nothing fancy, but the important bits are there...

part two of Deep Fried Bytes podcast up

Posted on November 07, 2008
Part two of my Deep Fried Bytes podcast is up. I had a good time doing these; hope people have a good time listening to them.

(re)focusing

Posted on November 06, 2008
Good friends know I’m a politics junkie. So I’m struggling this morning to reprogram my brain not to type http://pollster.com/blogs/ every 3-5 minutes. (XKCD, as usual, is on point.) I usually use a hacked up greasemonkey script for this, but today someone pointed me at leechblock, which looks completely awesome- lets you say ‘for this [...

visualization FTW

Posted on November 05, 2008
The Times has a really terrific visualization of the change in voting patterns from 2004. If you want to understand what happened last night, politically, going through this data seems like a critical place to start.

on complications of elections and IP

Posted on November 03, 2008
My journal’s blog (recently relaunched, slowly building up momentum) has a good piece on the interactions between the McCain campaign and IP law. Good background for those curious about the issue- how does he fit with YouTube? Does he have to listen when they say he can’t play Barracuda anymore?

I may have to become a deletionist, and other ?me? news

Posted on October 31, 2008
This is a little ridiculous. Flattering, but ridiculous. :) (Seriously, a good example of the rationale behind the deletionist position- some articles just don’t get enough ‘eyes’ to fix their errors. I think I’m still an inclusionist, on balance, but I can see the rationale...

hello CPS 82!

Posted on October 19, 2008
(planet readers, please ignore….)

Durham, higher education, and me

Posted on October 17, 2008
I’ll be in Durham this weekend; I’m not sure how much time I have free, but drop me a note if you’d like to grab a meal or beverage of choice. The formal reason I’ll be in Durham is to give a guest appearance at CompSci 82, Technical and Social Foundations of the Internet...

freedom to tinker on hacking self-drivingcars

Posted on October 17, 2008
Not quite as Deep and Serious as my other pieces over there, this is a fun one on whether or not you should be able to legally hack the Self Driving Car Of The Future. Turns out it is a slightly more complicated question than it seems on the surface, and one we’ve got very [...

why yes

Posted on October 16, 2008
that is my little sister. Thanks for asking.

FTK: clouds, hype, and freedom

Posted on October 14, 2008
I’ve written another post (really micro-essay) at Freedom To Tinker. This one is about ‘the cloud’, partially in response to Richard’s mini-interview, but really mostly in response to my continued frustration at the terribly meaningless phrase ‘the cloud’, and how it tends to confuse and obfuscate discussion of� critical issues...

quick Boston Summit report

Posted on October 13, 2008
Because of schoolwork and showing my sister around schools, I ended up not attending any sessions at the summit. But it was still great to see everyone- I got a sense of a lot of positive interest and momentum coming out of the hackfest, and of course it is always great to hang out with [...

what I have been up to

Posted on October 13, 2008
Lots of people I saw in Boston were asking ‘what have you been up to’ instead of the usual ’sounds like things are good from your blog’ :) I guess I’ve been a little quiet here about me, personally. So some updates: School is generally good; the first two years ended up being very successful (low [...

quick IP-tech-politics post (mostly candidate agnostic)

Posted on October 08, 2008
A long post on (very liberal) firedoglake about Obama’s local-level organizing techniques. Very long piece but worth reading regardless of your political orientation, as it seems likely to define how campaigning will be done in the future, and doesn’t delve (much) into the politics behind the candidates/movements themselves...

posting at Freedom To Tinker for a few weeks

Posted on October 03, 2008
I was recently invited to guest-post at Freedom to Tinker, formerly Ed Felten’s group blog and now officially hosted by Ed’s Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. Ed’s been a hero for ages (dating back to at least his voting machine work, if not to his Microsoft work) and so the invite was very [...

saddest (truest?) conversation of the day

Posted on September 30, 2008
(me) I’m an irritating perfectionist who can’t prioritize (me) stubborn ‘pride in work product’ (friend) lose it (friend) that’s an evolutionary …whatchamacallit (friend) like the appendix (friend) a holdover that adds no value

computer usage data bleg (update: and server market share)

