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Luis Villa's Home Page

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

Post Frequency: 1.5/day

Last Entry: February 26, 2020 at 00:21:04

some data points on facebook

Posted on May 14, 2010
My boss has written a blog post that tries to bring together some recent data points from across the privacy spectrum; it is worth a read. I’ve been noting a few (much smaller, more trivial) things myself over the past few days that suggest to me that privacy concerns in general, but facebook-related privacy concerns [...

Sponsoring a GNOME hacker (oops!)

Posted on May 12, 2010
While I was moving, and taking the bar exam, and getting married, and all the other stuff I did last year, it turns out I screwed up. People had sponsored me through GNOME’s adopt a hacker program, and I… well, I botched it- the postcards people had signed up for fell through the cracks...

responding to joindiaspora

Posted on May 08, 2010
The joindiaspora guys, in a generally good response to my questions, conclude by asking: [W]hat would be un-pragmatic about giving four excited dudes who spent their last semester of school thinking about a problem you are ?worried-about-but-can?t-deal-with-now,? twenty bucks so they can take an honest crack at solving it? :) Lots of people asked some variant on [...

Cambridge lazyweb request

Posted on May 05, 2010
Hello Cambridge-based lazyweb! I am looking at network Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) for guest wifi networks, and I have been told that MIT’s AUP for their guest wifi network is particularly terrific- short, simple, etc. Can someone in Cambridge who happens to stumble by MIT check into the network and copy/paste the text and email [...

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Questions for the Diaspora

Posted on April 27, 2010
So lots of friends were tweeting this morning about Diaspora, a project to raise funds to get a summer’s worth of hacking done on a distributed, Libre social network. A distributed, Libre social network would be a terrific thing to have; I’d love to support it...

three features I?d love in leechblock

Posted on April 22, 2010
I love leechblock. It really helps keep my life sane. I was working some with it this morning to tweak my settings, and it seemed like a good time to write about three features I’d kill for, even to the point of putting up money for them if there were a way to sponsor features [...

a quick vent about the structure of online agreements

Posted on April 13, 2010
I completely understand why many startups have terms of service with terrible content- providing terms of service whose content is fair to the user is incredibly risky and/or expensive (though it isn’t unheard of). But there is just no excuse for terms of service with terrible organization, especially when you’re trying to sell services to real [...

building software to let me read more and less at the same time?

Posted on April 05, 2010
There are lots of sources of links these days- delicious, twitter, and blogs. Many of these are interesting, but not so interesting that I want to read them all the time. Currently I have to decide either to read or not read these people. I’d like to add a third option: to have a ‘middle’ pool [...

over at opensource.com?

Posted on March 29, 2010
I’ve written a brief piece on the open source law community over at opensource.com. May be of interest for those hackers who wonder if they have any lawyer/guardian angels, and if so, do they ever talk to each other?

two great quotes from this weekend

Posted on March 28, 2010
“We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creatures of the plants, animals, materials, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and from despair, and places us responsibly within the human estate...

More Patent 101, and some Patent Licensing 201 (advanced class ;)

Posted on March 26, 2010
More patent lessons- first on submarine patents (basics!) and then on how patent pools are licensed. I don’t really want to continue this series, but the past few days have been a good reminder that there is a lot of misinformation out there around patents...

patent 101

Posted on March 25, 2010
[Disclaimer: I'm not saying this on behalf of my employer, I have no exposure to MPEG-LA's licensing agreements, and I'm not making a broader claim about the h264/ogg debate; I just want to clarify one specific point of law.] “If some patent troll decides H...

thunderbird plugin I suddenly want

Posted on March 24, 2010
I’d love a thunderbird plugin (or really just a feature) that says “you were bcc’d on this email- are you sure you want to reply to all and accidentally disclose that you were bcc’d?” (And yes, of course that means I did that today- pretty sure the first time in a very long career of email [...

Mailing lists are parties. Or they should be.

Posted on March 17, 2010
I can’t go to bed because Mairin is right on the internet and so I want to (1) say she’s awesome and (2) add two cents on mailing lists and using the power of a web interface to make them better. Bear with me; maybe this is completely off-base (probably I should just stick to [...

