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[self-portrait]Scrivener's Error Law and reality in publishing (seldom the same thing) from the author's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting.
23 January 2012

link to: 10:37 [GMT-6]

Public Service Announcements

 

As a public service announcement and on behalf of limiting the spread of communicable disease, please carefully watch the embedded video for some serious medical instruction.

Handball(s)!If the speaker in that video at the top of this entry seems vaguely familiar, it's tough guy Vinnie Jones — a star of recent British action films, and before that the hardest of the "hard men" in football. That's him on the left. Perhaps he should be selling little blue pills or doing a PSA for prostate cancer instead of for heart attacks...

No, the ref didn't see it.

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20 January 2012

link to: 12:21 [GMT-6]

Pegleg Dotcom, LLC, Limps Off the Plank

 

Pirates, prepare to walk the plank... Arggggggh!

I have a few thoughts about takedown of M3gaUp10ad and (entirely expected and predictable) juvenile (at best) response from An0nym0u5. As an actual exercise of free speech under the First Amendment based upon actual facts instead of just ideology, and in no particular order:

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18 January 2012

link to: 09:40 [GMT-6]

Battle of the Golan Depths

 

The Supreme Court decided Golan today, holding that Congress does have the power to reinvigorate foreign copyrights to match what would have happened if the US Copyright Act had been consistent with the Berne Convention. This is entirely consistent with the Court's opinion a couple of years back in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), which affirmed Congress's authority to extend the copyright term in a specific twenty-year increment. Justice Ginsburg wrote the controlling opinion today in Golan, just as she did in Eldred.

For once, I'm going to skip over the complex procedural history of how this matter reached the court. Although that history is very interesting to civil procedure geeks (like me), this time it does not affect the outcome or the factual record on which that outcome is based.

In any event, in the early 1990s Congress got whacked upside the head by the World Trade Organization for not properly complying with the Berne Convention — specifically Article 18 — when the US joined the Berne Convention in the late 1980s. The WTO reminded Congress that the formalities of registration did not, and could not, be used to deny copyright protection for foreign works. This resulted in legislation, because Congress really didn't want to be subject to WTO sanctions for copyright violations, and eventually in the Uruguary Round Agreements Act § 514 (codified at 17 U.S.C. § 104A).

The seeming result of this change was to bring a lot of works back into copyright that had been "relied upon" as being in the public domain. Needless to say, some people — especially, but not only, in classical music, for complicated statutory and cultural reasons that could easily occupy a 10,000-word article — objected to this restriction on their ability to freely perform/exploit works that they had relied upon as being in the public domain. (Also needless to say, these people generally ignored all of the compromise protection offered them in § 514/§ 104A in making their arguments...) They therefore filed suit, claiming that Congress did not have the authority to do what it did.

At a fundamental level, the challenge must fail. Absent a valid First Amendment or Fifth Amendment issue, Congress has an absolute right to take a property interest that is inchoately held by the public. The Supreme Court has previously disposed of the various First and Fifth Amendment challenges here. But notice what the plaintiffs' position really is: It is not a First Amendment challenge at all. It is a Fifth Amendment challenge that what Congress did was a taking... because it presumes that the public domain is property in which potential exploiters have a sufficient and personal property interest. In short, this is an internal logical inversion — they would claim a private right from public property, and further claim that their private right is superior to the private right that Congress intends to "restore" to the original owners.

But let's leave sheer logic out of it: We're talking about cultural appropriation here, and logic is never a winning (or sufficient) strategy in arguments over culture. This particularly monstrosity ended up in the Supreme Court with this formal statement of the issues:

Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994 granted copyright protection to millions of works that the Copyright Act had placed in the public domain of the United States, where they had remained for years as the common property of all Americans and free to use without restriction. The questions presented here are:

1. Does the Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution prohibit Congress from taking works out of the public domain?

2. Does Section 514 violate the First Amendment of the United States Constitution?

The Court answered both of these in the negative.

