Cooley Law School Sued Over Its Supposedly 'Misleading Employment Stats'

from the so-that's-why-it-sued dept

We recently wrote about how the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, whose sole actual claim to fame appears to be that it takes on more students than any other law school, was suing some online critics. It had actually filed two lawsuits, one was against some online critics, and the other was against a law firm that had clearly been sniffing around some Cooley practices. Well, now the other shoe has dropped and, as ShellMG points out, that same law firm has sued Cooley in a class action lawsuit, claiming that the school posts false claims about its postgraduate employment rates. This is, clearly, what Cooley was trying to stave off with its original lawsuit, since in its lawsuit against the Kurzon Strauss law firm, it highlighted a message posted to a legal board asking students to come forward with information about Cooley's employment stats. Of course, the fact that Cooley sued first (with, as many people pointed out, lawyers who graduated from other schools) kind of makes you wonder what the school is hiding. That is, rather than wait to see if the law firm actually had anything, Cooley filed what could be described as a SLAPP suit, in that it appears it sought to stop the law firm from actually getting its message out to former students. It certainly makes for an interesting defamation claim. Can you accuse a class action law firm of defamation for reaching out to find people who had a bad experience?

In the end, I still think that Cooley comes out of this looking terribly. Suing critics never looks good. And now its stats are likely to get a lot more scrutiny. I'm curious how comfortable Cooley is with that...

Filed Under: attention, employment, law school, stats
Companies: thomas m cooley law school

DailyDirt: Robots Mimicking Humans...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Everyone universally hated 'Clippy' when it popped up and tried to be helpful. So imagine the hate that could arise if a humanoid robot wondered around and tried to be helpful all the time. Thankfully, the field of robotics is not quite up to letting such a machine loose on the general population, but plenty of researchers are working on how to improve human-bot relations. C3PO has some early ancestors in a few of the following links.

• Georgia Tech has a robot named Simon that knows when he has your attention -- with about 80% accuracy. Maybe they should rename the bot to Simona and get about half of the population's attention. [url]
• The Geminoid DK robot has been getting some attention... for being really, really creepy-looking. [url]
• Binghamton University researchers are developing software for judging people's expressions -- anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Not necessarily in that order. [url]
• To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: attention, expressions, hmi, robots
Companies: geminoid

Redskins Owner Sues Local Paper Over Satirical Listing Of Grievances... Making Sure More People Read It

from the hello-ms.-streisand dept

We've talked about the ridiculous management of the Washington Redskins a few times before. This is the football team that took the extraordinary step of suing a bunch of fans who, due to the economic crisis, were unable to pay for season tickets they had ordered. While most other teams simply take back the tickets and find other buyers, the Redskins sued over 100 such fans (probably ex-fans now). The team has also been extremely aggressive in terms of what it requires of reporters, including trying to claim that posting photos of disgruntled fans was prohibited and creating "media guidelines" that seriously stifle what reporters can talk about, if they want to continue to be given any access to the team.

The latest situation is even more extreme. The team's owner, Dan Snyder, appears to be the subject of much displeasure among Redskins fans. There are lots of fans of lots of sports teams who dislike the ownership. However, I don't think I've ever heard the level of dislike towards an owner like the publicly expressed feelings many fans have towards Dan Snyder. The local Washington City Paper has, of course, played up on this general dislike of Snyder, and back in November published an amusing Cranky Redskins Fan's Guide to Dan Snyder, which includes an A to Z listing of "offenses." You see this kind of column all the time about various sports owners. And most ignore it.

But not Dan Snyder.

He had his lawyers send a threat letter not to Washington City Paper, but to Atalaya Capital Management, the investment firm that owns Creative Loafing, which is the company that publishes Washington City Paper. Got that? Atalaya pointed out that they have nothing to do with the management of the paper -- and especially have nothing to do with the content of the paper, but even so, sent back a wonderful letter explaining the basics of the First Amendment to Snyder, especially with regards to public figures. The full letter is embedded below (and worth the read), but a few choice snippets:

The purpose of this letter is not to correct each of your misstatements and mischaracterizations but rather to assert the media's First Amendment right to comment on public figures (which your client undeniably is) and matters of public interest (into which your client voluntarily injected himself through his prominent ownership of the Washington Redskins).

The Column plainly is a tongue-in-cheek opinion piece expressing fans' frustration with your client's ownership of the Redskins. This is quintessential First Amendment-protected speech. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that "one of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures. Such criticism, inevitably, will not always be reasoned or moderate; public figures as well as public officials will be subject to vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks."

The letter also highlights that Atalaya had been informed by the paper that it was more than happy to allow Mr. Snyder the ability to respond in the pages of its publication.

Snyder, apparently, decided not to pay much heed to this letter, as he proceeded with the lawsuit (full suit embedded below), in which he makes a number of claims. Now, there certainly were some statements that were made in the original article that, if untrue, could be defamatory. However, some of the claims were just downright crazy. The most ridiculous, of course, is his decision to claim that the illustration that accompanied the original article (shown below) was somehow anti-semitic. Yeah, that's a photo of Dan Snyder with a scribbling of devil horns and facial hair. I'm not sure how a childish scribbling to make someone look like the devil is anti-semitic. And that's because it's not. At all. And Snyder is being widely mocked for thinking otherwise.