Updating the MPL

Posted on March 11, 2010
Yesterday Mozilla announced that we will be updating the MPL, with the aim of making the license simpler, easier to use, and more robust. Mitchell’s post captures what we want to do in more depth; if you’re interested in the process, you should go read it and our full website at mpl...

looking for locomotives

Posted on March 01, 2010
I got some nice birthday gifts (mostly the ability to be around family) but possibly the best gift I got was this Wondermark strip: I will henceforth refer to reading a contract as ‘looking for locomotives.’ As a bonus, and related to my recent post about plain english in the law, Wondermark is apparently working with the [...

Happy birthday to me

Posted on February 26, 2010
Visiting family for my birthday; if I don’t respond to your email it is because I am soaking in sunshine.

Wikis and law school

Posted on February 24, 2010
The excellent Eric Goldman had a good post Tuesday about giving students grades for wikipedia content. This reminded me that ages ago I’d written that two of my classes were going to use wikis, but never followed up on it. picture: UC Berkeley Law School Quote, by ingridtaylar, used under CC-BY The classes I used wikis for [...

what writing a contract feels like

Posted on February 23, 2010
Alex Macgillivray, late of google and now of twitter, has a good post just now that might help hackers understand what transactional attorneys (aka corporate attorneys, aka ‘the people who write contracts rather than sue over contracts’, aka ‘me right now’) actually do on a day to day basis: To put it in computer terms, imagine [...

Telling numbers

Posted on February 04, 2010
I’m currently reading a book on modern legal drafting (read: ‘plain english for dummies, I mean, lawyers’). It is very good so far, but I think this is a telling stat about lawyers: 127 pages are devoted to why clear, modern english is a good idea...

Credit where credit is due (more Google tea leaves to read)

Posted on January 12, 2010
One of the very first things that made me skeptical about Google was their approach to censorship in China, which I thought deeply compromised their supposed ‘don’t be evil’ approach to the world. It struck me that their position- summarized as “the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more [...

quick life update

Posted on January 07, 2010
If it matters to you, you might want to know that I have no network at home from sometime yesterday until Friday night, and I also have lousy cell connection1, so I’ll basically be off the network when not at work for the next few days. Otherwise, it has been a good week: first real paycheck in [...

job satisfaction

Posted on January 05, 2010
Some of the legal stuff I do at Mozilla1 is fairly dull, painstaking contract work. What makes it worthwhile (besides the paycheck) is seeing that something good came out of it. So it was nice to see this blog post – I only played a small part in getting the new data center up and [...

software for massive document collaboration?

Posted on December 29, 2009
As part of my new role at work I’m going to be working on writing and editing some legal documents that I’d like to get both public and private feedback on.1 real text is edited in black and green (picture: Zenith Z-19 Terminal, by ajmexico, used under CC-BY) I’m trying to wrap my head around the available [...

continued notes on the macbook experiment, week 3

Posted on December 23, 2009
Some more notes on running a mac: installing new software is insanely nice. Yes, apt and yum are nice, but I don’t find out about software that way. I find out about software by reading something on the web (for me usually a blog post, but for others a news article) and from there installation on [...

hello planet mozilla!

Posted on December 14, 2009
Hello planet mozilla! As the class notice said, I am a long-time moz lurker, first-time poster, and I’m really excited to be joining mozilla. factoids, possibly relevant: My college next-door neighbor downloaded the first mozilla source release...

the macbook experiment, day 2

Posted on December 11, 2009
The last time I regularly used an operating system other than Linux was fall of 1997. Windows 98 was all the rage; Mac OS/X was not yet (publicly) a glimmer in Steve Jobs’ eye. So this means I have a fairly dysfunctional view of desktop software- I basically really don’t know what Linux and GNOME [...

starting fresh with mozilla

Posted on December 10, 2009
After some bumps in the road which delayed my start by a week, I started today in the legal department at Mozilla. Last night I lost a little sleep worrying if this was the right thing for me, but after a day around the office (during an all-hands meeting, no less) I’m pretty much glowing...

software freedom rainmaking

Posted on November 30, 2009
A little over a year ago, I formally introduced John Resig of jquery fame to Brad Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I was therefore very pleased to see today that jquery has joined the Conservancy. Rain Making on me and Krissa in Tongariro Sadly no one gives me a partnership cut of this rainmaking but I [...

thankful

Posted on November 26, 2009
I’m thankful, among other things, for the opportunity to have just concluded the trip of a lifetime with my wonderful wife. (She says, of course, to be optimistic and to assume we’ll do something even better sometime.) A couple of pictures from the last morning of the trip, off the coast of the big island in [...

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