1. First, the Court rejected the "impenetrable barrier to restoration" argument (slip op. at 13), finding no constitutional barrier to restoration. Largely relying upon the previous decision in Eldred (as noted above, also written by Justice Ginsburg), the Court notes that the actual extension offered is a limited time, and therefore literally within Congress's power under the Act. The interesting rhetorical exercise here is that the Court entirely skates on a different question: Might the Treaty Power (Article II, § 2, cl. 2) authorize Congress and the President to fill interstices in the Constitution (slip op. at 15–16)? That said, the Court rejects the "personal interest in the public domain" theory put forth by the plaintiffs in objecting to restoring foreign copyrights (slip op. at 16–19, citing previous examples of bringing works "back" into protection), and specifically holds that Congress may consider international effectiveness in fashioning domestic law:

Considered against this backdrop, § 514 falls comfortably within Congress’[s] authority under the Copyright Clause. Congress rationally could have concluded that adherence to Berne "promotes the diffusion of knowledge." A well-functioning international copyright system would likely encourage the dissemination of exist-ing and future works. Full compliance with Berne, Congress had reason to believe, would expand the foreign markets available to U.S. authors and invigorate protection against piracy of U.S. works abroad,

(slip op. at 22, internal citations omitted, some typography corrected) Justice Ginsburg concludes for the Court that protection of existing works in an international system is an important motivation entirely consistent with the IP Clause (Article I, § 8, cl. 8) and the imperative to promote progress through creation of new works. Compliance with international norms is, therefore, a rational exercise of Congress's power under the IP Clause.

2. The First Amendment question should have been disposed of by noting that the question had already been settled, and indeed never should have been granted. That said, Justice Ginsburg fairly gently points out two things that make the First Amendment essentially irrelevant to this particular question:

The iceberg lurking here is whether the formalities of registration, and particularly of renewal, are so inconsistent with Berne that the underlying legislation is, itself, insufficient... and therefore subject to much-more-profound reinterpretation in light of the First Amendment. Fortunately for the Court, this petition did not squarely present that question, because it doesn't have a good or easy answer.

Of course, there was a dissent. It is not a badly reasoned dissent, but it is somewhat disingenuous in one respect: It does not adequately acknowledge the distinction between constitutional restriction and policy-level second-guessing. For example, Justice Breyer claims that:

Still, I cannot find this argument sufficient to save the statute. For one thing, this is a dilemma of the Govern­ment’s own making. The United States obtained the benefits of Berne for many years despite its failure to enact a statute implementing Article 18. But in 1994, the United States and other nations signed the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which enabled signatories to use World Trade Organiza­tion dispute resolution mechanisms to complain about other members’ Berne Convention violations. But at that time the Government, although it successfully secured reservations protecting other special features of American copyright law, made no effort to secure a reservation permitting the United States to keep some or all restored works in the American public domain. And it made no effort to do so despite the fact that Article 18 explicitly authorizes countries to negotiate exceptions to the Arti­cle’s retroactivity principle.

(slip op. at 22–23 lit./67–68 log., internal citations omitted) That is, Justice Breyer's dissent is founded on the failure to negotiate the treaty accession and Uruguay Round amendments as he would have preferred, with 20/20 hindsight, and then elevating that disagreement to constitutional dimension. Sometimes that is valid; in this instance, however, Justice Breyer's rejection of treatment of past works as providing adequate incentive for creation of new works (see, e.g., slip op. at 17 lit./62 log.) is a policy, and not constitutional, preference. As a policy preference, it fails the test for overturning acts of Congress; at the extreme, not everything that is stupid is unconstitutional.

