WTS Epic Mount

Let’s not make this a trend, but here’s another sex-related IPTF story. Yes, the infamous WTS (“Willing to Sell”) Epic Mount story.

Now, in the MMORPG World of Warcraft players of a certain level can earn “mounts” or animals they can ride so they look cool and move faster in the virtual world. Problem is, they’re hard to come by–they’re extremely expensive. So a presumably female WOW player posted on Cragslist, offering to sell her “services” for an hour for 5000 gold. (Today, 5000 gold could cost around US $685.) An epic mount for an “epic” mount, get it? Haha. Hahaha.

So the next obvious question after “Isn’t this illegal?” is “Is this a taxable transaction?” Here’s a Howstuffworks article about taxation of virtual assets.

Be Careful What You Say: You Might Just Get It

Looking through the site logs (“blog logs?”), I noticed a short stream of incoming searches for, well, to avoid saying it again and fueling more searches driven our way, two four-letter words describing “illegal images of younger people” because of yesterday’s post on Commonwealth v. Maccini. Funny. Kind of. A bit scary.

Maybe then people looking for that kind of smut will now learn more about the state of technology and the law!

Federal Income Tax and Corporate Practice

At BC Law, I took Tax I under Prof. Kornhauser. She’s a new, visiting professor, but I saw that she had a degree in education and mentioned a “problem-solving” approach to tax in her class description. After taking the class, I highly recommend it because of this problem-based approach, as opposed to a case-based approach to tax. And here’s why.

Our class pretty much wholly relied upon working through a packet of problems alongside the tax code book. It was just you and the code. So not only was the approach very practical in terms of addressing real-world problems, but it taught me—and Prof. Kornhauser stressed this a lot in class—how to “read the code.”

So I’m writing a provision about compliance with “Section 1060 of the Code.” I have no idea what this is… I look it up in the Definitions section and figure out it’s Section 1060 of the Internal Revenue Code—the tax code. I browse through Cornell’s LII and find Section 1060. Anyone who has struggled with the code knows that at first blush it just looks like a mess. But, really, it makes a lot of sense. You read the whole section first, then re-read the first chunk, and then step through and mentally apply the conditions and exceptions that generally follow.

Now, the reason why I started this post: although Federal Income Tax might not have that much application to people interested in corporate practice, it’s use is that it teaches you to read the Code. And, personally, I’d stay away from theory and policy classes and take a class like Prof. Kornhauser’s that gets your hands dirty in it.

Oh, and regarding Section 1060: From what I can gather, it allows the parties in our specific agreement to agree in writing to the allocation of assets, and then guides the parties into how to report the assets to the government (Form 8594).

Privacy of Electronic Communications in Massachusetts

I was browsing through Massachusetts Superior Court slip opinions during this mind-numbing LexisNexis training, and I came across Commonwealth v. Maccini, No. 06-0873, slip op. (Mass.Super. April ___, 2007). This is a typical child pornography case where a cop in Ohio entered a few chatrooms and was solicited by a guy in Massachusetts who then sent him child porn.

The defense is that the child porn should be suppressed because interception of that material is in violation with the Massachusetts wire tap statute. Well, that fails because the communications were “tapped” in Ohio, and therefore the Massachusetts statute doesn’t apply. Furthermore, generally e-mail is treated more like postal mail than phone conversations, and so most courts don’t apply wire-tap statutes anyways.

Here’s what Judge Fabricant thought about it:

The question presented by this motion is whether the defendant’s e-mail and instant message communications were unlawfully intercepted within the meaning of the statute. The Court concludes that they were not, for each of two distinct reasons: First, Haueter received and recorded the communications not in Massachusetts, but in Ohio, where he was not subject to the Massachusetts statute or any similar statute; and second, Haueter’s receipt and recording of the defendant’s communications was not secret, but rather was with the defendant’s knowledge and implicit consent.

In explanation:

In State v. Lott, 152 N. H. 436, 439-442 (2005), the Supreme Court of New Hampshire applied a statute similar to ours to facts virtually identical to those presented here. After thoroughly exploring the nature and characteristics of electronic mail and instant messaging, the Court concluded that the defendant there, by using those methods of communication, “as a matter of law, consented to the recording of his communications,” because recording on a computer is inherent in such communications. Electronic mail, the Court reasoned, is essentially the equivalent of leaving a message on an answering machine; one who sends an e-mail anticipates that it will be recorded. Lott, supra, 152 N. H. at 441, citing State v. Townsend, 57 P. 3d 255, 260 (Wash. 2002). See also United States v. Maxwell, 45 M. J. 406, 418 (U. S. C. A. Armed Forces, 1996) (likening e-mail to sending a letter; sender retains no control, and no expectation of privacy). Instant messaging, similarly, is automatically recorded on the recipient?s computer. The recording remains as long as the chat window is open, and may remain indefinitely if the recipient uses any of various options that are inherent in the instant messaging program to preserve it. Lott, supra, 152 N. H. at 441, citing State v. Bouse, 150 S. W. 3d 326, 329 (Mo. Ct. App. 2004). One who uses these methods of communication, the Court concluded, is on notice of the inherent recording, and implicitly consents to it. Lott, supra. The Lott case, although not binding on this Court, is persuasive, and this Court adopts its reasoning to reach the same conclusion.

