copiesofcopies :: webl

I think I’m going with the angry, inexperienced black guy. I can just never tell where that affable white gentleman stands — is he a hero, or a maverick? You can’t ride the fence forever, McCain!

Thanks, CBS!

I wrote a post for SFLC’s blog, responding to a Law.com article on FOSS licensing:

Law.com recently ran a sensationalist piece by Edmund J. Walsh warning of the impending “dangerous real world business dispute” in store for any for-profit company that uses free software. Walsh points to lawsuits filed by SFLC on behalf BusyBox as a source of this danger, and having worked on those lawsuits, I hope I can provide a helpful counterpoint.

In a successful bid to horrify myself, I ran my favorite Chipotle order through the Chipotle Nutrition Facts Calculator.  No wonder I’m so thirsty!  And… fibrous!

Like many copyright lawyers, I often begin my research into a given question of law by turning to Nimmer’s treatise. I approach Nimmer exactly as I approach Wikipedia — I anticipate a solid overview of the relevant issues, direction of my next steps, and some wrong or incomplete information. A high school student would be remiss to rely on Wikipedia alone for his paper research, and I would commit malpractice if he relied solely on Nimmer’s summary of a point of law, but both of us can save some time by referencing these meta-sources on our first pass.

An outline of the possiblities

These superficial similarities prove little, but they at least raise the question of whether we could make a treatise like we made Wikipedia. In broad strokes, the projects are identical: take an enormous information resource historically prepared by a small number of experts (in this case only one!) and subdivide the work between a large quantity of lesser lights. None of these could write the thing on his own, and many of them will contribute one sentence or dependent clause that is dead effing wrong. But their efforts in aggregate will produce more and timelier information on a wider variety of topics than those of the sole treater, and obtain a relatively high average quality.

Particular problems and solutions

On closer examination, the legal treatise is different from the encyclopedia in a few important ways. First, the knowledge necessary to contribute usefully to a legal treatise is concentrated in far fewer noggins than that necessary to contribute to an article about… anything at all. Second, lawyers may have on average less disposable time in which to edit wikis than the general population. But hough we like to consider ourselves something of an elite class, everyone else knows that there are a lot of goddamned lawyers in this country. More importantly, there are a lot of goddamned law students in this country. And all self-aggrandizement about our heroic struggles through law school aside, those students have a lot more free time than lawyers. Avoidance of homework is the single greatest motivator of YouTube video-reply generation and Facebook profile-padding among high school students; law students are no less eager to join the prosumer former audience. What’s more, law students (particularly around finals time) are turning out treatise material nearly every day. Yes, it’s simplistic, latin-engorged, low-grade treatise material, but these deficiencies are more than made up in volume. And Clay Shirky told me these things are supposed to start bad.

Lawyers do this too. The low-level associates who are not combing warehouses for receipts are endlessly summarizing the most basic points of law for lazy partners — this stuff is treatise gold. Which brings me to the third important difference between lawyers and encyclopedists, which is that much of a lawyer’s work is protected in one way or another by privilege. But this objection seems to me easily overcome. Publishing notes from or even sections of documents prepared for clients, to the extent that they contain simple summaries of the law, need not raise any confidentiality concerns or expose the entire document to discovery (this is why we have redaction, right?). Besides, one need only quickly survey the wretchedly-named blawgosphere to see that lawyers are constantly blathering about the general issues they encounter in their work for clients (simultaneously demonstrating that lawyers aren’t really so hard-up for Internet dicking-around time).

Previous efforts and missteps

This has all been suggested before (and again). It has sort of been attempted. The Cornell Legal Information Institute’s Wex and the Wikilaw project are legal information wikis, but seek to provide more general legal information to the general public. EFF’s Internet Law Treatise is the closest thing to an actual test case, but the approach taken so far has maybe missed the point. The ITL has been online for a nearly a year and a half, but write access has been “invitation only” that whole time. The predictable consequence is that all of the edits in the last month except for two were made by Kurt Opsahl, the ITL’s founder. The rationale for this cautious approach is likely related to the project’s disclaimer — a (usually healthy) fear of a malpractice suit by someone who relies on the treatise as legal advice.

But there is no “right” time to open a wiki to public editing, except “right away.” As Shirky puts it, “the key to creating [the] individual actions [from which collective information resources are built], is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.” Anybody needs to be able to add a stub, update a page to include a summary of a recent decision, or introduce factually or legally erroneous information. If it doesn’t start bad, it probably won’t start at all (as Shirky’s case study of Nupedia illustrates). The need for the disclaimer is undeniable, but if it’s inoperative on a small scale, it will be inoperative on a large scale and the legal wiki created by lawyers is a non-starter. But I think such disclaimers are adequate, and need to be adequate if the legal profession is ever going to do anything interesting with new information tools (a potential alternative is truly anonymous posting, but this introduces policing problems and will probably discourage contributions as much as it encourages them).

