Russians crack down on BitTorrent piracy

By J. DeVoy

Russian authorities have shut down Pornolab.net, one of the largest adult BitTorrent websites in the world.  The full story is available at XBIZ.

Litigation’s so passé

By J. DeVoy

For whatever reason, this makes me think of my experiences thus far in the District of Nevada:

Man bursts into flames in porn store. You can’t explain that!

The tides come in and they go out. You can’t explain that! Magnets just stick to each other, with no glue! You can’t explain that! Jagermeister goes in, puke comes out. You can’t explain that! And you sure as shit can’t explain a man bursting into flames while watching a porn movie in a sex shop.

Could this bizarre incident be attributed to a higher power?

“I believe so. I definitely believe so,” [Pastor Roger] Huang told AOL News, adding that he hopes the unidentified man is recovering from the burns. (source)

Is there anything more idiotic than Donald Trump’s hair? YES!

His ideas. Donald is a well known birther. This interview with George Stephanopoulos takes the cake.

Encyclopædia Dramatica Dead…. This is the darkest day in Internet history

Encyclopædia Dramatica
December 10, 2004 - April 16, 2011

If you don’t know what Encyclopædia Dramatica was, then I don’t wish to explain it to you. Lets just say that the Internet is less Internet now that Encyclopædia Dramatica is dead. Its successor is a hollow shell of its ancestor.

I feel like Taylor when he sees the Statue of Liberty in the sand… the terrorists truly have won.

Fuck “Oh Inter Net.”

The marginal edge: Using Zinc to be a better lawyer

By J. DeVoy

From what I’ve observed and in my admittedly short experience, good lawyers arise from knowing the facts of a case, knowing the applicable law, and merging them to find creative solutions to difficult problems.  Other personality traits drive how these skills are expressed in real life, though, such as risk aversion, ethics/morality, and, for lack of a more artful term, selfishness.  Assuming two lawyers are of equal skill and ability, these secondary traits can turn an endurable result into a good one.  Experience doesn’t fully develop these innate traits, though, and there are chemical components to them – which can be purchased for pennies a day.

Zinc boosts testosterone production, and just 50 mg of the stuff is 333% of a daily recommended dose.  The reasons why a litigator or transactional attorney would want as much testosterone are fairly obvious, as testosterone does the following:

• It affects your risk aversion in a dominance challenge (i.e. fight-or-flight response)
• It increases risk tolerance in financial decisions
• It increases mental and physical energy (source.)

Among other things, testosterone is linked to aggression, which can intimidate an opponent or be channeled into obtaining a desirable result. (source.)  While having an elevated testosterone level will not compensate for being a terrible lawyer, it will confer a marginal advantage, and may be enough to give a consistent advantage over an equally or better skilled adversary with lower testosterone.  For example, male testosterone levels decrease with fatherhood.  Men also have lower testosterone levels when they are in love; conversely, women have higher testosterone levels when in the same state.  (This may partially explain why women fall out of love and say their partner is no longer the man they fell in love with.) (source.)

A 200-count bottle of 50 mg Zinc tablets is about $5.  It’s not a cure-all and your mileage may vary; someone with high natural testosterone, or who eats a lot of meat, may not see a substantial difference from taking Zinc supplements.  At the margins, though, Zinc may be a tool for getting better results for clients.

BREAKING NEWS — Righthaven’s operating agreement revealed by Nevada District Court – Does the House of Cards Collapse?

Yesterday, the District of Nevada ordered evidence regarding Righthaven’s ownership of the copyrights it sues on to be unsealed.

Today, Docket # 79, which reveals heretofore unknown information about Righthaven’s business model, was unsealed.  As of right now, I don’t believe that any other source has this information.  Read the whole thing here.

For those of you lacking fluency in Copyright law, Silvers v. Sony Pictures Entertainment, 402 F.3d 881 (2005), says that you need to assign a specific right under 17 U.S.C. § 106 – and not the bare right to sue – for a copyright assignment to be valid.  Other courts, such as Sybersound, have held that you need an exclusive right in order to sue for infringement of your copyright rights.

The document, which Righthaven fought to keep sealed, seems to reveal what many observers suspected all along — that the Righthaven assignments may run afoul of Silvers v. Sony.

As many defendants in Righthaven actions have argued, Righthaven does not truly own the copyrights it sues over. Section 7.2 of the Agreement clearly states that “Righthaven shall have no right or license to Exploit or participate in the receipt of royalties from the Exploitation of the Stephens Media Assigned Copyrights other than the right to proceeds in association with a Recovery.”

