Category Archives: Everything Else

A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Congrats, Rwanda, on Being Landmine Free! Plus: HeroRATS.

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Rwanda has become the first country to become landmine-free. Under the Ottawa Convention, this mean that not only as Rwanda detected and removed all landmines placed on its territory, but all its stockpiled mines. Impressively, under the treaty, Rwanda had a full year more to achieve landmine-free status, so, in a somewhat rare event under international law, they’re ahead of schedule on compliance.

Largely because of security issues related to South Korea and the DMZ, the U.S. still has not acceded to the convention.

In Rwanda, mine detection dogs were used to sweep the country side, and to identify and secure any mine found. Dogs aren’t the only option, however. One of my favorite international charities, APOPO, is pioneering the use of heartbreakingly adorable Gambian pouched rats as landmine detectors. The HeroRATS have a lot of advantages over dogs when it comes to mine detection, particularly in developing countries. They are cheaper than dogs, quicker to train and reach maturity, easy to motivate, and — perhaps most importantly — are light enough where they will not trigger the landmines themselves. Currently, the rats are used for demining efforts in Tanzania and Mozambique.

HeroRATS are a versatile tool for international development — they can also be trained to detect tuberculosis infections. Although as accurate as humans in detecting TB, they are about a hundred times faster:

HeroRATS offer a local solution to the TB epidemic. A rat can evaluate 40 samples in 10 minutes, equal to what a skilled lab technician, using microscopy, will do in two days. Without requiring sophisticated instruments, this method is non invasive and can handle a high volume of samples, all very important factors in a pro-active screening approach.

-Susan

Signaling Strategies and the Quest for Employment

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For fairly obvious reasons, the issues of signaling in the employment context have been heavily on my mind lately. It has been clear for some time now that I am in dire need of a new strategy for my own signaling methods, but knowing that something needs to change is a good deal easier than knowing what to change. But as it stands, I am failing to send potential employers a clear (and hopefully accurate!) indication that I’m a worthwhile candidate.

This post on snap judgments and taking superficial first impressions seriously summarizes the basic situation nicely:

If you’re applying for a job, you want good credentials so your resume doesn’t go straight to the circular file. The key elements in this story are (a) high rewards, and (b) high search costs. Since the rewards are high, lots of people try to win; and since lots of people are trying to win, it’s too expensive to carefully study all of the candidates. The result: People try really hard to make a good impression, and anyone who fails to make a good impression pays a heavy price.

There are a lot of people “trying to win” right now, so employers are forced into ever greater reliance on arbitrary filters, in order to pick out a rough list of the candidates for whom spending more on search costs is most likely to offer a good ROI. While conducting the initial screening, employers know there’s a high rate of false negatives, but accept this as a necessary cost; even if the “best” candidate is accidentally overlooked in favor of a candidate marginally worse, the company is still better off, as it is not efficient to spend ten times more in search costs merely to find the candidate that is just a tiny bit better.

This is a problem for me, as, unfortunately, I am pretty sure I am not making it through that initial sorting. That is, right now, I am doing a poor job at signaling to employers my potential value.

I look decent on paper: decent class rank at a decent law school with the usual decent assortment of accomplishments and attributes on my resume. Not a rockstar by any means, but nothing that should flag me as a potential axe-wielding sociopath to be avoided at all costs. However, to an employer sorting through resumes and making a couple hundred snap judgments, I would imagine I also look pretty boring. Boring is not necessarily bad — if I looked like I had all the personality of a box of Shredded Wheat, that might actually count in my favor so long as I boasted an editor position with a law review and a couple summers at Skaddington McKirkland & Jaworsknight.

But I don’t. So as it stands, there is very little reason for an employer, in an initial evaluation, to tag me as a candidate worth expending additional search costs on.

To make things worse, right now I have another factor working against me: it has been more months than I care to count since graduation, and I still do not have a job. To employers, this can be taken as a strong indication that I am not likely to be a good employee, and may have some hidden flaws that my resume is not revealing. It makes sense for someone hiring to assume that, “Well, if this young lawyer has been unable to secure a job from anyone she has previously applied to, that raises an assumption she was not good enough for any of them, and therefore is likely not good enough for me either.”

Effectively, I am pre-screened as a candidate who likely should not be hired by all of the many employers that have previously failed to hire me. It is simply not worth it to an employer to spend extra resources on giving me a closer look, when presumably other firms already have given me such a look and found me to be wanting.

