Professor Michael McChrystal once pointed out that in the State of Wisconsin, the penalty for working as a beautician without a license is not much different from the penalty for practicing law without a license.
The tech blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261. (Mainstream news sites seem not to have noticed; the New York Times website front page mentioned the impending sale of Yahoo, but not SOPA.) A good deal of that discussion refers to SOPA in apocalyptic terms: the bill would allegedly “break the Internet,” or “end the Internet as we know it,” or drive YouTube and Facebook out of business if enacted. Even non-lawyer relatives are asking me about it.
Does the bill really do all that? No. Copyright-related debates have been going on long enough, and at such a fever pitch, that such predictions are pretty much the price of admission now to rally the troops. There’s a pretty good inductive argument that predictions of the imminent death of the Internet or of the content industry are actually a reliable indicator that neither the Internet nor the content industry will die. But that doesn’t mean SOPA’s a good idea. So step one is figuring out what it does.
I’ve sat down and read the bill and there’s some aspects to it I think are misunderstood — perhaps by almost everyone. One of its provisions is much more narrowly targeted, and I think reasonable, than is generally being described. I’m going to break this discussion up into a few posts, and I’ll tackle that one first. A second provision is … deeply odd, in ways I haven’t seen mentioned, and I have serious reservations about it, but it is probably not the Vishnu-like destroyer of worlds it is being portrayed as. Finally, I’ll wrap up with some thoughts on what drives copyright rhetoric and politics generally.
“One must walk before one can run.” This statement is true in almost every facet of life. Do you remember playing football for the first time? It was truly a test of athleticism and courage as well as skill. However, a quarterback does not usually start out by throwing touchdowns. Even the great Brett Favre most likely started at square one. A player usually starts “walking” by playing peewee football. When one starts learning something new, no person typically masters the skill immediately. One needs to practice, practice, practice.
This is the same with the law. Law school classes teach you substantive law. However, you do not necessarily learn all you need to know to practice in the real world. This is where the importance of an internship comes in. I believe that a law school internship is vital to a law school education. I am currently interning with the Wisconsin Supreme Court. My internship is an extremely valuable experience because it is exposing me to the inner workings of our state’s highest court and, at the same time, forcing me to further develop my research and writing skills. An internship can give context to what is learned in law school, teach one valuable legal skills, and also help students’ resumes stand apart.