all horse force

So it’s been a hop, skip, and a jump away from a while since I posted anything. It should not be surprising to anybody if I blame starting law school for that drought. I don’t want to make excuses, but god, if you’re still checking back and reading this, the least I owe you is an explanation.

Everyone says the first year of law school is hard, but I thought I was ready. I’d studied hard and done well on the LSAT; I’d just study hard and do well in class. I guess that formula is simple enough that it might yet hold true, but the experience couldn’t be less familiar. The LSAT just demanded that I lock myself in a room every Sunday for ten weeks and take a practice exam. It was a matter of discipline more than concentration, raw hours clocked rather then focused analysis. I’m learning that law school is actually much more than just a big logic game of shuffling seating arrangments and allocating people between vehicles; perhaps they should make wedding planners take the LSAT instead of law students. Law school seems to be instead a constant game of hide-and-go-seek between you and the professors, where you duck down and try not to get called on when you don’t know your shit and run around trying to tag them when you do. Once you get on call, by whichever side’s machinations, you get to go play on the Problematizing Seesaw, where you vacillate back and forth between clear rules and borderline cases as long as the professor stays amused. Afterwards you resolve to be a better seesawer next time, so you spend the evening going back and forth on your own imaginary seesaw, but it never feels quite like the real thing.

The end result is that after a month of school I feel a little dizzy. I think I’ve kept up alright, but my brain feels out of focus. I can’t get the two hemispheres to converge on any one idea. I have some faith that I’ll get my groove back soon enough, but I didn’t realize how out of practice I was. Three years without any significant intellectual challenges has built up a lot of cruft, and I’ve been getting by on a neat turn of phrase and a furrowed brow for too long. Big words don’t impress anyone in law school; neither do lazy analogies or unwarranted assumptions. It’s definitely going to take my focused and sustained attention over the rest of the year to get my domepiece back to fighting weight.

So I’m going on a diet. Not a food diet (though I’ve recently switched to Diet Coke after years of resistance, which should save me a few bajillion calories a year), but an information diet. I’ve decided that I really have to cut down on distractions, and right now I try to be knowledgable about too many things. I now have 99 feeds in my aggregator; there’s no way I can stay up on all of them and have a chance to be even a passably good law student. It’s nice to be well rounded, but I really feel like it’s time to stop sacrificing depth for breadth. If I need to get up to speed on something, I’ll do some research on it; no more trying to be preemptively informed.

That said, everyone needs to have a hobby. I’m not capable of banishing everything but Law from the life of my mind. The other thing I’m allowing myself is Music. It may be a cop out, since there was no way I was going to stop listening to music, but I’m going to try to actually devote more time to it. I think if I have a default thing to do when I’m not doing Law things, I’ll be more focused generally. My project is going to be an MP3 blog, similar to those under the Music heading in the sidebar on the left. The idea is no more complicated than me posting a track or two and some thoughts about them every week or so, but I think it will be get me (and hopefully you) more engaged with my collection and music in general. Ideally, I’ll be able to convince some others to join me in the endeavor, so I (we) can be up on what they’re up on.

So keep an eye out, and don’t forget to peep our brother publications, Beer Burgers and Dsquared, which have been publishing with renewed vigor as of late.

evan :: Oct.12.2005 :: Notices :: 3 Comments »

It’s been a banner week for the good ol’ Supreme Court, finishing off their term on Monday with a nice hefty wad of decisions. You all know which one I was waiting for , and it came down looking like a doozy: MGM v. Grokster was sent back down in an unanimous 9-0 decision. While it’s true that MGM and their fellow content conglomerates can claim to have “won”, in the sense that they achieved their desired procedural result, it is not nearly so splendid for them as they will claim.