So my problem is this: I need to find a strategy that increases the odds of an employer deciding to invest further time and money on obtaining a closer evaluation of me. Once they do that, they will, hopefully, discover that I am a capable and effective lawyer, and worth hiring. I believe this to be true; if it’s not, well, I have far bigger problems to deal than merely getting hired, and addressing the whole signaling issue would be kind of unnecessary. So for discussion purposes only, I am just going to stipulate that I am in fact the employee that any firm or agency making a hiring decision might like to find. How, then, can I quickly signal to employers that (1) I am worth taking seriously, and (2) the signal is very likely to be truthful?

I’ll be discussing this more here, both how it might particularly apply to my own situation and strategies for employee signaling in general. And who knows, with a good deal of luck, maybe in the near future I’ll even get some first hand experience on what signaling strategies work.

-Susan

Words Invented By Law Professors

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Law professors coin new words at roughly the rate of one neologism for every five articles written. Most of these words, however, either never catch on, or if they do remain in use, are strictly a legal term of art and do not enter the mainstream. I can think of two recent examples, however, of words that were first invented for use in law review articles, and have now started to become mainstream English.

The first is Copyfraud, coined in 2006 by Prof. Jason Mazzone in his article of the same name. Mazzone introduced the word to describe a pattern of widespread abuse of copyright laws:

Copyfraud, as the term is used in this Article, refers to claiming falsely a copyright in a public domain work. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the putative “owner’s” permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use, or altering their creative projects to excise the uncopyrighted material.

Since then, the word has evolved slightly; I see uses of “copyfraud” that apply not merely to claims of copyright in works in the public domain, but claims of copyright against uses that are either clearly not infringing or else clearly fair use. However, copyfraud still seems to remain in the neologism stage, and while in certain circles it is a common phrase, it has yet to achieve the popularity that, say, “unfriend” has.

In contrast, the term Net Neutrality, first used by Prof. Tim Wu in a 2003 law review article, is in widespread use today. It can fairly be considered to have entered the popular lexicon, and is regularly used in the mainstream media unaccompanied by an explanatory definition.

The most famous word invented by a law professor is still “genocide,” which was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. Today, the word genocide is as well established as patricide or even homicide, and will almost certainly remain a part of the English language for centuries yet. The word genocide first appeared in Lemkin’s book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, and was described as follows:

This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homocide, infanticide, etc.(1) Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.

I am sure there are other examples of popular words invented by law professors out there, but these seem to be the most prominent examples. If anyone else knows of another word with similar origins — either more modern creations or words of an older vintage — feel free to share them in comments.

-Susan

Coyotes & Unintended Consequences

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At the moment, I’m down in Atlanta, visiting my family for Thanksgiving. My dad and I were home yesterday when he called me to come look out the front windows — and there was a coyote lounging about across our front yard, in broad day light. He was also clearly injured, and heavily limping; my best guess is he was hungry and desperate enough to be wandering in the open, otherwise he would never have made himself so obvious to see.

We get a fair few foxes and rabbits here, and last summer, we even had a young (and presumably rather lost) black bear wander up about a mile from my house. But that’s the first time I’ve even heard about a coyote showing up this far in town. I know coyotes have become much more prevalent on the east coast in general, though, not just in Georgia, and I got curious about why it seemed like coyotes are suddenly appearing everywhere. From what I found, though, it does not look like anyone’s too sure about the answer.

Essentially, coyotes are an invasive species in most of their modern day territory. Coyotes were unknown east of the Mississippi until the second half of the twentieth century, and it has only been in the past few decades that they have really established a population in the Southeast. Explanations for the expansion pretty much boil down to “changes in habitat caused by humans” and “loss of competition from wolves.”

Despite their amazingly successful take over of North America, it’s not as if coyotes have been allowed to waltz over to the rest of the continent unchallenged. They are the most heavily persecuted carnivore in the U.S., and yet they now range from Los Angeles to Central Park, and from Panama to Alaska. I’m trying to think of another native apex predator that has had its range so dramatically expand as a result of human activity, but they’re the only ones that come to mind.

Coyotes are the primary cause of depredation losses in U.S. agriculture, resulting in around $40 million in damages every year, from killing sheep, goats, and calves. Coyote predation apparently took out 2.3% of the U.S.’s sheep in 1999. Although, proportionally, they kill far more sheep than cows, because there are so many more cows than sheep, most the coyote losses are in the cattle industry.

