I could go to the library and start pulling, or go online and read lots of reviews, but I figure that the readership here may have some better suggestions of particularly nice books on these topics.
]]>The first issue they miss is that there’s a world of difference between citing Wikipedia as an authority on a matter of law, versus citing it to establish a fact. For legal questions, Wikipedia currently is always wrong; legal authority comes from certain kinds of sources—principally statutes, regulations, and case precedents—and Wikipedia simply has not the authority. It might someday become a respectable secondary source the way that law review articles and treatises can be, but it won’t displace the primary sources themselves.
Things are different on matters of fact. Here, Wikipedia is like any other source that makes claims about the world. It might be right, it might be wrong, and everything else is about assessing its reliability in context. There’s no point in having a categorical rule here; if Wikipedia really is the best source on a point, go ahead and cite to it. Sometimes (indeed often) it may not be the best source, but the reasons people use to argue that it isn’t are the wrong ones.
In evidence terms, for example, the problem can’t purely be one of reliability. As a practical matter, Wikipedia is often right, and seems to be becoming more so over time. It’s also often wrong, but so too are newspapers and other traditional sources. Ultimately this is an empirical question, and plenty of people who dismiss Wikipedia don’t back up their assertions of unreliability with actual evidence of it.
The problem also isn’t one of foundation. People like to point out that “anyone can edit” Wikipedia and that it comes with all sorts of grave disclaimers. They then smile confidently, as though this proved their case that Wikipedia can’t be trusted. But if we start to ask hard questions about the process by which a Wikipedia article is constructed, we should in fairness ask the same hard questions about newspaper articles, entries in other encyclopedias, legal treatises updated every year by students, government reports, and so on. Every document is open to epistemological and sociological inquiry; no document cited for the truth of the matters it asserts is free from all doubt. Wikipedia’s disclaimers simply show it being honest about some of the subjectivity and contingency that haunt all human knowledge-production.
No, the evidentiary reason not to cite Wikipedia is one that’s rarely mentioned: best evidence. There’s almost always a better source to cite. The “no original research” policy comes into play here; Wikipedia strives to present only information that can be found and confirmed elsewhere. Whatever that “elsewhere” is, one generally ought to find it and cite it. Wikipedia’s extensive citations and external references strive to make this process easier; Wikipedia is often the starting point of a good research session, but is rarely the end of one. A rule against citing Wikipedia typically forces writers into seeking out these better sources, and thus it serves the same function as the preference in evidence law for the original document over copies of it.
Of course, the true reason practitioners and students shouldn’t cite Wikipedia is much less noble. Older judges, professors, and lawyers who don’t understand Wikipedia, who subscribe to various fallacies about it, or who may not even have heard of it won’t look kindly on those who do cite it. When you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy, you play by the rules set by those above you, even if the reasoning behind them is shaky. Law is a conservative profession and part of our job as professors is to warn our students about this fact, and warn them well. So don’t cite Wikipedia, kids; you may be right, but they’ll still make fun of you.
]]>First, I don’t feel any significant voids in my media universe, even in those media people like to make fun of as wastelands. There’s more good music available to me than I’m able to listen to, more good books than I can read, more good movies than I can see, more good games than I can play, and so on. Note that this is true also of TV, even though I don’t watch any. From my perspective as a consumer, the system is not broken.
Second, I’m engaging in pretty extensive speculative intertemporal speculation in my music consumption. Prices for music have been dropping so rapidly that extrapolation suggests that it will become free or almost free within a decade. Faced with that fact, why buy music now? (And note that illegal downloading counts as buying at a randomly-set price that may be zero or may be quite high, and thus has non-zero expectation.) I buy some, but nowhere near as much as I would have a decade ago if I’d had full-time income then. I suspect I’m not alone, and this can’t be helping music sales. As with banks, the expectation that a copyright-based industry is on the brink of failure may be self-fulfilling.
