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Updating Feed

I've updated my feed serving to Feedburner.

I'm Back

Am not sure how much I'll end up posting, but I went through the extremely hard work of porting my blog over to Blogger and setting it back up, so I'm back. I guess I should also say that I am still at Google working the legal side of the many great products that our engineers and other talented folk come up with. My team is hiring if you are interested.

Month Off

So, I've take almost a month off web logging. Have been really busy in the interim and away from computers. Got a new job, quit my old one. Took a trip to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and to visit some old friends at the Berkman Center. Now I am back to work and back to web logging though I will be linking less, (hopefully) commenting more, linking to a few things others' haven't and also posting more code. At least that's the plan.

Humble Blogging

Donna Wentworth, speaking at last night's Weblogs, Information & Society (very eloquently IMHO, contrary to her self-criticism>), said that one of the things she loves about blogging is that it allows her to apprentice at the hands of many greats. I couldn't agree more. Linking and commenting is apprenticeship. You read, learn and, most importantly, integrate the thoughts of others with your own to figure out whether you understand them. Feedback is also important and that is where trackbacks and Technorati's link cosmos come in handy. There are few enough of us bloggers that when we link to the masters, they check out our writing and let us know when we are wrong.

Knowing too that, as Dan Gilmor said at the same conference, our readers always know more than us, a master on a point or of the moment will be an apprentice on the next. Humble blogging is best.

Description of Legal Bricolage

A friend of mine who has been a courts reporter for a daily newspaper and is now freelancing about, among other things, digital rights issues, sent me the following:

I think [litigating internet issues is] along the
lines of playing cowboy, but instead of cattle, you're roping the abyss. When
I was writing about the courts, so much of it dealt with established criminal
statutes that it was hard to find something unique -- it usually involved a
tiny point of federal sentencing guidelines. Here, it's completely under
construction -- the laws are still being written and the new ones are still
being tested.

Good luck building the barn...

Of course, that made my day, but I am not sure we are so unique either in the legal profession or in the world. I wrote back:

You made my day. Thanks, never been called a cowboy before. But, this is true of every type of law -- I think. If you look closely enough, there are always issues that have never been heard, or facts that laws have never been applied to, or the need to come up with a creative application of some old legal doctrine or new statute. As with journalism, whatever story you are currently working on has never been told the way you are about to tell it (and you get to be learning along the way). Probably why I love my job and why freelancing is such a kick.

And, why I think bricolage is something that we all do and that we all could do more of.

More on "Les Bricoleurs"

Got a compliment today from the inimitable Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage. This made my day because I respect Denise tons and because she included the following new tidbit regarding "Les Bricoleurs:"

In essence, bricolage is what tinkers do -- collecting odd bits of stuff they think may be potentially useful, then using whatever bits seem to work in the context of some later repair job. Simple. And yet profound. Because the bits the bricoleur ends up using were not designed for the use they end up being put to. Figuring out which bits to collect and how to apply them to some task at hand requires a completely different kind of thinking than the procedural algorithmic thought processes business has become so dependent upon. While the Internet may have convinced some businesses to think "out of the box," most are still not even sure what box they’re in, much less which way to turn for emergency egress. If some unprincipled individual were to yell "fire!" right about now, the entire edifice of global commerce might suddenly collapse.

From Introduction to Gonzo Marketing, by Christopher Locke (also of Cluetrain fame).

What Law?

My principal legal interests are all forms of intellectual property law and internet issues (such as access, speech, etc.). These issues are the reason that I went to law school and, so far, I haven't been able to shake my interest in them.

I work as an attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California (though recently I have been working in the San Francisco office). There I do intellectual property litigation and internet counseling.

My clients at WSGR have included Napster, Google, Borland, StreamCast Networks (also known as MusicCity), Canal+, Inktomi, the Project to Promote Competition and many lesser known companies.

Two recent public pleadings in which I had a hand are:

• MGM v. Grokster, Motion for Partial Summary Judgment [pdf] on behalf of defendant, StreamCast Networks (aka MusicCity).


• Groupe Canal + v. NDS Group, Complaint [pdf].
  

WSGR's clients have great, interesting, highly technical, unique and fun legal issues to confront. They are what make me enjoy my work.

I also provide counselling to Creative Commons, the Online Policy Group and the Media Awareness Project. I am a sometime contributor to Chilling Effects and an editor at GrepLaw.

What to Code?

I program mostly on the side, for fun. However, from time to time coding projects are directly useful to doing my job.

For the moment, my principal coding projects (links to come) are:

1. GrepMoodMusic: The idea here is to be able to have playlists generated on the fly based on a listener's mood and listening history.
   
2. NewsGet: An RSS feed reader on steriods. It remembers what you read and can accept any feed defined by perl regexes and a uri.
   
3. Fun with the patent databases:The USPTO database contains lots of juicy information that ought to be extracted.
   

I'd also like to learn python and lisp. I still maintain Public.law and HLSNet. And, I am a tester for the h2o Project and the Creative Commons license chooser.

Why Bricoleur?

The simplest answer is because that is how I would describe myself, and there don't seem to be any better words in english.

According to pages found through google's glossary (where else would one turn?), "bricoleur" is:

A French word with no exact English equivalent used as a term by Seymour Papert to describe the style of approach exemplified by a tinkerer or a jack of all trades. Bricoleurs are comfortable in unfamiliar realms of learning and experience because they learn best by using indirect connections to known information, even if the details of the skills are not exactly related. They try things out until they figure out how to do something.

Courtesy of the Tech Learning Link Glossary. Also check out the google glossary entry for bricolage

I first heard of this characterization of what I think is my approach to learning from Sherry Turkle's great book The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit .

In our post-DMCA world the positive benefits of being able learn through tinkering is a hot topic. Ed Felton's excellent web log called "Freedom to Tinker" and the Yale web log called "LawMeme: Legal Bricolage for a Technological Age" are but two examples.