The Long March

In November, 1868, the newly freed slaves in South Carolina turned out to vote in the first presidential election they had ever been allowed to participate in. It was a momentous occasion; hundreds of thousands of persons who had been deprived of their rights for centuries were now finally able to enjoy all of the privileges of citizenship, including the right of suffrage. Voting in the 1860s meant travelling long distances to the county seat to cast a ballot, often requiring an overnight stay; it was an arduous process, but they were eager to make the attempt.

But many in 1868 found that they had made the trip for nothing. Armed militias of whites, determined to prevent blacks from voting, arose all across the South, particularly in South Carolina. Acting at the direction of Democratic party leaders, these bands of vigilantes, sometimes calling themselves Ku Klux Klans, confiscated Republican ballots, threatened prospective voters, and assassinated Republican candidates for office. On the two days of the November election, hundreds of armed whites rode all over upcountry South Carolina, surrounding polling stations and preventing blacks from entering. The tactic was a success; blacks were denied the right to vote in several South Carolina counties, and the local Democratic ticket was elected by large majorities in all of them.

And so, it is a measure of the distance we have come in 140 years, that yesterday an African-American man was elected as President of the United States, on the Democratic Party ticket, in an election that was almost entirely peaceful.

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The Scrabulous Lawsuit: Heading Toward Default?

I’ve posted extensively recently on Hasbro v. RJ Softwares, the Scrabulous lawsuit, including a four-part series on PrawfsBlawg and two posts here on the similar litigation in India. See my last post for links to all of those materials, and see this article for background if you’re just tuning in.

In the PrawfsBlawg series, I noted a number of interesting legal issues that might be raised during any litigation or, even better, appeal of the dispute between Hasbro, the owners of the North American rights to Scrabble, and RJ Softwares et al., the makers of Scrabulous. In particular, I noted some surprising weaknesses with Hasbro’s copyright claims, including the blackletter rule that games are not copyrightable, lack of ownership over the Scrabble dictionary, and the apparent lack of registration of the Scrabble letter tiles. Even more troubling, I noted a possible formalities problem with all of the Scrabble copyrights dating back to the original 1948 registrations. On the plus side for Hasbro, I questioned the purpose of the under-theorized blackletter rule, although I ultimately concluded it played an important role in copyright law.

Much as I would like to see these issues play out in court, however, I may not get that chance. On Thursday, Hasbro filed proof of service with the court, showing that the defendants were served on August 13. My guess would be that a motion for a default judgement will be hot on its heels. For civ pro junkies, I’ll go into a few more details after the jump.

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Market Opportunity: Unforwardable Emails

I’ve seen a number of news items over the past few years in which internal firm or law school emails get leaked to online legal gossip sites, to the embarrassment of the originating institution. In my view, the frequency with which this occurs indicates a world in transition. Once, there were no online gossip sites worth worrying about, and firm memoranda about salaries, scandals, employment issues, or stolen lunches from the office refrigerator rarely made it past the walls of the institution. Now, there are such sites, and salacious and even mundane internal correspondence regularly leaks to them. This strikes me as a situation that can’t persist in its current form much longer. Either practices will change (i.e., no more emails about firm policies) or some sort of restrictions will be put in place. (A third option, that expectations of confidentiality concerning such matters will evaporate, strikes me as unlikely.)

The latest item to set off this thought in my head was this news item from the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog (essentially a slightly more tony version of Above the Law). As I tell my Internet Law students, there are various ways of controlling a behavior such as forwarding emails. Law is one way, but not a likely one in this case. Informal social norms are another (“Give a hoot! Don’t redistribute!”). That seems unlikely here, too. But a third is some sort of technological solution. And here, I would think a technological solution is at least conceivable: an office network that offers, as an option, blocking redistribution of the content of certain emails.

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