So, then, why should authors care? Primarily, authors should care because it reinforces what were/have been "best practices" for a long time — ask permission, and then rely on fair use only after careful consideration if that permission is refused or too expensive — are legally required for a relatively small universe of foreign works. At oral argument, Chief Justice Roberts asked a semiilluminating question that would have been relevant — whether Jimi Hendrix's version of the "Star Spangled Banner" would have fallen afoul of § 514 if the original music had fallen inside of the foreign rights restored — but never pointed out that factually, Hendrix's interpretation would have qualified as fair use in a way that a literal "mere" quotation would not. That, however, requires actual application of brain to problem instead of mere reference to ideological predispositions; even if information wants to be free, entertainers want to be paid. Secondarily, authors should care because validation of § 514 also validates the converse — efforts to control infringement of their works in foreign jurisdictions that haven't always respected copyright. This is where Justice Ginsburg's silent nudge on Soviet treatment of US works, such as Bernstein and Copland, is most important.

And last, but far from least, a snarky comment about Wikipedia. For those who haven't noticed, Wikipedia is dark today, voluntarily, as a "protest" against SOPA. I share the ire against SOPA (and the various alternatives that have thus far been floated). The snark is twofold: That this points out exactly why voluntarily going dark as a news source misinterprets the First Amendment and is ultimately self-defeating; and that now, at least until midnight today, people trying to understand what Golan means (those who don't stop here first, that is <vbeg>) will not be deceived by the almost-inevitably wrong bullshit that appears on Wikipedia for new intellectual-property opinions. (Aside: No, Mike, it's not you; it's the various "editors" who are more interested in their versions of reality than the ones shared by everyone else, and fail to distinguish between "should be" and "is".) Instead, they'll have a chance of getting something that approaches accuracy... on a copyright matter, during a voluntary darkness in "protest" of a copyright matter.

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16 January 2012

link to: 12:28 [GMT-6]

Traumerei

 

Please judge these internet link sausages by the content of their recipes and not the origin of their casings...

Last for today, I want to comment on a successor to Dr King's concern about skin color. I am not implying that that battle is over, or even necessarily won; there are several towns in this county where one risks being pulled over for driving while melaninically enhanced. Instead, there's a move toward proxies, like religion, that are (in employment-law terms) of disparate impact rather than intentionally and universally discriminatory.

The case of Jessica Ahlquist is an excellent example, unfortunately. It also points out the defects in the Supreme Court's decision in Santa Fe School District, which did not go nearly far enough in rejecting prayer as a formal part of school athletic events. The obvious question is whether the sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. If one actually reads the attacks on Jessica Ahlquist, one sees a lot of accusations that she's not thinking for herself — that this is actually her parents using her as a proxy. Perhaps; but if that's valid, why not apply the same inquiry to the schools in Santa Fe that essentially directed a protestant, evangelical point of view as the only acceptable basis for that school-sponsored prayer/address?

Then there's the proxy issue for race and ethnicity. Take a look at that photograph of Ms Ahlquist that's on Ms McCreight's blog, linked above. It doesn't look very stereotypically Scandanavian, does it? Is there perhaps — just perhaps — some mixed ethnicity in Ms Ahlquist's background? And how, one might ask, does that compare to the much-more-homogeneous-than-average demographics of Cranston, Rhode Island (about 1.6σ off the US mean, and somewhere around 1σ off the Rhode Island mean, so far as I can determine quickly)? Disturbingly, I run across this all too often here in East Central Redneckistan, and ran across it all too often in the military worldwide and in dealing with legal and publishing issues.

If I were definitively judging Ms Ahlquist by the apparent content of her character — and I'm not; no sixteen-year-old girl deserves that, any more than sixteen-year-old girls acting as a clique as they so often do should be judging the worth of anyone else — I'd be a lot more impressed by her than I am by the Cranston community at large... assuming, of course, that the attacks on her Ms McCreight refers to were not largely made by carpetbaggers. (Yes, that inversion of the Southern Complaint during Reconstruction is intentional.) Not to mention that, at a fundamental level, she's right: It is discriminatory, and inappropriate, for an archly christian (and subliminally protestant) prayer to appear on the wall of a public high school in any context, let alone in isolation. It's wrong constitutionally under Santa Fe School District and Lemon and Larson and more other lines of precendent than I can name conveniently, let alone under any fair reading of the First Amendment itself; it's wrong fundamentally; it's wrong ethically; ... and it's wrong as a matter of religious doctrine, at least if one actually reads the later epistles. Most importantly for a day celebrating Dr King, it's wrong demographically as implicitly excluding all non-christians (and implicitly criticizing catholics).