Posted on September 22, 2008
Hey, all. I’m in need of data about ‘typical’ computer usage- i.e., ‘in 2007, the average computer user spent X% of time on the internet, Y% of time doing word processing, Z% of time listening to music, etc.’ The ideal data set would have this information for a number of years- ideally going back at [...

what you can (and can?t) learn from Google?s EULA mistake

Posted on September 18, 2008
When people started complaining about the Google Chrome EULA, it seemed obvious to me that it was a copy and paste error- old language, copied into a new situation where it didn’t quite fit. But after Google explained that they had just reused language from other licenses, Gizmodo noted: It’s not that I don’t trust Google, [...

what these guys need is? a trademark license!

Posted on September 17, 2008
Most screaming case for a community mark license I’ve seen in a while is the utterly cool PARK(ing) Day. Basically, they’ve got a very cool idea (probably patentable, not copyrightable) and have registered a mark (PARK(ing) Day, protected but not under copyright...

that havoc, he?s such a nice young man. John McCain, not so much.

Posted on September 14, 2008
HP: very nice post. The version in my drafts folder since Friday night is… hrm. Very similar in content, but, well, less polite. One might say ‘angrier’. I had a lot of respect for John McCain (probably would have voted for him over Gore in 2000) but over the past couple of weeks that respect has [...

GNOME Mobile Stewardship Team

Posted on September 08, 2008
On behalf of the board, I just announced a new GNOME Mobile Stewardship Team on foundation-announce. I’m pleased with this announcement for a number of reasons. Primarily, I think it’ll help us get better focus and direction around GNOME Mobile, and obviously that is important...

Software Freedom Day event in New York City

Posted on September 07, 2008
James Vasile asked me to pass along that the Software Freedom Law Center is having a reception for Software Freedom Day. Details are at his blog (which is worth subscribing too- low volume, high value when something is said. (I’ll try to make it, but my brother will be in town, so… possibly not...

Deblois plays NYC!

Posted on September 04, 2008
My sister Deblois will be playing her acoustic-folk-blues-surf-rock in New York City on Friday and Saturday nights; details here or below the fold. (Some sample music here; buy here.) Krissa and I will be at both shows; let us know if you want to join us! Friday, September 5th, 2008 THE NATIONAL UNDERGROUND 7pm 159 E Houston NY NY [...

creative commons picture script request?

Posted on September 03, 2008
I’m doing a lot of slide show work of late, so I was wondering if any of my readers knew of an in-image equivalent of the gfwa script I use on the blog? Basically, I’d love to know of (or have written?) a script that, given an image, a license, attribution strings, etc...

quick thought on blizzard?s thoughts on google chrome

Posted on September 01, 2008
“The fact that Google believes that they can launch a browser based on new technology means that the market is alive.” –Blizzard monopoly-e-commerce by Daniel Broche. License: It is a pretty bizarre “market” where the major participants are, in market share order: a repeatedly convicted monopolist that makes no money off its product in this market a non-profit [...

hands on a hard body online!

Posted on August 26, 2008
Apparently Hands on a Hard Body has been legally posted, in its entirety, to Google Video. (Wikipedia) You should really find a couple hours and watch it. On the surface the movie looks completely uninteresting- I was pretty much kicking and screaming when I was dragged into watching it...

openid plugin installed; couple diso links

Posted on August 25, 2008
I’ve finally installed the WP-openid plugin. Please email me if there are any problems with it; one hopes it works well at this point. WP-openid is nominally affiliated with diso. I’m curious to see where else diso goes from here- lots of interesting ideas there, and apparently now some corporate sponsorship, but not a whole lot [...

notes on ?the slacker?s guide to law school? by Juan Doria

Posted on August 25, 2008
Disclaimer: at some point my email address got added to a list of ‘people to email if you want to pimp your law-related product.’ Most of the solicitations I get that way I ignore, but every once in a while something looks interesting. This is one of them...

good keyboard bleg?

