Tag: hit&run

We had a very interesting and enjoyable preliminary private conversation on the subject a couple of weeks ago (just for The Practice Effect), and I much look forward to this public version. Please join us! Here are the details:

UCLA Law’s AI Pulse Project and University of Arizona TechLaw present:

The Brinternet: A conversation with futurist and science fiction author David Brin and Professors Jane Bambauer, Mark Lemley, and Eugene Volokh, moderated by Professor Ted Parson

What: Is the dominant advertising-supported business model for Internet news and opinion unsustainable?  In a pair of essays published on Evonomics, David Brin says yes. But alternative models, including subscriptions and paywalls, also increasingly appear unrealistic for most apps and content producers. Can micropayments (in the 1 to 5 cent range) solve this problem?

When: this Friday, September 18, 2020, 2:00 – 3:00 PM Pacific time.

Register to attend here.

Panelists:

David Brin is an astrophysicist whose international best-selling novels include The Postman, Earth, and recently Existence. His nonfiction book about the information age—The Transparent Society—won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.

Jane Bambauer is a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. Prof. Bambauer’s research assesses the social costs and benefits of Big Data, and questions the wisdom of many well-intentioned privacy laws. Her articles have appeared in the Stanford Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the California Law Review, and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Prof. Bambauer’s own data-driven research explores biased judgment, legal education, and legal careers. She holds a B.S. in mathematics from Yale College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Mark Lemley is the William H. Neukom Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and is affiliated faculty in the Symbolic Systems program. Prof. Lemley teaches intellectual property, patent law, trademark law, antitrust, the law of robotics and AI, video game law, and remedies. He is the author of eight books and 181 articles, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and an academic affiliate at the law firm Mayer Brown LLP. He teaches First Amendment law and a First Amendment amicus brief clinic, and has taught copyright, criminal law, tort law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy. He has been writing on the Internet and the law since 1995.

Edward A. (Ted) Parson (Moderator) is the Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law, faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, and the director of the AI Pulse Project at UCLA School of Law.

Background reading: 

Advertising Cannot Maintain the Internet. Here’s the “Secret Sauce” Solution.

Beyond Advertising: Will Micropayments Sustain the New Internet?

Neither micro- nor macropayments are required to attend this conversation.

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After 27 years of memorable work in films by Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-Wai, among many others, Jude Law can still surprise us. In The Nest, he gives one of the strongest performances of his career, playing a man whose life has evolved into a shaky edifice of lies, too many of which he has come to believe himself. Law brings a subtle emotional charge to the picture without unbalancing its carefully controlled tempo, and he’s wonderfully well-supported by his costar, the brilliant Carrie Coon (The Leftovers).

The Nest is writer-director Sean Durkin’s first movie since his well-regarded 2011 film Martha Marcy May Marlene (he’s spent most of his time since then producing). The story is set in the mid-1980s. Rory O’Hara (Law) is an expatriate English stock trader now working on Wall Street, and his wife Allison (Coon), an American, is raising their two children, Samantha (Oona Roche) and Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell), on a large, leafy estate. They are prosperous exurbanites—Allison teaches horse riding to well-off local kids—but not prosperous enough for Rory: He wants to uproot the family and return to his native London to take a new job that he says has been offered to him by his old employer, the avuncular Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin).

As is usually the case with Rory’s plans, everything is not what it seems. Arthur didn’t call Rory and invite him back—Rory called Arthur to ask for the job. And the job isn’t really what Rory is interested in. He’s actually scheming to help another company buy out Arthur’s operation and turn it into a global powerhouse —at great financial benefit to Rory, of course.

The relocation to England is agreeably compressed: After the introductory New York scenes, we simply see the family trying to settle into their new home—a way-too-big manor in the Sussex countryside, which Rory has rented for an amount of money he’d rather not discuss. Before long, Allison realizes that their bank account is running dry. Then their telephone service is turned off. Rory keeps bobbing and weaving—there’s “a huge check coming,” he says. But it never materializes.

The story proceeds in a succession of rich scenes: an awkward visit to Rory’s semi-estranged mother (Anne Reid), a gruesome episode with a dead horse, a heartbroken taxi ride (peak Jude Law), and a dinner party that careens completely off the rails when Allison publicly runs out of patience with her husband. (“You’re so full of shit,” she tells him.)

Through all of this, we can see the slow death of Allison’s feelings for her husband passing wordlessly across Coons’ face. It’s a riveting performance, especially when Allison takes in yet another of Rory’s latest brainstorms and delivers the judgment of terminally fed-up spouses throughout the ages. “You’re exhausting,” she tells him.

No Escape

No Escape has the hunched and gasping air of an old-school torture-porn movie (it much resembles Eli Roth’s Hostel films). But there’s no torture! Or rather, there is torture, but you mostly don’t see it—somebody’s always standing in the way when an ear gets lopped off, or an arm gets severed. There’s some very claustrophobic tension, and a good bit of glopping around in the guts of a fresh corpse, but generally, this movie is torture lite.

