all horse force

I just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s teardown of a recent Gizmodo feature post about the current issues with ebooks. I was mildly annoyed by the feature when I first read it, but Cory really threw the book at them, which in retrospect they wholly deserved. More importantly, though, his post remind of two excellent speeches he’s given in the past year which I had never given their due: “Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books” and his Microsoft Research DRM talk.

Both these speeches articulate beautifully a side of the copyright argument that needs a wider audience. As a working author who is successful because he made his work freely available online, Cory has an essential perspective on how to balance copyright law today. Most people are simply happy to accept the “intellectual property is the exact same thing as physical property” argument and leave it at that, no matter how incongrous that is with other things they probably value, like schools and libraries, or with the history of the world.

evan :: Jul.29.2004 :: NetBits :: No Comments »

I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of online resources for budding Legal Eagles like myself, and I’m not just talking about the LSAC’s chock-full-o-services-but-built-with-shit-code website. Somehow in my travels I ended up at JD2B.com, which is billed as a “non-commercial coummunity[sic] for law school applicants”. It has a nifty blog section, but oh lord, the links. The sheer multiplicity of them. Multiple links for abso-fucking-lutely everything a law student could be concerned about. Most interesting for me, though, was lawschoolnumbers.com. Everyone tells you that all that matters is your GPA and LSAT score, but this site tells you how they matter. Using the internet for what it’s good for, these guys simply set up a database and a registration system and asked people to put in their info: GPA, LSAT score, schools they applied to and whether they got in or not. You can put in more info if you like, but those data points give us prospective applicants a very sound basis for comparison with our GPA/LSAT. At this point they’ve got over 3000 users and it’s growing.

I’m particularly fond of the lawschoolnumbers approach because I’ve never understood why it isn’t considered polite to discuss things like test scores and salaries. In both cases you’re presenting yourself to an evaluator who has all the facts, and yet you’re restrained from getting a sense of where you stand in the competitive landscape by social norms. Certainly, if everyone knows your score/salary, there’s some potential for embarassment, but there’s also a greater good being served. The employees/applicants as a group are much better informed if each individual shares their information, and if an individual finds their information embarassing, that’s all the more motivation to improve it by retesting or renegotiating. Even if you don’t agree with me that the potential harm of the embarassment is outweighed, an anonymous database like lawschoolnumbers removes the potential entirely. So why don’t they have something like this for all application-type processes we go through in life? Fuck modesty and decorum, man, I need the numbers!

evan :: Jul.26.2004 :: NetBits :: 5 Comments »