Well, it’s that time of year again, so let me share with you who the Final Four this year will be:

Kansas
Duke UCLA
North Carolina
Texas Memphis

The best game of the tournament will be the KU-UNC game, but that’s not to say I’m not going to enjoy my beloved Jayhawks kick the ever loving snot out of Duke Texas Memphis to take the national title this year.

This one’s mostly for Alex. I’m pretty sure he’ll find this as amusing as I did.

This is for those who don’t recognize the style of the image.

This is for those who don’t get the teapot reference.

“Occasionally, I am a human being like everybody else.” — Hillary Clinton

Which begs the question, of course. What, exactly, is Hillary Clinton when she’s not a human being?

Well, it’s that time of year again, so let me share with you who the Final Four this year will be:

Kansas
Duke UCLA
North Carolina
Texas

The best game of the tournament will be the KU-UNC game, but that’s not to say I’m not going to enjoy my beloved Jayhawks kick the ever loving snot out of Duke Texas to take the national title this year.

Well, it’s that time of year again, so let me share with you who the Final Four this year will be:

Kansas
Duke
North Carolina
Texas

The best game of the tournament will be the KU-UNC game, but that’s not to say I’m not going to enjoy my beloved Jayhawks kick the ever loving snot out of Duke to take the national title this year.

Because everybody tries to kill Hitler their first time.

“By teaching people to hold their beliefs up to experiment, Mythbusters is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific dark ages than a thousand lessons in [scientific] rigor. Show them some love.”
-xkcd

There has been a fair amount of coverage over this story:

Alton Logan was convicted of killing a security guard at a McDonald’s in Chicago in 1982. Police arrested him after a tip and got three eyewitnesses to identify him. Logan, his mother and brother all testified he was at home asleep when the murder occurred. But a jury found him guilty of first degree murder.

… Logan, who maintains he didn’t commit the murder, thought they were “crazy” when he was arrested for the crime.

Attorneys Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz knew Logan had good reason to think that, because they knew he was innocent. And they knew that because their client, Andrew Wilson, who they were defending for killing two policemen, confessed to them that he had also killed the security guard at McDonald’s - the crime Logan was charged with committing.

… The problem was the killer was their client. So, legally, they had to keep his secret even though an innocent man was about to be tried for murder.

This scenario is every lawyer’s nightmare.  And I’ve been following the story in a few places, partly because I took the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam last saturday.

I can perfectly understand people finding the result in this circumstance unfortunate and distasteful.  I do too.  But I’ve seen far too much rationalization and twisting of legal rules to try and make these lawyers into even bigger monsters by trying to convince themselves that these lawyers didn’t have to violate legal ethics rules to achieve justice in this case.

The unfortunate truth is that the lawyer’s duty to maintain a client’s confidentiality did prevent these lawyers from ethically revealing what they learned to the public.  Lawyers have an obligation, just like doctors, priests, and other professionals who need intimate knowledge of their clients in order to do their job effectively, not to reveal that information to others.

There are exceptions, and these attorneys were clearly very cognizant of them.  These attorneys knew that confidentiality can be broken to save a life, so they decided to break confidentiality if innocent defendant received the death penalty.   But there seem to be a number of people who want to think that the confidentiality requirement had far more exceptions than it really does.

There is an exception for ongoing crimes and crimes a client intends to commit.  But since there’s no crime in not admitting to a crime you committed, the exception doesn’t apply.

There’s an exception for when the client waives its confidentiality, but in this case the killer only agreed to that after his death.

There’s an exception for disputes between the attorney and the client.  Typically this means that if a lawyer claims he did 20 hours of work and the client claims he did only 10, the attorney can show what he did for those 20 hours.   Likewise, if the client accused his attorney of committing the murder, the attorney can break privilege to defend himself from the accusation.

I’m not going to say this was an ideal situation.  It was far from it.  But the attorneys did the best they could with the constraints they were under.  I’m sure it ate at their consciences, but revealing what their client told them would have opened them up to disbarment proceedings.  With that hanging over their heads, and the ethical rules telling them they had a duty to the client they represented, I can’t blame them for staying quiet about it.

“Saying that Hillary has Executive Branch experience is like saying Yoko Ono was a Beatle.”
– Jsn

(link via Andrew Sullivan)

A producer that owns the rights to such films as George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” is suing the makers of a video game called “Dead Rising” for -get this- the metaphor of mall patrons as zombies.

The producer, MKR Group, alleged that Capcom’s popular “Dead Rising” game was essentially a computer game version of its “Dawn of the Dead” movies.

“Both works are dark comedies,” the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in New York on Monday reads. “In both, the recreational activities of the zombies and absurdly grotesque ‘kill scenes’ provide unexpected comedic relief.”

“Both works provided thoughtful social commentary on the ‘mall culture’ zeitgeist, in addition to serving up a sizable portion of sensationalistic violence,” it said.

A spokesman for Capcom, Chris Kramer, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The notion that two works can infringe on each other merely by covering the same topic and using the same metaphors is beyond ridiculous. If Alex and I were to both write spy thrillers about a suave secret agent working for a powerful Western nation who travels the world foiling the machinations of supervillains and nailing unattainable women, we would not be infringing on each others’ copyrights in the stories or similar stories about a certain martini-drinking Walther PPK-wielding secret agent. We would also need to tell the same literal story, utilizing the same characters (not just the same archetypes) and the same plot.

This is something I know far too much about, since I’m currently working on a law review article about just this topic, specifically about game rules and copyright law.  I’ve been looking over the claims I’ve been able to find.  I have no idea how MKR can justify its claims.  You just plain can’t prevent people from writing a story about zombies that pokes fun at mall culture simply because you wrote one first.