Coyotes are hard to get rid of, too:

[Coyote removal] costs in Virginia for FY 2002 were $228,000: $85,000 from the state; $22,000 from the VA Sheep Industry Board; and $121,000 from the federal government. (that works out to $578.68 per dead coyote).

Despite these numbers, it appears that coyote management in Virginia has been relatively successful. The program has been described as “fairly effective”:

During fiscal year 2007, the total number of sheep, calves and goats killed by coyotes in Virginia was 249, which represents a significant decrease from 369 killed in the previous fiscal year. Since the program began in 1990, “the number of sheep killed per farm has gone from 17 killed per farm in 1993 down to two killed per farm in 2007,” Fox said.

I don’t know where I’d find the numbers for this, but I wonder if it’s the case that the near extermination of the North American wolf population has, in the long run, caused a far greater net welfare loss than would have occurred had the wolf populations been left intact all along. Coyotes are by far the biggest killers of livestock, and they’re now essentially everywhere — bye bye wolves, hello rising coyote damages. So if it’s really the demise of wolves that lead to the coyote’s expansion, and if leaving the wolf population alone would not simply have resulted in the same amount of depredation but merely change the species responsible for it… Well, that’s a lot of ifs. But I’d be curious to know, in the long run, over a time period of centuries, what the net monetary impact of wildlife management has been in the United States. For coyotes, anyway, wildlife policies made a century ago could be partially responsible for agricultural losses today.

Bonus trivia fact: In Virginia, coyotes are classified as a nuisance and may be killed at anytime, except that if you’re trying to kill a coyote on a Sunday, it is illegal to use a weapon. I guess you’re stuck with using a trap or trying to strangle it with your bare hands.

-Susan

The Five Stages of Legal Unemployment

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Although Michael is good to have around as a reminder of how green the grass on the other side really is, in the interest of being Fair and Balanced, I now present the five stages of legal unemployment.

  1. Denial: “Well, I guess this is what unemployment feels like! It’s not so bad… And it won’t last long. Besides, after just taking the bar exam, I’d probably want to take a week off anyway, so I’ll just enjoy things for now. I’m going to organize all my files and catch up on every book I wanted to read the past three years but couldn’t find time for during law school! Yay!”
  2. Anger: “#@$%*&$@%! Did you hear about that chick who sued her college because she couldn’t find a job? Maybe I’ll try that. No, wait, I won’t sue GW… I’ll sue the Career Development Office!! Fracking useless good-for-nothing CDO! This is all your fault! And also the fault of all those stupid experienced lawyers who got laid off and are now rudely taking my jobs!!! You know what would be a fair way of deciding who gets a job? From now on, all hiring decisions should be made by a barehanded fight to the death, last lawyer standing gets hired! I WILL DEFEAT ALL CHALLENGERS.”
  3. Bargaining: “Dear law firm: Please hire me. I promise I am a decent lawyer. Also I have other useful skills, such as coffee-fetching, supply closet organizing, and shameless sycophancy. You don’t even have to pay me. All I ask in return is for a janitor’s closet to sleep in and full access to any food left over in the break room.”
  4. Depression: “Rejection letters? Meh. Rejection phone calls? Meh. No big deal… I already knew they were going to reject me. I think today I am going to sit here and count how many times these job listings contain the phrase ‘must have 52-weeks post-JD experience to be considered.’ While eating this entire box of Oreos. By myself.”
  5. Acceptance: You must not accept unemployment. Acceptance is the mind-killer. Acceptance is the little death that obliterates any chance of being a lawyer. The only acceptance permissible is the acceptance of a job offer. If no job offer is forthcoming, skip Stage 5 and start again at Step 1.

Currently, I am at Stage 3, for the fourth or fifth time. However, my theme song never fails to cheer me up. You can listen to it here.

-Susan

Things That Made My Life Slightly Better Today: Complete* List of Law Review Abbreviations

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Oftentimes while reading an article, I’ll try to find a source mentioned in a footnote, only to discover that whoever wrote the footnote has just completely invented a new citation format and is now directing me to a source that does not exist. G.W. I.L.R.? Eur.Jour.Int.L.? Seriously, people? The worst offenders, by far, are those from other academic fields, as when citing to a legal source they seem to be blissfully unaware that such a thing as standardization exists.

Which means I have to puzzle over their random list of letters and try to reverse engineer the scramble until I figure out what journal they were trying to cite to, and then go rummage around to look up the actual abbreviation.