]]>This article proposes a bright-line test, at least with respect to the taxation of cash method taxpayers, for distinguishing between these two types of worlds. Transactions in worlds whose currencies are redeemable or convertible, it argues, should be subject to current taxation under standard cash method timing rules, applied in-world. Transactions in worlds whose currencies are neither redeemable nor convertible, by contrast, should not be currently taxable.
I’m not fully convinced by Seto’s reinterpretation of the realization requirement, but his functional analysis of virtual property and his distinction between cash-method and accrual-method taxpayers are sharp and well-argued. This is both one of the better virtual worlds papers and one of the better tax papers I have read recently. The whole thing sparkles with cleverness.
]]>Thus, I argue, law can help people understand some the risks, and it can protect them from truly unfair surprises, but it can’t make social network sites completely safe from a privacy perspective, and it shouldn’t try. The only way to make Facebook perfectly private would be to unplug its servers and drop them in the Mariana Trench. People want to socialize, and legal policy doesn’t recognize that fact will merely divert them into socializing in even riskier ways.
Here’s the abstract:
]]>This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the law and policy of privacy on social network sites, using Facebook as its principal example. It explains how Facebook users socialize on the site, why they misunderstand the risks involved, and how their privacy suffers as a result. Facebook offers a socially compelling platform that also facilitates peer-to-peer privacy violations: users harming each others’ privacy interests. These two facts are inextricably linked; people use Facebook with the goal of sharing some information about themselves. Policymakers cannot make Facebook completely safe, but they can help people use it safely.
The Article makes this case by presenting a rich, factually grounded description of the social dynamics of privacy on Facebook. It then uses that description to evaluate a dozen possible policy interventions. Unhelpful interventions—such as mandatory data portability and bans on underage use—fail because they also fail to engage with key aspects of how and why people use social network sites. The potentially helpful interventions, on the other hand—such as a strengthened public-disclosure tort and a right to opt out completely—succeed because they do engage with these social dynamics.
In each case, the Democrats did it first, with someone unquestionably outstanding: Thurgood Marshall and Hillary Clinton (plus a little of Geraldine Ferraro, two decades before her time). The Republican response was to pick a hard-line conservative from the right demographic group, someone smart, ambitious, and who pales badly in comparison with the person who broke the glass ceiling for them. Their selection was driven by a crass and demeaning (but so far correct) calculation that being black or female would give them a substantial free pass from criticism on their records.
But at least—and here we should all be grateful—it makes the principle bipartisan. Minorities can serve on the Supreme Court; women can be president. It took the Republicans far too long, but they’ve now embraced these ideas with their deeds, as well as their words. Sarah Palin is not the woman who should be our first female President, but her selection—like Hillary’s much greater accomplishment before it—makes that road an easier one for the woman who should and will be.
]]>Those bangs and that grin have a strong Jeanine Pirro vibe.
Dan Quayle or James Stockdale?
An Alaskan Republican politican who hasn’t yet been indicted? I didn’t know there were any.
The Census estimates that there are 305 million Americans, which means there are 304,999,999 people more qualified to be President than Sarah Palin.
All of a sudden, I’m optimistic.
]]>Here’s the context. Under “Section 10(b),” the SEC has a mandate from Congress to beat up on companies that say false things—I believe “make material misstatements” is the term the kids these days are using—that affect their stock prices. Its recent policy document confirms its position that a company could run afoul of the SEC by linking to a third-party web site with false information on it. As the SEC explains, the key issue will often be whether the company “explicitly or implicitly endorsed or approved the information.” The document then gives several pages of guidance on when the SEC will consider a link to be an endorsement. The test is pretty much what you’d expect: is it a “reasonable inference” that the company is creating the link in order to signal approval of the contents of the site being linked to.
