Friday, May 16, 2008

Writing about Microsoft and ATT: boring

You don't have to agree with me, but just don't be boring when writing about law. The current edition of IP NewMatter, the quarterly publication of the IP Law Section of the California State Bar has the most exquisitely written boring article on the recent Microsoft v. ATT case, written by two lawyers from Klein O'Neill and Singh. The article boringly steps through each section of the decision and relevant statutes, mostly concluding with a discussion on the apparent loophole of 271(f), asking "What to do in the meantime?". But it is hard to know what to do, how to plan legal arguments, given the horrible sludge in the Supreme Court's decision - a decision which gets all of the fundamentals of computer science wrong. And if you get the fundamentals wrong, you can't argue if, or if not, software is a component? Ask a juvenile hacker. Yet nowhere in the article is any discussion of this ongoing scientific illiteracy problem at the Supreme Court. This silence makes the article a token reading for yesmen and interns, and patently BORING.

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