I’m a big fan of Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Henry Jenkin’s blog. He’s begun an incredible series of posts analyzing how comic books have dealt with war and conflict in the past and how comic books are dealing with 9/11 and current events.
Some of you might know that I’m a big Green Lantern fan. I’ve fallen behind over the summer, but the DC Universe is really coming to grips with the ethical issues when super powers set themselves up as supra-national police. With the Green Latern Corp, we have a group of extremely powerful agents enforcing the policy agenda of an immortal and alien race on a galactic scale. In sci-fi, galactic scale civilizations seem to be either a) totally alien and disconnected from “human” scale events, i.e. another plane of existance; b) bound by a moral code of non-interference, like the prime directive; c) galactic super-police, or, of course, d) hegemonic empires.
In sci-fi, though, it’s usually clear whether the civilization is a C or a D. I think comic books are struggling now with the realization that reasonable people can disagree on the boundary between the two.
Technorati Tags: comics, 9-11, superhero, culture
Posted by M as Interesting Link at 1:23 PM EDT
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Professor Volokh has publicized Lawtopic.com and asked people to blog about it and spread info around the law student community. It’s a pretty interesting idea. Professors and other legal scholars contribute ideas for legal essays that might be appropriate for students. In theory, people will post interesting and novel topics.
It’s a place I think I’ll be looking at more as I try to come up with a topic for the NYU Law A paper.
Posted by M as Interesting Link, Law school, Information Law at 10:05 PM EDT
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I ran across a rather strange ruling out of the United States Court of Appeals today. McCready v. eBay at first seems just kind of funny. An accused eBay crook, McCready, has filed multiple lawsuits against eBay and third parties in an apparent attempt to either win back his good name from slanderous feedbacks on eBay or further disgrace himself with frivolous, and potentially sanctionable, “abuse of process”.
The Court really lays onto Mr. McCready, and from what they describe, he might even have earned it. The court, however, treats McCready’s claims against eBay under the Fair Credit Reporting Act somewhat flippantly.
The FCRA protect consumers from agencies that “regularly engage[] in … the practice of assembling or evaluating consumer credit information or other information on consumers for the purposes of furnishing consumer reports to third parties” 15 U.S.C. 1681(a)(f). McCready claimed that the eBay Feedback Forum was a “consumer report” for the purposes of the act.
This doesn’t seem crazy to me. Mob judgemental behavior on the Internet is getting out of hand. Cellphone pictures of a subway pervert start off reasonably, hounding someone who stole your cellphone seems amusing, but flash mobs in China can attack and harass adultering men and women. As we start to place substantial value in peer generated social status quantified on the Internet, we’re going to need protections.
The court rejected Mr. McCready’s FCRA theory by ruling that the eBay feedback was not a “consumer report,” but their ruling has an odd twist. The court found that a consumer, under the FCRA “must, at minimum, be an identifiable person.” Since the eBay forum uses “users’ self-anointed ‘usernames’” the court found that the users were anonymous outside of eBay and thus not consumers under the Act.
This can’t make any sense. The identity that links a consumer report with a credit agency is an arbitrary set of strings, such as SSN and DOB. Granted, they’re globally identifying in a way that an eBay ID, in theory, is not. But simply because an identity is fractured into multiple spaces, each with a different recognition mechanism, shouldn’t imply that the same reputation values aren’t carried into each space.
Bad cases make bad law, they say. Hopefully courts will look into online rating systems somewhat more carefully when more legitimate claims arise.
Anyone seen any other cases like this?
Posted by M as Internet Policy, Identity, Recent Decisions, Information Law at 8:15 PM EDT
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Don’t drop your laptop.
I suppose that ought to be obvious. I used to be jealous of those people with laptops that had shock sensors because they could play games, pretend to have a lightsaber, and all sorts of gadgetry with their accelerometer equipped laptop.