Eric claims this guidance is “exceptionalist,” by which he means it treats online media differently than offline. I disagree. In the first place, a hyperlink doesn’t correspond precisely to anything in the offline world, so of course the rule for hyperlinks can’t perfectly track the rule for offline media. Is it like a corporate officer handing a third-party document to a reporter? Like an officer telling members of the public to go look at a particular document?
The deeper problem with the exceptionalism argument here is that the SEC is actually trying to hew as closely as possible to its guidance for offline sources. It’s telling companies, don’t “approve” or “endorse” statements you’re not willing to stand behind, whether those statements are online or off. Since “approval” and “endorsement” are to be considered from the perspective of a reasonable observer, the hyperlink-specific parts of the guidance simply incorporate what the reasonable observer generally knows about hyperlinks. They point at things the creator thinks will be of interest; they can sometimes convey implicit messages; they don’t always do; context matters a lot; sometimes what you don’t link is as significant as what you do.
These aren’t “exceptionalist” analyses; indeed, it would be more exceptionalist if we ignored the social facts that reasonable observers know about hyperlinks. We don’t ignore the social facts that reasonable observers know about offline media (like magazine interviews, corporate reports, press releases, and conference calls
Thus, I’d be interested in hearing Eric’s take on what a “nonexceptionalist” analysis of Section 10(b) hyperlink liability would look like. I doubt there can be any such animal.
]]>The other thing I’m curious about—and this isn’t Comcast-mockery, this is genuine curiosity—is why they don’t put a line on everyone’s bill saying what their usage was in the last month. People well under 250GB wouldn’t have to live in fear of that phone call from the Network Police. People using more would have some warning; they could actually, you know, moderate their usage in advance. How about it, Comcast?
]]>The larger question is how one justifies spending money on security. I often liken it to life insurance: all of the money I paid for it last year was wasted, since I didn’t die even once.
—Steven Bellovin, on Dave Farber’s Interesting People list
]]>But we’ll cross that bridge when we drive the frightened horses across it. With their covered wagons behind them on fire. And the devil, scrawny and crazed, riding behind them on an Italian greyhound.
And oh, yeah, new EP soon, available for free download on the Radiohead model.
]]>In this way, Rogers and his investigation team learned that the stolen goods were entering a highly organized distribution chain that often began with the hundreds of flea markets that had sprung up among the suburban sprawl of cities across the country. Crooked flea-maret venders would buy stolen goods from boosters, then put a few samples out on their tables—“as a marketing ploy,” Rogers says. “Because the next-level-up buyer, a ‘middle buyer’—often ex-cons who had discovered this great opportunity—made a habit of going to flea markets looking for product. When he saw Tylenol on a vender’s tabletop, he’d say, ‘Can you get me more Tylenol in fifty-count gelcaps?’” The vender, if he did not have the item in stock, would tell his boosters what to go and steal. “We’d catch boosters with lists of stuff to steal all the time,” Rogers says.
And note the choice of firm boundaries:
Typically, the middle buyers would sell the products to a “cleaning house”—in most cases, a three-to-five-thousand-square-foot warehouse staffed with undocumented workers who job was to remove price stickers, E.A.S. tags, and identifying store labels. … The cleaned products were shrink-wrapped and put in master cartons to look as if they had been bought from the manufacturer, then sold to corrupt wholesalers who would commingle the stolen goods with legitimately purchased products and sell them back to retailers—often to the same store from which they had been stolen.
The source Jon Colapinto’s “Stop, Thief!”, in the September 1, 2008 issue of the New Yorker. Did you know that Target has a crime lab? (Aislinn: “You’ll know that CSI has completely run out of ideas when they add CSI:Target.”) Or that some shoplifters now carry Tasers? Sadly, I can’t give the article an unqualified endorsement. It begins promisingly—“On a recent morning, a dapper man in his fifties with a narrow mustache, dressed in a black Armani suit, strolled past the cosmetics counter on the main floor of a midtown Manhattan department store.”—only to reveal that this dapper fellow is in fact the store cop. The shoplifters are more fun.
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