Okay, sure, in most cases that will take all of thirty seconds. In the grand scheme of things, this is a life problem that ranks about a .2 on a 10 point scale. It didn’t used to be an actual problem, as I had a system that was pretty reliable, but now that I’m no longer a student and don’t have magical legal database access powers, it’s gone from “minor nuisance” to “actual source of irritation.” So after the thousandth time of trying to find a journal article based upon someone’s insane made up version of a law review abbreviation, I finally decided to compile a handy reference collection myself. Sloppy footnoters will never cause me research anguish again:

And, if all else fails, Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations and NYU Guide to Foreign and International Legal Citations. These are very bulky and not good for quickly looking up common publications, but if nothing else is working, these will totally do the job.

Finally, this site is plausibly useful, but I’ve never actually had an occasion on which I needed to use it: International Citation Manual.

-Susan

Psalm 109:8 and Good Faith Biblical Interpretation

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The latest popular religious-political brouhaha to erupt involves a new conservative slogan, which is being featured on bumper stickers, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and other items of internet kitsch. The slogan is, “Pray for Obama, Psalm 109:8.”

On the face of it, Psalm 109:8 does seem like an appropriate sentiment for a right-leaning Christian to pray for God to bring onto Obama: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

But the slogan might be worth reexamining when taken with the rest of the text of Psalm 109:

6 Appoint an evil man to oppose him;
let an accuser stand at his right hand.

7 When he is tried, let him be found guilty,
and may his prayers condemn him.

8 May his days be few;
may another take his place of leadership.

9 May his children be fatherless
and his wife a widow.

10 May his children be wandering beggars;
may they be driven from their ruined homes.

11 May a creditor seize all he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

12 May no one extend kindness to him
or take pity on his fatherless children.

13 May his descendants be cut off,
their names blotted out from the next generation.

14 May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD;
may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.

15 May their sins always remain before the LORD,
that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

Bible verses are often quoted in a way that obscures or sanitizes the meaning if taken in context, and the vast majority of the time the “true” meaning is adamantly not implied or suggested by whoever is using the quotation. However, while undoubtedly some people purchasing the Psalm 109 products do so with unawareness of the double meaning, I do not think all who advocate the slogan’s use do so in good faith.

People are defending the “Pray for Obama Psalm 109” slogan even after being informed of the larger and more sinister context of the verse. Those in favor of the slogan argue that they don’t mean the slogan “like that,” so the shirts are merely expressing a benign sentiment. However, what this argument basically boils down to is that it is acceptable to deliberately spread about misinterpretations of the Bible and to obscure the true meaning of God’s word. Somehow, I don’t think that argument is entirely coherent with certain other Biblical passages.

At least one online company has announced it will no longer sell Psalm 109 shirts, although when I checked earlier, the shirt pictured in the image above was still available for purchase. Zazzle says:

With that in mind, it is only after great thought that we have determined that these products, in the context of the full text of Psalm 109, may be interpreted in such a way as to suggest physical harm to the President of the United States. In deference to the Office of the President of the United States, and in accordance with federal law prohibiting the making of threats against the physical wellbeing of the President of the United States, Zazzle has therefore determined that these products are in violation of the Zazzle User Agreement and not appropriate for inclusion in the Zazzle Marketplace. We have begun efforts to remove them from our website, and we will be vigilant to the publication of similar products moving forward.

-Susan

Big Brother’s Invisible Yellow Dots: Using Secret Printer Tracking Data in Civil Litigation

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This is apparently very old news, but I’ve never heard of it before. U.S. laser printer manufactures have, in cooperation with the federal government, included special tracking dot systems with their printers, so that every page printed contains hard to see dot patterns encoding the serial number of the printer and the time and date that a given page was printed.

The dots’ minuscule size, covering less than one-thousandth of the page, along with their color combination of yellow on white, makes them invisible to the naked eye, Crean says. One way to determine if your color laser is applying this tracking process is to shine a blue LED light–say, from a keychain laser flashlight–on your page and use a magnifier.

The best website up about the tracking dots is over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF has sent in a FOIA request for information on the program. So far, they say,

“[the] [d]ocuments we’ve begun to receive in response to our FOIA requests suggest that the government may have convinced all printer manufacturers to put some kind of tracking mechanism in every color laser printer.”