Dr King's dream was not of contemporary Iran, nor of 1960s Belfast, nor of 1620s Germany. That does not mean, however, that it is anything less than the minimum aspiration required both by the constitution and basic human decency.

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13 January 2012

link to: 11:24 [GMT-6]

Inefficient Horrorshow Tolchocking

 

Friday the Thirteenth is a good day for many workers paid on the 15th of the month, because it means payday is two days early.

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11 January 2012

link to: 12:06 [GMT-6]

Link Sausages With a Meat Course to Follow

 

Those of you who've been complaining about how little meat there is in the link sausages can skip to the bottom of this entry.

I'm going to close today with something that is not a sausage; consider this the real meat of the meal. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit yesterday upheld an injunction granted against Oklahoma's voter-approved "anti-Sharia" referendum, remarking near the end:

Appellants argue that the preliminary injunction interferes with Oklahomans' fundamental right to vote, prevents enactment of the voters' will, and "discourages the voters from participating in the election process."

Federal courts should be wary of interfering with the voting process, but we agree with the district court and the Sixth Circuit that "'it is always in the public interest to prevent the violation of a party’s constitutional rights.'" "While the public has an interest in the will of the voters being carried out … the public has a more profound and long-term interest in upholding an individual's constitutional rights." [S]ee also Cate v. Oldham, 707 F.2d 1176, 1190 (10th Cir. 1983) (noting "[t]he strong public interest in protecting First Amendment values").

Awad v. Ziriax, No. 2010–06273 (10th Cir. 10 Jan 2012), slip op. at 36 (PDF) (ellipses in original, some internal citations omitted).

Leaving aside that, from a policy perspective — indeed, from many policy perspectives — this is the correct outcome, it also points out the real difference between a representative democracy founded on the rule of law and pure populist direct democracy: In the former, there are limits on what the body politic is allowed to do to subsets of the body politic (however vague and inconsistent); in the latter, there are not. That, however, is just the starter course, because the actual meat (I'm not sure whether it's a roast, a stew, or a steak) comes from the Supreme Court's hearings yesterday on the FCC's ban on so-called 'fleeting indecent speech' (and, specifically, the seven words you can't say on radio/television). I have a challenge for the majority in Citizens United, and for those who support the concept that "money is [political] speech:" Make a principled distinction that justifies treating money not as a mere enabler of speech, but of actual speech that necessarily invokes First Amendment protection... that simultaneously justifies treating so-called "four-letter words" and depictions of "naughty bits" as nonspeech that is outside the scope of First Amendment protection while not overturning Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), which held that a student protestor could wear a jacket proclaiming "Fuck the Draft" without unlawfully denigrating the dignity of a court.

In short, I challenge the Supreme Court to demonstrate in a principled way that even though money is speech, broadcasting the word "fuck" is not. "Because a bunch of white guys in black dresses said so" is not a principled way!

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08 January 2012

link to: 16:12 [GMT-6]

Pink Elephants (and Pigs) on Parade

 

I'm not at all pleased by anything I'm seeing in the Heffalump primaries. It says something quite unsatisfactory that the party is in the thrall of its Know-Nothings, its Klansmen, its Lower-Upper-Middles — its dwarves, now that Snow Reallyreallywhite has gone to sleep (hopefully for a few hundred years).