Like Videodrome, another picture it resembles, No Escape has something to say about modern media—although not enough to amount to a message, really. The protagonist is a hyper-successful vlogger named Cole (Keegan Allen, of Pretty Little Liars). Cole has spent 10 years traveling the world in search of photogenic kicks and he’s built an audience of millions for his web series ERL (“Escape Real Life”). Now, he and his team—three co-adventurers plus Cole’s girlfriend, Erin (Holland Roden, of Teen Wolf)—are flying first-class to Moscow, where a wealthy fan named Alexei (Ronen Rubenstein) has devised an evening of extreme thrills for them. (Alexei is said to be “next-level loaded,” and he’s the object of the movie’s funniest line: “This guy is so rich that everything he does is legitimately the best.”)

The venue for Alexei’s big night out is an abandoned prison (or something), furnished with all the familiar horrors: an Iron Maiden, an electric chair, a rack, and a Houdini-style glass cabinet with water hose hooked up. Naturally, there are also tables filled with torture implements and gore-slicked goons hulking about in black leather butcher aprons. Once each of his companions has been situated in one of the torture devices, Cole is given one hour to free them all—while a world-wide audience of freaks and troglodytes giggles along under their rocks.

Cole’s mission is exceedingly difficult, as you might imagine, but—spoiler—not impossible. Writer-director Will Wernick—whose last movie was simply called Escape Room—keeps the nonsense moving along, and thanks to cinematographer Jason Goodell, the movie looks a lot better than it needed to. The switcheroo ending, however, is not something that Eli Roth would’ve signed off on.

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9/18/1857: Justice John Hessin Clarke’s birthday.

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Former CNN bureau chief Chip Walter starts his book Immortality, Inc., an examination of the wild dreamers and wealthy financiers striving for human immortality, at Alcor. That’s where heads and bodies of the dead lie frozen, awaiting a possible future in which they can be revived.

Alcor’s customers are still dead, and no magic bullet treatments have meaningfully halted or reversed the cellular and bodily decay we know as aging. The most important thing we’ve learned is that calorie restriction (or treatments that emulate its effects) seem the most promising, if not joyous, path to life extension.

Like space travel, human life extension has seen loads of visionary speculation spun and cash burned with promises mostly unfulfilled. Walter ends his book convinced that Silicon Valley moneymen and their scientist partners are indeed on the cusp of using genomics and artificial intelligence to deliver a near-endless human life; his reporting doesn’t quite deliver on the optimism. But if aging is halted or reversed it will be because of the manias of his subjects, a small group of people and companies—including Google and Human Longevity Inc. (co-founded by Human Genome Project superstar Craig Venter)—with enough wealth to risk wagers on the impossible.

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In times of crisis, pop culture often takes on inadvertent meaning, reflecting and refracting the darkness of the times. But few works can manage the eerie prescience of RTJ4, the rowdy, angry, superbly calamitous fourth album by hip-hop duo Run the Jewels, which chronicles a chaotic world in semi-apocalyptic meltdown, beset by police abuse and racial injustice.

The album was released in early June, just days after protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police turned destructive in cities across the country. Although it had been in the works for years, the music seemed like it had been willed into existence as a byproduct of the demonstrations.

In the album’s haunting centerpiece, “Walking in the Snow,” Killer Mike raps about the gruesome spectacle of police violence and the performative online outrage that often seems to follow: “And every day on evening news they feed you fear for free/ And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/ And till my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, ‘I can’t breathe’/ And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV/ The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy.”

The lyrics were so on-the-nose that Run the Jewels member El-P had to clarify that they’d been recorded the previous year—an uncanny reminder that the present crisis actually began long ago.

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San Francisco officials have kept private gyms closed for months. They claim it is necessary to reduce the spread of coronavirus. But some city-owned gyms have remained open, allowing police officers and other city employees to continue to work out. A local TV station asked city officials to explain why government gyms were allowed to remain open and was told only that private gyms would remain closed at least until the end of September.

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From Magistrate Judge Kimberly A. Jolson’s opinion yesterday in Ewalt v. Gatehouse Media Ohio Holding II, Inc. (S.D. Ohio):

This case concerns Defendants’ alleged deceptive trade practices that damaged subscribers to the Columbus Dispatch. According to Plaintiffs, “the GateHouse Defendants advertise and offer term subscriptions to The Dispatch … for specific prices, and their customers enter into these agreements … reasonably expecting that the GateHouse Defendants will provide The Dispatch for the number of weeks stated in those Subscription Agreements.” Instead, Plaintiffs allege, “the GateHouse Defendants reduce their customers’ term subscriptions by sending their customers unsolicited ‘premium editions’ and decreasing the length of those subscriptions based on the value the GateHouse Defendants arbitrarily assign to these premium editions.” …

The parties’ dispute concerns a series of Defendants’ internal emails and Plaintiffs’ use of those emails in their Opposition. Defendants contend that portions of Plaintiffs’ Opposition and Exhibit C containing those emails should be redacted because they contain trade secrets…. Generally, [the e-mails] discuss the number of premium editions to be issued, the price of those premium editions, Dispatch subscribers’ frustration with the premium-edition policy, and Dispatch employees’ opinions regarding the same….

