An interesting look at the intersection between automobiles, Justin Bieber, IP law, and comic books:

Last year, DC Comics, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., sued Mark Towles, who operated a business called “Gotham Garage,” which sold imitation batmobiles. DC, represented by attorney Andy Coombs, accused Towles of violating its copyright and trademark and confusing the public into thinking that his cars were authorized products.

Trademark is one thing, but can an automobile design really be copyrighted?

According to U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew, it can if it’s really special.

Towles moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the Copyright Act affords no protection to “useful articles.”

But Judge Lew begs to differ, ruling that Towles “ignores the exception to the ‘useful article’ rule, which grants copyright protection to nonfunctional, artistic elements of an automobile design that can be physically or conceptually separated from the automobile.”

In other words, the judge looked at the Batmobile and found there could be elements there that served no real purpose except it was pictorially unique. The judge will likely begin a fact-finding examination, such as whether the car really needs to be bat-shaped for it to be a crazy, cool ride.

ED Kain asksOn a side note, wouldn’t you think the occasional custom Batmobile would be just about the best sort of free advertising DC Comics could hope for?

It is! Right up until it’s being drunk driven, or involved in some sort of accident.

On The Drew Carey Show, Drew won a Batmobile in some contest. He lost it when he was caught having sex in it because apparently the car came with a “morals clause.”

In all seriousness, the benefits of advertising are probably outweighed by potential hazards and potential lose revenue if they ever decide to work with a carmaker on a limited-release or something-or-other. And, more to the point, copyrights that are not defended are lost. So, in a weird way – that makes some sense after deep thought – Warner Bros is compelled to actually defend this.

And, as far as the free advertising goes: Batman, as an entity, doesn’t really need the advertising. It already has brand recognition.

Behind all of this is the bigger stink: is that DC (or anybody) still owns the rights to Batman at all. Of course, that would not likely have any bearing on the physical likeness of the Batmobile, which is more recent (and would, of course, cover a lot of different designs).

I mentioned in an old Linkluster post regarding an old court ruling that allowed a police department to discriminate against people that scored really well on their variant of an IQ test. This spawned a conversation between Kirk, Brandon, Phi, and myself.

“It’s not okay to discriminate against dumb people, so why is it okay to do it to those who are smart?” -Kirk

“We see here that they used it to discriminate against people who did very well, but they almost certainly use it against people who did poorly. So somehow or another, they have already justified the disparate impact of the test.” -Trumwill

Reading over another account of the case, I am relatively sure that we all actually missed what’s really going on here. I touched on it in my comment, but half-accidentally. I initially actually believed the departments claims of concerns over turnover due to boredom or that it was a sort of personality profiling. But the more I think about it, this is less likely something despite disparate impact, but rather it was done precisely because of disparate impact.

We all know the legal problems with IQ tests: they have a disparate impact on minorities. This can be overcome, but only with a justification process that can be expensive and arbitrary. So organizations don’t like to do it. However, if you can devise an IQ test that doesn’t discriminate against minorities, then you don’t really have a problem. Therefore, instead of accepting scores above a certain threshold, you accept scores within a particular target zone. That means excluding low IQs (more likely to be Hispanic or black) and high IQs (more likely to be white or Asian). That, to me, makes a lot more sense than the personality profiling (with is self-deprecating in the extreme) or a disdain for high IQs (police departments are more frequently asking for more education rather than less). From a police departments perspective, eliminating a few high-IQ people from consideration is worth the cost of being able to eliminate those at the low end of the spectrum. From a utilitarian standpoint, that actually makes sense to me.

What would make things really interesting is if a bunch of Asian-Americans sued.

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This post is going to be treading on dangerous terrain. It’s unavoidable. All I ask is that we avoid derogatory remarks and derogatory references to stereotypes. Let’s assume the following for the sake of this post:

(1) An IQ test, or a test that can be directly tagged to IQ, will have a disparate impact on Non-Asian Minorities.

(2) The reason for #1, be it genetics, education disparities, cultural disparities, or what-have-you, are not particularly relevant to the discussion.

(3) Because of (1), cities are loathe to employ such tests because of the hurdles required to justify the disparate impact. But sometimes they do it anyway because regardless of #2, they see a benefit in excluding people below a certain threshold on such tests.

Imagine yourself in a coffeehouse, book store, or some other third place. A man who appears to be in his late-twenties walks up to you and says, “Excuse me sir/ma’am, but do you have a cell phone?” Do you:

(a) Say “buzz off”

(b) Say yes, suspiciously.

