BC Law IPTF Blog

To create a condominium in Boston, you must obtain a Tregor Tax stamp from the City Hall. The Tregor Tax was created by a Boston politician who wanted to curb the condo-ization of apartments and houses in the city. When you create a condo, you get the first condo for free; every condo thereafter costs $500. So if you’re creating 11 condos, you have to pay 10 * $500 = $5,000 to get your Tregor Tax stamp.

The Tregor Tax stamp goes on the master deed of your condominium project. To obtain it, go down from the third floor to the mezzanine. Go around the central offices and to Window 31. There you present your master deed for their review along with a bank check or a check from an IOLTA, conveyance, or client’s account fund. If all pans out well, you get a stamp and a signature from someone in the back.

And now the procedure for obtaining a Tregor Tax stamp in Boston is on-line. (Until this moment, there’s only a Craigslist mention of this on Google. And I’m pretty sure that “Tregor” is the correct spelling because “Traeger” and “Trager” came up with nothing.) Best of luck to all of you, and please remember to tip your waitress.

While researching the exceptions to non-competition agreements in California, I came across this exception:

16603. Every person who, as a condition to a sale or consignment of any magazine, book, or other publication requires that the purchaser or consignee purchase or receive for sale any horror comic book, is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both.

This section is not intended to prohibit an agreement requiring a person to purchase or accept on consignment a minimum number of copies of a single edition or issue of a magazine or of a particular book or other particular publication.

As used in this section “person” includes a corporation, partnership, or other association.

As used in this section “horror comic book” means any book or booklet in which an account of the commission or attempted commission of the crime of arson, assault with caustic chemicals, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, kidnapping, mayhem, murder, rape, robbery, theft, or voluntary manslaughter is set forth by means of a series of five or more drawings or photographs in sequence, which are accompanied by either narrative writing or words represented as spoken by a pictured character, whether such narrative words appear in balloons, captions or on or immediately adjacent to the photograph or drawing.

This definition of “horror comic book” would probably include most comic books out there, at least not the ones written specifically for children. I wonder what the history of this Code provision is.

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.

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).

I was thinking about this brilliant post of mine, where I pretty much said nothing of value, and wondered what virtulegal issues actually arise on Second Life, and whether other MMORPGs like World of Warcraft would have similar issues.

I mean, one major difference is that Second Life, well, has “people,” whereas WoW has, well, gnomes. In Second Life, people live in houses and have jobs and sit around and drink coffee and have sex. WoW–well, has gnomes. And they kill monsters. And go on quests for magic weapons.

So, where there is no specific object for “life” in Second Life–no quests, no XP, no magic weapons to find–maybe there’s more room and time for free minds to start thinking about their rights. (The “quest,” if any, in Second Life is to make money, buy cool things, and have lots of sex. Just like IRL, right?) It’s like Second Lifers are bourgeoisie, and the WoWers are serfs locked into meaningless toil, unable to afford the luxury to think about rights.

WoW is more of a game, where arbitrary rules are accepted. (Think if football was controlled by common law, and not by code.) You either follow the rules, or you don’t succeed in the game. What “rights” beyond that could you need?

I suppose there is the process, IRL, of “support”–bug fixes, code improvements, server uptime, game tweaks. And this is basically what the SLLA is asking for–an IRL improvement, external to the VR game life. This is what spawned the old-time protests on EverQuest and Ultima Online (though the Ultima Online protest about inflation was actually quite an interesting one, deserving a New Yorker article).

But last year, there was a WoW protest where a bunch of warriors gathered en masse to protest deficiencies in how the warrior classification was configured. By virtue of the numbers of characters on-line, in a single location, the servers had trouble handling the load. WoW ended up suspending the accounts of those who participated. Talk about protest and suppression!

I should really get back to reading Evidence… So I’ll finish this later, and try to wrap up my wandering thoughts.

(For full disclosure, I have a character on WoW, and, yes, he is a gnome. But a damn fine one. With lots of magic weapons.)