Posted on August 24, 2008
Anyone have any recommendations for good desktop keyboards with integrated pointing devices (preferably a ‘nipple’ aka ‘pointing stick’)? I really like my MS ergo keyboard, but hate having to move my hand to the mouse regularly...

seen at a party over the summer

Posted on August 23, 2008
Berkman@10: I’m with eon by Wendy Seltzer. License: It was worn at the party by Jimbo Wales. (You probably have to know eon, aka Charlie Nesson, to really appreciate it…)

gnome wishlist: one-click backup/restore?

Posted on August 10, 2008
Krissa’s hard drive is dying, beginning the unpleasant process of rsync dump + restore on the new hd. So- is there a one-click backup/restore tool for single-user machines, along the lines of the backup/restore experience in Time Machine. The Ubuntu folks were working on something along these lines but AFAIK there is no actual code [...

taking stock of the summer

Posted on August 09, 2008
If you’re ever in Istanbul, make it a point of getting dinner near the time of the last prayer call at the Golden Horn Hotel Sultanahmet. Bring your camera. A fragment of Uncle O’s surfboard. I’m back in New York, still taking stock of the (generally pretty awesome) summer...

enjoying having Krissa around again

Posted on August 02, 2008
Besides all the obvious reasons that I’m pleased to have Krissa around, it is always a real joy to hit a farmer’s market with her. We are well stocked for tomorrow. :) The San Francisco farmer’s market is a very different beast from the ones in New York- we don’t get citrus and rice (among many [...

istanbul

Posted on July 13, 2008
Great time; great conference; even pretty good board meetings. Came into the week convinced that hiring Stormy was a good idea; exited believing that hiring Stormy was an excellent idea. Krissa and I on the pillows in the restaurant in the alley behind our hotel...

dinners

Posted on July 07, 2008
Night one. Night two. So far, so good. Now, wish me luck finding the conference today… :)

GNOME Foundation hiring Stormy Peters

Posted on July 07, 2008
I’m excited to announce that, after a long search, the GNOME board has decided to hire Stormy Peters as executive director. Formal language press release, for those of you interested in such things, is here. If you want to discuss the Stormy hire (or just say ‘welcome’ :), take it to foundation-list...

contacting me in istanbul

Posted on July 06, 2008
During my istanbul stay, the best way to reliably reach me in a timely manner will be text message at +16172307951. Please include your name so i know who i am texting with :) My email access is spotty so far, and voice mail is hard/expensive to check...

10 years and excitedly counting

Posted on July 04, 2008
For some reason she volunteered to continue putting up with me… :)

san francisco, etc.

Posted on June 23, 2008
I have to say it is pretty easy to fall in love with this place, especially on days like yesterday when it is clear and not too hot but not too cold- spent most of the day in a park relaxing at the birthday party of a friend of a friend. dolores park by Beth Rankin...

things I would not have believed if you told me ten years ago

Posted on June 18, 2008
things I would not have believed if you told me ten years ago: that the most influential TV show for my demographic would be a Comedy Central news show parodying a Fox News anchor; that my old boss would be on this show; and that while doing it he’d quintuple the downloads of Netscape.

continued experiments in microblogging

Posted on June 18, 2008
Assuming friendly wireless, power, etc., I’ll be microblogging (not at twitter) today’s Creative Commons Technology Summit. We’ll see how that goes.

journaling in internet time?

Posted on June 14, 2008
Given that virtually all journal articles are published on SSRN, and read and discussed, before they hit actual journals, could journals seek to substantially shorten the amount of time between submission and publication, so that authors feel that journals are active contributors while the article is ‘hot’, rather than feeling that they are the finishing [...

decadence

Posted on June 11, 2008
I’d contribute to the decadence discussion, except I think I’ve already said what needed to be said three years ago and a year and a half ago and again. I will, though, point to this (and other posts that month) and then urge people to look at this if they want to talk about new features.

observation on my office and the dominance of Word

Posted on June 06, 2008
blogger discussing how his lawyer used the Open Document Format instead of .doc: The type of documents they produce in that [law] office, as in many other offices if not most I?m sure, is just pure text with a little formatting. They really have no reason to keep buying licenses for MS Office for this...

