Justice Department Doesn’t Want to Represent Hollywood Pro Bono

In response to several Senators’ proposal that the DoJ have the ability to bring civil suits for copyright infringement (in addition to criminal suits, which they can already bring), the DoJ has said the following:

We strongly oppose Title I of the bill, which not only authorizes the Attorney General to pursue civil remedies for copyright infringement, but to secure “restitution” damages and remit them to the private owners of infringed copyrights. First, civil copyright enforcement has always been the responsibility and prerogative of private copyright holders, and U.S. law already provides them with effective legal tools to protect their rights….

Second, Title 1′s departure from the settled framework above could result in Department of Justice prosecutors serving as pro bono lawyers for private copyright holders regardless of their resources. In effect, taxpayer-supported Department lawyers would pursue lawsuits for copyright holders, with monetary recovery going to industry.

Third, the Department of Justice has limited resources to dedicate to particular issues, and civil enforcement actions would occur at the expense of criminal actions, which only the Department of Justice may bring. In an era of fiscal responsibility, the resources of the Department of Justice should be used for the public benefit, not on behalf of particular industries that can avail themselves of the existing civil enforcement provisions.

Via Boing Boing via EFF.
Previously: Which Party is Better for Sane IP Law?

The Starving Beast

If you spend long enough studying politics, there will eventually come a day when you have what may be a startling revelation. Voters are kind of dumb. Sometimes, they’re really dumb (many voters are simultaneously in favor of lower taxes, more services, and a balanced budget). Yet very few people are willing to admit this publicly. Politicians won’t do it, because they don’t want to insult the same people whose votes they are begging for. The media rarely do it either, perhaps out of fear of giving their detractors more ammunition to label the press as “elitists.”

So it was refreshing to read Patty Fisher of the San Jose Mercury News directing some of the blame for California’s budget crisis at voters themselves. It’s California voters who have approved bond measure after bond measure, committing more and more future revenues to paying off debt. It’s California voters who have created numerous special taxes dedicated to specific programs, instead of directing revenues into a large general fund where lumps and shortages can be evened out. And perhaps most importantly, it was California voters who passed Prop 13, a drastic cap on property taxes. The resulting situation looks like it was designed by someone pursuing the starve the beast strategy; reducing or restraining the size of government by reducing or restraining the tax base.

I didn’t realize how dirty or dilapidated Los Angeles was until I moved to San Jose. I guess I just grew accustomed to trash on the streets, potholes in the roads, and graffiti everywhere. Los Angeles badly needs more money for police and infrastructure, but Prop 13 deprives it of property tax revenues that are used for these purposes in other states. Teachers should be paid a lot more than they are, but the state’s fiscal straitjacket makes that impossible to do. The problem with a starve the beast strategy is that it is indiscriminate. It’s not just wasteful and low-priority programs that are starved, it’s critical and important ones too.

The Best Lecturer I’ve Ever Known

Today I received the following in an email from USC Law:

USC|LAW
Advisory from the Dean

Dear Alumni and Friends of the USC Gould School of Law,

It is with tremendous sadness and sense of loss that I have to report the passing of my friend and colleague, Charlie Whitebread. Charlie died yesterday from cancer. He had been a law professor for more than 40 years, teaching his last students this past spring.

Many of you know how tragic this loss is to our law school community. For those who did not have the good fortune to have Charlie as a teacher or as a friend, he exemplified those attributes that our law school holds dear. He was a phenomenal classroom teacher, an engaged scholar, and a tireless advocate for our students and for justice. I have attached a bio which describes some of Charlie’s accomplishments, though no words can adequately convey the life force that was Charlie Whitebread.

Many have already asked about our plans to recognize Charlie’s contributions to USC. We are currently setting a date for a celebration of Charlie’s life, and we will inform you once we have the date, time and venue set. Some of Charlie’s closest friends approached me asking if they could do something to honor Charlie’s memory. They decided to set up a Charles H. Whitebread scholarship fund at USC Law because they knew how much Charlie cared about our students.

With much sadness,

Bob

No one, no one, can teach a class like Charlie Whitebread. The thousands and thousands of students who took his Criminal Law section in the Bar/Bri review course got only a small glimpse of his incredible knowledge, humor, and dynamism. I will miss him.