Furthermore, it seems that in Section 3.3, Stephens Media, not Righthaven retains the right to determine who gets sued. Section 8 gives Stephens Media the right to terminate any Copyright Assignment and then get a complete reversion of all rights. That doesn’t sound like a valid assignment to me.

Ruh roh.

In the interest of getting this to press right away, I am publishing the information now. More analysis may be added later, but I have a funny feeling that the comments will fill up with analysis.

Feds indict online gambling sites

By J. DeVoy

Fresh on the heels of D.C.’ s decision to pursue legal online gambling, the DOJ indicted a number of gambling websites today, including PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker. (source.)

The L.A. Times observes that this happened only after the online gambling business had taken off and become an economic success. (source.)  Much like the government’s efforts to stop private groups from making a profit through IP infringement – and keep the damages for themselves, depriving IP holders of a chance to recoup their losses – which have been widely discussed, this looks like another case of the government getting involved to push out competition for their own endeavors.  If the state is going to be administering, sanctioning and aggressively taxing gambling, the last thing it wants is competition.

Online Gambling Comes to DC

By Marc J. Randazza

Washington, D.C. – not Las Vegas, Miami or Texas – is poised to be the first to allow online gaming for its residents. But it’s not without some catches.

Players must be within the city’s small borders in order to play online. Despite the gaming occurring online, the technology – possibly through IP screening – will prevent interlopers from other states where online gaming is illegal from joining in. Further restricting access, prospective players will have to go to designated “hot spots” to be dealt in. These locations will be set up by the city, and will be set up in bars, stores and other locations.

Finally, players must register for the service. This will include an age verification, much as how Vegas casinos require gamblers to play.

Intralot, a tech company, will be the District of Columbia’s point company on the project. As of now, there are no outside contractors participating on the project. The move, intended to compete with the limited gaming facilities available in nearby West Virginia, Delaware and Maryland, is intended to keep D.C. denizens from going elsewhere for their gambling needs – allowing the city to tax more revenue. Given the premium real estate goes for in D.C., the online route seems like the most prudent plan to bring gambling to the area.

At first blush, the new law seems similar to Nevada bill AB268, which seeks to bring online gaming to Nevada, and its related bills, SB103 and SB218. It remains to be seen how the new D.C. law and other pending bills will square up against Federal statutes, particularly the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, 31 U.S.C. §§ 5361-67.

dear lolman

By J. DeVoy

Not new if you read The Spearhead, Crime and Federalism and In Mala Fide, but still hilarious.

Weekend read: “Compliment & Cuddle”

By J. DeVoy

Just in time for the weekend, controversial pickup writer Roosh has finished his seminal work Compliment & Cuddle: The Nice Guy Method to Making Love.  It’s free, online, and can be read in an hour at most.  Like all of Roosh’s work, it will shock and offend the uninitiated and willfully blind, especially with its adolescent tone, and amuse everyone else. (Don’t say you weren’t warned.)  In each of the five parts, you will learn to curb your masculine desires to be your own person and enjoy your life in an effort to become an appropriately sensitive, groveling 21st century man who begs for affection.  Important tips include treating any girl who looks at you like a celebrity, spending lots of money on her right away, and to fall in love — a.s.a.p.!

All five parts are available at the following links:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

I find this project hilarious in a painful way; while I am not the most practised student of Roosh’s particular style of game, Compliment & Cuddle is a comprehensive guide of what not to do.  Even when you have a girl in a relationship and the heavy lifting of attraction-building is done, one can still feel her slip away and lose interest by taking things seriously, as impromptu meetings at a shitty bar where you talk about the time you got arrested in college and drank an entire bottle of gin with the band Pigface become dinners where you listen and conduct a conversation about some important issue in her life.  To the extent C&C can be heeded as a cautionary guide, it is a valid one.  Being a calculated puppy-kicking asshole won’t get you anywhere, either.  But utter indifference and a triumph of self-concern confer a man with the keys to obtaining all the frivolous relationships he could want.

New federal web laws will confiscate wealth from adult, other industries

By J. DeVoy

Pat Leahy seems to actually know a bit about intellectual property law, if you listen to him speak long enough.  Based on the failed introduction of COICA in the fall, he’s clearly aware of the ravages piracy has caused on the broader recording and entertainment industries, as well as the harm of fraudulent goods being sold over the internet.  Leahy is now renewing his call for tough new internet laws to rein in “rogue websites” that sell counterfeit goods and are at the heart of the piracy epidemic that has sent adult entertainment revenues tumbling.