integrity in software and law school, strike 58104

Posted on June 04, 2008
I’ve always been sort of morbidly fascinated by ExamSoft and SofTest, the combination of software products that, in theory, keep us from cheating during law school exams. There are a whole lot of things wrong with it (buggy, elevates books over computers, etc...

some SF photos, and experimentation with WP 2.5 gallery

Posted on May 26, 2008
Probably can’t quite use the Wordpress gallery full-time yet. In particular note the picture that is not rotated correctly, the lack of f-spot support, and some UI quirks. But I’d guess that within another wordpress release or two I’ll switch away from gallery after seven years...

Istanbul!

Posted on May 25, 2008
Istanbul Mosque at Sunset by David Dennis. License: Marked out of my Tracks TODO list: purchase tickets for Istanbul. Soooo psyched. (Pretty pleased about completing my first week at work too, but still a little too overwhelmed by that to actually write anything...

podcast recommendations?

Posted on May 21, 2008
I find myself with lots of podcast-appropriate car time1, and correspondingly my blog-reading time has cratered. And I was given an ipod on my first day of work.2 So… anyone have any recommendations for podcasts worth listening to? I’ll probably try to catch up on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum music podcasts, these boneheads,3 and [...

in san francisco

Posted on May 18, 2008
Spirals as eyes? by Brett L.. License: I have arrived in the south end of the Mission district in San Francisco, near Precita Park, and will be here (and/or near Menlo Park for work) until the beginning of August. Party invites for a housewarming will probably be going out soon for friends that I know [...

interesting research on ?conditional cooperation?

Posted on May 10, 2008
Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License: For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon G�chter may be of interest. Key sentence: [W]e find strong evidence that many people?s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people?s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more the more [...

new altlaw feature

Posted on May 06, 2008
Altlaw, the restoring-caselaw-to-the-public-domain-where-it-belongs project I’ve been involved with on and off since last year, just got a new feature; it now parses the cases that are cited and shows them as sidebar links. It hasn’t propagated to all cases yet, but you can see an example here...

duke polisci majors actually can do something useful with their lives

Posted on April 30, 2008
Go us.

sometimes a number hits you like a baseball bat to the head

Posted on April 27, 2008
Televisions from days gone by by Neil Anderson. License: Clay Shirky on how small wikipedia is, relative to the way we’ve spent our culture’s free time for the past fifty years: So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of [...

RHEL-izing Wikipedia

Posted on April 23, 2008
I’ve been waiting for this. (It isn’t the first time; see wikitravel, but it appears to be a higher-profile publisher.) It is obvious that to some people and institutions, stable and vetted is good. It is true in software, and in specific areas (textbooks, guidebooks, possibly encyclopedias) it is probably true in written books as [...

new headshot

Posted on April 16, 2008
I got interviewed last week for a linux.com piece. I also got LASIK over spring break, after 22 years of glasses. (It’s been a month without them and I’m still pretty psyched.) The result of the above two facts is a new headshot, in best chinposin style: Next necessary step: new hackergotchi, possibly from this picture [...

second worst dialog I saw during a recent Ubuntu upgrade

Posted on April 11, 2008
This dialog gets points for being graphical, and loses many, many, many points for presenting no information that any reasonable user could possibly get any use from unless they already previously understand (1) what FUSE is (2) how to get FUSE plugins (3) who the ‘first user’ is (4) what the ‘fuse group’ is and [...