In particular:

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05 January 2012

link to: 16:10 [GMT-6]

Don't Bend Over for the SOPA

 

There is substantial (justified) controversy right now about the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and alternate versions that have been proposed. The attacks variously construe SOPA as an "internet kill switch for Hollywood", a "censorship engine for the Internet", and various other ills that largely boil down to assertions that BigMedia will use SOPA to entirely shut down parts of the 'net that contain some purportedly unauthorized copies of BigMedia-controlled works, with substantial collateral damage to other exchanges of works and to other political and commercial activity.

The obvious problem here is a jurisdictional one: The DMCA (17 U.S.C. § 512) simply does not apply outside the United States... and many United States-based pirates use RIM/Blackberry formalisms to evade jurisdiction in the United States. Then, too, a large proportion of the pirate clientele is in the United States, making this all the more frustrating for US-based holders of copyrights. Worse yet — and largely through dubious attempts at administrative convenience and efficiency (the fifth, nonstatutory, but usually controlling fair-use factor) — BigMedia has undermined the credibility of the DMCA system in the first place. Worst of all, too damned many providers are getting too damned much revenue from traffic (whether clicks on advertisements or whatever) to be very interested in actually complying with proper DMCA notices1... even if they were predisposed to comply with the law as it is instead of with the law as they believe it should be.

The real problem with bending over for the SOPA, though, is that it is founded upon fundamental misunderstandings of both creative activity and the power relationships involved. I'm not going to delve into the dubious enforcement mechanisms or anything else; I propose, instead, that any such power, authority, standing, and right must be limited to the actual creator — not to a mere licensee (publisher, record company) or patron (multimedia). I do not claim that the following changes will completely fix SOPA — but I think they will enable an actual, meaningful conversation concerning its merits that very well may result in something that works without too much collateral damage.

PROPOSED AMENDMENT TO H.R. 3261

H.R. 3261 is amended by adding the following new Section 3:

"3. Limitations on Standing. Notwithstanding the provisions of 17 U.S.C. § 201(b) or any transfer of copyright inconsistent with the succession of interest established in 17 U.S.C. § 203 or 17 U.S.C. § 304(c) as would apply to the work in question, only the Creator of a work as defined in this Act has standing to request any action under § 102 or § 201 of this Act, or to take any action under § 103 of this Act. This limitation on standing under this Act does not act to diminish the rights of any copyright holder or licensee under 17 U.S.C. § 106, 17 U.S.C. § 106A, or 17 U.S.C. §§ 501–513, but applies only to this Act."

H.R. 3261 is further amended by adding the following new Section § 101(25):

"CREATOR — The term 'Creator' means:

   "(a) For audio recordings without visual component, the natural person writer (or majority of multiple natural person writers) plus natural person performer (or majority of multiple natural person performers) of the audio recording at issue;

   "(b) For audiovisual or purely visual recordings, the natural person writer (or majority of multiple natural person writers) plus natural person director (or majority of multiple natural person directors) of the audiovisual or visual recording at issue;

   "(c) For all other works, the natural person writer (or majority of multiple natural person writers).

"For the purposes of this definition only, 'natural person writer' means an individual who contributed discernable original content otherwise protected under the Copyright Act and consistent with Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Services Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991), and explicitly excluding any person or entity who might claim 'authorship' pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 201(b)."

The intended — and, to at least a first order approximation, actual — effect of this language is to remove mere licensees and BigMedia distributors from decisionmaking authority over SOPA incidents. Admittedly, there are some "problem children" among Creators, such as the descendants of James Joyce and Margaret Mitchell, but they are the exception, rather than the rule... and would still have to comply with everything else in SOPA to have any influence. This also prevents mere licensees and distributors from overreaching into rights that were not at issue at the time they acquired whatever rights they were initially granted, and avoids a serious constitutional and international-law problem with forcing foreign actors to recognize the constitutionally dubious work-for-hire doctrine that redefines the "author" of a work to be what the rest of the world — and, in particular, the English-speaking world in the 1780s — would have called the "patron." This is a fundamental problem with the US conception of copyright, particularly measured against both the English common law and the Statute of Anne (1710). It is also the means by which BigMedia stuck its nose into the copyright tent in the first place, inconsistent with the purposes of the Intellectual Property Clause (to "promote progress in the useful arts and sciences", in modern capitalization).

