Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Voyeur Dorm Case Not Applicable in Miami?

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

In Miami demands end to home-based porn site, the Miami Herald says that the City of Miami's code enforcement board wasn't very impressed by the 11th Circuit's Voyeur Dorm, L.C. v. City Of Tampa, Florida precedent:

After 10 hours of listening to evidence and arguments, Miami's code enforcement board ruled late Monday night that Phillip Bleicher's Flava Works, an Internet porn production and distribution company, is illegally running an adult entertainment business out of a single-family home at 503 NE 27th St., zoned for residential use, and ordered that those operations cease.

“I think the city has met its burden of showing a link between the house on 27th Street and the website,” board member Oscar Rodriguez Fonts said before moving to deny a motion, made by Flava Works' attorney James Benjamin, to dismiss citations posted by city code inspectors in May.

The city claims that there is a material difference between the Miami ordinance and Tampa City Code 27-523, the one in the Voyeur Dorm case. That case turned on a very particular reading of the Tampa code's prohibition on offering adult entertainment “to the public”:

The residence of 2312 West Farwell Drive provides no “offer[ing] [of adult entertainment] to members of the public.” The offering occurs when the videotaped images are dispersed over the internet and into the public eye for consumption. The City Code cannot be applied to a location that does not, itself, offer adult entertainment to the public.

Miami took the view that its rules were materially different:

“Miami's adult entertainment ordinance encompasses Internet activity in a way the Tampa ordinance did not,” Rodriguez Fonts said.

Not having the text of the Miami ordinance, I have to admit that's certainly possible. It's also possible that the same considerations the controlled in the Voyeur Dorm case might apply here.

Either way, unless it is blindingly obvious, it sounds like a possible student note topic to me.

Posted in Law: Internet Law | 3 Comments

One Laptop Per Child Review

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Freedom to Tinker has the perfect One Laptop Per Child Review — written by a 12-year-old. He likes it a lot, but identifies a couple of issues.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 1 Comment

Ed Bott’s Contrarian View of Microsoft DRM

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

It's commonly believed that Vista's built-in DRM is a Bad Thing. I think it's bad because any time they put features in my machine that are meant to control me rather than letting me control the machine, I think the natural order of things is being undermined. Plus if the machine can do one thing I can't control, who says it can't be leveraged to do other nasty things to me?

It seems, though, that some people also blame Vista's DRM for other evils, including performance problems (I hadn't heard that). Ed Bott, who although he is a Microsoft fan in the way of a super-power user has in my experience always proved to be fair-minded, says it Ain't So:

Over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, in between two-hour daily workouts with a snow shovel, I read a remarkable paper called A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. And I wasn’t the only one. According to Technorati, the paper has so far been linked by more than 250 blogs, and Google News finds more than 100 citations to the paper in mainstream online publications.

Too bad it’s just so wrong about so many things.

In fact, I read the whole paper – all 10,224 words of it – seven times that week, and lost count of the number of exaggerations, half-truths, unsupported statements, and flat-out errors in it. It’s a big steaming pile of FUD, with just enough truth sprinkled on top to make it seem like there’s some substance underneath it.

I don't profess any expertise here, but it's interesting. There's more where that came from, and at Busting the FUD about Vista’s DRM.

Posted in Law: Copyright and DMCA, Software | Comments Off on Ed Bott’s Contrarian View of Microsoft DRM

Radar Profiles John Young

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

John Young posts the text of Radar Magazine's generally sympathetic profile under the (ironic? paranoid? both?) title of Radar Smears Cryptome.

Previous John Young/Cryptome-related posts:

Posted in Cryptography | 1 Comment

Ten Reasons Why You Should Teach Here — And Three Why You Shouldn’t

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Hiring season is approaching — indeed, today is the day that hiring committees get to see the first round of AALS faculty appointments register forms — and the law blogs are full of unusually good advice for lawyers wanting to enter the teaching profession. In recent years I've felt constrained about what I could say publicly about the hiring process because I was a part of a hiring committee. But this year, as far as hiring is concerned, I am just a regular faculty member, so I can speak more freely.

Rather than repeat the general advice you can find elsewhere, I thought I would instead say a few things about a subject I know particularly well: teaching here at the University of Miami School of Law. Although our overall US News rank is very middle-of-the-pack, due mainly to our large size, our faculty has a relatively high reputation rate both in US News and other comparable surveys. But none of these (flawed) indexes really reflect much about what a faculty member's life is like, and thus they are even less useful to an aspiring faculty member than they are to would-be law students.

So, aspiring law professors and future colleagues, I've compiled ten reasons why you should teach here — and three why you shouldn't.

Continue reading →

Posted in Law School, Miami, U.Miami | 10 Comments

This Is Not Good for America

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

A Case So Shielded One Side Is in the Dark (behind Times paywall; archived Copyright violation?)

Mr. Eisenberg is suing the government on behalf of clients who say they were illegally wiretapped by the National Security Agency. Yet he was required to write an appellate brief in a government office, supervised by a Justice Department security officer.

…

“Yesterday, under the auspices and control of my litigation adversaries, at their offices and on their computer, I wrote a brief, of which I was not allowed to keep a copy, responding to arguments which I was not permitted to see, which will be met by a reply which I will not be permitted to see.”

That this doesn't make for justice as we (ought to) know it will, I hope, go without saying.

Posted in Civil Liberties | 3 Comments