| in pari delicto
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Welcome
This site is a constant work in progress by a Marylander transplanted to study law in the frozen tundra.
Snapshot
[more] Recent Text Posts
The fifth sentence
Bad faith fair use
Technological innovation
Gmail Review
MD passes antispam bill
Hungary foils plot to bomb Holocaust Museum
Don't Tell the RIAA...
Gmail outlawed?
[more]
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The fifth sentence: The newest Internet game going around asks people to:
On the whole, the danger posed by these questions is slight, since they will seldom be asked except when the popular meaning is roughly the same as the legal meaning.
Bad faith fair use:
The Second Circuit Court of appeals today issued a ruling that republication on the Internet of quotes from an illegally acquired seminar manual can still be fair use, despite the fact that they were acquired in bad faith. The Court held that while good/bad faith does factor into the equation, the overall issue of transformation is what is most important to deciding what is fair and what isn't.[via Corante]
Technological innovation: Dave Winer: "Someday I hope to meet someone who's never seen a typewriter."
I've often thought about the fact that my kids will have no clue what a "record player" is. They'll understand the word "record" (but think CD). Actually, maybe they won't even do that -- by the time my kids are old enough to buy music, it's quite possible that nobody will buy physical media anymore at all, for anything. Crazy...
Gmail Review: I've had a few days to play -- incessantly -- with Gmail, Google's beta email offering, and I'm really liking it. It seems like everyone else has posted complete Gmail reviews with screenshots, so I'm just going to supplement with my thoughts, rather than duplicate the efforts on the people in Jason's extensive list. Leave a comment if anybody has any particular questions you'd like answered. Also, I've given my thoughts on the privacy implications of Gmail in a previous post.
Overall, although I wouldn't go so far as to use the word "revolutionary," Gmail is making some important strides in email user interface. Particularly, it makes a lot of sense to me that we should be thinking of our email in the context of conversations, not just individual messages. In fact, in Gmail it's not even POSSIBLE to separate an email from its thread. Gmail changes the user's email schema from individual emails to a thread, and presents previous messages in a way that looks like stacked file folders, so you can only see the label on the folder. It's easy to click on a hidden message to expand it. Also, Gmail hides quoted text in the bottom of emails, as well as excess header info -- a nice touch. I was surprised at how easy it was to understand going from the index view to the conversation view. Seeing an entire conversation listed as one item in an inbox looks a little odd at first, but after a second it makes instant sense. Searching is REALLY powerful. I like being able to set more than one label (folder) for a message, and I'm finding that I'm able to locate the messages I'm looking for more quickly than I used to be able to. The search and filter interface is a bit opaque, though: you can do an "advanced" filter (using Google search commands and logical operators) by typing the advanced query into the section on the wizard for finding words in the document (no field), but this isn't obvious. It would be nice to have an advanced filter editor. Also, you can't edit filters (maximum of 20) once they're created. As for the ads, I really don't notice them, and I was surprised how much they are literally keyworded (if I write "bla" in my email, I will get ads about "bla") rather than what the media seems to be implying, which is that Gmail would build up a profile of what topic areas I'm interested in. I would also never have expected a keystroke shortcut system for web-based email, and I certainly didn't think I'd like it, but I'm actually using it quite a bit. The reply box at the bottom of the page that expands also is very intuitive. The one thing that I really think would be the major deciding factor before I get rid of my desktop mail package altogether is that I'd like a biff-style program to sit in my WinXP system tray to alert me when I have new mail. Ideally, I could also set this program to tell me either the senders of new messages, or give me labels with counts ("New messages: label1 (10), label2 (2)"). Other minor stuff, most of which I'm sure Google has already thought about:
MD passes antispam bill:
Maryland lawmakers have passed the nation's toughest antispam bill, calling for stiff fines and as much as 10 years in jail for people sending fraudulent, unwanted e-mail.At least based on the Times, article, it doesn't look like there's a citizen suit provision, which -- if true -- would be a WEAKENING of existing Maryland law and, in effect, a WIN for spammers. If there's no private right of action, only big spammers (if anybody) will be attacked because the Maryland Attorney General will have to do the suing. If the legislature were really interested in doing something about spam, they would have empowered individuals who received the spam to act against the spammers. [ The Washington Times, via The BaltiBlog]
Hungary foils plot to bomb Holocaust Museum: Nice to know that nothing is off-limits to suicide bombers...
Hungarian police say a detained Palestinian has told them he planned to bomb the Holocaust Museum in Budapest.[via BBC NEWS]
Don't Tell the RIAA...: Don't tell the RIAA, but during Q1 2004: "Album sales were up 9.2 percent. Sales of CDs, which represent 96 percent of album sales, rose 10.6 percent. For the first time since 2000, two recording artists -- Norah Jones and Usher -- managed to sell more than 1 million copies of their albums in a single week." For their part, the RIAA claims that online file-sharing is still harming the record industry and is depressing legal music sales.