(c) Say yes and ask why without suspicion.

(d) Say “go away”

(e) Say yes, grab your cell phone, and hand it to the stranger.

My answer, I must confess, would be (b). I wouldn’t lie or be so rude as to tell them to buzz off, but I guess I am just suspicious of strangers walking up and asking me something like that. It’s not necessarily a rational thing, but once I did loan my cell phone to a stranger when they proceeded to use it for twenty minutes trying to get a hold of somebody. I wasn’t in a hurry, but my plan was not to hang around where I was for twenty minutes. Then being the villain anyway for asking for my phone back before they were quite done.

I was the late-twenties guy (I’m not in my late twenties, but I look like I am) and asked that to a guy at a coffee shop in Redstone. He went with (e), though before he could actually give me the cell phone I told him what I was wanting (“Could you call my cell phone? I can’t find it.”). He called the cell and proceeded to walk around the coffee shop and help me find it.

It’s not unlike back when I was living in Deseret. Shortly before I left Colosse, my car was broken into and a few thousand dollars worth of stuff was taken from my car (it’s a long story as to why I had a few thousand dollars worth of stuff in my car). I called the Colosse PD, who couldn’t have been less interested if they had tried. I had to basically force them to take the serial number of my laptop in the event that it resurfaced at a pawn shop.

Flash forward to Deseret and I left my jacket somewhere. In my jacket was a checkbook. A couple months later, someone wrote a check to a pizza delivery place with said checkbook. I’d already canceled the account that the checkbook was cancelled to (something I had intended to do anyway, since the bank had no branches in Deseret) but the loss of my last checkbook expedited matters. Anyhow, the pizza delivery place sicked the credit collection dogs on me. In order to get out of it, I had to file an affidavit.

I apologized to the detective for taking up his time. But his response couldn’t have been more different from the Colosse PD’s. He got a subpoena for the cameras for the day in question. They didn’t have that, so he interviewed employees there. He gave me updates every two or three days. I didn’t stop him because I was interested in retrieving the jacket if it was at all possible. After about a week, he apologetically said that he had burned all leads.

Of course, we can ask “What else would a detective in small-town Deseret actually do with his time?” No doubt, there is some truth to this. But I became acquainted with the Detective over time because he lead a handful of drug arrests at the apartment complex I was living at. He was not an unimportant guy. Flash forward a little later after my car had been broken into and the culprit arrested, a DA visited me personally to ask if the plea bargain they had worked out was okay with me or if they should pursue it to the maximum extent of the law (I told her the plea bargain was fine).

A while back, Katie Alison Granju wrote about Tennessee changing its divorce by way of court decree forbidding judges from forbidding “sleep-overs” between a parent and significant other, post-divorce. Granju isn’t sure what to think:

As for me, I admit that I’m kind of torn on this one. On the one hand, I do struggle with a deep-seated, somewhat kneejerk distaste for the idea of kids waking up to mom or dad’s latest hook-up reading the sportspages in the breakfast nook. Additionally, I don’t think that a parent who has gone through the hell of seeing his or her marriage end in whole or in part due to infidelity should have to endure the secondary pain of begging a judge to keep the third party in the marital break-up from spending the night in a home where the children are present.

But on the other hand, a blanket ban is clearly discriminatory toward gay parents, who have no ability to marry their romantic partners in Tennessee, and thus, under a blanket ban they wouldbe de facto barred from ever again having a meaningful family relationship with another adult until the children were grown and gone. Plus, I’m kind of with the libertarians on this one in that I don’t want the courts telling me how to raise my kids and run my household unless and until I clearly demonstrate that my behavior is causing real harm to my offspring.

I find the reasoning in the second paragraph to be a little weak. This isn’t about an automatic ban, but rather one that a judge can issue or not issue. Presumably, a gay couple would be more likely to say “live and let live” since neither one of them can marry (in Tennessee, at any rate, at the present time). It’s straight couples, where marriage is at least an option, where one partner or the other might say “You/we can wait until we’re remarried.”

But it is an interesting question and I guess in the overall I am similarly conflicted. Bans can be enforced if the other parent can prove some specific harm, but it’s hard to prove harm without making divorce proceedings much more acrimonious than they would already be. “My soon-to-be former spouse is a slut, your honor.” or even better, “My ex-husband has demonstrated a history of having bad taste in women. Uhmm, except me!”