The Court basically expanded the standard set in Sony v. Universal, which says that a technology need only be “capable of substantial non-infringing uses” to avoid being liable for any copyright infringement by its users. Now one can also be liable if they “distribute a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe”, which seems to only say that one must very cautious about how one markets such a device. This standard seems to cover most of the ground of Orrin Hatch’s nasty INDUCE Act, but I think there’s a lot of wiggle room preserved in the distinction between “inducement” and “promotion”. Under the new Grokster standard, it would seem that a given technology could be stupendously awesome at enabling infringement, but as long as the creators don’t mention that awesomeness, they’ll be safe. On the other hand, I think many people could make a good case for the making available of such awesomeness qualifying as inducement to infringe. Some patronizing metaphor about letting kids loose in a candy store would likely be trotted out to great effect in that argument.

For anyone who’s interested in what actual lawyers think about the effects of Monday’s decision, Copyfight has an excellent round-up, at least for their side of the debate. The other side isn’t that happy with the decision either, with Douglas Lichtman, a U of C law professor who filed a brief in support of MGM et al., pointing out that “intent-based standards…are among the easiest to avoid.”

What’s most interesting to me about Justice Souter’s ‘majority’ opinion is that much of the evidence cited against Grokster and Streamcast doesn’t seem to meet the new standard of promoting the use of their programs to infringe. Maybe I’m way off base, because I’ve only heard this issue mentioned once amongst the deluge of analysis in the last 48 hours, on the latest IT Conversations ‘law’ podcast with Ernie Miller (cop it with the new hotness). The bulk of the evidence centers around references to Napster, mainly documenting Grokster’s attempts to market to ex-Napster users after it was shut down, up to and including the use of the “ster” suffix. While Napster was shut down because it would not / could not stop the infringement happening on its network, it seems wholly unwarranted to therefore mark all its users as tainted, such that any attempts to market to them are evidence of infringing behavior. Napster was without question capable of substantial non-infringing uses, even though the particulars of its business left it open to liability for infringement, and it would seem that the Court has disregarded the possibility of marketing to people interested in those uses. The only somewhat direct evidence of promoting the capabilities of their software to infringe comes from an out-of-context quote from Streamcast’s CTO: “The goal is to get in trouble with the law and get sued. It’s the best way to get in the news.” The remark could have been a flip response to a stupid question from the press, or any number of things, but here it stands as “promoting infringement”. It’s odd to think that one quote could bring companies such massive liabilities, and perhaps in the jury trial it won’t be sufficient, but I certainly wouldn’t hire that guy to work for me unless I could get a muzzle-wearing provision into his contract.

All in all, I think the decision isn’t as bad as it could have been, but I’m sorry it even had to be made. I think most of the pundits are right when they say that the only real winners here are the lawyers.

evan :: Jun.28.2005 :: Notices :: No Comments »

On Thursday, April 7th, a bunch of interesting fellows will be giving a talk at the New York Public Library on “Who Owns Culture?” (via BoingBoing). I’ll be there and I hope some of you will join me. It’s $10 for regular humans (only $7 for Young Lions, though I hear you can use your Ancient Elephant or Sneaky Hyrax card, too). Anyone who reads some or all of Lessig’s latest book beforehand qualifies for bonus points.

I really like that this event is being hosted by NYPL, because libraries are the primary examples of how keeping copyright limited in both scope and duration has been enormously good for our society as a whole. I think the talk will probably focus on what rights we as a society have to make sure our collective creative output, our culture, is preserved for future generations. In Kembrew McLeod’s new book Freedom of Expression®, Rick Prelinger notes that copyrights on films now last longer than the physical medium of film. This means that if the rights to a film cannot be easily established and cleared, it is most likely the film will rot in its can before anyone will be allowed to archive it. Even when the media is not at risk, there is the very real danger of works just being forgotten. Copyright now extends for so long, and the period of commercial viability for most works is so short, that most works will slip out of the public consciousness entirely before anyone is allowed to distribute them freely and widely. Sure, many of those works might be better off forgotten, but I don’t think we should be making that decision for everyone who comes after us. We can archive it all, easily. We should let the kids in 3723 decide for themselves if they like Better Than Ezra or not.

evan :: Mar.02.2005 :: Notices :: 4 Comments »

I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple of days, but better late than never: if you are still using Internet Explorer, go download Firefox now. That link should be the last one you ever click with IE.

