Scrivener's Error

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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.

29 September 2011

link to: 14:43 [GMT-6]

Now Serving Number Six...

Just taking a short break from the civil procedure jungle of the HathiTrust lawsuit today (OK, it's a day-long break, but I actually have waiting rooms to wait in, too...). Maybe we'll make it all the way to the bridge at Do Long tomorrow.

Not with amusement, but with vast cynicism begun at a briefing at USAFE headquarters in the 1980s "suggesting" that US servicemembers and family members be whisked back to the US after any confrontation with the Italian criminal justice system due to systemic bias against foreigners (and particularly non-Europeans), I must ask whether Amanda Knox might be a witch. At least over here we don't propose to burn criminal defendants because they weigh less than a duck, and therefore float, and therefore are made out of wood, and therefore burn like witches, and therefore are witches. Except in Georgia and Texas, that is.

All seriousness aside, this is a disturbing example of what happens when the State's pursuit of and right to "justice" becomes corrupted by the pursuit of vengeance. There's no excuse for the murder of Meredith Kercher. Neither is there any excuse for dragging furriners off the street, investigating incompetently, and convicting them for heinous crimes largely because they're furriners. Yes, we do it over here, too; that does not excuse the practice. Neither is it to say that Ms Knox is necessarily entirely innocent; sometimes the cops do frame the guilty, but the State has an obligation to be better than than Captain Queeg. I can't pass judgment on the substance, but the procedure followed by the prosecution in Italy (including the police) was not conducive to obtaining a truthful result.
Maybe Simon Cowell should participate in the next Heffalump debate among the presidential candidates. At least according to some foreign journalists, it's entirely possible that no one would know that anything had changed.
I remain completely underwhelmed by e-readers, including the apparently orgasm-inducing Fire. I'll consider getting interested with at least three times the battery life (ten hours is nowhere near sufficient for a must-recharge-instead-of-swap-batteries unit), native PDF-with-layout support, at least another 65% drop in price... and some assurance that I can permanently disable whatever wireless is built in and run it solely through SD-card loading, and in particular do so without breaching any purported EUL. It's not the ads that I object to so much as the potential tracking. And even then, it will be just some normal level of interest.
Algis Valiunas asks, in a sideways fashion, why do literati show so much disdain about business in their works? Speaking from what I observed in a public (state-financed, for those of you across the Pond) school — and a much higher proportion of our literati have public-school backgrounds than you might think — at least part of it is the scorn heaped upon them by their classmates, parents, and most of the education-system apparatchiks. There are only so many times that a budding literatus/literata can be expected to put up with being told to change focus and do something worthwhile with the future, usually involving traditional business activity... while simultaneously observing, even if not consciously, that the jocks of both genders seldom get the same disdain for their ambitions. Put another way, when one's formative years involved concerted attacks upon one's still-fragile-and-forming self-identity, it's not too surprising that years later one might lash out at the perceived source of the attack.

Labels: culture, jurisprudence, life, mass media, politics

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Sausages?

Internet link sausages, as frequently appear here, are gathered from uninspected meaty internet products and byproducts via processes you really, really don't want to observe; spiced with my own secret, snarky, sarcastic blend; quite possibly extended with sawdust or other indigestibles; and stuffed into your monitor (instead of either real or artificial casings). They're sort of like "link salad" or "pot pourri" or "miscellaneous musings" (or, for that matter, "making law"), but far more disturbing.

I am not responsible for any changes to your lipid counts or blood pressure from consuming these sausages... nor for your monitor if you insist on covering them with mash or sauce.

Archives

Warped Weft

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.

Links of Interest

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Writer Beware and the Writer Beware Blog provide essential knowledge for writers who don't want to be ripped off
Writing-World.com published by the former managing editor of the now-defunct Inklings
Agent Research & Evaluation provides both free and paid analyses of literary agents
US Copyright Office, including both registration forms and records and quite a bit of other helpful information
Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) allows searches of granted, pending, and some rejected trademark registrations
US Supreme Court Opinions from the current and past couple of terms
Law Library of Congress includes statutes for free
The Public Library of Law can help you find the law... but not use it in court, as many of its resources are not in proper form and do not provide all of the citation information needed in court papers
Legal, free e-books are available through Online Books (University of Pennsylvania) and Shakespeare (MIT)
Legal, free music is available through
- ClassicCat.net (what kind of music do you think you'll find here?)
- Music.Download.com (long-awaited successor to MP3.com)
- Janis Ian (artist)
- John McCutcheon (artist)

Other Blawgs, Blogs, and Journals

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 # >.

How Appealing is aimed at appellate lawyers and legal news in general. If you care about the state of the law, start here — Howard's commentary is far better balanced, better informed, and better considered than any of the media outlets. To concentrate on the Supreme Court, don't forget SCOTUSBlog.
Some academics' blawgs with a variety of political (and doctrinal) viewpoints:
- Professor Anthony Arend (Georgetown Law)
- Professor Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA Law) (aka "The Perfesser")
- Professor Jack Balkin (Yale Law)
- Professor Dennis Crouch (Missouri Law) (better known as Patently-O)
- Professor Michael Froomkin (University of Miami Law)
- Professor Eric Goldman (Santa Clara University Law)
- Professor Rick Hasen (Loyola-LA Law)
- Professor Brian Leiter (U of Chicago Law/Philosophy)
- Professor Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law)
- Professor Michael Madison (Pitt Law)
- Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law)
BoingBoing, by speculative fiction writer (and 'net activist) Cory Doctorow, is quite hostile to copyright enforcement efforts, particularly regarding file-sharing
The main European IP blawg of interest remains the UK-based IPKat, on a variety of intellectual property issues, with some overlap (with a less Eurocentric view) at IPFinance
Cyberlaw (Stanford) has its agenda grounded firmly in the so-called "digital commons," which might make a bit more sense if any of the advocates of that viewpoint understood diddly-squat about population ecology
The American Constitution Society blawg is a purportedly "liberal" counterweight to the so-called "Federalist Society" (which, despite its claims, should be called "Tory Society") that has yet to establish much coherence... but maybe that's all to the good.

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