Now I’m jealous of those people because their laptops probably would have faired better. The good news is that only the hard drive was damaged, and not even fatally. The bad news is that I do need replace it and my laptop isn’t really designed to have a replaceable hard drive.
I used to work as a computer support guy in my college dorm, but I always refused to take a laptop apart. I was never quite sure that I could put it back together. I’ve built desktops and servers many times, but they’re not the expensive puzzlebox of a smal laptop.
And I have nothing but good things to say about GNU ddrescue. It’s not for many mortals, but you should definitely recommend it to your friendly neighboorhood CS geek if you have serious hard drive problems.
Posted by M as Deep thoughts, Computers at 9:48 AM EDT
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I’ve been quiet recently on the blog, as I attempt to finish up a couple of projects in my summer internship. It’s almost over, but before I return to law school I have a vacation to look forward to.
My girlfriend and I are travelling out to see the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone for 10 days. Any advice or recommendations for us?
Posted by M as Uncategorized at 8:13 PM EDT
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As I get ready for job interviews this fall, I took some time yesterday to google for my name. It’s always interesting to see what comes up, but this time I wanted to make sure that I knew what my prospective employers would see. Thankfully, I’m as boring as ever, always confused for my father, whose name I partially share.
It makes me wonder if people have started considering the “googability” of their childrens’ names. A John Smith would be virtually anonymous to employers doing unofficial background checks. On the other hand, Fraenk Unyque would be pretty high profile. Parents probably always balance uniqueness against convention already, but maybe Google has some impact on their choices.
Posted by M as Uncategorized, Deep thoughts, Google at 12:15 PM EDT
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I’ll be more serious later, but I had to share today’s Sheldon.
I now know that what to call the feeling when you’ve been literatured.
Posted by M as Rambling, Funny Link at 11:01 AM EDT
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Ed Felten has posted a really great technical overview on the Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. The paper isn’t long, so hopefully lots of non-technical people will read it. The connection between technical router policy and larger network neutrality policy is very valuable.
I’m unclear on one point, though. Prof. Felten argues that the importance of quality of service guarantees, often a retort to proposals for network neutrality mandates, can be overemphasized. He suggests that QoS is inapplicable when the speed needed by the application is either greater than, or significantly less than, the speed of the network. Speed, in this context, seems to be both latency and bandwidth. Prof. Felten suggests that voice applications don’t really need QoS, because the speed of the network is great enough in comparison that the “valleys” of speed are never too severe.
The reality, though, is that we’ve never had an Internet with end-to-end QoS guarantees. While voice might not need QoS, other high-bandwidth interactive services might benefit highly from regularized speed. This kind intelligence just seems to make sense to further additional innovation.
Prof. Felten concludes that we need more time to determine what regulation would be appropriate. I think that’s right. The bills we’ve seen ignore the subtle technical points that he covers in today’s paper.
Posted by M as Net Neutrality, Interesting Link at 2:34 PM EDT
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I see that Public Knowledge is blogging about moral rights and the CleanFlicks decision today. Tim Schneider asked in a question to my first post on this whether stricter European copyright laws are justified out of moral rights. I’m not sure if that’s historically true, but a system that derives copyright from some moral or intrinsic right of the creator is bound to be far stricter than one that derives copyright as a type of monopoly subsidy in support of a social policy.
The language of copyright issues in the U.S. today sounds more like the a moral rights approach than the laws read. When politicians and content producers talk about Infringement as theft, they’ve transformed copyright infringement into a kind of malum in se, rather than a kind of malum prohibitum.
Thoughts?
Posted by M as Interesting Link, Copyright, Fair Use at 1:55 PM EDT
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Wow, this (via Volokh comment) didn’t take long. Now we can all simulate what it’s like to throw a career away in front of a billion people. Live video remixed into a strange game.
I might be a bad person, but when I saw this Sunday, I couldn’t help feeling that using his head to hit him was a perverse commitment to the game.
Posted by M as Rambling, Funny Link at 8:25 PM EDT
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