He is known to follow a vegan diet, eating no meat or food containing animal products. In the past, he has worked as a computer network specialist and with the operating system LINUX. [He] wears eyeglasses, is skilled at sailing, and has traveled internationally.
“He” is FBI most-wanted criminal Daniel Andreas San Diego. My thought on reading that was, “sounds like half of the Bard kids I know. Crazy how people with similar interests to people you like can be totally nuts.”
In this way I am different from Erik Marcus, who runs Vegan.com, as he seems to have had a related but much less reasonable reaction: he sounds like people I like, so surely he’s not that bad, right?
Light fisking after the jump.
(more…)
Remember my three AM visit from the Irvine Police Department? Apparently they get even friendlier by four AM.
A discussion in my Torts class this week brought back, in a roundabout way, to the work I was doing in my Agency course last Spring. Our final topic in Torts is product liability, and our professor asked us to consider how the duty to warn and plaintiff’s conduct principles would apply in a wrongful death action over injuries resulting from cigarette smoke. Obviously, cigarettes come in packaging with a warning to protect against just this sort of suit, but the interesting problem raised by cigarettes in particular is their addictive properties. Let’s say our hypothetical smoker started when there were no warnings, developed cancer over years of smoking, and eventually died from it. Should we let the cigarette companies because they continued to smoke in spite of the warnings? Two types of case come to mind:
Philosopher of Law Ronald Dworkin has a very nice short piece in the NYRB about the Danish cartoon debacle, The Right to Ridicule. It basically recaps about all the things smart people have said about this episode, but in a concise manner. For example, he leads off by noting that “Reprinting would very likely have meant—and could still mean—more people killed and more property destroyed.” But he goes on to consider the risk that this “will be wrongly taken as an endorsement of the widely held opinion that freedom of speech has limits, that it must be balanced against the virtues of ‘multiculturalism,’” and hails free speech as necessary for a democracy. If (like me) you were dismayed by this whole affair but remained unclear on what to think about it, Dworkin offers clear and forceful arguments for distinguishing why the international printing of the cartoons in solidarity was ridiculous, from why their printing should be defended in principle.
If you were on any Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains or in any stations recently (which I certainly wasn’t), you might have noticed some ads from a rather provocative campaign (via FindLaw):
The ads criticize Roe v. Wade and ask: “Abortion: Have we gone too far?” They also contain specific anti-abortion arguments, such as this one: “The Supreme Court says you can choose: after the heart starts beating, after its arms and legs appear, after all organs are present, after the sex is apparent, after it sucks its thumb, after it responds to sounds, after it could survive outside the womb.”
Everyone will by now have seen the headlines proclaiming that Bush Chooses Roberts for Court, so I won’t waste time acting like I’m telling you anything new. WaPo also has this nice little bio piece which gives you some background on the man who will most likely take over for O’Connor.
I just don’t feel right dedicating an hour to crafting something interesting.
I can, however, bring you links.
A man in Weare, New Hampshire is seeking to use the precedent set by Kelo vs. City of New London to acquire land to for a development project called “The Lost Liberty Hotel”. His claim is that his hotel will bring in tourists and tax revenue, which will benefit the town more than the building currently on the property: Justice Souter’s home.
The hotel “will feature the ‘Just Desserts Café’ and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America.” However, the best part is that “Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel ‘Atlas Shrugged.’” (via Obsidian Wings)
I’m working from home today, which means that I’m susceptible to diversion. I was doing well, until Ed Felten brought me a bunch of Grokster links. Dr. Felten is worried, others believe the court simply punted back to the lower courts, and industry lawyers love it.
The Christian Science Monitor doesn’t seem to get it:
The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2001 that Napster could be held partly liable for copyright violations by those using its file-sharing program. The court ruled that Napster officials could have policed the illegal downloading activities through the company’s centralized servers, but instead ignored the lawbreaking.To bypass such legal liability, Grokster and StreamCast decentralized their servers, making it impossible for them to monitor how their file-sharing programs were being used.
Right. Not because maintaining central servers is needlessly slow and expensive, but because they’re sneaky.
Forbes.com has a more encouraging take:
Why not compete with free download services on their own turf? Companies such as Apple Computer, RealNetworks, Napster and others are making a go of selling music online legally. They have a long, long way to before they even come close to the number of pirated downloads, but the early results are encouraging.Make the media companies compete, and they’ll find a way to innovate on their own. Give them an excuse to start suing entrepreneurs with new ideas, and they’ll just become more complacent than they already are.
Leave it up to competition? That makes way too much sense.
I haven’t read the decision yet (I need to get back to work!), and I don’t know a lot about the law, but it seems to me that all is not lost for Grokster. My understanding is that this means there will be a trial in the Ninth Circuit, where Grokster will have a chance to show that they did not engage in inducement.
Meanwhile, there was also another relatively important technology decision today.
I’m sure many of you have already heard that the today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of appropriating private property for private development. For anyone unfamiliar with the idea of eminent domain, it is a long established policy to seize private property when there is a direct public need (roads and schools are the typical examples). Apparently, lower courts who heard this case mostly held that appropriation just for (private) economic development is only justified when the property being seized is blighted. But the New London residents in question were fighting this action because the neighborhood “includes Victorian-era houses and small businesses that in some instances have been owned by several generations of families”, all of which will now be replaced by “a riverfront hotel, health club and offices.”
This decision is rather unsettling to me, mostly because I’m torn by several different legal intuitions. For one thing, I’ve driven through New London, and it is certainly an area that could use a major revitalization effort, even if the neighborhood in question is itself not part of the problem (although I really wouldn’t know either way). I’m also not crazy about championing the cause of property rights, especially at the cost of the economic health of a city. In that respect, clearly John Paul Stevens (as well as Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, who constitute the majority in this decision) agrees with me:
”The city has carefully formulated an economic development that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including — but by no means limited to — new jobs and increased tax revenue,” Stevens wrote … ”[i]t is not for the courts to oversee the choice of the boundary line nor to sit in review on the size of a particular project area,” he said.
Fine. But I can’t help shaking the feeling that this is a terrible precedent, and that instances of exploiting this ruling by developers will far outnumer cases of positive development projects. Justice O’Connor is with me on this one:
”Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random,” O’Connor wrote. ”The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”
Preach it like it is, sister. And yet, something about agreeing with a decision on which Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas all joined just doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe it’s simply that the case here is private ownership of land vs. private development of that land, and that Stevens et al. simply believe that when the community stands to benefit (or at least, the local government has determined that it does), the law is on their side. In any case, I haven’t yet read the
decisions, but I do intend to, and I hope anyone else who is interested will do the same.