One of the thoughts that comes to my mind is that such a ban is convenient to ask for in the event that one side or the other remarries quickly. You know, if maybe they already had their spouse picked out before the papers were files. It would strike me as a double-whammy for a cheater to turn around and say “No sleepovers until you are re-married like I am now!”

On the other hand, in cases of joint custody, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to say “Hey, you can have the sleepovers when the kids are at the other parents’ house.” Of course, that only works if the kids bounce back and forth. It becomes a little more complicated when one does have the kids around almost all of the time.

I think I lean slightly in favor of allowing sleepovers absent the demonstration of harm of one sort or another. I can think of instances where I would not want it to happen, but the scenarios are so variable and diverse that I am not sure how much faith I would have in a judge correctly sussing it out.

From Arapahoe County, Colorado:

A CBS4 investigation has learned that former Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. has been arrested, suspected of trafficking methamphetamine, a controlled substance.

Sullivan, 68, was the elected Arapahoe County Sheriff for 19 years. He retired in 2002 and went on to become director of safety and security for Cherry Creek Schools. He was a nationally-regarded law enforcement figure and in 2001 as the National Sheriff Association named Sullivan “Sheriff of the Year.”

A more complete story here, with an ironical tidbit: he was sent to a jail named after.

The story gets worse from there:

There were other developments in the Sullivan story Friday. Denver Police reopened an investigation into the death of Sean Moss, a case that led to police interviewing Sullivan earlier this year about his relationship with Moss.

The 27-year-old’s body was found face down in the South Platte River in January. A DPD detective interviewed Sullivan after Moss death after learning Sullivan and Moss were friends and that Sullivan had bailed Moss out of jail two weeks earlier.

When CBS4 reported on the connection Thursday, a Denver Police spokesperson said it was a “closed case” and there was “nothing suspicious” about the Moss death. Friday, the Denver Police Department labeled that a “misstatement” and spokesperson Sonny Jackson said there is an “active, ongoing investigation” into Moss’ death.

Long Island University Professor says that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was bullied, others agree and disagree:

Millions of viewers have reviewed the evidence. So, was Rudolph bullied?

“What they do to him is bullying especially what they’re teaching the kids now as big as it is in the schools, but yes, he was definitely bullied,” Audra Bamford said.

“We just watched it the other night and I was telling my kids that’s not how we treat our friends,” Ronette Hillenbrand added.

“No I don’t think he’s being bullied,” Dr. Friday said. “I think the problem lies with Santa. He’s just not hugging this poor defenseless thing.”

Santa’s involvement (or lack thereof) hadn’t really occurred to me. Perhaps it’s a telling indictment of how the expectation isn’t even there that authority figures will help.

I think it all depends on how far you stretch the definition of “bullied.” You can limit it to physical violence. You can broaden it a little to include threats of physical violence. You can broaden it even further to taunts and ostracization. I think all of these things apply as bullying of some sort, though some of these forms are more serious than others. I remember back in college I had a discussion with a female classmate wherein she argued that girls are worse bullies than men because guys rely on violence while girls are more creative and hit other girls where it really hurts: self-esteem. I countered that (a) violence hurts and (b) violence in boys is not unrelated to self-esteem. On the second point, she said that the same was true of girls and it was nothing like the self-esteem hit of being accused of being fat. We never came to an agreement. I think there was a fundamental misunderstanding of how boys and girls respond to accusations of weight (which hits girls far harder than boys) and physical weakness (the other way around).

As for Rudolph, I am inclined to agree with Dr. Giuliani that yes Rudolph was bullied, but disagree with his assertion that the movie promotes violence. The attitude towards the taunting of the other reindeer is treated with uniform negativity. If it does anything wrong, it’s to perpetuate the notion that the bullied are bullied because they are “special.” Which sounds nice, of course, but… doesn’t exactly ring true.

On the subject of bullying, Dr. Phi wonders to what extent “helicopter parenting” has actually helped alleviate the bullying problem from years past.

According to a study, criminals are not so forward-thinking as to consider the punishment for their crimes:

The findings suggest that 76% of active criminals and 89% of the most violent criminals either perceive no risk of apprehension or are incognizant of the likely punishments for their crimes.

Of course, you could look at that the other way: Punishment acts as a deterrent for nearly a quarter of criminals and over a tenth of the most violent criminals. Of course, to really get their attention, the level of punishment may be such that it would be unconscionable. In any case, I find the lead-in to this to be problematic:

The tenet that harsher penalties could substantially reduce crime rates rests on the assumption that currently active criminals weigh the costs and benefits of their contemplated acts. Existing and proposed crime strategies exhibit this belief, as does a large and growing segment of the crime literature.