I love the smell of a fascist state in the morning

Posted on April 09, 2008
Suspending the protection of the laws in favor of executive power: it makes the trains run on time gets fences built on time. Brought to you by the people who decided we didn’t need that pesky fourth amendment anyway. (Why yes, this did provoke me to finally renew my ACLU membership...

good news/bad news, journal edition

Posted on April 07, 2008
Good news: I’ve been selected as Editor in Chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, 2008-2009 edition. I’m excited to be able to work with a great team to release a solid issue of the journal, and also to spend some time thinking about where journals might go next...

couple quick quotes

Posted on April 07, 2008
“I think [defining BSD as ‘free because it has no restrictions’ and GPL as ‘not free because it has restrictions’] confuses freedom with anarchy.” –James Vasile. As concise and correct a refutation of this position as I’ve seen...

spring ?08 new york diary

Posted on April 06, 2008
For a whole variety of reasons (birthdays, my brother’s extended visit, decision to leave NY post-graduation) Krissa and I have been making a serious effort to enjoy New York over the past few months. I’ll take the liberty of treating the blog as a personal diary (sorry casual readers), and put here a list of [...

post-April Fool?s note

Posted on April 02, 2008
For future reference: if you’re in an organization with a lawyer, this is how you do April Fool’s.

openjdk trademark license

Posted on April 02, 2008
Sun has posted a new draft of their openjdk trademark license. If I read it correctly, it basically says you’re OK to use it as long as it is the ‘vast majority’ of the code is the same as the official codebase. The ‘vast majority’ language seems like a reasonable compromise, allowing the copyright license [...

tracks 1.5 released!

Posted on March 30, 2008
As I’ve mentioned before, I live in Tracks, a web-based Getting Things Done-like tool. For quite a while I’ve been living out of the unreleased preview version, because of the load of new features in there, like the ability to hide actions that don’t need to be seen yet and the rough-but-functional mobile view...

Microsoft Technology Summit- mts08

Posted on March 30, 2008
So… I spent most of last week in Redmond, on the Microsoft campus, attending the fourth ‘Microsoft Tech Summit.’ The name is sort of misleading. It does describe the subject matter fairly well- the presentations were mostly pretty technical, and they were very much about Microsoft...

brief ?CC-licensed specification? rant

Posted on March 27, 2008
The next time I hear “we’ve licensed the specification under Creative Commons so anyone can implement the spec”, I’m going to scream at someone.1 To take a list from a Microsoft license I read yesterday, implementing a spec may require (among other things) licensing of “pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark [...

twittering for a change

Posted on March 26, 2008
The idea of blogging for 2 1/2 days sounded brutal; so I decided I’d experiment with ‘blogging with constraints’, aka ‘resisting my urge to write paragraphs by forcing myself to only write 140 characters at a time.’ Only tool I have for that (unfortunately) is twitter, which is imperfect, but I’m giving it a go…

week in redmond

Posted on March 23, 2008
I’ll be in Redmond this week for the Microsoft Technology Summit; thanks for the invite go to Brian Hitney, who I met at Raleigh Bar Camp over the summer. Samir, Pia, and Jeff seemed to think it was a decent idea after their (admittedly mixed) experience last year...

good news/bad news, journal blogging edition

Posted on March 23, 2008
good news: a post from my journal’s blog team made it all the way to slashdot. bad news: slashdot (more specifically, the blog we’re nominally affiliated with) called our writing ’surprisingly readable.’ It’s sad that lawyers are supposed to be excellent communicators, and yet our training typically stilts our writing so much that it is surprising [...

I miss/hate/etc. miami sometimes

Posted on March 20, 2008
This led the evening news on both local CBS and ABC affiliates, including interviews with workers at the local aquarium who were asked (seriously) if boaters should be “afraid” of repeat occurences. I remain speechless. stiltsville by sam garza...

spring break link blogging

Posted on March 18, 2008
Several weeks of backlog from my feed reader: shakespeare on entrepreneurship: ?Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt!? So true. Via. I’m always on the lookout for examples that Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot, but I’m not sure this is one of them, since [...

amazon mp3 payments to artists?