The EFF has discovered the key to the tracking dot code, as shown in the picture here. They reveal the printer serial number and the exact date — down to the minute — of when the document was printed.printerguide

The Secret Service seems to be the agency that convinced printer companies to include these dots patterns. An anti-counterfeiting agent has stated that, “The only time any information is gained from these documents is purely in [the case of] a criminal act,” but there are no statutes actually limiting their use in any way.

Printing companies, like Xerox, assist the government in using the dot patterns. In the course of an investigation, the Secret Service

“decodes the information contained in the dots only to investigate counterfeiting cases. Once it has the serial number of the printer, the agency can work with printer companies to find out where the printer was sold.”

However, counterfeit investigations are only the tip of the iceberg for potential uses of the tracking dot system.

The EFF, and most other sites with information on the dots, seem primarily concerned with privacy concerns regarding government abuse of the tracking data, which is certainly a valid issue. But the first thought I had was the potential value of tracking dot information for private parties, especially for use in civil litigation. I was hoping to find an example out there of a case where tracking dots were used as evidence to either establish when a document was printed or who did the printing, but I couldn’t turn one up. Still, this seems like it’d be such an insanely useful information bonanza that there’s not way it could have not been used in litigation at some point. I’m going to scout around some more this afternoon, and if I find any cases where they were used, I’ll put them up.

Off the top of my head… Potential cases where tracking dot data might be invaluable would be, for instance, contract cases where there are allegations additional pages have been substituted in the contract, or family law cases where maybe one party is alleging they have a threatening not sent by another party, or employment cases where an employee is alleged to have engaged in improper conduct at work where printing was involved. There are thousands of cases where it might come in handy.

On a final note, because this is LL2 and because in my world essentially every subject can and should be linked to international law, there may in fact be some international law implications here as well. According to the European Parliament,

To the extent that individuals may be identified through material printed or copied using certain equipment, such processing may give rise to the violation of fundamental human rights, namely the right to privacy and private life. It also might violate the right to protection of personal data.

The protection of privacy is ensured by Article 8 of the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, in Article 7, provides for the protection of private and family life, home and communication, and in Article 8, for the protection of personal data.

Directive 95/46/EC of Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (‘Data Protection Directive’) ensures the protection of personal data and applies regardless of the technology used for the processing of personal data.

-Susan

The Lakota Tribe’s Lawsuit Over the Sweat Lodge Deaths Cites to Wrong DRIP

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Following the sweat lodge deaths of three people who attended an Angel Valley self-help seminar, the Lakota tribe has filed suit [PDF] in the Arizona federal district court against the seminar leader, James Arthur Ray, and the Angel Valley Retreat Center, as well as the United States and the state of Arizona. (Hat tip: Religion Clause).

The Lakota Nation alleges that Ray and the Retreat Center have (1) Violated Article 1 of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 by violating the peace between the United States and the Lakota Nation, (2) Desecrated the Onikig’a (sweat lodge ceremony) by causing the three deaths, (3) Violated the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Arts. 29 & 36, and (4) that Ray and the Angel Valley Retreat Center committed fraud by impersonating and Indian and should be held accountable for the deaths to the survivors.

They also demand that those who requested the sweat lodge be dismantled be charged with destruction of evidence, and request that the judge refer Ray for prosecution.

I think it’s fairly clear that the lawsuit, which in essence is a criticism of cultural appropriation and the commodifiction of Indian Heritage, is intended as a means of obtaining publicity rather than a serious legal claim. There are huge issues with the suit’s standing (such as requesting relief for the deceased individuals’ descendants), its causes of action, and the requested relief, which would prevent the Ogala Lakota Delegation of the Black Hills Sioux from going further with their claims. Sam Longblackcat’s press statement, released in regards to the lawsuit, suggests as much. After noting that, unlike James Arthur Ray, Lakota Indians “don’t go into a Roman-Catholic church, put on the Pope’s hat and take the Pope’s staff and call ourselves Pope,” Longblackcat states:

We expect this lawsuit to strengthen our stand as first nation people. Manifest destiny, divide and conquer, these are tactics to assimilate and annihilate the first nations – no matter on which continent. It happened in Vietnam, it is happening today in Iraq. We want the world to know that the first nations exist, and that we are not going to let anybody take from us ever again.

As for the lawsuit, it first bases its claims upon a violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, 15 Stat. 635. The Fort Laramie Treaty was in face the basis of a case heard once before by the Supreme Court, in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980). Article 1 of the treaty, which the suit claims Ray violated, states:

If bad men among the whites, or among other people subject to the authority of the United States, shall commit any wrong upon the person or property of the Indians, the United States will, upon proof made to the agent, and forwarded to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs at Washington city, proceed at once to cause the offender to be arrested and punished according to the laws of the United States, and also reimburse the injured person for the loss sustained.

