Break, SYS Revisions, Hutches & Credenzas

This coming week begins the law school's Spring Break, which, as always, is welcome. It coincides with the end of the required Professional Responsibility classes, which means that even when school starts up again, I won't have classes until the afternoon, and only one class each on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. (God bless once-a-week clinical courses, though I'll be paying for them come next semester, when I'll likely have to fill my schedule with traditional classroom courses.)

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My schedule ultimately evens out, as the other casenote editors and I have begun the processes of selecting a case for the write-on competition, and my SYS prof was kind enough to return our papers the Thursday before the break, so that we can make full use of our time off to work on revisions. Revision has always been my favorite (if time-consuming) part of the writing process, so I'm looking forward to polishing up my work. The goal--whether realistic or not--is to have a finished draft ready for a quick second review by the end of the week. Just so long as my
other tasks don't interfere--the fore-mentioned case search, a client meeting, an environmental law paper to be cite-checked, and the subject of the next section.

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I went out and bought a credenza, hutch, and rolling 3-drawer file to replace my current desk, which has been in my service since the third grade. (A quick bit of math makes me admit, to my general disbelief, that that comes out to fifteen to sixteen years . . . .) The desk is really built for a third grader, with a hutch too low for a computer monitor to fit on the desk itself, and a surface too narrow to accommodate the mounds of papers that necessarily accompany legal scholarship. So, taking that into account, the new credenza/hutch is 72 inches--6 feet--wide. The expansion requires the removal of one of my two remaining drawers (which, incidentally, date back to roughly the same period as the desk) so from now until the time when the new desk elements arrive and are assembled tomorrow afternoon, my room looks like it has been overrun by books, anime figures, starships/warships, and electronic equipment. More updates once the new desk is in place.

Two Weeks, 24, & SYS

(Re)Reading: Armor, John Steakley
Watching: Minami-ke ~Okawari #8-9
Playing: Professor Layton and the Curious Village (weekly puzzle updates); Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

Here I logged into my account thinking that it had been a week since my last post, only to discover it's been two. Oh well--baby steps, right?

Today I turned twenty four (hey, like the TV show!). In a lot of ways, twenty four seems to resemble twenty--one year away from the next milestone (here, 25--though instead of being able to imbibe liquors, you're half the way to thirty and can finally rent a car on your own).

For the reasons below, though, the greatest birthday gift I'm liable to get is one I can give myself: a good night's rest.

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Today was also the deadline for the rough draft of our second-year seminar papers. I forewent sleep the morning of March 5th to finish it up, attending the morning class as a walking (or, I suppose, sitting) zombie, took a four-hour nap, headed back for my afternoon/evening class, then went through the draft from 8 pm to 12 am. (I never realized how long proofreading a 41-pager could take when you're sleep deprived.) I emailed the paper to the prof at 1 am, and called it a night. (Should have called it a morning, in retrospect.)

Headed to school early today to borrow the high-capacity stapler from the law review room, only to have the blasted thing destroy my printed copy with a tangled mess of industrial-strength staples. God bless LexisNexis, which along with Westlaw, gifted the law review with complimentary printers, so I could reprint the paper (on LexisNexis-branded paper, no less) and get the stapler to do its job properly. Turned it in, only to notice by sheer luck the plagarism statement attached to another paper, which reminded me that I needed one too. So, with less than five minutes remaining before the morning class, I rushed back to the law review room, printed out the form, signed it, and clipped it to the draft. Made it to class with a full thirty seconds to spare.

What lessons can we learn from this fiasco? One: never trust a high-capacity stapler (or the bastard who used it before you, gumming it up). Two: thank God for law review's free printing privileges.

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Speaking of SYS, I suppose a general summary of my topic is in order. In a nutshell: doujinshi and fansubs both constitute cases in which loose enforcement of copyright actually benefit both public domain and the economic and creative incentives for the copyright holder (which, though often diametrically opposed, form the dual purposes of copyright). From those cases, I seek to establish a definition for a class of "fan-based activities," which I then use to propose two addenda to the current four-factor test for fair use, as prescribed by 17 U.S.C. section 107(1)-(4). These addenda expand fair use to include overarchingly beneficial (though technically infringing) uses like doujinshi, fansubs, fan fiction, etc., thereby furthering the purposes of copyright while requiring no legislative change because the addenda aren't for the specific factors described by section 107, but for the courts who employ the four-factor test.