Turow, along with Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken and Authors Guild board member (and apparent Shakespeare expert) James Shapiro, have an op-ed piece in the NY Times that a whole bunch of you have been sending in, in which they assert that Shakespeare might not have been able to survive the web era, because of all of this “piracy.” The argument is quite a bit stretched, but see if you can follow me: because playwrights had physical scarcity, in that they could keep people out of the playhouses unless people paid to enter, it allowed playwrighting to flourish. They call this a “cultural paywall.” Then there’s some sort of bizarre leap about how copyright is really the same thing. It’s not. And, then it leaps to something about how stricter copyright laws are, ipso facto, better. The evidence for this? Shhhh, don’t bother the Authors Guild bosses with logic! And, of course, the inevitable punchline is the idea that Shakespeare wouldn’t have survived in this online era with all this piracy and stuff.
Of course, it’s difficult to think of a worse example than Shakespeare for this argument (and sort of bizarre that Shapiro would sign off on an op-ed that so thoroughly misrepresents Shakespeare). Of course, as most of you know, an awful lot of Shakespeare’s works are copies (sometimes directly) of earlier works. Sometimes they’re derivative, but other times, he copied wholesale from others. So the bigger question might not be if Shakespeare could survive all the file sharing going on today, but whether or not he’d be able to produce any of his classic works, since they’d all be tied up in lawsuits over copyright infringement.
Mike Masnick, “Would Shakespeare Have Survived Today’s Copyright Laws?”, Techdirt, 2011-02-18
February 19, 2011
QotD: “Would Shakespeare Have Survived Today’s Copyright Laws?”
April 1, 2010
Also, mandatory sobriety checks for judges, legislators
The Law Society of Upper Canada is planning to do mandatory random drug testing on law students starting this fall:
The move comes in response to requests made by faculty leaders, said Mahamad Accord, director of public relations at the regulatory body. “Why should we accept a lower standard for professional athletes than we do for society’s guardians of the truth?”
Although some professors of law view the move as intruding too far into the personal lives of lawyers and students, others applaud the measure.
“Lawyers play an essential role in society and the impact of drug-addicted lawyers is demonstrable and negative,” according to Professor Shubert at Osgoode Hall. “These changes are long overdue and will have a tangible benefit for legal aid recipients.”
But I’m exaggerating in the title to the post. The guidelines don’t go that far . . . but they probably should. I suspect there’s at least the same level of drug use and alcohol abuse in those selected groups as there is in the general population, even if their chances of detection (and judicial punishment) is demonstrably much lower than “ordinary people”.
March 31, 2010
The product liability crapshoot
Tales of odd and unpredictable results coming out of product liability court cases are dime-a-dozen. This result is pushing to the limit of illogical: Carlos Osorio vs. One World Technologies Inc. et al.. This is the case where the court awarded the plaintiff $1.5 million because the tool manufacturer hadn’t adopted the newest safety technology, despite the plaintiff’s clear breach of common sense and safe practices in using the tool.
The accident happened on April 19, 2005, and the table saw Osorio was using was a Ryobi BTS 15, which was purchased at Home Depot on Jan. 10, 2005, for $159. At the time of the accident Osorio may have been employed at that company for two months; however, this is not clear, according to a deposition by Phat Vong, who purchased tools for the flooring company Osorio worked for.
Osorio is from Colombia, has a degree in computer science and was installing flooring as he learned English. At the time of the accident, he was trying to make a rip cut on a 2′-long, 2-1/2″-wide by 3/4″-thick piece of oak flooring, according to court records. He was attempting to cut the board “freehand” without the rip fence, according to the documents. Osorio intended to make a cut in a straight line all the way through the board. He had cut only a small portion of the workpiece when it got stuck at the blade. Osorio immediately experienced chattering and felt vibration in the workpiece. He stopped cutting and cleaned the tabletop. He then attempted to make the same cut again but the chattering continued, and he decided to push the board harder. His left hand then slipped into the spinning saw blade, according to court documents.
The saw blade height above the tabletop was set to approximately 3″ — at or near the maximum elevation, and the guarding system was not installed on the saw during the operation, documents state. The table saw was on the floor, Osorio was kneeling on one leg in front of the table saw, and his body was just to the left of the saw blade, according to a motion filed by Osorio’s lawyers.
For those of you who don’t know woodworking tools, a table saw is not something you can casually use in the same way you might use a hand drill or a sander. It’s a stationary tool with a long history of injuring the careless or unwary user: the act of pushing a piece of wood into a rapidly spinning serrated metal blade requires care and attention to avoid injuring yourself or nearby workers.
Carlos Osorio managed to do just about everything to increase the risk of injury. He removed the safety devices that are there specifically to prevent the kind of injury he sustained. He clearly didn’t understand the risks of what he was doing, and he was operating the saw in an unstable position. The only way he could have been in greater danger of injury is if he was intoxicated or blindfolded.
The only reason the saw’s manufacturer was the defendant in this case is the “deep pockets” theory of legal practice: don’t sue the responsible party (in this case, the employer who clearly failed to train Osorio in the safe use of the tool), sue the richest person or organization even peripherally involved in the case.