From the web site of the Second Life Liberation Army :

The Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA) was formed as the ‘in-world’ military wing of a national liberation movement within Second Life. The movement contends that univeral suffrage is a right that should be established within Second Life immediately. As Linden Labs is functioning as an authoritarian government the only appropriate response is to fight. To this end the political movement has dissolved itself and handed over interim power to the SLLA Army council headed by it Chief of Staff. When the SLLA succeeds in its aims it will disband and hand power back to the political wing of the movement. For the time being all military decisions will be taken by the SLLA Chief of Staff and implemented by SLLA fighters.

The SLLA has been exploding “push guns” or virtual bomb blasts that temporarily cloud over the screen so that you can’t see your avatars or anything around them.

From a story on this from the AFP, one of their major demands is for Second Life’s developer, Linden Labs, to go public and allow users to buy shares of stock–claiming this as a “basic right” of Second Lifers.

Is rebellion the same as terrorism? How about on Second Life, where violence has been technologically curbed? In the absence of courts, in a virtual world controlled by a private company, how can virtual citizens demand their rights, especially if they’re in a minority?

Apparently, there was an attempt to establish courts–the Second Life Superior Court–but I haven’t been following this enough to see if there has been anything established.  The blog post linked above is over a year old, and it’s the only mention of it from a Google search, so maybe it’s defunct.

So I’m re-writing some subpoenas duces tecum (or “subpoena duces tecums”?), and I’m abhorred at the inconsistency in addressing formats. I learned that there were proper ways to write postal addresses–and now I’m learning how no one follows them.

Straight from the USPS:

Addresses should be typewritten or machine printed in dark ink on a light background using uppercase letters. Except for the hyphen in the primary or secondary street number (if needed) or the ZIP+4 code, all punctuation may be omitted. All lines of the address should be formatted with a uniform left margin. When using a foreign address, always place the country name by itself on the last line. (See sample address types in section A2.)

Address characters must not touch and should be equally spaced. All lines of the address should be parallel to the bottom of the envelope. Be sure to include all pertinent information such as the directional code, apartment, floor, and suite number.

The entire address should be contained in an imaginary rectangle known as the OCR read area (see illustration in section A1) that extends from 5/8″ to 2 3/4″ from the bottom of the mailpiece, with 1/2″ margins on each side.

The barcode clear area, 5/8″ from the bottom, and 4 3/4″ from the right edge of the mailpiece (see illustration in section A1), is the area where a POSTNET barcode is preapplied or printed by an OCR.

Extraneous (nonaddress) printing that appears in the OCR read area should be positioned above the delivery address line and as far away from the address block as possible.

So you may ask, “Paul, what does this have to do with intellectual property, or law and technology?” It has nothing to do with IP, but it does have to do with lawyerly anal-ness and technology.

The reason for proper US postal address formatting is for the OCR, or optical character recognition, that sorts and sends mail. When mail fails OCR for one reason or another, then its sent to human readers who sort the mail. (My mom used to do this.) That’s the tech reason.

The lawyerly anal-ness reason is that before we resort to the common law (or “tradition”) of addressing mail, we should first look to the rule.

NC State has a helpful–though egregiously spelled and punctuated–image, referring to the USPS’s “Addressing for Success” document:

The question that spurned this little rant, though, is the question of where to put a floor designation on an address. As above, the postal service wants the floor designation when applicable, but nowhere does it say where.

The consensus amongst my colleagues is that it should go after the location, e.g., “street.” But if you were to put an office or building name, it would go above the location. A floor is somewhere inbetween an office/building and a suite.

I am thus paralyzed and can do no more.

Update: I “asked” the postal service (thanks to my friend, Fipi Lele!) on their online address checking service. I entered:

256 FREEPORT ST
2ND FL
DORCHESTER MA 02122-2845

It removed the “2ND FL” and tried to replace it with a “STE.” So no help from them on this. Maybe “floor” is not a valid designation. If not, then it should properly go above the location, I believe.