Posted on March 05, 2008
I’ve been scouring the internet for this information, but no luck so far, so I’ll ask here in hopes something will come of it. Amazon is charging less (in some cases significantly less) for their mp3 music service than the same album in physical media...

reason for more flickr pictures

Posted on February 28, 2008
BTW, people may have noticed that I’m using a lot more flickr pictures of late; the reason is that I found (and modified to my taste) Patrick Mueller’s ‘get flickr with attribution (gfwa)‘ greasemonkey script, and it makes posting cc-licensed flickr pictures easy...

self-explanatory

Posted on February 26, 2008
Now I am 30! by Dan Morelle. License: Trying not to be too reflective today. Ungodly drilling noise in apartment below mine is helping with that. :) Thanks to everyone who made the last 30 years so interesting and fun; hope for more of the same in the next 30.

shaver asks some interesting questions about Microsoft and legal liability

Posted on February 25, 2008
First off, I Am Not A Lawyer And This Is Not Legal Advice. If you go to Microsoft (or to anyone) and say ‘but this law student on a blog told me so’ then you will be laughed out of the room, or sued, or both, and you’ll deserve it. :) Mike Shaver blogged early [...

considering Lessig

Posted on February 21, 2008
So Lessig isn’t saying no to Congress quite yet. This really should excite me; to call Lessig one of my heroes is not a stretch at all. Lawrence Lessig 1 by Mario Carvajal. License: My initial response was, I think, pretty solid: Lessig would make a very good Congressman...

good news/bad news, Mozilla Messenger edition

Posted on February 20, 2008
We could communicate by Bill Stilwell. License: bad news (in my mind): lots of focus on ‘email’ rather than ‘communication’ in the recent discussion of the renaming/rebirth of Mozilla MailCo as Mozilla Messaging, and even some comments that could be read as negative on the idea of integrating various communications technologies into a competent whole...

Sara White Welsh, 1911-2008

Posted on February 19, 2008
We’ll miss you, Aunt Sara. I’d say ‘Rest in Peace’, but I hope you’re dancing or driving fast, not resting…

document sharing/commenting on the web

Posted on February 17, 2008
Two document-centric sites came across my radar last week; some quick thoughts on each: docstoc.com: sharing-focused document site- you upload, they publish to the world so that anyone can read it. Founded by law school students, so, among other things, has lots and lots of law school outlines, which is a nice resource...

why the writers demands shares of revenues instead of profits

Posted on February 16, 2008
After I casually mentioned my support of the writer’s strike, a good friend told me that he thought that the strike was bad, in part because the writers should be getting a share of the profits and not of revenue (and since there were no profits in internet video yet, they should be getting nothing [...

Lessig for Congress?

Posted on February 15, 2008
Wowza. As I just submitted to /.: With the unfortunate passing of Congressman Tom Lantos parts of Silicon Valley and San Francisco will be having a special election in June to send a replacement to Congress. Given the area, it would be great to have someone who is both tech and policy-aware fill the seat- and [...

class notetaking rant

Posted on February 14, 2008
So… if you’re given a wiki to take notes into to share with your classmates, and you’re typing notes, why would you not type notes into the wiki? Lots of typing and at least some visible notetaking last week, but nothing in the wiki...

Evangelia?s thesis available online

Posted on February 14, 2008
I got an email today from Evangelia Berdou, who came to a couple guadecs to meet, greet, and pick GNOME-y brains. Turns out she’s published the fruits of her GNOME research- her PhD thesis. I haven’t had time to read it yet, but I’m sure it is interesting- she had a habit of asking very [...

tech law journal blogging

Posted on February 13, 2008
Reference point: another student tech-law journal that is blogging, fairly successfully, it looks like. Maybe it is time to get all the tech-law journals that blog under one roof so we can swap notes… :)

Bzzzzt.

Posted on February 12, 2008
Wrong answer. giant by brom. License: The six month release cycle is not an all-controlling god, and bugs in one known, specific subsystem are not undebuggable without wide release (which was KDE’s most valid excuse). If it isn’t ready for wide use, it isn’t and shouldn’t be a GNOME ...