On the surface, government intervention is a good thing – an entity with tremendous resources and power is stepping in to preserve the market for IP holders’ goods.  If you think the government is doing this for the benefit of the adult market – or that these efforts will in any way aid adult – think again.  As always, the beneficiaries of these policies are the groups that weren’t hurting too badly in the first place.  For example, the RIAA and MPAA spend tons of money pursuing infringers just to preserve the markets for their respective works, as they have the resources to do so, and simply meting out high-profile punishments without regard for what recovery they can actually obtain is sufficient to serve their ends.  For example, the movie industry posted massive profits for 2010.  Then there are brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton that love government intervention so that the market for their overpriced products is kept free from cut-rate counterfeiters.

The adult entertainment industry lacks this kind of centralized, well-funded activism apparatus.  While the sums at stake for the industry as a whole may rival those sought – and spent – by the RIAA and MPAA, a patchwork approach to litigation, including undisclosed settlements, keeps outsiders from seeing the full scope of piracy’s damages.  In just one case, Evil Angel and Jules Jordan won a $17.5 million award against various defendants for DVD piracy – an activity that seems almost quaint in the current climate of BitTorrent litigation.  While that’s a huge award, too, it still pales in comparison to the amount of money the RIAA will spend to fight pirates in a single year.  Especially after Citizens United, money talks, and its the mainstream recording industries that are spending more of it to influence legislative activity.

So, evidently, this legislative push is not made with the intent of making life easier for adult content producers.  In practice, it will not behoove them either.  Here’s why:

Destruction of evidence

When the government shuts down a site, it doesn’t preserve and disable it – it throws its logos up and tells the world that it has been taken over by the Feds.  For those in the process of building a case, or considering one, the information needed for that prosecution is gone, certainly as far as you’re concerned, if not from the potential defendant’s servers.  Some of these sites will reemerge on alternate domains, but then the facts underlying a producer’s case may have changed.  A view count on a pirated video, which has probative worth with respect to damages, may reset from hundreds of thousands of views to zero.

Confiscation of assets

Shutting down sites like channelsurfing.net isn’t enough.   The government is now pursuing those sites’ operators, such as Bryan McCarthy, for criminal copyright infringement.  ”Hang ‘em high!” May be the rallying cry of some producers, but the funds used for criminal legal defense and assets forfeited to the government in a plea deal or upon conviction are all things that copyright holders won’t get in civil damages.  Servers, real property, and anything else used in running a site that the government confiscates under its ill-defined conception of rogue websites all go to the government – and there are a lot of ways the government ensures it receives this property.

In essence, these actions become a hidden tax on adult content producers who are robbed of a means to pursue litigation and the damages to which they may be entitled for copyright infringement.  While keeping one’s business afloat on copyright infringement lawsuits is a poor model, recouping lost sales by going after pirates makes a hell of a lot of sense, and can be pretty damn moral, too.  But if Congress gets its way, any potential gains studios may realize become government property.

…

This doesn’t even begin to address the free speech concerns of what would constitute a too-infringing website, and where that line would be drawn.  The threats to collaboration and innovation should be obvious.  And while many believe something should be done to aid in the fight against piracy, this probably isn’t the answer, as government intervention is money out of studios’ and producers’ pockets.

Market regulation is something the government should have some hand in, due to its reach and resources.  If all antitrust and market enforcement action were private, no group or groups would have the resources to find and police every instance of market abuse and cure them in an even-handed way free of self-interest.  It’s a good thing that the FTC and DOJ exist to fight antitrust violations (to the extent they can in the wake of Iqbal and Twombly), but for ICE to get involved by unilaterally shuttering websites goes far beyond the market-policing role and delves into something much more sinister.

NY Times pranked again; nostalgic for Jayson Blair

By J. DeVoy

Consistent with its history of shoddy reporting and extreme gullibility, the New York Times has once again fallen prey to a fairly obvious April Fool’s Day hoax.  Eric Turkewitz has the story on the New York Personal Injury Law Blog.

Without stealing Turkewitz’s thunder, I’m appalled.  Anyone who expects much from the mainstream media is a fool, but the Times’ consistent pattern of getting it wrong – completely wrong – makes one wonder if NY Times Co. v. Sullivan wasn’t a wasted effort after all.