From Slashdot:

“The Chinese have recently been allowed to enjoy the Chinese version of Wikipedia now that the ban has been lifted. And the result is an explosion in use after being banned for a year. From the article, “Activity on nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s Chinese Wikipedia site has skyrocketed since its release, which Internet users in China first started reporting on Nov. 10. Since then, the number of new users registering to contribute to the site has exceeded 1,200 a day, up from an average of 300 to 400 prior to the unblocking. The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before, with the total now surpassing 100,000, according to the foundation.” No one’s sure how long this will be available to the People’s Republic of China but hopefully the government will recognize that at least a significant part of the populace enjoys a Wikipedia community.”

That’s all.

Virtual Economies Attract Real-World Tax Attention - Reuters via Yahoo! News.

The article looks to the virtual economies underlying virtual communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft:

“You could argue that to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there’s no mechanism by which you’re taxed on this stuff,” [Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress] told Reuters in a telephone interview.

* * *

Inside Second Life, users can buy and sell virtual objects from T-shirts to helicopters, develop virtual real estate, or hire out services ranging from architecture to exotic dancing. Up to $500,000 in user-to-user transactions take place every day, and the Second Life economy is growing by 10 to 15 percent a month.

“Ownership, property rights, all that stuff needs to be decided. There’s just too much money floating around,” said game designer Sam Lewis, who trained as an economist and has worked on games such as Star Wars Galaxies. He is currently lead designer for an upcoming game from Cartoon Network.

This is becoming such an important topic that Reuters has even opened up a Second Life virtual news bureau: http://secondlife.reuters.com

Politicians host community meetings. People advertise within the community. There is an exchange rate for the Linden dollar (as of Oct. 16, 2006 the exchange rate is L$243/USD). Business and progress are bustling in the virtual space.

Intel is currently being investigated by the European Commission on anti-trust charges stemming from alleged pricing pressure put upon retailers.  Microsoft has also faced the wrath of European anti-trust regulators for the past several years over several business practices.  Several European countries have also independently sparred with Apple over the closed format of its iTunes store.  Does this signal increased hostility to dominant US-based high tech companies?

From TechNewsWorld:
European regulatory authorities have taken a step toward bringing allegations that Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) is violating antitrust law closer to a resolution — and the company’s probable prosecution.

Officials investigating claims against the chip maker reportedly have presented their evidence to an internal panel of so-called “devil’s advocates,” a step taken before formal legal proceedings are launched.

If charges are levied, the competition commissioner will issue a statement of objections to the company. Intel’s European antitrust woes began several years ago in Germany, with allegations that retailers were being pressured into stocking only PCs that were equipped with Intel chips. Complaints also surfaced over Intel’s manufacturer rebate program.

Navigating the Rebate Issue

Surprisingly, rebates can be a gray area in anticompetition law, even in the United States, commented Tyler Baker, a partner with Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley.

“I don’t know all of the details about the rebate systems Intel uses, but I can tell you it is a very much unresolved question in this country,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

Many U.S. courts are hesitant to find that rebates are illegal, because they are a form of price competition — which antitrust laws encourage, he explained.

However, pricing can subtly morph into a de facto exclusive dealer’s arrangement when companies are required to buy large quantities of product to qualify for a manufacturer’s rebate.

“Some courts have found that rebates can be set up or structured to be more than just price competition,” Baker said.
Following Microsoft

Intel may be poised to head down the same path in Europe that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has been on for the last several years. Microsoft’s antitrust legal problems extend into many different areas, Baker noted, so the analogy is not a perfect one. It is, however, close enough.

“Intel is a very dominant company, and dominant companies are sometimes judged by different standards. That is true both [in the U.S.] and in Europe,” he pointed out.

Intel might find, as Microsoft did, that business practices are not judged in isolation. While it might be unclear whether one activity could be considered an antitrust violation, the combination of several ambiguous business practices can add up to antitrust concerns in the eyes of regulators.

Whether charges will be filed is still uncertain, and it is too early to extrapolate any lessons from the latest events, Baker noted.

“If the EC brings a case, then other companies will have to pay greater attention, of course, to these issues,” he said.

On the other hand, the European Commission may decide not to press charges. After all, the panel of devil’s advocates was established precisely to ensure that poorly investigated cases do not enter the legal system. “That will also send a message,” Baker said.