LuminousVoid

Its finals time. And starting something like this would have been helpful a few weeks ago. I swear I’m gonna get to it this summer .

It’s based on the paradoxical notion that anarchists have to be more organized than average if they don’t want to depend on power structures, and presents some ideas on how to kick the boss habit.

Time Management for Anarchists: The Movie. A short flash movie about the importance, and howto of keeping yourself organized. Other people are willing to do that for you, but the problem is you end up doing what they want you to, not what you want to.

Not a very novel concept to a law student. via BoingBoing.

Is this a joke or was someone serious about this:

Clever Phone Booth Repurposing

I think in my next computer purchase, I'’m going to go with a Macintosh.

The main thing that does it for me is the OS X. I’ve been a PC guy forever, and for the five years before law school have lived exclusively in Linux/Unix. I worked all day long in Unix, I came home and used Linux on my PC’s. Sometimes I’d boot into windows for gaming, but that was about it.

Then I came to law school. And I needed to start using XP and a laptop. Which linux didn’t handle too well: the hibernation was kind of funky. I haven’t found anyone who can get my machine (Thinkpad X31 — fabulous!) to hot-dock properly under Linux. The worst was when I hibernated in windows, and then woke in linux. This would completely screw up any files that had been left open in windows and worked on in linux. Very bad.

I miss that strong Unix shell. I miss being able to list a directory, pipe that output into text, or write up a quick script to automate some task. I can’t think of how many times I’ve wanted to be able to grep through a bunch of output. I miss the diagnostics I can do with ps, top, and kill. I’m sure windows can do these things, I’ve put emacs and perl on my machine. But its not the same.

But with OSX, it IS the same. OSX is built on top of a Unix. They’ve even got their own version of the coolest unix feature around: the FreeBSD ports system, renamed DarwinPorts. With ports you can install and upgrade about 2000 pieces of open source software.

But I’ve still got some apprehensions. Which is why I’m going to start investigating the situation. Is the Unix seamlessly entwined with the GUI? Can I really work around in Unix and expect the GUI to still work? Will X11 based applications work along with the Mac GUI? Will Mac people even know what I’m talking about when I ask about the Unix stuff? or will I look like a freak?

Will I have to buy new software? I currently use OpenOffice, which does a pretty decent job of interfacing with MS Office, but sometimes does act screwy. I’d hate to have to buy MS office, but probably will have to someday. It looks like the Mac OpenOffice is brand new, which might not be a good sign.

I don’t plan on buying a desktop anytime soon, and my current laptop still has a good couple of years left on it, so its not going to be soon. But its looking like it will happen. Maybe by then they’ll have two buttons.

So posting has been light as the semester finishes. Ambivalent Imbroglio was asking what was up with the blogging so I figured I’d update the world.

I just handed in my note for the AIPLA Quarterly Journal. Its a look at a debate that Easterbrook and Lessig had about the role of cyberlaw. I look at the debate and apply its lessons to give some policy issues in how to handle the Grokster case. Not too polished, but I don’t think the Grokster decision will really solve the problem of contributory liability. It was a bit of a selfish pick of a topic: I educated myself in contributory infringement and its issues while writing a limited paper on it, so I could be in a position to write up more when the decision came out.

I’ve got to write about 30 pages for Multinational IP. I’m writing about our treaty commitments in Berne, and TRIPS, and the limits these place on the solutions to the orphan works problem. Orphan works are copyrighted works where the copyright owner is impossible or difficult to find. The problem is that no-one can use those works, even if you are willing to pay for it. This makes all sorts of compilations and derivative works risky.

I took a class in “Art of Lawyering” that was corequisite with my internship. Now I have to write a 10-15 page paper for it. A while ago, I wrote a short memo to myself about how our schools new schedule was a socialization of cost and a privatization of benefit. Basically we increased class time and the amount of work in a week and shortened the number of weeks in the term. We did this so that the people in the fall interview program didn’t have to miss class with their 15 or so interviews in a week. We all pay the price so those few can go to 15 interviews for the 1 job they will eventually get. I think I’m gonna formalize that rant in a 10-15 page paper.

I have exams in Privacy and Trademarks. Privacy has been a wonderful class. We have touched on wide areas of the law: media, consumer protection, employment and criminal procedure. I highly recommend you take an informational privacy class in your school. Its going to be a growth industry for corporate compliance practicioners. I just hope we get some nice class action torts out of any anti-Choicepoint legislation that gets written. I doubt that would pass this congress though.

Trademarks has also been really neat. There aren’t too many concepts in it, and my professor was great. Funny guy who was very witty in his analysis. There’s an amazing amount of trademarks that’s unsettled. Specially in the whole idea of diluton, which to me sounds like a crock and a giveway to people with big advertising budgets: in short, we protect people with unique marks not because we want to prevent consumer confusion (the traditional source of trademark infrigement) but because, well we ought to protect the power of marks. The main problem is the exam is going to be closed book. Thats just not me.

I just realized both classes I took this term had texts written by the profs who taught the class. Wow. That’s got to be part of the reason the term was so interesting.