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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.
RIAA countersued for racketeering: Awesome...
"Labels are using 'scare tactics (that) amount to extortion' in efforts to extract settlements, Scimeca alleges in legal papers sent to the U.S. District Court in Newark."[New Jersey Star-Ledger, via Eric's Blog]
San Francisco - postscript: Southwestern University Law School Professor Robert A. Pugsley (a legal academic who, it appears, makes his living as a legal commentator, and whose most recent publication is over five years old) was on O'Reilly yesterday advocating the arrest of the the mayor of San Francisco. It's hard to take such a proposal seriously. (The court of original jurisdiction today declined -- at least yet -- to issue an injunction which Mayor Newsom would have to violate to be jailed for contempt of court.)
Pugsley did raise the somewhat worthwhile point, however, that since the STATE is actually issuing marriage licenses through the locality, the licenses issued by San Francisco might not be valid at all. If true, the argument is that San Francisco is doing more of a disservice than anythinig else to the people whom it marries. However, Pugsley's argument that Newsom could be jailed under an ordinance forbidding the enrollment of false records, in light of the tremendous legal controversy which indicates the issue is far from settled, seems specious at best.
Lessig: Gay Marriage in SF: Larry Lessig offers an interesting analysis about the San Francisco mayor's decision to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples on the theory that the state law prohibiting the action is unconstitutional. Lessig's argument -- which I think is well-supported -- is that the executive branch has just as much authority as the legislative or judicial to declare a particular law (or court ruling) inconsistent with the state constitution.
Compare Dan Gillmor's argument that this amounts to nothing more than "governmental lawbreaking" because it's the province of the courts and the legislature, not the executive, to rule on constitutionality. Gillmor responds to Prof. Lessig by raising the point, which Lessig concedes, whether a local-level executive has the authority to effectively overrule a higher-level governmental body.) Another interesting question is how the SF action should relate to the Good Faith & Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Implicitly, if two gay people are married in California, and then they go to Nevada, shouldn't Nevada have to honor the marriage on the face of the license, without looking behind it to see whether the marriage would be legitimate under its own laws? Does it matter if only San Francisco, or only the county, recognizes SF gay marriages, and the rest of the state ignores them? If the state passes a law declaring all marriages authorized by the City of San Francisco invalid? UPDATE: Lessig writes: "So I said my analysis depended upon facts about CA law that I didn’t know. My wife reports that NPR reports that there is a law in California that instructs state officials to obey laws until properly challenged in court. If that’s correct, that, in my view, changes the analysis completely: Except in the most extreme cases, such a law would be a sensible way to order disputes about CA law. Whether or not the marriage law is constitutional, I should think that law would be constitutional. And if that law is constitutional, then an official who disobeyed it would be — as Dan Gillmor said originally — violating the law."
Can you fake being crazy?:
"In 1972, David Rosenhan, a newly minted psychologist with a joint degree in law, called eight friends and said something like, "Are you busy next month? Would you have time to fake your way into a mental hospital and see what happens?"[ via The Volokh Conspiracy ]
Eyewitness: "I doubt many reporters have actually witnessed a suicide bombing up close – indeed, not many Israelis have. After today, I know there is a basic difference between what one sees in the first five or ten minutes and what one sees in the next 20 or 30 minutes. Most of the reporters who 'covered' the bombing did not actually see the corpses on the ground. They do not know about the body convulsing in the bus. What they saw was a bus blown to smithereens, which is awful enough, while the rest was left to their imaginations. But if you haven't seen it before, you cannot imagine it. You don't have a clue. If I learned one thing today, it is this.
"WE MOVE too quickly from death events to news events. Nobody should see the scene I witnessed this morning, while the quiet still hung in the air. Then again, maybe everyone should see it, at least everyone in the news media. They should switch off their cameras and mobile phones and close their notepads. They should observe the silence, first of all by being silent."
Bret Stephens, Jerusalem Post editor, on the 1/29/04 terrorist attack. [via Kesher Talk]
Birthright Israel, Revisited: Out of Step Jew discusses ways of revamping Birthright Israel to make the program more effective. The blog also contains an open letter to Michael Steinhardt, the major benefactor of the program. In summary, OSJ suggests that Birthright become something that students would have to work to attain, and that would entail a more extended commitment than a ten-day trip. This change, it is argued, would make the program more effective by making the experience more valuable for its recipients.
My Birthright Israel experience was a dramatic one which I won't soon forget. This is the hopeful goal of Birthright: that the mostly secular Jews who take the trip will regain a connection with their heritage such that they will become more observant, fight assimilation, and marry another Jew. The problem which OSJ seeks to rectify is that some of the trip recipients see it just as a free vacation, and end up just as secular when they ultimately marry a non-Jew and have non-Jewish children. The problem with OSJ's proposal is that Birthright seeks to locate the "susceptible" (used in a positive, not negative sense) Jewish youth and target them for intense indoctrination (again, not necessarily a bad thing). The goal of Birthright is different from OSJ's: to target the UNinterested kids who wouldn't go to Hillel or work to be involved with an Israel program. Birthright hopes that some number of these kids will go to Israel, fall in love with Judaism, and never look back. Although it's inevitable that some (many?) of the Birthright recipients won't manifest any demonstrable change in behavior, most align politically with Israel (an effect which won't benefit Israel for a decade or more), I am one of the "success stories." OSJ cites what he sees as lackluster success statistics as evidence that Birthright, in its current incarnation, is a failure. While it might or might not be true that Birthright isn't working, low numbers don't indicate that. We have to make a conscious choice: Should we make the religious Jewish community more observant, or should we try to bring some secular Jews into the fold? I agree that it might be reasonable to ask recipients to commit to becoming more involved in their community (by giving them a choice of ways to become involved, not requiring classes or doing things that will make the program inaccessible). But considering that most twentysomethings with a strong Jewish identity (the ones who would do work to get the Israel trip or commit to an extended course of study) aren't going to intermarry or abdicate their Judaism, I argue that Birthright, in its current incarnation, has the right idea.
Site Design: Thanks to Greg's help and a little googling, I'm starting to figure out how to work with my MovableType template. I've set up the front page so that it shows the most recent text post and the most recent photo post, and that the various archive pages show both in a reasonable manner.
Maphet (who has been awesome in helping me get everything set up) installed two plugins for me: CatEntries and FilterCategories. FilterCategories allows me to exclude "Text" from category outputs. The CatEntries lets me categorize my photos in other categories than just "Photos" and lets me pull the most recent non-text post. The only remaining problem is that, for some reason, CatEntries doesn't respect the <$MTEntryDate$> tag the way MTEntries does -- which is why you'll see that tag not working if you look at my front page today. I emailed the author to see if there is a workaround, but if anyone else knows how to deal with this, let me know. Also - comments on my fledgling design would be highly appreciated ;-)
Trying to make a hybrid site...: I'm trying to make a hybrid site that does half photoblogging and half normal weblogging. I'm trying to set it up so that it shows the most recent non-photo entry and then the most recent photo entry, which I've tried to implement by creating a category called "Text." I am trying to figure out how to get MT to exclude the "Text" category when it pulls the most recent entry. There's supposed to be a plugin called MTCatEntries which does this, but baltiblogs doesn't seem to have it installed...
New Blog: Testing out new blog under MovableType. Thanks to the awesome folks at Baltiblogs for the hosting!
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