As the Lakota tribe is in North and South Dakota, not Arizona, clearly there’s no claim based upon territorial jurisdiction, and no Indian persons were involved at the sweat lodge ceremony where the deaths occurred. So if there is wrong upon Indian person or property here, it’d appear to be based upon intellectual property. Having zero experience with Indian law, I have no idea if there’s any precedent for something like this, but I’m certainly not aware of any U.S. statutes that protect against cultural appropriation.

More interesting are the Lakota’s claims that are brought under the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the unfortunately acronymed “DRIP”). The DRIP was a UN General Assembly resolution was adopted in 2007. However, the United States, along with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, objected to its passing. The DRIP is therefore, for multiple reasons, not a “treaty” that can be incorporated into U.S. law via the Supremacy Clause, and it’s also not the sort of international law that can be Paquete Habana‘d in through the judiciary.

Even if that weren’t the case, the Lakota Nation’s complaint would be an inadequate pleading, as it does not quote DRIP as it was finally adopted, but rather quotes the 1994 draft articles. I think this was an honest mistake on the plaintiff’s part, not intentional, as the adopted DRIP is actually more favorable to their case. The Draft Articles that the complaint quotes merely provide that, “Indigenous peoples are entitled to the recognition of the full ownership, control and protection of their cultural and intellectual property.”

In contrast, the DRIP, as it was adopted, states that,

“States shall provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples, with respect to their cultural, intellectual, religious and spiritual property taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.” DRIP Art. 11.

It also provides that indigenous people “have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.” DRIP Art. 31. So not only does DRIP provide for an aspirational cultural property rights regime for indigenous people, but also attempts to place an obligatory duty on states to “provide effective redress mechanisms” for violations of these rights. Unlike aspirational If the DRIP were a “real” treaty, Longblackcat might’ve had a legitimate claim to bring forward, particularly alleging that the U.S. does not provide a way of Indian tribes to protect their intellectual and cultural heritage from being used by scam artists like James Arthur Ray.

-Susan

There’s a Map for That: AT&T sues Verizon

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In the first commercial ever to be more annoying than the “Can you hear me now?” ads, Verizon’s latest commercial series, “There’s a map for that,” is a direct attack on AT&T and their “There’s an app for that” iPhone-related marketing campaign.

mapforthat

The ad shows two maps comparing AT&T and Verizon’s 3G network coverage area, with Verizon’s map covering vastly more territory. Now, AT&T had filed suit against Verizon in the Northern District of Georgia, seeking an injunction to prevent further use of the maps in advertising. AT&T alleges that the maps are misleading, as although the Verizon map indicates total coverage, AT&T’s map only indicates a of its network area. This is because Verizon uses only 3G networks. In contrast, the 3G network is only a tiny footprint of AT&T total coverage, which also includes the slower but still usable 2.5G network. AT&T claims, therefore, that the maps are falsely claiming AT&T only has coverage, of any sort, in the tiny blue shaded areas.

Verizon has already changed the ads once before in response to AT&T complaints. Originally, the ad included the words “Out of touch,” which were removed, and Verizon added in small script “Voice & data services available out of 3G coverage areas.” With that modification, I fail to see what meager claim AT&T has remaining. Yes, I am sure many consumers are bad at reading maps and forget to pay sufficient attention to the legends, but that’s, well, advertising. There is nothing at all incorrect or even directly misleading about the advertising campaign — Verizon is just counting on people’s passive ignorance. It’s not nearly as shady as, say, mucking about with the y-axis on two graphs and claiming they show comparable figures.

I’m actually surprised AT&T didn’t just go all out and add in a meritless copyright or trademark infringement claim for the “there’s a map for that” slogan. Instead of going for the obvious meat, however, AT&T appears to have opted for the “Americans are stupid so ads cannot be at all complex” attack.

As discussed before on this blog, maps are inherently nonobjective. To claim that Verizon’s map is “misleading” is the same as claiming its “misleading” to depict a map with Greenland the same size as Africa. AT&T may not like the subject matter which Verizon chose to depict in its maps, but there is nothing incorrect or deceptive about them; they show precisely what they say the map shows, which is a comparison of 3G networks.

-Susan