The proposed amendment is just plain more fair to everyone involved, as it allows the actual author to laugh off trivial infringements... and puts pressure on licensees and distributors to actually and effectively exploit their rights in a way that defeats piracy by providing a high-quality product at a reasonable price.


  1. I'm going to blow my own horn here a bit. We succeeded with an attack against this last problem in Ellison, in which the Ninth Circuit made clear that § 512(i) — requiring both an effective policy for dealing with infringements (especially repeat infringements/infringers) and reasonable implementation of that policy — is not mere surplus verbiage. We were prepared to go well beyond the defect relied upon by the Ninth Circuit at trial and demonstrate that the ISP had not "reasonably implemented" the defective policy that it did have.

    I suppose that it's possible that virtually every ISP that has been confronted with a credible, fact-based § 512(i) attack has immediately settled thereafter... which would explain why there are virtually no opinions after Ellison that focus on that aspect of the DMCA. Well, actually, it's not: I have personal knowledge that some of the big cases out there should have (on the basis of documentation in my possession and my personal experience interacting with specific ISPs) included a § 512(i) attack on the ISP's eligibility for the safe harbor, but did not. That explicitly includes the now-completed Grokster action; the various assaults on LimeWire; and the current brouhahas regarding YouTube and HotFile. It is not, however, limited to those examples.

    <SARCASM>Of course, that would require relying upon actual facts and performing a prefiling investigation adequate under Fed. R. Civ. P. 11(b)(3), which is inconsistent with the policy stance of BigMedia and too much of BigLaw. Further, it would diminish the motion practice, meaning that BigLaw personnel would have to become familiar with the facts in their cases instead of quotemining from Westlaw/Lexis. Yeah, that's gonna happen Real Soon Now.</SARCASM>

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04 January 2012

link to: 12:56 [GMT-6]

Mixed Spices

 

The following link sausages are alternately flavored with rant and academia (or sometimes both), but they're all variations on salsiccia sardonicus. It's up to you to figure out which is which... or just be vaguely amused and not bother.

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02 January 2012

link to: 10:42 [GMT-6]

Beginning of the End of the World News

 

It is 2012 now, after all. It's not just the Mayans; it's also Nostradamus. And an unjustly underappreciated Anthony Burgess novel. And if the incessant blathering of the Heffalumps isn't enough to make one wish for the end of the world, I don't know what will be...


  1. Two observations:

    • Just because it's got numbers associated with it doesn't make it mathematically sound. If you want a classic example, consider net-present-value calculations, which are no better than the multiple assumptions built into them about interest rates, uniform time-value, opportunity cost, etc.
    • Then, too, there's the issue of royalty obligations and predictability. If one believes publisher accounting, or even the stark evidence of publisher royalty statements and the absence of checks attached thereto, the "vast majority" of books never end up paying royalties to authors; instead, royalty earnings chew away at the advance, which all too often remains as out of reach as the tree is to Xeno's arrow. For example, if one accepts the industry meme that 80% of books never earn out their advances, a particular sales cannibalization within an imprint — or even across imprints within the same conglomerate — has a (0.80)2 = 64% chance of not increasing the actual publisher outlay to any author. Only when sales aggregate do they result in such payments... and that demonstrates the quantum effect of royalty calculations. (Unfortunately, my HTML-fu is not good enough to accurately represent the underlying math.)

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28 December 2011

link to: 07:42 [GMT-6]

Remora in the Sea of Marmara

 

By this time tomorrow, anyway. The preparations for that little reconnaissance mission have eaten up a lot of time this past month!

