In the wake of Hurricane Faye there was this post at the Volokh Conspiracy criticizing Florida's anti-gouging law. With Gustav bearing down on our shores it may remain timely, particularly because it's the underlying thesis I wish to take issue with.
In the post Ilya Somin praised the "wisdom" of Glen Whitman in writing that anti-price gouging law may have the opposite effect to that intended. But I find myself questioning their assumptions.
I have been a Yankee fan ever since I discovered baseball. Babe Ruth? Mickey Mantle? I wanted to root for THAT team. Even when I turned nine, and came to realize that they were no longer on the current roster, I stayed hooked. Even through the team's persistent mediocrity of the 1980s, I was steadfast. Despite family apathy (e.g, "What do you want for your birthday?" "I wanna go to a Yankee game!" "What ELSE do you want for your birthday?"), despite spending so many years living in the American League West, despite the challenge of Boston, where my Red Sox fan classmates routinely harassed me for my baseball affections, I've stuck with my team.
And yet my loyalty has never been as undermined as it was this past June, when I made a pilgrimage to the venerable old Yankee Stadium to see my last game there -- and was so disgusted by how the team treated its fans as to refuse to return unless and until things change.
Having a few days off I decided to make a 24-hour escape to the hills to enjoy Lake Tahoe. Everyone should see Lake Tahoe at least once in their lives, this mammoth sun-bathed lake rimmed by Sierra peaks. Fed by melted mountain snows, this glacially-fed reservoir in the crater of an ancient volcano is known for its particularly clear waters.
Such a gorgeous locale could hardly escape human notice, and patches of civilization line its shores. Of course, with civilization comes pollution, and Tahoe's clear waters are in danger of losing their amazing clarity as a result of the nearby development. Consequently for a number of years there's been a movement, as expressed by a lot of bumperstickers, to "Keep Tahoe Blue."
Development-wise what's done is done, however, and the human dimension of the Tahoe environment is interesting to see for its own sake, particularly in the area of South Lake Tahoe. It's a unique place, with clusters of 1950s kitschy motels on the eastern edge of California's lake shore and high-rise hotel casinos shooting up just on the Nevada side. Still, Stateline, NV is hardly Vegas, or even Reno, and the surrounding mountains appropriately dwarf it all.
I had a nice day out, swimming in the lake during the afternoon and visiting the casinos in the evening. Being a Thursday, there was even a deal on a buffet, and I decided to treat myself to a meal that turned out to be both tasty and sickening, all at the same time. For this was a meal that turned out to be a crucible for so many things wrong about how America treats the environment.
Last Wednesday I attended "State of the Net West" at the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. I'm always running off to Internet law symposia and such whenever I can, but this one was different than others in that it included Congressional representatives. That kind of thing may be normal for DC-based events, but it's a rare occurrence in places like the Bay Area. Most of the events I've gone to have various experts wringing their hands over law and policy, but here we had people who helped make it in the first place.
As is typical at these events there were panels on Internet copyright, but there was also another topic of growing popularity: Internet reputation. The confluence of social networking sites and search engines has increasingly resulted in instances of damaged personal reputations, sometimes through the imprudence of their own holders but often through defamatory conduct by others. All this raises the question of how the law bears on this problem, or how it should, as any efforts to clamp down on the collateral problems endemic to Internet communication such as these will also necessarily result in clamping down on the freedom to communicate entirely.
In fact that's what all Internet law boils down to, the question of how to achieve regulation without strangulation, to minimize the problems without minimizing the potential.
It's a tricky endeavor and one that regulators often get extremely wrong. Sometimes they get it wrong by tying the regulatory language too closely to whatever specific technology is state of the art at the time of the drafting. One example of such unfortunate drafting is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 update to the Wiretap Act that was supposed to expand the latter to apply to all the new-fangled electronic communication technologies emerging around that time, technologies hardly even imagined way back in 1968 when the original Wiretap Act was drafted. But while ECPA's statutory language may have made perfect sense for mid-80s technology, it makes no sense when applied to the modern Internet, itself a technology hardly imagined twenty years ago.
But sometimes it's just the very idea that regulation is required that causes the problems. When we look at some of the revolutionary Internet tools that didn't exist even just a few years ago (e.g., search engines, YouTube, blogs) we need to recognize that the reason they are able to exist at all today is they were free to develop. So even if we were to temper any new regulation in such a way that these incumbent technologies could continue unfettered, by introducing regulation at all we might still inadvertently foreclose the next big idea. Just as the ones we have today were able to grow from a glimmer in an innovator's eye to the world-changing tools we now know them to be, we must allow future ideas to be able to grow freely as well. Consequently, no matter how onerous the problem regulation is intended to solve, it needs to be recognized that imposing it may likely cause bigger ones.
