The First Thing We Do, Let’s Replace All the Lawyers With Computers

Back in the 80′s the old joke was to tell people that they could be replaced with a non-functioning button.  After all, the tech boom was beginning to get into full swing and it looked like automation could eventually replace anyone.  Of course not everyone has been replaced entirely.  Those that couldn’t, have been off-shored.

However, an article in today’s New York Times , John Markoff shows that the saying may still have some legs. If you are a lawyer or a paralegal, you need to watch your back, as the computers are now coming for you. 

Using the same types of language comprehension software that was used by the Jeopardy contestant “Watson”, computers can quickly sift through millions of documents in discovery phase to find relevant links that would take an small army of paralegals months of billable hours.  Softwares can detect changes in writing styles, find nuances and even positve or negative sentiments in e-mails, text messages or even recordings, all for far less than your normal room full of laywers would charge. Far less. As Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end told the Times,

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out. People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

More importantly, when presented with a mountain of information, people sometimes zone out and miss things. Herr used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company’s lawyers did in the 1980s and ’90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found.

What does all of this mean?  Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, a major meaning-based firm, is convinced that the legal sector will start to see a drop in employees sooner than later.  He estimates that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery could reduce manpower to the point that one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

But in all fairness, the document that the software selects will need to be read by a human, at least for now.  And in the end, a human lawyer will need to go in front of a human judge.  But if Watson is any indication, even that may change in the future.

Sue First And Ask Questions Later

If you maintain a blog or website, and you post blockquoted text, photos, or images from copyrighted sources such as newspaper websites, you could unknowingly find yourself served with a lawsuit from a firm called Righthaven. 

In case you didn’t know, Righthaven is a company based in Las Vegas that sprang to life last spring for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that repost, or even excerpt, Las Vegas-Review Journal articles without permission. It has filed a large number of  lawsuits, and settled dozens of them in its favor.  Righthaven’s tactics are pretty straightforward and extremely legal:  it purchases the copyright to an article or image and then searches the web for anyone who has published the article or image in question without authorization.  It gets the information concerning the person who has posted said information and then proceeds to sue them into oblivion.  While most out there would ask the blogger or group to take down said article before resorting to lawsuits, Righthaven goes straight for the jugular like a school of hungry piranha.  Most or all of their  lawsuits have demanded the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages as well as surrendering ownership of the domain name. That’s a lot of money for the bulk of bloggers out here, so most of the cases have settled out of court. Basically when you are served by Righthaven, you either have to pay thousands of dollars in court costs to defend yourself if you think your use of the material was fair use or you have to settle the case and still lose hundreds or thousands of dollars. It’s what they call “instant litigation”.  Apparently it works pretty well.

“But what about Fair Use?”  you may ask. 

Oh yes, that.  Recently, Realty One Group fought back and was awarded a summary dismissal based on the finding that eight of 30 sentences from a Review Journal story about the real estate market qualified as fair use of the material.  Righthaven came out afterwards and say they would not pursue “instant litigation” against those whose use is less than seventy five percent of a copyrighted work. 

They also stepped ino it when they decided to sue the Democratic Underground site for a publication of four paragraphs from a 34 paragraph article about Senate hopeful Sharron Angle.  The Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped in to defend Democratic Underground and counter-sued Righthaven for abusing copyright law.  Righthaven backed off, asking U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt to dismiss its original claim, but maintaining that that it still could win if it really wanted to.  The problem here is that there really is not any amount set by the law that tells you how much is fair use and how much is too much.  In that respect it’s kind of like pornography: you know it when you see it. 

So continue blogging folks, but watch your sources and your backs.  Lawyer infestations are worse than bedbugs.

Now That’s What I Call Infringement! Volume 2!

I do love the smell of Schadenfreude in the morning.

About a year ago, I wrote about a little trouble brewing in Canada between the record companies and recording artists.  Now, there is a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described as “exploit now, pay later if at all.” It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (you know, those “That’s What I Call Total Crap”) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licenses.  Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a “pending list,” which signifies that approval and payment is pending. This pending list has been going on since the late 1980’s. 

