Deposition Weirdness

Photocopiers

If you haven’t yet watched this reenactment of a deposition segment about the meaning of the word “photocopier” on the New York Times website, you should.  The New York Times summarizes the lawsuit in which the deposition was taken as follows:

In 2010, the Cuyahoga County Recorder’s Office in Ohio changed their policy about copying records. Digital files would no longer be available, and the public would have to make hard copies of documents for $2 per page.  This would prove to be prohibitively expensive for Data Trace Information Services and Property Insight, companies that collect hundreds of pages of this public information each week.  They sued the Recorder’s Office for access to digital versions of the documents on a CD.  In the middle of the case, a lawyer representing them questioned the IT administrator of the Recorder’s Office, which led to a 10-page argument over the semantics of photocopiers.

The deposition segment starts with a question about whether the Recorder’s Office used “photocopying machines – any photocopying machine?”  The deponent attempts to turn the table: “When you say photocopying machine, what do you mean?”  The ensuing dialogue would not be out of place in an absurdist play.

Continue ReadingDeposition Weirdness

The Fragility of Strads

266x180xlipinski-strad-300x204_jpg_pagespeed_ic_-vowBH2CskBravo to the Milwaukee Police Department and everybody who cooperated to ensure the safe return of the Lipinski Stradivarius! What an impressive feat.  The recovery of the violin ends several days of anxious speculation about the violin’s fate. Was it still in Milwaukee, as former FBI officer Robert Wittman (founder of the FBI’s National Art Crime Team) believed? Or in a vault of an extremely wealthy and unscrupulous person in a remote country, perhaps side by side with the missing Vermeer painting “The Concert”? Did these robbers know what they were doing or were they a group of blundering amateurs—and which of the two would be more favorable?

Continue ReadingThe Fragility of Strads

Why Orchestras Matter

MSOWhen orchestras hit the headlines, the news is rarely good. The latest example is the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (MSO), which announced in December that it must raise $5 million just to complete the season. Although management and the musicians have cooperated to come up with substantial cost savings, the orchestra’s survival has become highly uncertain.

But why should you care? More to the point, why should a community support an institution that cannot finance its operations out of ticket sales?

Continue ReadingWhy Orchestras Matter