CLE opportunities past and future

Posted on February 11, 2008
Twice in the past few days I’ve been asked to sign up for Continuing Legal Education (CLE). Sadly, I have to ‘graduate’ first. Oops. Still… each was interesting: The Friday CLE opportunity was at Columbia’s symposium on Fair Use...

in market for new feed reader

Posted on February 09, 2008
Mis suscripciones RSS by torchondo. License: I’ve finally gotten fed up with my feed reader. Most of the time I don’t really care if my feeds are updated in a timely manner, but when I want it timely I want it timely. Like, on election day, I want my politics feeds to update more often [...

another better writer captures what I?m thinking perfectly

Posted on February 05, 2008
Via Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden explains why he voted for Obama in the primary, capturing my critical thought perfectly: I?m for Obama knowing perfectly well that, as Bill Clinton suggested, it?s a ?roll of the dice?. A roll of the dice for Democrats, for progressives, for those of us who?ve fought so hard against the [...

Yes, we can.

Posted on February 05, 2008
Hope - Obama (Shepard Fairey poster) by Steve Rhodes. License: Today is a unique day in my lifetime; a primary day where almost 1/2 of states are voting, but where the outcome is still very much in doubt. If you’re in one of those states, whether or not you agree with me about Obama, find [...

more software that rocks my world: Zotero

Posted on February 04, 2008
GTD Kitteh! by Karin Dalziel. License: I’m doing a research project right now for a faculty member, and I’ve finally found the research software that I’ve wanted since my high school history teacher taught me to take great notes (good) on note cards (bad)...

?why should a customer care about IP assurance??

Posted on February 03, 2008
Matt Asay asks “Why should a customer care about IP assurance?” He and Savio Rodrigues both make what appears to be the same error: comparing IP to “environmental rules or workplace safety regulations”. There is a critical difference, of course: if the EPA or comes after Microsoft, and I use Microsoft products, I can’t be [...

a vast flood of random web/legal curiosities

Posted on February 02, 2008
Hello ABA Journal readers. Welcome to my blog! You may want to look at the copyright license this blog is under, and my explanation of Why I Blog. You may also want to subscribe only to the law feed, since much of what I write about is technology or personal...

?why should a customer care about IP assurance??

Posted on February 02, 2008
Matt Asay asks “Why should a customer care about IP assurance?” He and Savio Rodrigues both make what appears to be the same error: comparing IP to “environmental rules or workplace safety regulations”. There is a critical difference, of course: if the EPA or comes after Microsoft, and I use Microsoft products, I can’t be [...

a message to overwhelmed friends; alt., why I love Tracks and GTD

Posted on February 01, 2008
Hipster PDA and GTD notes, tighter crop by Teo. License: So, this was an all-too-common pattern in my life, prior to about 18 months ago: get busy lose some or all track of what is on my plate feel guilty about not understanding what was on my plate; and never say no to more projects, in part because [...

hosted tracks

Posted on February 01, 2008
For those interesting in playing with tracks, you might want to look at tracks.tra.in- it is the stable branch plus a few tweaks, rather than the (totally awesome) trunk, but still gives you a good sense of what the tool does.

N810 in a nutshell

Posted on January 29, 2008
N810 unboxing by Matt Biddulph. License: Got my N810 yesterday. Some thoughts: GPS: sexy. All kinds of interesting possible results. Kudos to Nokia for leading in this, though now that my blackberry does rough triangulation from cells, I’m not sure how pragmatic it is...

summer internships at SFLC

Posted on January 29, 2008
Passing on an announce for other tech-interested proto-lawyers: The Software Freedom Law Center is currently seeking legal interns to join the staff this summer. �Applicants should have a demonstrated interest in software freedom and should be conversant in legal and technical concepts related to free and open source software, but no specific prior course of study [...

worst kind of draining?

Posted on January 25, 2008
… food poisoning, or something a lot like it. And today was supposed to be a fun-ish friday… blah.

morning link bits

Posted on January 24, 2008
All too short and insubstantive piece on the Amazon ‘top reviewers’. Reminds me a bit of the wikipedia cabal discussion. We will eventually demand transparency in these institutions, I think. (via the awesome furdlog- must-read if you want to keep tabs on some of the big picture tech policy issues, especially as understood by the [...

the best kind of draining?