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24 December 2011

link to: 13:18 [GMT-6]

Prof Larry Ribstein

 

Condolences to family, friends, and colleagues for the untimely death of Professor Ribstein, a (if not the) leading theorist on business entity structures that are not corporations. We were at most academic acquaintances who had met a couple of times in passing. Our politics did not match well, but our shared interest in the interface between individuals and their business interests led to some interesting exchanges over the years... and helped sharpen my thoughts on how authors and other creators of intellectual property should arrange their own business affairs.

This leaves a considerable hole in the theoretical and practical landscape of "uncorporations" — and leaving aside the personal issues, that's a bad thing in this day of proliferating llcs as the purported "solution" for everything.

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21 December 2011

link to: 14:02 [GMT-6]

I See Dead People (and Lawsuits)

 

I've been spending the last week-plus surrounded by various types of dead bodies. (And the house sure stinks because of it... although one should also recall that the term for the back files of a periodical is a "morgue".) Zombies, however, don't make for great blogging. At least not for me.


  1. This is not the time or place for spending a lot of time on the returns system, or the distinction between consignment and sales, or anything else like that. They're all critically important, but for the purposes of this paragraph they're red herrings. Stinky, rotting red herrings that are poisoning the rest of the fish barrel, but still...

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12 December 2011

link to: 12:21 [GMT-6]

From the Illinois Governors' Wing of the Federal Penitentiary:

 

The flu is so much more fun at one remove with remoras also going through end-of-semester panic...

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06 December 2011

link to: 22:49 [GMT-6]

Forest, Trees, and Underbrush

 

So, if they're "student-athletes," perhaps a little bit of the "student" aspect needs to go into college football "standings." I therefore present the Bowl Standings for Collegiate Athletic Commercial Advantage, or BS-CACA. I'll weight the BS-CACA equally between "football performance" and "academic performance," which in turn is equally weighted between the NCAA's most-recent academic progress report for the football team and the university's median freshman standardized-test score. And thus, we get:

School BCS Score BCS Rank NCAA APR   ACT   Academic Final Score Final Rank
LSU1.00001966.754125.5.4167.5854.79271
Alabama.94192963.704926.5.4722.5886.76533
Oklahoma State.93333942.360725.0.3889.3748.64516
Stanford.84764977.934431.01.0000.7222.78492
Oregon.79015941.344324.0.3333.3388.56459
Arkansas.76876937.278725.0.3889.3338.551311
Boise State.740879811.000022.5.2500.6250.68294
Kansas State.68278940.327924.0.3333.3306.506713
South Carolina.65539954.557426.5.4722.5148.58517
Wisconsin.637410967.770528.0.5556.6631.65035
Virginia Tech.519011955.573827.0.5000.5369.528012
Baylor.497712951.508226.5.4722.4902.494015
Michigan.479413928.131129.0.6111.3711.425216
Oklahoma.460314960.655726.0.4444.5501.505214
Clemson.421815977.934427.5.5278.7311.57658
Georgia.411916976.918027.0.5000.7090.560410

It would look even more... interesting if we could substitute in the ACT score median for the respective teams instead of the entire freshman class.

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link to: 10:41 [GMT-6]

Predator-Prey Relationships

 

Just remember: A tree's natural enemy is not some woodland creature, but a lawyer. Unless, that is, you're talking about a lawyer who is also a woodland creature, like a weasel who passes the bar exam.

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Archives  

Now live at the new site. I have arranged some of the more infamous threads that have appeared here by unravelling them from the blawg tapestry (and hopefully eliminating some of the sillier typos). Sometimes, the threads have been slightly reordered for clarity.

   

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These may be of interest; I do not necessarily agree with opinions expressed in them, although the reasoning and writing are almost always first-rate (and represent a standard seldom, if ever, achieved in "mainstream" journalism). I'm picky, and have eclectic tastes, so don't expect a comprehensive listing.

A blawg is sort of like a blog on legal issues, but usually has a lot more links to outside resources (other than other blogs) than does a typical blog. Scrivener's Error is a blawg, not just a blog. You can find other blawgs at < ? law blogs # >.

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