The list was supposedly up to 300,000 songs. 

And that, as they say, is when the lawsuit started.  I mean, this wasn’t as if these were bad hipster bands you never heard of before.  These were unknown artists like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen.  And in the original class action lawsuit, the artists  were asking for $20,000 per infringement - the same amount the record companies ask for when bringing a lawsuit against little Betty Jo Stingray for illegally downloading the latest Justin Bieber album.  The phrase “hoisted by one’s own petard” applies here.

Apparently after a year of legal wrangling, the four major record labels that comprise the Canadian Recording Industry Association – EMI Music Canada Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. – have agreed to pay $45 million.  That comes out to about $150 per song, or as the the lawyers call it, chump change.  It certainly beats dishing out about six billion. It also establishes a new mechanism to help ensure that artists are paid more promptly.  Apparently everyone is happy, though it is striking that it took a class action settlement to get the record labels to address their own ongoing copyright infringing practices in paying artists for the use of their works.

After all, these are the folks who are supposedly fighting for the rights of the artists they were ripping off.

Hiding Behind Anonymity

Free speech is a great thing.  It allows me to make snarky remarks about Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Carol Bartz and others just because I can.  Now the fact is, all I am is background noise to them.  But hey, I can still do it. 

Anonymity is also a great thing.  There are some of us in this country who, because of circumstances, may not be able to stand up and speak.  Being able to use the cloak of anonymity to show the world something it needs to see or hear is important to the daily workings of our democracy.  It gives those who may be unable to speak a voice.

Now both of these things come with an awesome responsibility.  The first and foremost responsibility being that you don’t abuse it.  You don’t pose as someone else in order to disgrace or bully another fellow human.  You don’t use anonymity in order to spread lies over the web about someone.  To do so is a mark of cowardice, pure and simple. 

On October 17th, a Supreme Court judge in New York City gave Google 15 days to provide the court with whatever identity information it has on commenter(s) that left a defamatory comments on YouTube videos of Columbia Business School grad and former actress and model Carla Franklin.  Franklin wants to know who the anonymous poster is, so she can sue the hell out of them for defamation.  Fair enough. 

While some may not remember, a little over a year ago, Google was in the same boat; a blogger had started a blog titled “Skanks in NYC,” which targeted a model, Liskula Cohen, calling her, among other things, a skank, an old hag, and a "ho".   Cohen lawyered up and sued Google, who promptly turned over the name of the blogger, Ms. Rosemary Port, a former friend of Cohen’s.  Port then lawyered up and sued Google for violating her right to anonymity. 

Port’s case was disposed, mainly based on Google’s Blogging terms of service, which basically said that if a judge says turn over the name, that is what they’ll do.  Cohen dropped her defamation lawsuit a few weeks after it was filed for reasons unknown. 

But as with the Cohen/Port case, there is yet more talk about freedom of speech and anonymity with Franklin’s case.  The only difference is that the last few weeks we have had a national conversation about bullying to throw into the mix and in many ways it was needed.  As I said at the top, the internet is not a place to use anonymity to spread lies about someone.  Granted, there are worse things you can do than call someone a whore online, but the fact of the matter is honey, when you call someone a whore, you better be prepared to back it up, lest your cheap-ass weave winds up in someone else’s hands.

Some of us have thicker skins than others.  Some people actually laugh at hate mail.  Some have the ability to use a slur as a badge of honor and turn against the person or persons who hurled it at them to begin with.  But the point is not to tell someone to buck up and grow a pair.  For some people, getting a lawyer, finding out who said what and suing the hell out of them is the equivalent of finding the bully and beating the snot out of them.  The difference is that that isn’t done hiding behind the cloak of anonymity.   It doesn’t matter where it happens, bullying should be stopped immediately and forcefully.  It is not funny.  It is not fun.  And it does have consequences.  Abuse of the responsibility that accompanies  free speech doesn’t look good on anyone.