Actually, it can just as easily rest on the notion that a criminal in jail isn’t committing crimes against the general public while in jail. I’m not saying that I agree with this, but it’s there. As some proponents of the death penalty are inclined to point out, the only way to make sure that someone never murders again is if they are dead. It’s one of the reasons why death penalty opponents should vigorously support real life with possibility of parole sentencing.

There’s a rather disturbing case out of North Dakota involving a student at UND facing disciplinary action on a rape that the police actively believe did not occur. It’s not just that the police are failing to press charges, but rather, they are wanting to prosecute the accustor for giving a false statement.

Now men, broadly speaking, and often conservatives, will look at this case with due outrage. And, to be honest, they’re not all wrong here. The recent moves by the Obama Administration to needle schools into loosening the standards of evidence to make it easier for schools to take action make a lot of undesirable things possible.

On the other hand, we don’t know why the police are going after the woman, what lie they might have caught her in, and so on. It could be that the evidence against her is pretty thin. We shouldn’t necessarily assume otherwise. Horrifying accusations on overreaching retaliation against accusers has been known to happen.

Rape really is one of those cases where there is a zero-sum balance. Made more complicated by the disparity in gender between accusor and accused. As a man (in the United States, at any rate), it was never likely that I would be sexually assaulted. Likewise, it is unlikely that a woman would ever be falsely accused of rape. This always leads both sides to minimize the danger of the other. If you’re going to err in one direction or the other, err against them!

Our arguments are always buttressed by our perceptions of likelihood. One in four women are raped! Half of rape accusations are false! When, in reality, we just don’t know all that goes on. Both of these numbers are disturbing. Putting the thumb on the scales to “encourage women to come forward” by refusing to name them even in cases where they have long been discredited (Chrystal Mangum) may encourage rape victims to come forward, but it also provides protection for people who would make such accusations frivolously. And “but no woman would do that!” sounds pretty hollow. The person saying that wouldn’t do it, but there are some crazy women out there. Likewise, though, the one-in-four estimation is truly horrifying. And demands action. And our system has a horrible history of not taking claims of rape seriously.

The easiest way out of this mental logjam is, of course, to simply choose to disbelieve whichever statistics are inconvenient to your perspective. One in four women aren’t raped. They only think they were because they had sex they later regretted. Or the sampling is flawed. Half of rape accusations are not false, and here are the flaws with the study. And to be honest, I couldn’t begin to sort it all out. And since almost everybody has a vagina, and therefore is most likely to be a victim or rape than ever falsely accused of it, or a penis, and therefore is more likely to be falsely accused than raped, everyone has a skin in the game.

So. Err against them.

As many of you are aware, before it was released, someone got a hold of the iPhone 4 and sold it to Gizmodo. They are being charged with theft:

The San Mateo County District Attorney’s office has filed criminal charges against two men who obtained a prototype iPhone 4 last year and sold it to the gadget blog Gizmodo, CNET has learned.

Steve Wagstaffe, the district attorney, said in an interview today that his office has filed misdemeanor theft charges against Brian Hogan, the man who allegedly found the prototype in a bar after it was left there by an Apple engineer. An arraignment has been scheduled for August 25.

The second man charged is Sage Robert Wallower, who allegedly contacted technology sites last year while shopping around the iPhone 4 prototype. Wallower, a former Navy cryptologic technician who was scheduled to graduate from UC Berkeley in 2010, told CNET last year in an in-person interview at his home: “I didn’t see it or touch it in any manner. But I know who found it.”

My first instinct was that this doesn’t sit right with me under the concept of “Finders/Keepers.” On further reflection, though, there are definitely limits to the applicability of the rule. I can’t just take over a car that is left in a parking lot overnight, for instance. So at the very least, there would need to be some attempt to contact the owner. Except, that’s what these people did:

So you recognize this handset as an iPhone—it looks and works like an iPhone, and it’s even disguised as an iPhone 3GS. It’s not password protected (!), it’s running an OS that looks like the normal iPhone OS only a little different, and it has Facebook and other apps running. (Our source says he didn’t poke around too deeply.) Hours later—before the next morning, actually—it didn’t work.

The assumption is that it was wiped remotely as soon as either the engineer or Apple realized it was lost—probably later that night, not just to lock down the features of the new hardware, but to avoid spilling the beans on the new operating system. So, with a bricked phone in hand, an obvious course of action would be to call Apple. And as we reported before, that’s exactly what happened—our source started dialing Apple contact and support numbers. He was turned away, and given a support ticket number.