[But, first,] Defendants have not demonstrated that the specific information they seek to redact from Plaintiffs’ Opposition is, in fact, a trade secret…. [And, second,] Defendants are required to show that “disclosure will work a clearly defined and serious injury … And in delineating the injury to be prevented, specificity is essential.” General representations of some potential undefined harm, like those made by Defendants, are insufficient to justify redacting the information in question.

Ultimately, “[o]nly the most compelling reasons can justify non-disclosure of judicial records.” Even “[w]here a party can show a compelling reason for sealing, the party must [still] show why those reasons outweigh the public interest in access to those records and that the seal is narrowly tailored to serve that reason.” “[I]n class actions—where by definition some members of the public are also parties to the case—the standards for denying public access to the record should be applied…with particular strictness.”

Defendants have not demonstrated that the information contained in Plaintiffs’ Opposition is a trade secret. And, because this is a purported class action concerning central Ohio’s primary newspaper, the public has at least a moderate interest in viewing the information in question. The relevant portion of Plaintiffs’ Opposition contains information regarding the Dispatch’s subscription policies and Dispatch employees’ opinions regarding the same. On the record before the Court, there is no reason for the Court to prevent the public from viewing that information….

The public has a right to know ….

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From nippon.com:

Japan’s Supreme Court for the first time has ruled that tattooing people without a medical license does not constitute a violation of the medical practitioners law….

[T]he top court’s Second Petty Bench turned down an appeal by public prosecutors over a suit against a 32-year-old man who tattooed three people. It finalizes a high court ruling that overturned a district court verdict fining the man 150,000 yen.

The Second Petty Bench … said that “tattoos require artistic skills different from medicine, and that it cannot be assumed that doctors do the act exclusively,” concluding that the practice is not a medical act.

Thanks to Jenny Wilson for the pointer.

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A planned House vote on a bill to decriminalize the possession of marijuana was canceled on Thursday under pressure from law enforcement lobbyists and other pro-prohibition special interests.

The expected floor vote on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act would have been the biggest accomplishment yet for cannabis reformers, but the effort has been postponed until after Election Day, Politico reports. Democrats have gotten weak-kneed about a bill that they once saw as a major criminal justice reform.

Indeed, it would have been. The MORE Act, sponsored by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.), would remove cannabis from the schedules of the Controlled Substances Act and make that change retroactive, effectively expunging any federal marijuana offenses and convictions. The bill also orders federal courts to lift all sentences for people currently locked up due to a marijuana conviction.

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explained when the bill was introduced last year, the MORE Act was in many ways superior to other marijuana legislation, because it “completely deschedules marijuana rather than moving it to a lower schedule or making exceptions to the ban for state-legal conduct, and it seeks to lift the burdens that prohibition has imposed on people caught growing, distributing, or possessing cannabis, a vital project that too often has been treated as an afterthought.”

This year, the bill had collected more than 100 co-sponsorships in the House—it even had support from three Republicans—and appeared on track to pass the lower chamber. Even though the bill was expected to die in the Senate, that House vote would have been historic.

Unfortunately, cop lobbyists seem to have convinced House Democratic leaders that it would also be a liability. A coalition of law enforcement special interests and other proponents of the drug war sent a letter to congressional leaders last week warning about the potential dangers associated with legalizing and “commercializing” marijuana.

That, combined with vague fears about how Republicans might weaponize the legalization vote for negative ads in swing districts, was apparently enough to convince Democrats to scuttle the vote.

That isn’t just disappointing: It’s pretty pathetic. Democrats were right to position the MORE Act as a vehicle for racial justice and a key step toward addressing the problems of America’s criminal justice system. The war on drugs is deliberately racist, and it always has been. Decriminalizing marijuana would a pretty good first step towards righting those wrongs.

But even after everything that happened this summer to put criminal justice in the foreground of the national conversation, and even with polls showing that most Americans (and a larger share of Democrats) support the legalization of marijuana, Democratic leaders were still too spooked to take an important and historic vote. That’s just sad.

If police interests find it this easy to shut down marijuana reform—which doesn’t even really affect the way cops do their jobs, aside from removing one of the excuses they might use to stop, search, and seize an innocent person’s stuff—how can House Democrats talk about passing policing reforms with a straight face?