Thank You Megan

Lately I’ve been debating whether to write a “pox on both your houses” post about the upcoming election. I started the campaign season thinking that both Obama and McCain looked pretty good, and that I would be happy with whichever one won. I think I still believe that deep down, but the media and campaigns have gotten to the point where normally-objective sources of news have become far more partisan. Normally I really like Slate, but their headline story today reads like an Obama campaign press release. The article is really just three paragraphs and a chart, showing economic data for each presidency for the last 50 years or so. Democratic presidents have presided over more economic growth over that time frame than Republican ones. The obvious but unstated message is that you should vote for a Democrat if you care about the economy. While I expect this kind of thing to come from the Obama campaign, I would expect Slate to add a bit more context and honest analysis. The article’s author, Michael Kinsley, deals with some of the following issues, but they’re buried in a footnote instead of handled in the particle proper:

• Correlation is not the same thing as causation. The data only show the former. Higher growth under Democratic presidents could be a coincidence caused by something else entirely. Kinsley pooh-poohs this concern, saying that “My own feeling about that is that as long as the pattern continues, who cares why? Correlation will do just fine.” But this misses the point; the only way we have any assurance that the economy will continue to better under Democratic presidents is if they were the cause for the growth.
• In particular, Congress has a lot more control over what goes on in the economy than the President does. There’s actually very little that the President can do about the economy.
• As much as economic growth can be contributed to economic policy, the growth during the Clinton years would be the result of policies pushed by the Republican congress and accommodated by Bill Clinton (balanced budget, welfare reform, NAFTA). The broader point is that neither party’s policies from administrations past are the same as they are now.
• Despite Kinsley’s assertion that the chart encompasses “half a century” of data, the dataset is vanishingly small by a statistician’s standards, as it includes only six Republican presidents and four Democratic ones (Eisenhower (R), Kennedy (D), Johnson (D), Nixon (R), Ford (R), Carter (D), Reagan (R), Bush (R), Clinton (D), and Bush (R)).

I don’t want to get too much deeper into the problems with this particular article. It’s just one example of the media leading the country in going a bit crazy as the election grows closer. I also don’t mean this as a defense of the Bush administration. They lost me at steel tariffs (if you can remember back that far), and then really really lost me when they lied about the need to go to war in Iraq. Lately Cheney’s been hinting that he won’t turn over his records as prior administrations have done when they left office. After all the mendacity of this administration over the past seven and a half years, it’s hard to even muster outrage anymore.

Despite the protestations of the Obama campaign, however, Bush/Cheney won’t be on the ballot this November. I still don’t know whether I’m going to vote for Obama or McCain. Obama is an inspiring speaker and seems like a genuinely thoughtful person. He would be a breath of fresh air after the anti-intellectual Bush. But when he panders to unions or bashes NAFTA or Walmart, I worry that he might actually mean what he’s saying. McCain, on the other hand, seems genuinely concerned about cutting earmarks and fighting corruption. He’s championed those causes for quite a while, at considerable political risk to himself. But I used to admire his courage on immigration too, yet he seems to have caved on that. His campaign’s ad accusing Obama of promoting sex-ed for kindergartners is just as deplorable as the Obama campaign’s ad painting him as a doddering old fogey because he doesn’t use email (his war injuries make it painful for him to type).

So you can’t trust what the campaigns are saying, and at this point, you can’t trust what the media is saying either. It’s time to tune out. Megan McArdle puts it a lot better than I can. Go read that post. Then turn off the news until Nov. 5 and find out who won.

Javascript Quirk #2: Optional Statement Terminators

From the Javascript tutorial at AppJet I learned the other day that

var blerg = "hi there"

is just as good as…

var blerg = "hi there";

If you didn’t see the difference, it’s the semicolon at the end of the line. A lot of languages (C, C++, Perl, PHP) require a semicolon at the end of a statement to let the compiler or interpreter know that you’re done. Python takes the opposite tack and just ends the statement where you start a new line. Javascript splits the difference. Want to terminate your statements with a semicolon? Great, javascript likes that. Prefer not to? That’s fine too. This may sound awfully nice of javascript at first, but it creates the following problem for people coming from stricter languages:

“Hmmm… My page doesn’t look right. I’ll take a look at the code. Oh! There it is. Silly me. I forgot to put a semicolon at the end of that line.”
(inserts a semicolon, reloads page)
“Hmmm… it’s still not working…”

In other words, it makes it harder for someone trained in another language to spot bugs in javascript. There are too many false positives. Slightly worse than this javascript quirk is the way that the “Good Habits” page of the AppJet tutorial goes about telling you about it:

In many languages, the semicolon character (;) must be used to end each statement. In JavaScript, this is optional, and to keep things simple we have so far been omitting them in our examples…. We’ll start using semicolons in the examples of the next chapters, so you can get a sense for where they belong.

If you really want to instill the good habit of ending your statements with a semicolon, you really ought to be consistent about it, instead of getting your readers into a bad habit in your first chapters and then trying to break it in your later ones.

A Scary Paragraph

Slate’s Daniel Gross on government bailouts of financial firms:

To be eligible for a bailout, firms must also demonstrate a particular genius for screwing up. Before it went bust, Bear Stearns had a monstrous $33 of debt for every dollar of capital, and hedge funds it owned destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of clients’ cash. It got a bailout. Lehman Brothers, which has taken painful measures to reduce its risk, is perversely less likely to get direct government help. “The worst Lehman can do is destroy the firm,” said Barry Ritholtz, CEO of Wall Street research firm FusionIQ and author of the forthcoming Bailout Nation. “Bear Stearns, on the other hand, set up the firm so that if they screwed up, they could threaten the entire financial system.” That may explain why Treasury Secretary Paulson has thus far resisted providing federal succor to Lehman.

