“What we’re talking about here is, you know, copyright infringement,” McSherry says. “And that may be a serious problem, but it’s a little bit chilling if that can get you dragged from your house in the middle of the night.”

It’s not just rousting people out of bed or executing search warrants in eight different countries. From the indictment, it’s clear the Justice Department pulled out all the stops, getting a judge’s permission to try to put the Hong Kong-based company out of business by seizing domain names and, according to one federal source, getting a judge to approve search warrants for private emails that Megaupload officials were sending to each other.

via Privacy Lawyers Process Megaupload Copyright Case : NPR.

What the NPR article left out was a Mission Impossible sounding adventure that the police engaged in where they had to defeat multiple electronic locks and cut the owner of Megaupload out of a safe room before arresting him. Another weird twist involved an advertisement that famous artists like will.i.am participated in for the website. will.i.am later claimed to not have authorized his participation, even though his words explicitly advocated and promoted the website.

Readers that are familiar with copyright law will remember that MGM v. Grokster held that producers of technology that induce copyright infringement can be held liable for that infringement. Sites that do not induce infringement are protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions. This is why sites like YouTube are able to exist while Napster and Grokster cannot. The United States government alleges that megaupload was inducing this type of copyright infringement.

I share these links because the facts are entertaining and movie-like. However I do not think the questions here are difficult. The precedent is settled that inducing infringement is not legal and if the government can prove its case then megaupload should not exist in its current form. There are plenty of great companies like dropbox and amazon that do the same thing and do not promote breaking copyright law.

“It’s inconceivable to me that someone with a college education, or a graduate-level education, would not know before deciding to go to law school that the economy has declined over the last several years and that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago,” [Robinson] said.

via ABA head has little sympathy for jobless lawyers.

After reading the article I could not help but think that the legal profession needs a figure like Jim Cramer to raise the alarm. In his famous rant Cramer criticized Ben Bernake for not having any idea how bad things are in the stock market. I wonder if the ABA President understands how bad things are for graduating law students. Many are having trouble finding jobs, even those from top schools. This post from the Freakonomics blog describes how attending law school is like the NFL draft and notes that big law has shed 15,000 jobs since 2008. Meanwhile the cost of law school continues to rise and graduates that do not get scholarships or attend public school like me become crushed under mountains of debt.

Law students and other critics of the American Bar Association want the ABA to take action to address this problem. Robinson may be placing the blame with the students but much like the housing crises both parties bear some responsibility. Students need to be aware of the state of the market and the choices they make. That is why I chose to attend public school. However the ABA should take steps to mitigate the rising cost of school and work to implement policies and programs that increase high-paying entry-level employment for recent law school graduates.

What policies and programs should the American Bar Association consider implementing? Some ideas that come to mind include a tuition cap as a condition of accreditation. Another is to build some kind of program that encourages legal entrepreneurship and creates mentoring opportunities for students who want to become solo practitioners after law school. Finally the ABA might consider paring down the number of accredited institutions so that the number of entrants into the depressed market is reduced and therefore give those that go to law school better odds of finding a job.

Update: I just saw this article from the ABA Journal and think it’s important reading as well.

Our educational system has shortchanged and underrated the ability of students to write well. In college I got As on most of my written work because professors were grading it next to papers written by students that could not properly distinguish between a singular and plural noun. In law school there is little writing. The writing I do for class, with a few exceptions, has little useful feedback. In theory law journal membership is supposed to remedy this deficiency by offering an opportunity to hone these skills. It fails miserably at this. We spend our time editing the format of the citations below the line instead of the quality of the writing above it. We are required to write a student note but receive no feedback on it. Finally our submission for membership to the journal garners no grade or feedback. The only acknowledgement of its quality is the offer of membership we receive.

As someone who has gone through a year of law school and read numerous court cases I suppose I am somewhat qualified to judge the papers. However I do not believe I am the best candidate. Having never done it before I have no idea what to look for. Even the rubric we are given is unclear. Should a misplaced comma count as a full point off in the grammar section? If there is an especially egregious use of a semi-colon is that worth a two-point deduction? I suppose I can just make it up as I go along. Meanwhile the first-year students reading this can rest in peace knowing that their write-on grades are not necessarily correlated to the quality of writing.

Bob Woodward Speaking at UConn Law

Woodward’s allegiance to the importance of evidence was most visible in his discussion of the birther movement and Donald Trump. Trump, he said, is the Joe McCarthy of the modern era. Making assertions about Obama’s birth without any shred of his own evidence. Woodward expressed disappointment in the press for airing Trump’s concerns as news without any evidence being presented by the Donald. Furthermore Woodward described the overwhelming evidence of Obama’s citizenship including the two newspaper announcements, the actual birth certificate, the republican officials in Hawaii that certified the legitimacy of the certificate, and in spite of Trump claiming that nobody knew Obama, Woodward pointed out there are individuals that have stories about him from his younger days. These individuals are just not well-known.

I am especially glad that Woodward expressed hope for the future of journalism. He noted that there are other journalists doing work just as good as his Watergate investigation and thinks that the Apples and Googles of the world will have to start putting up money in this area. While Woodward was concerned that Google and others are taking the advertising revenue from these sites I think that this problem will be solved in part by the pay walls. Like it or not the “free content” ride on the Internet is going to be over soon and we’ll have to subscribe to Internet websites much in the way we subscribe to physical magazines or newspapers.

One good thing Gov. Malloy is doing is plugging the exemptions for various special interests in the state sales tax. These “tax expenditures” unfairly subsidize specific products and industries that were lucky enough to have lobbyists fight for them.

Criticisms largely stem from individuals that believe there should be greater revenue increases or greater spending cuts. Gov. Malloy has struck a careful balance by increasing tax rates to be comparable but competitive with neighboring states. Following the suggestion of Jon Olson and others advocating for tax increases may cause the rich to flee the state. This contention is supported by a report from Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy. A report from Princeton suggests that the impact of new taxation on migration is negligible. Taxes and money are not the only factor that individuals consider when choosing a place to live but it is reasonable to presume we are competing for individuals in the tri-state area that work in New York City. Rational rich people will choose the locale with the lower taxes and absent conclusive data it is better to be safe than sorry.

Rep. Cafero and other Republicans have criticized the budget for not cutting spending enough. The CT Mirror explains that this is due the structure of Gov. Malloy’s budget cuts:

The biggest cut in the Malloy budget technically involves a “lapse” or relatively undefined savings still to be achieved. The governor announced this week that it would come from state employee wage and benefit concessions as well as other savings tied to rank-and-file labor and management.

The Mirror article does a great job articulating the hurdles faced by the administration in obtaining these concessions and suggests that they may not get it all.

Overall the Malloy budget is a good one but it is not the final budget. We will likely see tweaks especially to deal with an inability to obtain the entire $2 billion in concessions from the unions. Connecticut already runs a fairly lean governmental operation and there is little room to make major structural changes without impacting a safety net or causing local property taxes to rise.

In the year since the Supreme Court handed down its 183-page decision in Citizens United, the liberal objection to it has gradually boiled down to a single sentence: The majority was wrong to grant First Amendment rights to corporations.

via Campaign Finance Debate Continues After Citizens United – NYTimes.com.

How our laws are made.

via Sunlight Foundation (and available in poster form!)