When Corporate Media Cover "Independent Media": "'Only in democratic countries,' [George Seldes] wrote in the 1930s, 'is there the beginning of a suspicion that the old axiom about the press being the bulwark of liberty is something that affects the daily life of the people -- that it is a living warning rather than an ancient wisecrack. A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press.

Sure, you may not always agree with the rulings or the reasons... but at least you get to see behind the scenes. And the rulings aren't even impenetrable lawyerese (IMHO), they are often quite understandable (relatively speaking). It's pretty cool.

I was thinking and I realized that the Judicial branch is my favorite branch of the US Federal government. The other two branches act quite randomly and you can never get an explanation out of them. The Supreme Court justifies every decision with tens or hundreds of pages of reasoning, explanation, and recommendations on future cases.

"And so too is the danger of this legal imperialism also about time. If the imperialists are wrong, then we will have lost something important by the time the Internet's Robert Bork graduates from Chicago. We don't have 30 years to get this one right."

The idea that laws should be considered in terms of their possible consequences is controversial??? I'm stunned. I was never that cynical, and I was still on the optimistic side of the truth.

The author is a highly respected law professor at Harvard.

In Search of Skeptics: "There's a famous movement in the legal world called "law and economics." Originally a conservative cause (famously associated with Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals) but quickly attracting advocates of all stripes (including the decidedly unconservative Judge Guido Calabresi of the 2nd Circuit), the movement presses law to justify itself in terms of its consequences. What good does a particular regulation do?

One Month 'Till M-Day.

Like I said yesterday, enough with the companies with products with the same name!

Napster-the-company is not a peer-to-peer client, but they may be a server of search results. Napster-the-software may be both server and client, but software can't be a "service provider", which has to be a person or corporation (as "service provider" here is a role a human or company plays, not just "a thing which provides service"). My attempts to tease out what that paragraph means have been futile.