In the mortgage relief debate, a lot of people are concerned about not wanting to reward people who recklessly borrowed more than they should have. But in the case of financial firms, that’s exactly what we’re doing. The moral hazard problem here is enormous. Financial firms will get the message that they’re better off growing ridiculously large and leveraging themselves to the hilt (like Bear Sterns) instead of being more conservative (like Lehman Brothers).

Javascript Quirk #1: Variable Scope

I may be the last web hacker in the world to get around to learning javascript, but it’s finally happening. And it’s aggravating at times; coming from the intuitive world of python, javascript’s rules seem arbitrary and capricious. The first one to bite me was variable scope.

var blerg = 1;  //this is a global variable
blarg = 2;  //this is a global variable
function myfunc() {
  var meep = 3; //this is a local variable
  mop = 4;  //this is a global variable.  wtf?!
}

A more complete demonstration of javascript’s scope rules can be found here.

Which Party is Better for Sane IP Law?

Who knows. Wired has a story about legislation pending in Congress that would empower the Justice Department to bring civil suits for infringement of intellectual property rights (the Department already has power to bring criminal suits, but rarely does so).

This just seems backwards. Copyright/patent/trademark holders already have the right to bring suit if they see their property being infringed. In other contexts, a private right of action like this is seen as a good way to enforce the law at minimal government expense. Rights-holders have a strong financial incentive to bring suit to defend their works, so the government can just sit back and let them bring suits, and the law will be enforced. (In passing some laws, Congress will expressly refuses to create a private right of action, out of fear that a law will be enforced too vigorously, but that’s the exact opposite of what’s going on with the law they’re currently considering.)

So in the case of IP laws, a private cause of action already exists, but some members of Congress are considering having the Justice Department take over some of that litigation. Huh? There are two huge problems with this:

1. Redundancy/Expense This is a project that the government just doesn’t need to get involved in. Justice Department attorneys have limited time. Adding this responsibility to their already long list would mean either hiring more lawyers or diverting attention from current priorities.
2. Over-Enforcement Though less obvious, the costs here are potentially greater. Under the current system, a copyright/patent/trademark holder can give the public a gift by deciding not to enforce his or her IP rights. Lots of things just aren’t worth litigating over, so lawsuits are never brought. This acts as an important check on the strength of intellectual property rights, and makes the rest of us richer in the process by letting us share and build on ideas that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to. The Justice Department, however, would not have the same natural constraint as a private rights-holder. It would bring suits that wouldn’t be worth the time and money to rights-holders who depend on the receipt of money damages to make the litigation worthwhile to them.

Who’s responsible for this? Here’s the list of the bill’s Senate sponsors:

• Patrick Leahy D-VT
• Arlen Specter R-PA
• Evan Bayh D-IN
• George Voinovich R-OH
• Dianne Feinstein D-CA
• John Cornyn R-TX

Hmmm. D, R, D, R, D, R. Three from each party. I guess Leahy (who I assume is the real sponsor), wanted to present this as a bipartisan issue, so he got three sponsors from each party to make it look balanced. That being said, I think that obtuseness over IP issues is shared between both parties. Utah’s Orrin Hatch (R), for example, is famously cozy with Hollywood. (I wonder why his name isn’t on this.)

It’s clear that this bill is a gift to the entertainment industry. I’m sure the RIAA would like nothing better than to get the Justice Department to take over the job of suing America’s file-sharers. Then the Justice Department, instead of the RIAA, could be the target of widespread resentment for suing grandmothers and college students. As nice as this law might be for Hollywood, though, it’s a bad idea for the rest of us.

Google, Please Do Legal Search Next

The New York Times reports that Google has started digitizing newspaper archives and making them searchable. They’ve been doing this with books for a few years already. Of course, in both those cases there’s the problem that Google’s digitizing means making an unauthorized copy of someone else’s copyrighted work. Google argues that their copying is limited enough to fall under the fair use doctrine (they don’t give you free access to copyrighted materials-just the particular pages that contain your search terms). I tend to side with Google on the fair use argument, but it makes me wonder why they haven’t taken on legal search. I have little doubt that Google could do as good a job at it as Lexis and Westlaw do now. And when you’re copying government-produced caselaw, there just aren’t the copyright concerns that pop up in other areas.

Counterproductive

Slashdot links to a story at InfoWorld about IT workers possibly forming a union, citing outsourcing as one of the problems that the union would address.

Psssst, guys. If you form a union that makes your employers pay you more and decrease your work hours, you are increasing the chance of your job being outsourced. InfoWorld cites the typical geek’s individualist streak as being the main obstacle to forming a union, but it seems to me that the outsourcing threat is the real limiting factor. IT is a competitive industry. If you raise the cost of your employer doing business in your hometown, eventually your employer will look elsewhere. The most easily unionized workers are those who don’t face competition because their jobs can’t be moved somewhere else (think government workers, the hospitality industry).