Today I was admitted to practice before the District Court for the Southern District of New York and assigned my requested attorney bar code: AW1337. I will be pwning n00bs briefly, meaning both “in the near future” and “by virtue of briefs, which are things that lawyers file.”

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the fourth installment in a classic action-adventure franchise written by George Lucas.

When Coors Brewing Company introduced the first of its recent questionable innovations in beer canning technology, the Frost Brew Liner, I admit I was charmed. Does a thin layer of plastic inside my can really lock in the Rocky Mountain freshness? I don’t know, but the child within cries Yes! And what’s more, the vaguely Web 2.0 infograms on the can made it feel like science.

But Coors: like the extra-wide easy-pour opening on a can of your cool, refreshing Coors Light, the credulity of this Rockies-tapper extends only so far. Guys, this vent thing is just not believable. I even gave you the benefit of the doubt when i saw the first commercial — I thought “maybe an internal straw-like apparatus extends from the mouth of the can to air in the interior, to prevent a vacuum from forming and allow the crisp, frost-brewed lager to pour smoothly forth.” Now, I didn’t think for a second that it would work, but as with the frost brew liner, that explanation would have at least left some question in my mind.

But ever the cultural reverse engineer, I took a can opener to your bold new design, and the truth was far lamer than the pseudoscience I invented for you. Look at this thing:

Coors Light Vented Wide Mouth Can

It’s not that easy to see from the picture, but basically the vaunted “vent” is much closer to a “dent” — a shallow canal running outward from the mouth about 3/4 of an inch. What could this possibly accomplish? It’s exerts no more influence on my pour than the unpredictable deformations that inevitably result from merely opening the can. It is a nothing.

For shame, Coors. I fear the integrity of your practice of the beer-related sciences has fallen victim to Madison Avenue’s siren song.

Tonight when I came home from work, I decided to mix myself a martini. Alas! as I went to add the vermouth I noticed it had gone off (I really should have noticed this long, long before). The ice was quickly diluting my gin in the shaker… I had to act fast!

Like any would-be mixologist worth a damn, I decided the only thing to make was ’something up.’ So in went some Grand Marnier, a little pot-stilled rum, and bitters. Out came my first mixological invention worth recording, the Girl Erin (named for the lovely and thoughtful Erin who gave me the book that got me interested in the mixological arts).

The Girl Erin

Ingredients:

• 2 oz Plymouth gin
• 1 oz curacao (I use Grand Marnier)
• 1 tsp 115-proof pot-stilled rum (I use Inner Circle green)
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters

Pour all ingredients into a shaker with ice and shake well. Serve up, with a quarter-wheel of orange on the rim of the glass.

It’s a work in progress, and there is room for experimentation (one obvious tweak would be to replace the Angostura with orange bitters, which i didn’t have on hand), but it’s a pretty tasty drink as is.

The Settlers of Catan is a sweet, nerdy, hex-based strategy game. Pioneers is a free software implementation of ‘Settlers’ — some co-workers and I have taken to playing it in the SFLC conference room (and over the tubes) after hours, typically with scotch and pizza. It’s great, you should do it.

They say that every contribution to a free software project begins with one developer’s itch (to see a new feature implemented, a bug fixed, etc.), and the graphical themes (e.g.) that shipped with v.0.11.3 of Pioneers made my brain itch something fierce. So I made a new one. ccFlickr, as the name suggests, is cobbled together from Creative Commons-licensed images harvested from Flickr. Here is a screenshot:

Download ccFlickr

To install, just place the ccFlickr directory in the directory with all of your other themes. In Ubuntu Linux, this is: /usr/share/games/pioneers/themes/

It’s a first effort, but I’m happy with the result. The one problem I’ve noticed is that, because I made tiles with the exact dimensions of a hex (rather than making smaller images to tile), space sometimes shows up between tiles upon resizing the window. Not sure whether this is an issue with the scaling algorithm, could be fixed by making the tiles rectangles (the space is usually on the diagonal), or if it’s unavoidable.

All of the images I used to make the theme are licensed CC BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike), so that they can be distributed with the GPL-licensed program. Some images were originally (or still are) licensed CC BY-NC-SA on Flickr. In each of these cases I requested a BY-SA license to the images, and the authors were kind enough to grant one, either by changing the public license on Flickr or by simply giving me a one-off grant of permissions. Here are the images:

• “Catch the Sun” by estaticist
• “Cool textures” by MaxPower
• “IMG_1833.JPG” by mtoz
• “obscured by clouds” by vsz
• “Oh my gold !” by Tater1982
• “Sand Dunes in Gran Canaria” by szeke
• “Swirly rock” by bcostin
• “There are 4 mln people in NZ… and 40 mln sheep!” by Alles Photos