The RIAA, I'm sure, would deny that these statistics undercut the reasonableness of its new tactic of music downloaders, not just high-traffic providers. [via Wired News]
Gmail outlawed?: The BBC reports today that a California legislator is proposing a state law, aimed at Gmail, which would outlaw the reading, by any person or computer, of another person's electronic mail. For a variety of reasons, this bill is pretty unlikely to pass, but in true law-student fashion, here are my thoughts on why I'm not so concerned about Gmail's privacy implications:
First, Google is being explicit in their privacy policy about the fact that a computer monitors my emails for content and serves ads. Hotmail and Yahoo might do the same thing, or might monitor without serving related ads, but they don't tell me. Their privacy policies do not preclude them doing this, even if they don't address it explicitly. Google's policy explicitly says that they do monitor, but that they do not record records for what ads are served to me, or what keywords are found in my messaages. They only give aggregate results to advertisers ("Your ad was served 10,000 times.") which is the same as what every other webmail service does. Second, the California legislation -- even if it were a good idea, which I doubt -- would be overbroad. Everyone has, and wants, spam filters or computers which filter your email into different folders, or whatever. Although these are not captured by the legislation's intent, they certainly would be covered since they do exactly the same thing (check an email for keywords and take action if those keywords are found). Finally, there is no need for legislation here. The media has done an outstanding job in this instance of serving as a consumer watchdog, identifying a product -- before it is even released! -- with privacy concerns and bringing those issues to the public's attention. This is the way it is "supposed to work." Legislatures shouldn't prohibit the existence of systems like Gmail because, if I am concerned about what is being discussed by the media, then I will simply choose not to use Gmail. If I am not concerned, I will use it. The reason that I, personally, choose to use it is because I am insufficiently concerned about these issues -- although generally I am very concerned about privacy, I judge that the risks to me are low in this particular situation. There is no larger public evil which people are unaware of if they let Google scan their email for keywords. For me, the reason that I choose to disregard the potential privacy implications is because, first of all, I trust Google (which, of course, could change if Google were bought out by a company I don't trust) and I don't have any particular private information that I talk about in my email. (If I did, I should not use Gmail, or Hotmail, or Yahoo, or any email service. In fact, I probably should not use email at all.) Gmail represents, for me, a new way of using email. The interface is clean and easy to use, and it makes a lot of my email tasks easier. I was surprised at how quickly I picked up the "Gmail" email schema and how, after a day of using it, I'm already "emailing differently." Incidentally, I was also surprised at how few ads I've seen -- I probably only see them on a few occasions, maybe one message in six, in messages which explicitly relate to a given topic (one email was about the movie The Passion; another which had the word "sorry" in it gave me ads about being "sorry"). It doesn't seem that Gmail is set up to "figure out what I am talking about" and serve ads based on that -- it's solely a keyword-based thing. And as compared to the absolutely horrendous blinking ads with soundtracks that I get on Hotmaill, I don't really notice the Gmail ads, except when I choose to look at them.
UPDATE: More from the Volokh Conspiracy. Interesting counterargument from Steven Wu at LawMeme.
ReplayTV: As I mentioned, I was very excited about getting a new ReplayTV 5040. I ordered a refurb 5040 online, and it arrived, but died about 20 minutes after I started using it. I called tech support, which was one of the outsourced deals in India where the CSRs have not ever really even USED the product they're supporting. After going through basic troubleshooting steps to no avail, I spent a while going back and forth with various folks until I got them to send me a replacement. Finally, they did, and it arrived today -- DOA. Next struggle is to get them to send me UPS airbills (which they've promised they'd do for a week) so I can send the TWO defective units back to them.
Went to CompUSA and bought a new TiVO. Works great, and now I'm finally a part of the newest craze in procrastination.
GMail: I can't start updating my blog again and not mention my [other] latest fascination: Gmail. Many screenshots have popped up around the web from people who have gotten invites. I'm not so much excited by the 1GB of space that GMail is offering (although I guess it's necessary to get the sort of usage they're encouraging), but rather by what I believe to be a revolutionary change to the way people use email. As an HCI-focused person, I'm going to be very interested in piecing through the Gmail interface to see how unimpressive or impressive I think it is.
Sadly, I'm not on the "cool list" yet ;-) UPDATE: Just got on the list. I'll play with it for a bit and then post some comments. Thanks, Jason!
Exams: I've been neglecting my blog for the past weeks because I have a quirky approach to law school: either just keep up with the reading and not worry about it, or spend much of my time preparing for exams. Since we're in the last month, I'm focusing less on distractions, like the distraction that is supposed to arrive Monday. I guess we'll see what happens ;-)
Googling Jews: If you Google "Jew" today, the top hit is an anti-Semitic site called "Jew Watch." There's a campaign to raise the PageRank of the Wikipedia entry for the term "Jew" so that it overwhelms the anti-Semitic site. A week ago, the Wikipedia entry had no PageRank at all, according to the Jerusalem Post. Now it's fourth.
This post is me doing my part.
UPDATE: Google has posted an explanation of the issue as a link on the top of its search results. |
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