By bricking the phone, Apple protected their secrets. But it seems to me that morally, if not legally, by doing so they sacrificed any reasonable expectation of getting it back.

Back before I had a smartphone, I had a Pocket PC. They allow you to put a message up on start-up. Mine said that it was the property of Will Truman, here is the number he can be contacted at, and there will be a $x reward for its return (the number went down over time). I didn’t have that message on my smartphone, because I figured that if nothing else I could call it if it were lost (it was lost once, found on the floor of a movie theater and generously kept for me). Had Apple done this, they likely would have gotten their phone back. From the sound of it, they would have even without a reward.

But they chose to brick it.

Finders, keepers, in my view.

Apparently, New York is having a problem in collecting bail bond forfeitures.

A couple years ago the they had a good article on the internationally unusual nature of our system:

“It’s a very American invention,” John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said of the commercial bail bond system. “It’s really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business.”

Although the system is remarkably effective at what it does, four states — Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon and Wisconsin — have abolished commercial bail bonds, relying instead on systems that require deposits to courts instead of payments to private businesses, or that simply trust defendants to return for trial.

Most of the legal establishment, including the American Bar Association and the National District Attorneys Association, hates the bail bond business, saying it discriminates against poor and middle-class defendants, does nothing for public safety, and usurps decisions that ought to be made by the justice system.

Here as in many other areas of the law, the United States goes it alone. American law is, by international standards, a series of innovations and exceptions. From the central role played by juries in civil cases to the election of judges to punitive damages to the disproportionate number of people in prison, the United States has charted a distinctive and idiosyncratic legal path.

It seems to me that the question of whether it discriminates against the poor and middle-class is if this innovation has resulted in requirements for higher bails since the judges know that bondsmen will put it up. If so, it causes a price spiral that discriminates against defendants the same way that they would be discriminated against if they had to put the money up themselves. But if that’s not demonstrably the case, it seems like it would help them by allowing them to get out of jail (or get their loved ones out of jail) in ways that they wouldn’t be able to, otherwise. It’s not unlike those paycheck loan places, except reserved more for a rather specific emergency.

Wilson Quarterly has a good (and more sympathetic) look at the industry:

Most people don’t realize how many fugitives from the law there are. About one-quarter of all felony defendants fail to show up on the day of their trial. Some of these absences are due to forgetfulness, hospitalization, or even imprisonment on another charge. But like Luster, many felony defendants skip court with willful intent. The police are charged with recapturing these fugitives, but some of them are chased by an even more tireless pursuer, the bounty hunter.

Bounty hunters and bail bondsmen play an important but unsung role in a legal system whose court dockets are too crowded to provide swift justice. When a suspect is arrested, a judge must make a decision: set the suspect free on his own recognizance until the court is ready to proceed, hold the suspect in jail, or release the accused on the condition that he post a bail bond. A bond is a promise backed by incentive. If the suspect shows up on the trial date, he gets his money back; but if he fails to show, the money is forfeited. We don’t want to deprive the innocent of their liberty, but we also don’t want to give the guilty too much of a head start on their escape. Bail bonds don’t solve this problem completely, but they do give judges an additional tool to help them navigate the dilemma.

Bail might be a rich man’s privilege were it not for the bail bondsman. (Many bondsmen are women, but “bondsperson” doesn’t have quite the same ring, so I’ll use the standard terminology.) In return for a non-refundable fee, usually around 10 percent of the bond, a bondsman will put up his own money with the court. A typical bond might run $6,000. If the defendant shows up, the bondsman earns $600. But if the defendant flees, the bondsman potentially can forfeit $6,000. Potentially, because when a fugitive fails to appear, the court gives the bondsman a notice that essentially says, “Bring your charge to justice soon or your money is mine.” A bondsman typically has 90 to 180 days to bring a fugitive back to justice, so when a defendant jumps bail, the bondsman lets the dogs loose.

In addition to (perhaps) helping people afford to get out of jail when they otherwise wouldn’t be able to, this strikes me as a rather helpful sort of outsourcing. Hunting low-level fugitives is something that it’s rarely going to be worthwhile to do, from a financial standpoint. But we create a system that makes it worthwhile… to somebody.

Freakonomics also has a podcast/article on the topic.

UPDATE: Another interesting article on the subject from Las Vegas, where Bail Bondsmen are upset at Marshals, who are allegedly illegally offering bonds.