Posted on January 24, 2008
… is a class that drowns you in both history and state of the art for an hour and a half, and then spends half an hour challenging you to think about what comes next. And all of it (implicitly and explicitly) screaming at you that This Really, Really Matters...

i don?t even know what this means

Posted on January 20, 2008
Objectivist phenomenology? (Seen on a mail drop box in lower manhattan.)

sunstein on obama

Posted on January 20, 2008
I’ve told people that I support Obama in part because I’d rather gamble on someone who wants to lead 60% of the country than to be certain of another four years of someone who can at best lead 51% of the country. Cass Sunstein has some similar thoughts that may be worth reading if you’re [...

two important posts on services and the edge

Posted on January 19, 2008
Philippe Aigrain on categories of services Danny O’Brien on self-hosting Too much data to process right now- am going through old blog posts of interest… and there are so many of them. Argh!

my classes, wikified

Posted on January 19, 2008
Two of my classes this semester have class wikis: Computers, Privacy, and the Constitution Telecommunications That would be two more than I’ve ever had before. There are a few different spins you could put on this development. Along the student-faculty axis, it is putting more control in the hands of students...

you know your law school textbook must be about a ?modern? topic?

Posted on January 16, 2008
… when it uses sans-serif fonts in the chapter headings. (In this case, ‘Electronic Commerce’, Mann and Winn.)

wesabe ?data bill of rights?

Posted on January 14, 2008
Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund is speaking at the Princeton Cloud Computing seminar I’m at. Their ‘data bill of rights’: This Data Bill of Rights is our promise to you. You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want...

lent slideshow remote?

Posted on January 12, 2008
I can’t find my beloved slideshow remote. To the best of my recollection, I haven’t used it/seen it since the summer. Did I accidentally lend it to someone and not reclaim it? anyone? anyone? please? :/

of oil platforms, performing, and other legal oddities

Posted on January 10, 2008
Thomas: so, I know nothing about French copyright law, so take with a grain of salt. But… Several years ago now1 Dave and I were looking at a Novell slide deck which had a copyright slide. The copyright slide said that you couldn’t copy the slide deck...

on robert on obama

Posted on January 08, 2008
dude: of course Obama is nuanced like that. If he’d argued any other way at Chicago Law, he’d have woken up in bed next to a bloody copy of some Posner text. If he was lucky. If he was unlucky, he’d wake up in bed next to bloody copies of all the Posner texts...

almost-post-vacation software playing/lazyweb/misc.

Posted on January 07, 2008
I still have one more week of vacation, which means I’ve been starting to play a bit with software to get my brain off law for a while. Some notes: lazyweb: as previously mentioned, I’ve got a remote control which, to the computer, looks like a keyboard...

hallelujah

Posted on December 21, 2007
Stewart, Colbert to return. I support the writer’s strike (they should get the same royalties across all media) but a primary campaign without Stewart and Colbert is a national calamity.

automatically ?mirroring? distro torrents?

Posted on December 19, 2007
So… I was having a discussion with a copyright classmate about the legitimate uses of bittorrent, explaining that (like any good protocol) torrent can be used to transfer both legal and illegal bits. screenshot by dantekgeek, used under CC-SA It struck me that many would probably be able to spare disk space for a pile of [...

happyhappyjoyjoy

Posted on December 19, 2007
Jump for Joy, by bingbin, used under a CC-BY license That is about how I’m feeling right at the moment. Last exam done. Not going to be my finest semester (job search was unexpectedly distracting, and frankly I got a bit cocky about copyright and patent, which I paid for come end of semester) but not [...

?open source fact check? blog

Posted on December 17, 2007
A new blog, dedicated to fact-checking spurious claims in open source blogs. Reminds me a bit of my own adventures (1, 2) in open source journalism. :) I will be keeping an eye on this blog; hopefully it becomes something useful and which others check before promoting openly false posts by others.

my blog: the Q&A for law firms and other interested parties

Posted on September 12, 2007
This looks long… is there an executive summary? Sure. Nutshell: if you’re a law firm considering hiring me, and you stumble across this blog, please don’t get nervous. Instead, talk to me, and/or read the rest of this post. I’m eager to explain why I blog, and why I think it may make me a better [...