WordPress Tags: Internet, Skanks, Pettiness Junction, Lawyers

Now Playing: Calexico – Carried to Dust – The News About William

Somebody’s Not Getting Any Christmas Cards This Year

I don’t always agree with Michael Arrington, but I do admit, the man has balls.  Apparently, Arrington was tipped off about a secret meeting of “Super Angels”  and decided to crash it.  When snubbed, he decided to do a little snooping and question asking.  Arrington knows these people.  More so, he’s friends with many of them, although that friendship may be sorely tested in the upcoming months, if what he says is true.  

Because what Arrington reported on was not a meeting of capitalist whining about the latest tax code or what a boring, pain in the neck  Michael Arrington is, but rather about some of the following items:

1. Complaints about Y Combinator’s growing power, and how to counteract competitiveness in Y Combinator deals
2. Complaints about rising deal valuations and they can act as a group to reduce those valuations
3. How the group can act together to keep traditional venture capitalists out of deals entirely
4. How the group can act together to keep out new angel investors invading the market and driving up valuations.
5. More mundane things, like agreeing as a group not to accept convertible notes in deals (an entrepreneur-friendly type of deal)

So what is all this talk mean?  In a word, collusion.  In two words, price fixing.  In three words, against the law.  It is unlawful for competitors to act together to keep other competitors out of the market, or to discuss ways to keep prices under control. And that appears to be exactly what this group was doing. 

Like I said, Arrington knows these people all too well.  The reason that he is shining a light on this possible breakage of Federal law?  Well, that is yet to be seen.  Somehow moral outrage and Michael Arrington are two things that don’t seem to go together easily, but I can be wrong.  The possibility that Arrington may have an axe or two to grind may have emboldened him to take these steps.  But that would be a story for another time.  What I can infer at this point is that there are lawyers being called and denials being prepared.  And Michael Arrington will not be getting any Christmas cards this year if this is true and the Feds decide to crash the next party. 

WordPress Tags: TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, collusion, price fixing, Law, Lawyers

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The NBA-Where Lawsuits Happen

Oh my.  Bad times in Dallas. The  Dallas Mavericks, not only lost in the first round of the playoffs to a decrepit San Antonio team, but now are being sued by Ross Perot, Jr. 

At least Mark Cuban is.

According to the Business Insider, Perot is claiming that Cuban has recklessly managed the business and that the Mavericks are on the edge of insolvency.  Perot wants damages, the team put into receivership, and would like to see a forensic accountant appointed to examine the teams finances.

To which, the always open mouth of the NBA responded:

"The Mavs operations and debt are guaranteed by me. There is no risk of insolvency. Everyone always has been and will be paid on time… being in business with Ross Perot is one of the worst experiences of my business life. He could care less about Mavs fans. He could care less about winning.”

Now, of course, the purpose of a business is to make money, and in the time that Cuban has owned the Mavericks, they have become the sixth most valuable franchise in the NBA, according to Forbes.  But the point is, an NBA franchise is not a way to print money.  According to the commissioner himself, only about half of the teams make money.  This should be something that Mr. Perot Jr. should be familiar with-after all, when Cuban bought the franchise back in 1999, Perot was a minority owner then.  And trust me on this- at that point, no one wanted to be seen at a Dallas Mavericks game. 

But the point of the lawsuit is that Perot is claiming that Cuban has saddled the Mavs with debt, and that the resources of the team have gone to the benefit of Cuban’s other businesses.  Then again, Mr. Perot’s own enterprises have not been going all that well lately.  This past summer, Cuban accused Perot of "trying to find nickels in the sofa cushion" in an attempt to recapture losses stemming from the Victory project, a retail and office development surrounding the The American Airlines Center. An empty retail and office development center surrounding American Airlines Center, I might add.  Live by real estate, die by real estate.   

Either way, it always fun when two Dallas billionaires decide to take each other on.  After all, the season’s over, and free agency is coming up.  Might as well have some legal drama to fill in the time.

WordPress Tags: Basketball, Dallas, Sue sue Sue-dio, lawyers, drama

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Antitrust? There’s An App For That.