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When the government uses civil asset forfeiture laws to steal the property of innocent people, it often backs down upon encountering unexpected resistance, as bullies tend to do. But as Gerardo Serrano’s experience with legalized larceny illustrates, those victories do not necessarily help other people who find themselves in the same Kafkaesque situation.

Five years ago, Serrano was on his way to visit his cousin in Mexico when Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in Eagle Pass, Texas, found a magazine containing five .380-caliber rounds in the center console of his pickup truck. Serrano, a U.S. citizen with a Kentucky concealed-carry permit, said he did not realize the magazine was in the vehicle and offered to leave it behind as he continued on his journey. But as far as the CBP agents were concerned, those five cartridges made Serrano an international arms smuggler. Although he was never charged with a crime, the agents seized the truck, a 2014 Ford F-250.

After Serrano paid a $3,800 cash bond for the privilege of trying to get his truck back, two years went by without a hearing. Then in October 2017, a month after the Institute for Justice helped him file a lawsuit arguing that the government’s forfeiture practices violated his Fifth Amendment right to due process, CBP suddenly decided to return his vehicle, which the government had never officially tried to keep. Serrano continued to pursue his lawsuit, which aimed to qualify as a class action, because he wanted to stop this sort of thing from happening again. A federal judge shot him down two years ago, and yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit agreed that Serrano had failed to state a due process claim.

That conclusion is astonishing when you consider the options that Serrano confronted after CBP took his truck. The notice that the agency sent him 10 days after the seizure explained that he could do one of six things:

1. He could file a “remission petition” begging the same agency that took his truck to give it back instead of selling it and keeping the money.

2. He could submit an “offer in compromise,” agreeing to pay the government part of his truck’s value in exchange for its return.

3. He could “abandon any interest in the property,” letting the government keep it.

4. He could “request court action and have his case referred to the U.S. Attorney for institution of judicial forfeiture proceedings.”

5. He could “do nothing,” leading to the same result as Option 3.

6. He could “offer to substitute release of the seized property on payment,” meaning he would get the truck back after paying the government its full market value.

Serrano’s only realistic hope of getting his truck back without succumbing to government extortion was Option 4, which was the one he picked. Yet he waited two years as the government dragged its feet, neither returning the truck nor filing a forfeiture complaint that Serrano could then challenge. In fact, Serrano never got that opportunity, since CBP evidently decided that proceeding with the forfeiture was not worth the effort, expense, legal risk, and bad publicity. Call that Option 7.

After surveying this confusing, intimidating, infuriating, expensive, and time-consuming process, the Fifth Circuit concluded that nothing was amiss.

The three-judge panel conceded that “the seizure of a vehicle implicates an important private interest,” which weighed in Serrano’s favor. But it deemed “the risk of erroneous deprivation of such interest” to be “minimal,” because of all “the remedial procedures”—every one of them rigged in the government’s favor—that theoretically “permit a claimant to contest the deprivation of his vehicle.”

The third factor that the appeals court considered, guided by the 1976 Supreme Court case Mathews v. Eldridge, was “the Government’s interest, including the function involved and the fiscal and administrative burdens that the additional or substitute procedural requirement would entail.” That factor, the panel concluded, favored the government.

“We cannot ignore the context of the underlying seizure,” the court said. “The Government’s interest in preventing the unlawful exportation of munitions, drugs, and other contraband is significant.”

You might think that the relevant “context” in this case was that Serrano lost his truck simply because he forgot about the five handgun rounds he had left in the center console. Although CBP claimed “the truck was used in an attempt to illegally export munitions from the United States, in violation of federal law,” it is obvious that Serrano, who never even crossed the border with his “munitions” and offered to leave them behind when he realized his mistake, was not involved in any such activity. Serrano was never charged with violating federal law, and neither was his truck, since the government did not actually file a forfeiture complaint. Given the situation, the 5th Circuit’s invocation of the government’s interest in preventing international arms smuggling is comical.

The judges also noted that “a significant administrative burden would be placed on the Government if it was required to provide prompt post-seizure hearings in every vehicle seizure.” Due process undeniably imposes a burden on the government; that is the whole point. If the government is worried about that burden, maybe it should stop stealing people’s stuff on the slightest pretext.

The Institute for Justice says it will appeal the 5th Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court. “When the government takes someone’s property, the owners should have an opportunity to challenge the seizure in court immediately, not wait days, months, or, as in Gerardo’s case, even years,” said Institute for Justice attorney Anya Bidwell. “The Supreme Court has already said that there must be a prompt hearing when you’re arrested. It also requires pre-seizure hearings for real estate. It makes no sense for the Fifth Circuit to hold that a car is somehow different and you are not entitled to quickly see a judge and contest its seizure.”

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