As a Huey Lewis and the News fan, I had to go see this movie, seeing how they were commissioned to write the theme song, their first released new song in the better part of a decade.
Meanwhile the IP lawyer in me finds the story of how they came to do it amusing: Apparently the movie's producers saw a Ghostbusters van and got to thinking how nice it would be to have had a theme song like that movie had.
But then they remembered, "Wait, didn't Huey Lewis sue over that song?"
Which naturally led into the next thought, "Why don't we ask Huey Lewis to write us a theme song?" So they did, he agreed, and the rest is history.
Interestingly Huey Lewis and the News didn't actually prevail in their copyright suit against Ray Parker Jr. for infringing on their "I Want a New Drug" song. Instead there was a confidential settlement. But there may be an important lesson here, that even if you don't win your infringement lawsuit there may still be a payoff. Or at least an opportunity to write more songs about drugs...
I recently caught the touring production of the musical, The Drowsy Chaperone, when it came through San Francisco. Overall my feelings towards it are positive, but like the also-recently-seen movie Mamma Mia I was left with the sense that, good as it was, it could have been better.
Post largely rewritten after seeing it again 8/9.
Friend: You're going to see Mamma Mia? My mother loves Mamma Mia!
Me: No, MY mother loves Mamma Mia...
You'd never know it by looking at her, of course, but she has seen the play in nearly every jurisdiction where it's been performed (e.g., London, New York, California, Hamburg...). I myself have seen it in each of the first three locations at least once. Unless you absolutely hate ABBA, it's always good for a toe-tapping good time. The play cleverly weaves together many of the most famous ABBA songs along with plenty of humor and female-empowering themes.
So we decided to go catch a matinee of the movie on its opening day. I felt some trepidation going into it: a movie is a very different dramatic medium than a play. Would it still work? Or were its enjoyable qualities dependent on it being a piece of live theater?
On retrospect I think this anxiety clouded my initial take on the movie. It definitely seemed different, and I equated those differences with deficiencies. But seeing it the second time, with a better idea what to expect, allowed me to better appreciate it.
I have a Google alert set up to let me know when my name appears in the news or on someone's blog. It doesn't go off all that often (I'm not that newsworthy), but it can be helpful to let me know when someone has linked to my blog.
Occasionally though I get alerts for the wrong Catherine Gellis. It's not a particularly common name, but it's not unique either. Vanity googling earlier revealed that there's another in Virginia, and one in New England. Or at least there was. Today's Google alerts were for news that the latter has just died of cancer, and at just 33 (I'm 34).
So I write in part to stave off any confusion by any other googlers. We had the same name, had relatives with the same names, used to live in the same area and were close to the same age. I've been confused with the other Catherine Gellis before, and could easily again be with this one.
I also wish to express my condolences for her untimely death. She wasn't someone I knew, and I don't think we were related, but somehow by virtue of sharing the name I still felt somehow connected to her. Few people get to go through life with the privilege of being named Catherine Gellis, but she was one of them. From all accounts she seemed like a decent person and loved by many, as all Catherine Gellises should be.
Last week I was in New Jersey fulfilling a few more of its unconstitutional CLE requirements. I've objected before to how onerous these requirements are for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that they require attorneys to physically be in the state to fulfill them. This requirement poses an undue burden on out-of-state residents, who must travel great and expensive distances to get to those classes, and thus runs afoul of the US Constitution, which prohibits such discrimination against them.
I had not realized until a few weeks ago though that it is apparently possible to schedule an appointment to watch video replays of the CLE lectures on dates other than when they are formally presented. They still cost twice as much to view than the live lectures (again discriminating against out-of-state residents who are necessarily unable to fly in and out for the more affordable yet randomly-scheduled in-person versions) and are still not given on all dates, but it's something, I suppose.
So on this occasion I watched two videos to satisfy the third year requirements. (Inconveniently I must still do the second year's sometime in the next six months lest I become ineligible to practice anyway, but I was unable to schedule their viewing during the date I could be in New Jersey.) The courses were "Municipal Courts" and "Landlord/Tenant Law."
A few weeks ago on our houseboat we had another "Family Night." I made pancakes in deference to the one's vegetarianism, inadvertently forgetting about another one's gluten intolerance. Oops. I remember another gluten-intolerant friend once telling me that he recognized his intolerance one night after he'd eaten a huge bowl of pasta and ended up in a homicidal mood for no good reason. Brilliant. Just the kind of mood you want to risk putting your roommates in...
