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David G. Post is the I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University, where he teaches intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace.  In his new book In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, he uses Thomas Jefferson’s views on natural history, law and governance in the New World to illuminate cyberspace’s technological, legal, and social complexities.  In the post below he looks at the implications of a court case in Italy.  Read his previous post here.

In a kind of reprise of the well-known Yahoo! case (involving a French lawsuit against Yahoo! for displaying Nazi memorabilia on its auction website in violation of French law) from a several years ago, four Google executives are facing criminal charges in an Italian court arising out of a third-party posting of a video at a Google site:

The Italian case relates to a three-minute movie uploaded to Google Video’s Italian site in 2006. In the video, four teenagers from the Northern city of Turin are seen teasing a boy with Down syndrome. After Google received two complaints about the content, the company says it removed the clip within 24 hours. But Italian officials, who didn’t return calls for this article, argue the video should never have been allowed to be uploaded in the first place.

Google concedes the content caused offense. In a statement the company says: “As we have repeatedly made clear, our hearts go out to the victim and his family. We are pleased that as a result of our cooperation the bullies in the video have been identified and punished.”

There’s a great deal one can say about this — indeed, one might even say you could write a whole book about it! At one level, it illustrates an interesting and important difference in substantive law: US law, through sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act (oddly enough), provides intermediaries (like Google here) a very broad immunity from liability for third-party-provided content, while Italian law (I take it, not knowing much about Italian law) does not. It’s an important difference, because it reflects (presumably) a real difference of opinion, and of values, and of policy.

The hard question is: how can we realize the benefits of a truly global communications medium like the Net — the first truly global medium we’ve ever come up with, and whose promise is unimaginably immense — while different sovereigns impose their different visions of the good onto network traffic? We do not have a good answer for that, at the moment. The conventional wisdom here leads to results that are absurd.  To summarize: Italy can legitimately assert jurisdiction over Google if Google’s conduct is having “significant effects” within Italy, and Google has tangible assets (machines, offices, typewriters, servers) that are located in Italy (or executives who might set foot someday on Italian soil). Viewed from Google’s perspective, and the question “With what law does Google have an obligation to comply?”, the conventional wisdom says that Google has the obligation to comply with the law of all sovereigns within whose territory it has tangible assets, or where its executives might travel.  I call this “Jurisdictional Whack-a-Mole.”

“If you (or your assets) pop up in Singapore, . . . Wham!! Singaporean law can be – can legitimately be – applied to you. Your daughter’s junior high school newsletter, once posted on the Web, is subject to Malaysian, and Mexican, and Latvian law, simultaneously, because it may be having “significant effects” in one (or all) of those countries, and . . . the school’s obligation to comply with those laws is defined by the likelihood that it has assets in any one of them, or that any of its officers might travel to any of them.

That’s a strange kind of law – law that only gets revealed to the interacting parties ex post, and which can therefore no longer guide the behavior of those subject to it in any meaningful way.

This is a really hard problem, and it is one that we need to solve. If I had a simple solution that I could summarize in a brief blog posting, I would do so — and I would not have felt the need to write a whole book about it. I’m hoping the book’s website becomes a focus for some discussion about all this, because I’m pretty certain that we could use more discussion about it.

David G. Post is the I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University, where he teaches intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace.  In his new book In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, he uses Thomas Jefferson’s views on natural history, law and governance in the New World to illuminate cyberspace’s technological, legal, and social complexities.  In the post below he looks at how Jefferson’s moose can guide us towards an understanding of the internet.

In 1995, I wrote a small essay for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s then-newfangled “website,” entitled “Jefferson in Cyberspace.” The thesis was this: the great opposition between Jefferson and Hamilton – between de-centralizers and centralizers, Republicans and Federalists, between centripetal and centrifugal forces, chaos at the frontier and order projected from the center – was being played out in real time, before our eyes, in and around the early battles to regulate and control the emerging global inter-network – “the Internet.” And, I (rather glibly) suggested, in this most radically de-centralized of networks – the one that managed to span the entire planet without having anyone in charge – Jefferson and the Jeffersonians seemed to have the upper hand.