Now, who saw this one coming?  According to Bloomberg, US antitrust enforcers are considering an investigation of Apple Inc. following a complaint from Adobe Systems Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

And all this after Steve proudly nailed his 95 theses to the iChurch door.  Now if this is true, we are setting the doomsday clock to one minute before midnight.  The fireworks should be fun to watch. If I am not mistaken, this is the first real foray that Apple could have to Antitrust-land.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now Apple and Adobe has been having a War of the Roses for some time now, and things have been at a fever pitch over the last few weeks with Apple’s iPad launch and the subsequent rebuffing of Adobe in no uncertain terms.  That’s one flag.  But Federal authorities are also apparently interested in how Apple’s restrictions on apps could benefit its iAd application advertising service.  Apple’s new language forbidding apps from transmitting analytical data could prevent ad networks from being able to effectively target ads, potentially giving Apple’s new iAd mobile-advertising service an edge.  For all the noise that Adobe is making, this might actually be the one the feds want to look at more. 

Now while no one can predict what the government will do in any case, the fact that the government is even slightly interested in what is going on is not a good thing. Just ask Gates and Ballmer.

But before we jump too far ahead, remember, Adobe’s complaint began a negotiation between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, not about if there should be an inquiry, but who should lead it. If the inquiry reveals enough evidence to merit it, an official investigation will begin and Apple will be subpoenaed.  So as titillating as the the headlines are today, there is still a lot of work to be done before anyone even thinks about hiring the room full of lawyers.

So what does it take to do a full Sherman?  Quite a bit, actually.  Remember that Microsoft was under the gun for years, and the government still couldn’t prove anything.  All they really did was divert time, energy and focus.  To win a Sherman Antitrust case against Apple, the government would have to prove both that Apple’s market share constitutes a monopoly and that it has abused that monopoly power in ways that damage its competition.  While that may seem obvious to some, the Devil, as they say, is in the details.  And in a case like this, there are plenty of details. 

WordPress Tags: Applestan, Antitrust, Adobe, Lawyers

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Not The Lawyers!

There was a joke a few years ago – If Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were in a steel cage fight to the death, who would win?  Answer: The American public. 

For some reason, that was the first thought I had when I heard that Adobe was calling in the lawyers on Apple.  The only thing I can think of really working in Adobe’s favor here is if they have verifiable paper trails showing that Apple led them down the garden path with promises that Apple would accept Flash and then switched at the last minute.  Other than that, guys, what are you thinking?  Like I said last night, you are starting to sound like the ex-wife who has decided to destroy her former husband rather than getting on with the business of living.

That said, if it takes Adobe to knock some sense to the increasingly childish actions of Apple, I’m not complaining. I really dislike any company holding such a widely spread platform in crippling stranglehold, limiting user freedom and developer innovation.  Oh, I know, “I really don’t understand the problem here. Apple wants developers to make apps in Objective C. It’s their platform, and they can lay down whatever rules they want. Protest with your wallet (if you’re a consumer) and your skills (if you’re a developer)”.  Tell it to Oprah.  But folks, won’t someone take a step back a realize that Steve has been acting like a little tin god? It isn’t a color that looks good on him and he’s starting to wear it out.

The point is, code is code.  And you can write hack programs in Objective C just as easily as you can in Flash, Silverlight, C#, C++, VB, you name it.  To paint all products “bad” based solely on the language puts you in a category of being either lazy, stupid or trying a massive power grab with a rather obvious agenda.  And I’ll never accuse Steve Jobs of being either lazy or stupid. 

It makes no difference. Either Adobe gets their butts kicked and have to drop the prices of Creative Studio to get people to buy it or else they take Apple to the mat and people stop seeing Steve-o as Tech Jesus and more like the overbearing leader of a really great tech company. 

Now that would be a win-win for everyone.

WordPress Tags: Applestan, Adobe, lawyers, Sue sue Sue-dio

Now Playing: Leonard Cohen – The Songs Of Leonard Cohen – One of Us Cannot Be Wrong

Now That’s What I Call Infringement!

You’ve heard the story before; copyright infringer gets pulled into the courts, under the possibility for paying ludicrous amounts of money for downloading Beyonce’s newest single without paying for it.  Well, it is happening yet again.