Yesterday we celebrated America's birthday, today we celebrate Huey Lewis's. But even Huey himself was on hand to celebrate America's yesterday when he and the News performed in DC at "A Capitol Fourth," the annual shindig on the lawn of the Capitol.
As a fan it's nice to see HLN get the kind of exposure and respect such an invitation affords, and it was also nice as a fan to have the performance so helpfully beamed to me by PBS. But having previously endured these DC affairs before, I'm acutely aware how awful they are to attend.
For one thing, it is at best bitterly ironic (to say nothing of unconstitutional) that people must surrender their Fourth Amendment rights in order to attend these celebrations of "freedom." When I attended in 2004 I was appalled to discover I was not able to enter this public event in a public park without "voluntarily" submitting to invasive searches of my person and possessions. On that occasion, while I waited in the entrance line like a lamb to slaughter, I heard Clay Aiken belt out how proud he was to be an American, "Where at least I know I'm free." I suppose he was able to maintain that illusion because as a performer he likely wasn't forced to undergo these invasions of his privacy. But as one of the teeming masses, I was much less sure.
The other problem with these events is that they're really designed for the television audience -- a completely banal, milquetoasty television audience. Consequently they suffer as a live event, which is a shame for a band like HLN, which is such a consummate live band (even Jimmy Smits in his corny introduction acknowledged them as such). It also always drives me up the wall as someone so familiar and appreciative of their work that they are so often regarded as a banal, milquetoasty band. But maybe that's changing...
See, the other bit of Huey Lewis news is that they have a new song, released this week on MySpace, the first studio effort since 2001. Seth Rogan asked them to do the title song to his new movie, Pineapple Express. I'd worried about what the lyrics would be like given that constraint, but it turns out they're eminently serviceable and much better than I feared (on par with "Back in Time," itself a title song from 1985's Back to the Future, which still has legs today). The real story though is the music, and for those who've not heard HLN for a while I recommend it as a snapshot of their current sound. It's the same energy-driven musical layering they've been doing since well before the Sports era, but now with a built-in horn section and increased R&B flavor. I can say nothing about the movie, but I can definitely vouch for the song.
Of course, I'm obviously biased, but you don't need to take my word for it -- even the Wall Street Journal thinks so.
In fact, listening to it closely now I think it's more the pity they didn't do this song last night in Washington. But then, that's the kind of rebel I am...
A few months ago I saw Jonathan Zittrain give a talk about his now-released new book, The Future of the Internet -- and How to Stop It. One of the premises of his talk was that the Internet is becoming exceptionally balkanized, with little corporate fiefdoms springing up to intermediate the Internet user's experience. He drew analogies to the heady days of the mid-1990s, when personal computer networking was just starting to become mainstream. In those days, people would subscribe to services like CompuServe or AOL (now the same entity, but separate back then) and their entire online existences would take place within those company-defined worlds.
I remember a joke I heard back then (which unfortunately I don't know whom to attribute it to) that went, "The people who think America Online is the Internet are the same people who think Taco Bell is fine Mexican cuisine." The point of the joke was that there were all these people who interacted online within the narrow spaces provided by their services, thinking they were accessing the entire world, when in reality they were experiencing just a tiny sliver of the online universe.
I had high hopes for last night. Some friends of mine had met at a Giants Singles Night in a previous season, and since I've decided that it's time to think about settling down with someone in whose confidence I can be assured evidentiary privilege, I thought it would be a good idea to go.
I was wrong. It was an enormous waste of time and money. Except for an increasingly exasperated DJ there was no organization, no sense of place or occasion for these scattered and sparse mingling singles -- just a limply cordoned area and a coupon for a free drink out on the centerfield plaza. Men were in short supply, as was maturity generally. It immediately became apparent that any man who might actually be my type had demonstrated it by wisely not attending.
I haven't yet written about the current presidential race, which is both good and bad. I'm always wary of writing posts on common topics, fearing my own addition will amount to little more than, "Me, too." But at the same time it's still worth the exercise to distill some sort of insight from all the noise, and it might have been nice to have had a record of my opinions as they developed over time. Particularly how they changed and evolved with respect to the candidacies of Clinton and Obama.
Kevin Underhill has a great blog, Lowering the Bar, that chronicles in a particularly witty fashion some of the absurdities that abound the legal world. I first thought of him and his blog when I encountered the headline on England's The Guardian website, "Banger to rights: sausage exonerates woman."
Because what could be sillier than a sausage?
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