It was, to be candid, too flip – a blog posting before there were blogs, an interesting little idea without a great deal of deep thinking behind it. But in contrast to many of my interesting little ideas, the more I thought about this one – which I was to do, off-and-on, for the next dozen years or so – the more interesting it became. There really did seem to be something “Jeffersonian” about the Net; it was, somehow, obvious (and many people commented on it at the time), but I couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly what it meant, or what made it so. And the world of Internet law and Internet policy really did seem to be divided between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians, who came forward with their opposing positions on all the big issues of the day, from the exercise of jurisdiction over Internet conduct to the operation and management of the domain name system, the regulation of Internet anonymity, encryption policy, the scope of free speech protection on the Net . . . .

And then there was Jefferson himself. The more I read of (and by) him, the more interesting he became, too. The variety of his intellectual pursuits (from architecture to mineralogy to zoology, with pretty much everything in between) was so astonishing; he may well have been the only person in history who was, to use Isaiah Berlin’s well-known dichotomy, both a great Hedgehog and a great Fox, propounder of some of history’s greatest Big Ideas and simultaneously one of the planet’s leading experts on cartographic techniques, viniculture, canal-building, plow design, linguistic evolution, paleontology, . . . . What was he up to? What held it all together? What connected the Declaration of Independence to the Big Bone Lick (Ky.) fossils that he pored over in the White House basement? The Summary View of the Rights of British America to the study of Native American languages? The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom to the design of meteorological measuring devices?

He was on to something, that much was pretty clear; but damned if I could say exactly what it was. And the closer I looked, the harder it got.

Enter, the moose. In 1787, Jefferson had the complete skeleton and carcass (with antlers) of an American moose, 7 feet tall at the shoulders, shipped to him in Paris (where he was serving as the American Minister to the court of Louis XVI), re-assembled, and installed in the entrance hall of his residence.

It’s an amusing little episode, Jefferson at his most lovably eccentric (and you may recall it used for that purpose in the popular film from a few years back, “Jefferson in Paris”). But really – what was he up to? In a letter to a friend, he called the moose “an acquisition more precious than you can imagine.” Was he serious?

Asking the question that way, it turns out, helps unlock some of Jefferson’s most interesting, and most revolutionary, ideas, for the moose stands, as it were, at the hub of a peculiarly Jeffersonian network of ideas and problems and plans. To begin with, there’s the question of scale. Jefferson cared deeply about scale, about the principles – the “laws of nature and nature’s God,” as he put it – governing the growth and size of things, how they get bigger, how they get smaller, and why. The moose was part of an argument Jefferson was having about the relative sizes of New World versus Old World animals. A theory, gaining ground among European scientists, held that animals in the New World were actually smaller – degenerate – versions of their Old World counterparts. Jefferson thought it was hogwash; he devoted much of his book “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published the year before, to a detailed empirical refutation, complete with tables and charts and exhaustive listings of animals large and small. And the moose – the largest of the New World quadrupeds, far larger than any of its Old World relatives – was to be the coup de grace, as it were, the final nail in the coffin.

It all looks a bit ridiculous in retrospect, but it wasn’t ridiculous at the time. The study of animal size and scale not only pointed the way to the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, it helped Jefferson solve one of history’s great scaling problems: the Problem of the Extended Republic. “Montesquieu’s Law,” as it was sometimes known, held that republican government – government by the People, where the governed control the governors – couldn’t scale; it could never be made to work over large territories. Jefferson thought that was hogwash too, and he spent much of his life figuring out how to scale up republican institutions so that they could span a continent. The only thing more incredible than the plans he came up with to get that done is the fact that most of it actually came to pass.

