Part of what I hope to do with the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia is bridge the communication gap between lawyers and engineers.  The two groups think completely differently.

To take a recent example, a new P2P file-sharing system has emerged called the Owner-Free Filesystem (OFF).  It stores and transmits only chunks of random binary data.  To retrieve a file, one uses a special URL that provides a mathematical formula for combining those random chunks into the original file.

Random bytes can’t be copyrighted, the system’s designers say, therefore the network is immune to copyright liability, although users are still liable for any infringement they themselves commit.  The idea is that the RIAA/MPAA/etc. cannot take legal action to shut down the OFF network, and will be forced to search individuals’ hard drives if they want to prove infringement.

It’s a typical engineer’s conception of how the law works — technicalities and loopholes.  They think they can get around the law with cleverness.  But it doesn’t work that way.  True, there are many technical loopholes in legal statutes, but statutes only form a small part of what “The Law” actually is.  The rest of the story comes in judicial decisions, or common law.

In this instance, the Supreme Court decision in MGM v. Grokster clearly comes out against OFF.  In Grokster, the court said that merely distributing “a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright” (case syllabus, my emphasis) makes the distributor liable for copyright infringement.  Furthermore, a court would likely not care that the network only transmits random bytes.  The end result — you get a copy of a copyrighted work without the owner’s permission — is still infringement.

Therefore, the OFF would lose if it got sued by copyright owners.  The point is this: it doesn’t matter what the statute says, it matters what a judge would decide if presented with the case.

Here’s another, simpler example: There is a federal statute prohibiting flag burning.  Law professors ask first-year students: Is this a law?  The answer is no, because any federal judge would decide that the statute violates the First Amendment and would not enforce it.

I hope that services like AltLaw and KeepYourCopyrights will encourage engineers and other non-lawyers to take a closer look at how law actually works.  If engineers stopped wasting their time trying to engineer clever technological solutions to legal problems, and instead advocated for legislative reform to solve those problems, they might have a better chance of getting what they want.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.  If you need legal advice, get an attorney.

The web is a strange beast.  Server logs reveal just how strange.  Someone’s crawling AltLaw.org, sending an HTTP Referrer of “http://www.nero.com/enu/downloads-nero8-trial.php” with a User-Agent identified as “MSIE 5.00; Windows 98″.  What the heck?

Just when you thought the A.I. Winter would last forever, up pops Brainhat with an open-source inference engine that uses natural language as its primary interface.  Cool!

Finally, my blog has a new theme.  I liked the old one, but it was getting a bit… old.  And the serif-font-on-a-translucent-background-image was never a great idea.  I didn’t have time for a complete redesign, so I settled on the excellent Mandigo theme by onehertz.  The header image is my own — the view from the North end of the Central Park Reservoir, around dusk.

I need a new laptop.  My current machine, a rebranded ASUS that I bought on the cheap a few years ago, has developed a crack in the screen hinge, so it’s only a matter of time.

I have to admit, I’m sorely tempted by the Macbook Air.  It’s a beautiful machine — sleek, light, even elegant.  But I’ve been 100% Linux for some time, and I’m reluctant to turn my life over to the tyranny of Steve Jobs.  Of course, all my favorite apps — Emacs, Firefox, OpenOffice — are still there, and I’ve read one can even install Ubuntu on an Air with only the usual Linux-on-a-laptop aggravations.

My alternate choice is a Raven from Emperor Linux, a.k.a. the ThinkPad X61.  It’s more expensive and heavier, but it’s a tablet.  I’ve always wanted a tablet, but pen-based software is barely functional even in the commercial software world, so I don’t expect much from open-source equivalents.

Any gentle readers out there with experience using a Linux tablet?  Is it worth it?

I dropped by the Java Users’ Group meeting last week since Rich Hickey was there to talk about Clojure.

I expected a bit of carping from the Java guys, and at first they were all “efficiency this” and “security that.”  But by mid-way through the talk I think they were getting it.  A few even got excited about macros.

If I didn’t make it clear in my first post about Clojure, I like this language.  Here’s some more reasons why:

1. All binding constructs — let, defn, and the like — perform destructuring.
2. Universal data structures — vector, list, map, set.
3. Built-in java.util.regex support.
4. Sixty squintillion Java libraries.
5. A small but growing number of Clojure libraries, some written by yours truly.
6. You can generate Java .class files that run Clojure code.
7. Lightning-fast bug fixes from the author.

Cool fact: All valid JSON is also valid YAML.  So any YAML parser can also parse JSON.  Long live the mighty list/map data structure!