So, again, it’s OK for the government to search and seize your electronic communications. Basically, once you send a message to someone else, you do it knowing that they are keeping a copy of it. But does that mean that it’s not private? Does that mean you don’t expect them to send it to the general public? This case doesn’t get into any “expectation of privacy” reasoning; it avoids it altogether. But it’s still a good summary of the current state of the law, pre-Long, and that’s why I’m posting on it.

Joost – A Beta Review

I have to say that I was initially skeptical of Joost. Even though it’s an offering by the creators of Skype and Kazaa, a torrent-based method of delivering free video content, it sounds like the right stuff. But I was skeptical about how efficiently the content would be delivered and the quality of the content.

Not bad. I’ve only been watching “Stella” from Comedy Central, but it’s good. It halted a bit when I started, but I forgave it, and hit pause and walked away for a bit, and after a minute or two it cached enough content that the rest of my viewing time was pretty much seamless.

I get about 800×600 AVI-quality video, close to par with ripped video content. (Imagine that you rip a DVD to CD size (~700 MB), and that’s what you get—much better than YouTube Flash video.) The selections were well chosen for my personal demographic—definitely enough to keep me happy after I finished the second season of “The Office.”

I think this is going to be great—as long as it lasts. Pretty psyched.

Technically, I just want to add that I’m watching it on an Acer 5610Z laptop, which is an economy laptop, so not-too-high-powered. It doesn’t run on my Mac Powerbook—it only runs on Intel-based Macs. This is exciting. And I’m going to keep on watching Stella until it’s reasonably too late.

In regards to Stella: The guys from The State are there, and they’ve done a great job keeping the wit, humor, and style of The State going about a decade later. I’m also impressed by how racially integrated the cast is. Good show. Check it out on Joost, OK?

Woot: 5:31 8:00 8:07 7:34

So Woot’s special for May 8, 2007 has a picture of four atomic watches in a row. Here’s the secret:

The times are 5:31 8:00 8:07 7:34. What does it mean?

Let’s take out the spaces and punctuation (a little s/\D// action), and we get:

531800807734

Now flip this upside down, like we used to do in middle school on our calculators, and what do we get?

I won’t say it out loud because it might be obscene… But give it a shot. Too much fun.

Wishing Well

I was just thinking that if there was a wishing well where everyone had one shot to get what they wished, then inflation would go out of control. Everyone who asked for $1 M would drive prices up; then people would ask for $100 M, then $1 B, and so on. Global economies would collapse. And if everyone asked for true love, then would true love lose its meaning? World peace? Teddy bears?

Supreme Court Opinion Links to Online Video

As the American Bar Association Journal eReport e-reports, the Supreme Court in Scott v. Harris refers to the URL of an online video of evidence from the case. The Supreme Court web site also hosts this video.

In a footnote to the opinion:

JUSTICE STEVENS suggests that our reaction to the videotape is somehow idiosyncratic, and seems to believe we are misrepresenting its contents. See post, at 4 (dissenting opinion) (“In sum, the factual statements by the Court of Appeals quoted by the Court . . . were entirely accurate”). We are happy to allow the videotape to speak for itself. See Record 36, Exh. A, available at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb and in Clerk of Court’s case file.

Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. ___, at 5 n.5 (2007).

Further, from the ABA report:

A lone dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens said the case [Scott v. Harris] should have gone to a jury for decision. “The court has usurped the jury’s fact-finding function,” he wrote, since “whether a person’s actions have risen to a level warranting deadly force is a question of fact best reserved for a jury.”

Stevens challenged the majority’s interpretation of what the video shows, and he referred to his fellow justices as “my colleagues on the jury.”

(See, also, SCOTUSblog for a more substantive look at the decision.)

I’m wondering what technical infrastructure the Supreme Court web site has in place to start hosting video or other electronic content in the future. It seems fairly ad hoc at the moment. If you look at the file structure for serving the opinions, it looks like this:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-1631.pdf

So all the opinions go into the “opinions” directory, and the PDF versions from 2006 go into the “06pdf” directory. Then the file is identified by the Supreme Court numbering system (“05-1631.pdf”).

On the other hand, the videos go into a “video” directory, with the filename as the case name:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb

This shows that the sysadmin is OK with the “video” directory just being a flat index of video by case name (and not the unique Supreme Court number), most likely meaning that they don’t plan on putting that many videos there in the first place. This means that this is a “one off” kind of thing with plans to add some video in the future, but not much. Furthermore, the naming convention only assumes one video per case.

So while the addition of a video URL may be interesting, they apparently don’t plan on doing much of the same in the future. If they did, then they should really change their file structure and naming systems to scale into the future.

As a quick suggestion, scalability is simple enough:

/opinions/06video/05-1631-01.rmvb

Better yet, as I prefer semantic filenames over “code” and non-proprietary formats, it *should* be

/opinions/06/video/scott-v-harris-05-1631-01-car-crash.avi