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Hot on the heels of Lodsys threatening Apple’s app developers (and Apple threatening back), NPR’s All Things Considered Team tackles the latest scourge to take advantage of our outmoded legal system: patent trolls. Required listening for all app developers, IP attorneys, and law students who are thinking of jumping in bed with the devil.
As a bonus, Peter Detkin explains that when he popularized the term he was thinking of the mythical Norse monster, not the hunting term.
Via NPR.
It’s not that far off.
In a video from 2010, a state trooper in Maryland flashed his gun while pulling over motorcyclist Anthony Graber for speeding. When Graber posted the video from his helmet cam on YouTube, prosecutors charged him with breaking the state’s wiretapping law because he recorded the trooper’s voice without consent. A judge dismissed the case.
Which is a more compelling argument?
a) “They need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be.”
or
b) “But police officers above all others should be subject to this kind of filming because we have a duty to hold them accountable as powerful public servants.”
The Maryland Wiretap Law is codified as Maryland Courts and Judicial Proceedings Section 10-402. Under that statute, certain communications may not be recorded so long as they are “interceptions” of wire, oral, or electronic communications.
Attorney General Robert McDonald advised the court to dismiss the case stating: “The Wiretap Law regulates the interception of oral, wire, or electronic commuications. The typical encounter between a citizen and police officer does not involve a wire or electronic communication. Thus, the application of the Act will turn on whether a recording of the audio portion of such an encounter constitutes the interception of an ‘oral communication’ protected by the Act.” The opinion goes on to state that such a decision would turn on whether the oral communication was deemed to be a private one.
Here, it is safe to say that a police officer ordering a motorists off his vehicle on a public highway is not a private communication, especially when that officer is shouting and brandishing a firearm.
The more interesting question is whether citizens want the freedom to be able to record police officers doing their jobs (see also Rodney King, Oscar Grant, and the TV show Cops).
From Morning Edition.
“In the bad recessions in the past, the graduates recovered in 10 to 15 years. But we’ve never had such a strong recession,”[Till von Wachter, an economics professor at Columbia University,] said.
From CNN.com
Harvard has just posted every Law exam ever administered since 1870 on their website. It’s nice to know that nothing changes, including: alliterated actors’ names, convoluted fact patterns, and that students hate hate hate real property.
Thanks Harvard!
Today, the FBI released hundreds of pages of heavily-redacted documents from the March 1997 slaying of Christopher Wallace, one Notorious B.I.G. Despite efforts by law enforcement and Wallace’s family, his killer has never been brought to justice. The suspects include: the driver of a black Chevrolet Impala SS — an African American male dressed in a blue suit and bow tie, carrying a blue-steel pistol; co-founder of Death Row Records Suge Knight; and the LAPD, among others.
Access the files here, here, and here.
Via the LA Times.
Jomo Zambia wants his previous conviction for pandering expunged despite already serving his four year jail sentence, leaving the California Supreme Court to mull over Too $hort and 50 Cent lyrics. Specifically the Court has been trying to figure out exactly what the California definition of pandering means: a crime for anyone who induces, persuades or encourages another person to become a prostitute.
What Zambia’s lawyer contends is that only a pimp who recruits innocent victims and not working already prostitutes can be guilty of the offense of pandering. All other pimps are merely guilty of attempting to pander or solicitation of a prostitute. You cant become what you already are, Zambia’s attorney, Vanessa Place, argued.
And her argument seems to have legs (fishnet-clad ones at that). While Justices Marvin Baxter, Ming Chin and Patricia Bamattre-Manoukian seemed ready to side with the state, Justice Joyce Kennard said Zambia made a compelling argument. When one is already a prostitute, one cant be encouraged to be a prostitute, Kennard said. That seems to be a common-sense interpretation.
Read more about the origins of the word pimp in a 2008 Slate article and forward it along to the Court while you’re at it.
From the Chron.
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future. He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.
With the improvement of computer’s ability to understand, the once common practice of hiring armies of attorneys to sift through discovery documents will be rendered obsolete. Advancements in computer’s linguistic and sociological capabilities means smaller firms can handle more complex cases, which in turn means fewer attorneys are needed.
But is this a bad thing? There are fewer job openings and more attorneys than ever before, but is it really necessary to pay a legal professional $400/hour to process data. One would hope this would open up an attorney to do more complex, necessary work than mere document review. When one attorney can do the work of 500, the other 499 can work on more pressing issues like writing motions, researching precedent, and arguing their cases. Hey, maybe they can even spend some more time on the indigent and underrepresented.
Or maybe there will just be more unemployed, over-educated people with stagnating student loans. As Paul Krugman recently opined:
Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind thats hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there arent many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.
Via the NY Times.
Nick Kam