The Bangus Ultimatum

Whenever I go home via the expressway, I go through the Bocaue exit and pass by row upon row of firecracker stalls. The whole thing was a clusterfuck waiting to happen: Firecracker stalls side by side with other firecracker stalls, gas stations, and (I kid you not) auto repair shops and open-flame carinderias. Forget the fact that all this right beside a major highway, prone to stray sparks from vehicles and maybe the occassional cigarette butt from random motorists.

Against all probability, nothing happened. Until this morning, when I woke to the sound of explosions, and the sight of smoke against the dawn. The firecracker stalls by the Bocaue exit have been razed by fire, taking with them 8 lives and affecting close to 1,000 homes. It took one more act of stupidity on top of all this bozosity to blow up on our faces: “a buyer tested a type of firecracker called “higad” and its sparks reached a display of firecrackers …” Kinda reminds you of the gas station scene in Zoolander don’t it?

This isn’t a fortuitous event, this is something that could have been avoided with a rat brain’s worth of diligence. But there’s none of it in the factories where they kill child laborers slowly, (or through an equally moronic lack of safeguards, blow them to smithereens), none of it among municipal officials who were supposed to prevent this with proper zoning, and certainly none among the proprietors of these establishments.

And yet the firecracker industry has the temerity to bemoan how they’re being slaughtered by smuggling. In a rational democracy, that should be the least of their problems. What we have here is a classic externality problem: A wide gap exists between the private marginal costs to the firecracker industry, and the inevitable social marginal costs to everyone. Legal liability helps bridge that gap by “internalizing” such externalities, transferring the costs back to the guilty parties. But that’s assuming the system works. The laws are in place, yes. But 1) lax/no enforcement and 2) relative inaccessibility of the courts translate to no law at all.

The chronicles of the Anonymous Lawyer on “soulless, billable-hours-obsessed partners, the overworked BlackBerry-dependent associates and the wrecked families that are the dark underside of life at his large firm in Los Angeles” is just fiction, but I’m including it in the Lawyers and Law Students section of the sidebar, if only to give me and (and hopefully, the law students reading this blog) an early warning device (against—I don’t know really).

Scheherazade points out three lessons from all this:

1) the blog as a medium has an inherent credibility. 2) Humans in general, and lawyers in particular, are amazingly susceptible to status and heirarchy — Anonymous Lawyer’s appeal was the perception of access to honesty from the upper stratus of the standard professional heirarchy, and the delicious way the author could make explicit all the power struggles and displays of status and power within a law firm. Jeremy can convey that in beautiful, elegant turns of phrase. 3) The profession really is draining talent, energy, and enthusiasm from a huge hunk of lawyers, which is a travesty. Anonymous Lawyer was fiction, but too many people recognized themselves in the mirror Jeremy held up. It makes me really sad.

Cheesy flash animation and liberal use of webdings notwithstanding, a really good introduction to the philosophical underpinnings of libertarianism.

And it looks like a big one. An EU court denied Microsoft’s attempt to have sanctions suspended, and ordered it to:

1. Unbundle Windows Media Player (at least in European markets)
2. Disclose info on its proprietary server-side protocols
3. Pay USD 613 million in fines

Microsoft says it won’t appeal. They’ll publish interopterability info soon, and unbundle Windows Media Player by January.

You can read the entire decision, or read the BBC article.

Actual, real-life, very funny legal brief (yes, there is such a thing): How The Grinch Stole Christmas Vacation .(236KB PDF File)

I’m a bit late on this one, but the US Supreme Court granted certiorari on MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc. The Court will hear oral arguments in the case in March 2005. Simply put, one of the more important cases on P2P. Slate has an article introducing the case and the issues it presents.

Supreme Court justices, who are not exactly charter members of the download generation, could have an awkward time connecting with all of this and may have been tempted to throw their hands above their robes and just give up. The genius pace of modern techno-ingenuity is enough to make some judges balk at imposing any legal blockades, for fear the law will act as a drag on invention and creativity. This fear was openly expressed by the judges on the 9th Circuit in Grokster, who noted circumspectly that “we live in a quicksilver technological environment with courts ill-suited to fix the flow of internet innovation.”

And if the velocity of modern technical genius is breathtaking, so, too, is the often ingenious entrepreneurial pluck of cyberbusinesses out to make a buck. Again in the words of the 9th Circuit: “The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to old markets, and particularly to those copyright owners whose works are sold through well established distribution mechanisms. Yet, history has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests.” If the marketplace was able to adjust and assimilate such copyright-infringing machines as the player piano, photocopier, tape recorder, video recorder, personal computer, or karaoke machine, the reasoning goes, it will eventually figure out a way to handle the MP3 player.

From an LATimes article:

When I started doing this years ago, I never even thought about liability,” Nevada says. “But Santas have a pretty good chance of getting sued. You got the obvious things: You drop a child on its head. Then there’s Santa saying the wrong thing…. I had a Santa working for me a couple years ago; he had a girl on his knee, and he commented, “You have nice eyes and nice hair.’ She claimed sexual harassment.