Only this time, the tables are turned.  There is a huge lawsuit, but this time the defendants are the record companies.  So what’s the story?  Well, this story takes place in Canada.  Now, there is a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as "exploit now, pay later if at all." It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (you know, those “That’s What I Call Total Crap”) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licenses.  Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a "pending list," which signifies that approval and payment is pending. This pending list has been going on since the late 1980’s. 

The list now stands at over 300,000 songs.  From TheStar.com:

From Beyonce to Bruce Springsteen, the artists waiting for payment are far from obscure, as thousands of Canadian and foreign artists have seen their copyrights used without permission and payment.

It is difficult to understand why the industry has been so reluctant to pay its bills. Some works may be in the public domain or belong to a copyright owner difficult to ascertain or locate, yet the likes of Sarah McLachlan, Bruce Cockburn, Sloan, or the Watchmen are not hidden from view.

The more likely reason is that the record labels have had little motivation to pay up. As the balance has grown, David Basskin, the president and CEO of the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency Ltd., notes in his affidavit that "the record labels have devoted insufficient resources for identifying and paying the owners of musical works on the pending lists." The CRIA members now face the prospect of far greater liability.

Excuse me, if you are having problems finding Bruce Springsteen, how about contacting your American affiliate and ask them?  It isn’t like the man went into hiding from the mob or anything.  So somewhere along the line, artists got tired of being pirated by their own record companies and sued.

The plaintiffs are seeking $20,000 damages for each infringement, based upon the same rules that led the recording industry to claim a single file sharer is liable for millions in damages.  Do the math.  300,000 songs at 20k per song. Talk about being hoisted by your own petard.   Did I mention that the artists are also seeking punitive damages? 

Well, you did say that piracy was killing the music industry.

Now Playing: Everclear – Songs from an American Movie, Vol. 1: Learning How to Smile – A.M. Radio

WordPress Tags: Music Industry, Lawyers, Guns and Money, business, copyright

That Crunching Sound You Hear

Interesting little wreck going on.  No, Not Tiger’s car wreck, but the wreck of the Crunchpad. 

According to Mr. Arrington, the Crunchpad, a very nicely designed tablet designed to surf the web, was ready to debut at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20.  Then, well, I’ll let Mr. Arrington take it from here:

“On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.” Yuck, I thought. Another delay, probably with the screen that had been giving us so much trouble – capacitive touch at 12 inches isn’t trivial. And sure enough, the email started off with “no good news to update. updated hardware is still on its way , so that’s a timing issue. friday will be a challenge now.”

But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.”

Interesting, to say the least. Considering the intellectual property is shared between Arrington’s group and Fusion Garage, it makes one wonder exactly where someone could come up with the scenario of basically saying  “OK, well, thanks for all your hard work on your idea, I’ll be taking everything now and saying good-bye.”  As Arrington put it :

“This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.”

Fusion Garage blames “shareholders” for the abrupt change in plans, at least in the e-mail that Arrington placed onto the blog.  Fusion Garage’s blog hasn’t been updated since February and no news has come out of the camp. 

While there are plenty of times when I don’t agree with Mr. Arrington, this is not one of them.  Something smells foul and it looks like it is coming from the direction of Fusion Garage.  Time, the courts and lots of lawyers will tell, but my gut is backing Arrington on this one. 

So what was it?  A renegotiation of the equity split gone sour?  Pure greed?  Corporate sabotage?    As I have said, tablets are “the next big thing”, whatever that is supposed to mean.  And there is more than one player out there in tablet-land.  And the fact is, things like this happen in corporate America all the time.  Great ideas have been bought and then conveniently left to rot because they might pose a market threat to another competitor.  The best ideas sometimes never make it out of the gates. 

This, I’m afraid, is one of those times. 

Now Playing: Cake – Prolonging the Magic – You Turn the Screws

WordPress Tags: Business, Crunchpad, lawyers, Sue sue Sue-dio, failure, Arrington, Fusion Garage