The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law

The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law is a law text in cartoon form, available free online.  (Also available as a book.)


Thanks to BoingBoing for featuring this.

Mickey Mouse violation

Slate Magazine asks, Can Disney stop North Koreans from wearing Mickey Mouse costumes?

Basically, no.

"The law is useless to Disney because there is no international court to hear intellectual property disputes between private parties."   "U.S. courts lack jurisdiction"  and North Korea is not a member of the WTO.

The whole article is available at:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/07/mickey_mouse_in_north_korea_can_disney_punish_copyright_infringement_inside_the_hermit_kingdom_.html

Hedonic Damages

Brendan I. Koerner wrote on What's Your Happiness Worth?

"The accident had clearly stripped Johnson of substantial happiness, and he demanded compensation for that loss—"hedonic damages," in legal parlance. Other noneconomic tort awards, like money doled out for emotional distress, are arbitrary, based on little more than the jury's intuition and the size of past sums. There's no such thing as an expert witness on pain and suffering, since it's acknowledged that there's no way to calculate something so subjective. Hedonic damages, by contrast, are ostensibly rooted in science, based on a statistical formula that purports to translate a lifetime of joie de vivre into cold cash. That means the plaintiff can put an expert witness on the stand to explain the principles of hedonic damages and moisten a few jurors' eyes. Such testimony is often ruled inadmissible because of doubts that forensic economists can compute joy. But when the testimony works, it can inspire jurors to dole out millions." 


"The jury in the Johnson case seemed swayed by that logic. It awarded $3.5 million to Johnson and his wife, far more than they would have recovered had they pressed only for economic damages of lost wages and medical costs. How the jury arrived at that multimillion-dollar figure is a mystery to Smith, as he did not suggest an exact sum—and never does. "I orient them to the concept and give them the statistical values, then leave the final tailoring up to them," he said."

 Read the whole article online at:
http://www.legalaffairs.org/printerfriendly.msp?id=505

Re-defining property

Paul Graham writes on Defining Property

As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice while enjoying the delicious cooking smells coming from the food shop. The owner wanted the student to pay for the smells he was enjoying. The student was stealing his smells!

This story often comes to mind when I hear the RIAA and MPAA accusing people of stealing music and movies.

[snip]

What counts as property depends on what works to treat as property. And that not only can change, but has changed. Humans may always (for some definition of human and always) have treated small items carried on one's person as property. But hunter gatherers didn't treat land, for example, as property in the way we do.

The reason so many people think of property as having a single unchanging definition is that its definition changes very slowly

Read the whole essay at
http://paulgraham.com/property.html