“But hold on,” you say, “I’m just a mindless follower, and IE still has over 90% of the browser market. Shouldn’t I just use what everyone else does?”

Yes, you might think that, but you’d be wrong. Over 90% of people don’t drive a new BMW, but if I offered you one in exchange for your ‘99 Taurus, would you turn me down? That’s the deal here. You can continue to use an outdated browser so beholden to commercial interests that it can’t even be bothered to block unrequested pop-up windows, or you can use a free, fast, open source browser that you can customize with any combination of thousands of extensions that seamlessly improve your browsing experience. If you’ve ever valued any computer advice I’ve given you, go install Firefox now. Then go install some of these extensions. I’ve found all of them useful, I bet you’ll at least like a couple:
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evan :: Nov.11.2004 :: Notices :: 6 Comments »

So all the comments from this entry were great. I think the experiment was a success, or at least I feel a lot better about the state of the essay. Here’s the latest draft:
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evan :: Nov.02.2004 :: Notices :: 1 Comment »

As most of you know, I’m in the waning throes of applying to law school, and my application is now only missing one final piece of the puzzle: the much-hated essay. I’m pretty sure I screwed this up the first time around with colleges, so I’m gonna try something new. I”ll post my first draft here and hope that some of you are kind enough to read it and tell me what’s wrong with it. I figure if the whole thing’s gonna be about the potential of the internet, then I ought to put my money where my mouth is. Leave a comment, send me an email, yell at me in person, however you want to get your point across is fine with me. Just keep in mind that it’s already about as long as it can be, so if you think I need to add something, let me know what you think I should cut. Now without further ado, The Essay:
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evan :: Oct.29.2004 :: Notices :: 6 Comments »

John Peel has died. He may have been the greatest radio DJ ever. I only heard his shows a few times, but every time I did I heard something I’d never heard before and instantly loved. There really has never been a British artist I’ve liked that hasn’t been on his show, and more often then not they’ve released their performance as a Peel Session EP, which are all prized pieces of my collection. Byron Bitchlaces had the idea of posting one’s favorite Peel Session track. For me, it’d be off of the Boards Of Canada session, not because they’re rare, exclusive, or remixed tracks, but because they were the first I heard of BOC, and that’s a wonderful gift from John to me right there. I couldn’t for the life of me pick just one, though, so here’s a couple:

Aquarius
XYZ

RIP John. You’ll be missed around the world.

evan :: Oct.26.2004 :: Notices :: 1 Comment »

So after a month or so of being very stingy with the Gmail invites, Google can’t seem to give enough away. I now have 6, and every time I use one it’s instantly replaced. On the off chance that someone reads this blog, hasn’t received one already, and would like one, just let me know. Help is on the way! (at least if your biggest problem is unthreaded email conversations).

evan :: Sep.08.2004 :: Notices :: 7 Comments »

I’ve now been blogging for a year. I don’t have that much to show for it, but I have outlasted the average lifespan of a blog by about 364 days, and I like to think that I’ve had some influence in inspiring a few others to take up the reins of self-publishing in this manner. While I haven’t been posting much lately, I do intend, somewhere on top of applying to law school and getting in shape, to post more often with an ample increase in quality.

If anyone is inclined to reflect on this year we’ve spent, here are some of my favorite entries:

• One nation, under my ass.
• Radiohead hates the Internet
• Rights and the Right
• Fox News really is the Devil.
• Funny like a crutch (if the crutch majored in English lit)
• Cover-up #1,235
• Oh no they didn’t!
• Copyright disobedience! Huzzah!

evan :: May.12.2004 :: Notices :: 1 Comment »

It’s obviously still Monday, but I’m jumping the gun because I’m afraid I’ll forget to put the page up tonight at midnight. So without further ado, our own Grey Tuesday.

evan :: Feb.23.2004 :: Notices :: 4 Comments »