Law

Search and Seizure

This entry was posted in Capitalism Constitution Economics EU Intellectual Property Law Law Enforcement Libertarianism on by

Just in from Europe:

The European Parliament has passed the EU Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive by 330 votes to 151.
…
At passage, the law imposes civil penalties on counterfeiters, but amendments aimed at bringing in criminal sanctions for piracy, favoured by large media companies, were defeated, and a late-tabled amendment restricted the civil penalties to so-called professional counterfeiters, and not individuals copying music or films on an occasional basis “in good faith” for their own use.
… the directive does allow companies to raid offices, homes, seize property and petition courts to freeze the bank accounts of those they believe to be engaged in piracy.

Do they really mean “allow companies to raid…?” So now Vivendi, et al, hire their own enforcement arm to perform the function of the police?
Well, I’m going to look at this in more detail when time permits just to make sure what the article says is a reasonable translation of the proposed law. But, if it is even close to right then folks in the EU are in real serious trouble.
Via Nipper’s Patent Law Blog.

A Lawyer is a Lawyer is a Lawyer

This entry was posted in Capitalism Economics Law Libertarianism on by

Right?
Well, no, not exactly. We all read about trial lawyers, district attorneys, attorney generals, defense lawyers, etc., and perhaps think we know all about lawyers. Most of us don’t visit lawyers often if at all. We tend not to use them for our marriages, our real estate purchases, etc. Really, why would we want to waste money on a lawyer. Sometimes we are right. Other times we are wrong.
So what other kinds of lawyers are there besides the ‘glamorous’ ones listed above. There are the transactional lawyers. The what? Well, I scratched my head over that for a long time and finally got my head wrapped around it a year or so ago when I realized that I had worked with many transactional lawyers and just hadn’t correctly applied the label. They all did this:

…write contracts that protect our clients when things go wrong.

Scheherazade writes a lot more about what it means to be a transactional lawyer and you should go read it all. I particularly enjoyed this part:

The part that’s not fun is the chronic suspicion you have of everyone else, and what turns into a constant tug-of-war between trying to draft the contract so your own client has free rein to be as big of a son-of-a-bitch as he/she/it wants while the other side gets hamstrung if they stop being sweetness and light. I can see why businesspeople don’t want to cultivate that particular sharp imaginative ability, and outsource it instead to us.

Via Professor Bainbridge who adds to Margaret’s discussion:

Perhaps my main disagreement with her comments is that they doesn’t sufficiently stress the role of regulatory arbitrage – figuring out how to structure a deal so that the size of the pie expands for everybody (her analysis focuses mainly on pie division). In addition, good transactional lawyers also devote attention to the question of thinking about how the contract incentivizes good behavior on the part of both their client and the other side.

Transactional lawyers will be an important part of any future free society (read unencumbered by inefficient and oppressive gov’t regulations).

Academic Blogging

This entry was posted in Blogging Education Law on by

Professor Bainbridge quotes at length one Dean’s thoughts on blogging, scholarship and tenure:

Bottom line: While no replacement for writing articles and books, and no one is going to get tenured or promoted through blogging (at least not today); but what I’ve called a serious blogger would get a big plus on the positive side on the ledger from me when it gets to merit review time! Failing to reward it would be failing to recognize that blogging is not just another new communication medium; it is a new way to do scholarship.

The Dean also recognizes something many of you are experiencing. Blogging can absorb huge amount of time:

That being said, just reading blogs – let alone writing them – can be entirely too much fun, and could suck time away from the grind of in depth writing and research. In fact, I should be massaging my footnotes instead of writing this. I’m also advising my juniors not to get blog-happy.

Read the rest and for those interested in delving deeper there are links to a couple long discussions.

Warning Labels

This entry was posted in Law Marketing on by

These are both funny and a sign of the times:

A five-inch fishing lure which sports three steel hooks and cautions users that it is, “Harmful if swallowed,” has been identified as one of the nation’s wackiest warning labels in an annual contest sponsored by a consumer watchdog group.

Go read the rest.
Via second place winner Alex Tabarrok.