Scaling questions, it turns out, are of the deepest importance for our understanding of the Internet, because the Internet is a phenomenon defined entirely by its scale: the network we call “the Internet” is the one, out of the hundreds of thousands or millions of networks out there, that somehow got to be really, really, big. As someone once put it: It’s not big because it’s the Internet, it’s “the Internet” because it’s big. How did that happen? Why this network and not some other? Can it keep growing and, if so, for how long?
Unless we understand all that, we don’t really understand this new place at all.

But is it, really, a “new place”? I’ve had many, many discussions over the years with my colleagues about that, and it finally hit me: time to bring out the moose! Jefferson didn’t want the moose only to persuade, he wanted it to dazzle (and a moose is, to be honest, a pretty dazzling creature). He wanted viewers to step back and say: “Whoa – we’ve never seen anything like that before!” He wanted to dazzle because he wanted people to believe that there really was a “new world” over there, because if they believed that then they could sweep aside old prejudices and old ways of thinking and begin the process of re-engineering society, and government, and politics. He had plans for the new world, plans that could never be realized until people believed that it was, in fact, a “new” world, and when they believed that, it was, amazingly enough, more likely to become true.

We are going to need some new thinking about society, and government, and politics for the global Net; our old ways of thinking, based on lines projected onto a map, will not work, not at a global scale, and not on a global network where everyone can communicate instantaneously with everyone else. I realize I need to persuade you of that – and I’ve tried to do so, in my book. But I also need to find a moose, something to dazzle the inhabitants of the Old World – not Europe, but the “old,” pre-Internet world of, say, 1980 or 1950 – so that they can see that this really is a new place, with things in it that they have not seen and cannot even imagine. “Whoa – we’ve never seen anything like that before!” Then (but possibly not until then) we can start thinking about how we can, once again, scale up our legal and political institutions and processes, this time to global scale, so that they work better in this new place.

So what does cyberspace’s moose look like? Well, I have some ideas and some candidates – but my publisher told me not to give away the punch line to the book. [Hint: it’s a gigantic compendium of information, available in over 50 languages, put together by hundreds of thousands of anonymous volunteers, without pay, and it serves as the most widely-consulted reference work ever written). I’d like to hear your ideas, though – come join the discussion at http://jeffersonsmoose.org.

Recording artist and environmentalist Mr. Scruff is collaborating with Brighton “reverse graffiti” artist Moose on a series of artworks to highlight the worlds dwindling fish populations, caused by over fishing.

Watch them create an enormous fish–based on an original Scruff illustration and measuring 100m x 35m–situated on a hillside outside Manchester. It’s constructed from pinned fabric which allows the light to pass through so the grass underneath will not be harmed.

Norway

Coordinates: 63 0 N 11 0 E

Population: 4,611,000 (2006 est.)

Thanks to Sarah Palin’s Vice Presidential nomination, moose have been appearing in the US news quite a bit more than usual. In Scandinavia however—particularly Norway—the largest member of the deer family frequently makes headlines and generates an equally large amount of money for the Nordic country; one estimate puts the value of this year’s meat yield alone at $60 million. For a nation that imported over $5 billion in food last year, this is no small sum. The 5-week hunting season in Norway began last Thursday and will likely result in a lessening of the population by about 35,000 animals. Besides the monetary benefit to sportsmen (and women), this annual culling means safer highways and railroads for Norwegians, and, some would argue, a cleaner atmosphere for the rest of us.

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Moose Pancakes! That's what we had over the weekend. Or, technically, that's what we had last weekend. Since then Blogger's been a pain and I've not been able to upload a thing or you would have seen this post sooner.

I hope you have a great start to the week with a good night's sleep and we'll catch up later. Until then find out more about our experience with Moose Pancakes.

I knew I wasn't in New York anymore
Southbound, I-89, Vermont to Long Island
Somewhere near Randolph,
one of those towns you only see
on picture postcards,
in art house movies,
and pinpoint black dots on a road atlas

These are the towns we pass straight through
these are the places we forget
These are the people we ignore

And I would never have known Randolph
And I never would have stopped
I would have kept my foot on the pedal
and soared by,
sixty-five miles per hour

But I know this name
I know this place
because my car's oil pressure gauge
went flatline at exit 4,
You don't fool around
with "STOP SAFELY!" messages
blinking on the dashboard
Something tells you
you're in trouble

Like a mirage,
a Mobil gas station appeared,
just off the exit ramp,
tucked into a white carpet,
sheaths of jagged, shaggy layers of snow
surprisingly busy with snowmobiles
truckers in workboots and parkas and knit caps,
and locals, fair-skinned and sturdy,
buying the Sunday paper and a pack of cigarettes

I pulled in, parking my unruly Volvo SUV in a corner,
ashamed and awkward and intimidated
by people who knew where they were going
and what they were doing

I prayed someone inside
the tiny store at the edge of the crossroad
would save me

"We're too small," the manager said,
never looking at me, ringing the cashier,
wiping the counter,
answering the phone
"We don't service cars.
You're gonna' need a tow.
25 miles to the nearest town
Don't worry.
25 miles is nothing around here."

AAA had to come to
rescue me
I learned a lot about Randolph, Vermont
in the two hours of my unintended visit to this
town, buffered by crossroads in the middle of nowhere

I asked Brenda,
the Mobil gas station attendant,
what people did in Randolph
and she told me:
"You're doing it."

Brenda bought me coffee
and lent me her cell phone
to call AAA
("Only Verizon works out here,"
she said)
We were the same age
Fortysomething
She'd rather be
a stained-glass artist
than a Mobil gas station attendant
but she already has grandchildren
she was abused for nine years
she knows how to open car hoods
she knows how to find dipsticks
she wants her children to join
The National Guard
I told her:
"I write poetry"

Driving home in a thick, white breeze of snow Sunday afternoon
Clutching the wheel for dear (not deer, ahem) life,
afraid my car would roll over
as two cars did just before me
on an icy bend on I-89 South

I saw a sign just like this



I thought I had stepped onto the set of Northern Exposure, a show I remember more for the cute Jewish doctor in Alaska
(okay, it could happen, but his mother wouldn't be happy about it)
and the nomadic moose in the opening credits

You see a lot of strange things on Long Island:
fake body parts pumped plump with Botox and gel,
Ugg boots and cuffed denim shorts,
Wrinkled in Time Grandpas in red Corvettes

We've got lots of doctors my mother wished I married
but we don't have moose



We do have the occasional MEESE-kite,
now that I think about it.
I wonder if MEESE is the plural of MOOSE

FYI: In Yiddish, meesekite ("mieskeit") are unattractive human faces.

Not that a moose isn't pretty in its own way.
It's an acquired taste, I suppose
Like squid
Like liver
Like gefilte fish

On this day in 1792 the New York Stock Exchange was formed. We turned to Oxford Scholarship Online(OSO) to find out more about the NYSE. OSO helped us find Wall Street: A History by Charles R. Geisst. Below is an excerpt from Geisst’s introduction.

Like the society it reflects, Wall Street has grown extraordinarily complicated over the last two
centuries. New markets have sprung up, functions have been divided, and the sheer size of trading volume has expanded dramatically. But the core of the Street’s business would still be recognized by a nineteenth-century trader. (more…)

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Earlier today we mentioned that last week, Nobel-prize winning scientist Eric Kandel wrote about the five most unforgettable work on memory for The Wall Street Journal. One of the titles in the article was Memory From A to Z by Yadin Dudai. Below is a random entry excerpt from the book.

(more…)

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Last week, Nobel-prize winning scientist Eric Kandel wrote about the five most unforgettable works on memory for The Wall Street Journal. Today we will look more closely at two of these titles, Memory and Brain by Larry R. Squire and Memory From A to Z by Yadin Dudai. Below is an excerpt from the beginning of Memory and Brain. Check back later today to learn more about Memory From A to Z.

(more…)

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