Of course, the even bigger issue is that in bringing this lawsuit, you can bet that a hell of a lot more people have now seen the original article totally trashing Dan Snyder. If his goal was to suppress this content, then he's failed badly (yet again). On top of that, a lot more folks now think that Snyder has an incredibly thin skin. I would also imagine that Snyder will not enjoy any actual legal fight, in which the various assertions about him in that original column are dragged into court and examined for accuracy. Even if there are libelous statements in there, is Snyder really interested in going through a courtroom analysis of each of the claims in the column?

Filed Under: attention, dan snyder, defamation, redskins

Are Tweets And Text Messaging Actually Increasing The Appeal Of Long Form Writing?

from the entirely-possible dept

To hear Nick Carr explain the internet these days, you'd think that it was killing off interest in long form reading. Of course, that's not actually true. Carr made a classic error in the thesis for his last book, not realizing that a large segment of the population used to do no long form reading at all -- and the fact that many of them are now reading something is actually showing increased readership, rather than decreased.

Clive Thompson has now stepped into this debate (not directly naming Carr, but it certainly sounds like he's referencing him), suggesting that all this tweeting and texting has actually increased an appreciation for long form writing, though potentially decreased interest in middle form writing. His argument is anecdotal, so I'd really like to see some more data on it, but it does match at least some of what I've found. The crux of his argument is that people who just have a little bit to write now use things like Twitter to pass that along, rather than writing a short blog post, which are all almost always longer than your typical tweet. But, they do save up the "big ideas" and write much longer posts. And he notes that many bloggers have found that those longer, more in-depth posts, seem to get more attention.

To some extent, we've seen the same thing. While we still do have shorter "mid-form" posts, the posts on Techdirt are now a hell of a lot longer than they used to be a few years back, and the longer ones do seem to get more attention. For years, I ridiculously tried to keep to a rule that all Techdirt posts should fit within one paragraph. The idea was to keep them short and focused, but at times, when explaining deeper concepts, this got silly and made for exceptionally cramped blog posts (hello, wall of text). At some point I realized that was pointless, and switched to a style that went to what was appropriate. And it was about that time that Techdirt's traffic shot up and we actually started building a decent following. I can't say that there's direct cause-and-effect, but at least my experience seems to mesh with what Thompson suggests.

Filed Under: attention, long form writing, twitter

Forget Information Overload: What If The Real Problem Is Information Underload

from the shift-your-perspective dept

For years, I've definitely been a believer in the idea that there's information overload today. After all, there are so many new sources of information out there that of course one of the problems many people believe they face is that they simply can't keep up. However, I may need to seriously rethink that concept after reading this article, pointed out by Clay Shirky and written by Mike O'Malley, which suggests we've got the problem backwards. The issue today isn't information overload, but information underload. Here's the basic example, arguing that people in the past had to know a hell of a lot more than we do today:

Here's an image of pastoral life, taken early in the twentieth century in North Dakota. Rustic simplicity, except that the farmer in charge has labor management problems--who are these workers, how is he compensating them? He has to manage the horses--how is their health? Do they need feeding and watering? He's got to get the harvested wheat stored properly: he's checking the weather all the time--just imagine how much information is involved, in an age before reliable forecasts, in guessing the weather! He's scanning the crop itself, to see how much he lost to insects or disease. He's got a good idea of crop prices in Chicago and whether they're trending up or down. The scene was information-dense, and if you click on the image, you can see how the original title frames the scene.

The modern farmer climbs into the air conditioned cab of a combine harvester, and turns on the radio. The radio fills the attention spaces left by, say, reading the weather signs or managing the workers or the animals.

Now, I would imagine that many modern farmers would take issue with some aspect of this simplification. There is still plenty of information that the modern farmer needs to be aware of, but it is a different level and a different type of information. But, to a certain extent, that is O'Malley's point. The "information overload" we face today is of a very different nature than the information overload of the past, and that is that today's information overload is often filling areas that are less about necessities:

So what appears to us as "too much information" could just be the freedom from necessity. I don't have to worry about finding and cutting and storing fire­wood: I don't even have to manage a coal furnace. That attention has been freed up for other things. What we see as "too much information" is probably something more like "a surplus of free attention."

As a historian, I no longer have to spend hours scanning texts to find the smaller sets of information I need. They pop up quickly when I deal with digitized texts, and the search process is streamlined and automated much in the way a gas burner streamlines and automates a wood stove.

In the end, he suggests that our attention is pretty much constant, and if it's not engaged in one thing (e.g., trying to predict the weather), it'll get engaged in something else (e.g., reading up on some blog rant). It's just the nature of the way that we work -- but it's not an indication that we're actually dealing with information overload. I'm not sure I totally agree, but it is a different way of looking at the questions surrounding how we deal with the amount of information presented to us at any given time.

Filed Under: attention, information overload, underload

Movie Debuts In Theater And On The Pirate Bay (On Purpose)

from the with-a-nice-message dept

Often, when we talk about films that creators choose to share via BitTorrent, one of the snarky comments we'll get is that they only did this because they couldn't get the film into a theater. So it's interesting to see that the filmmakers behind the new Swedish film Die Beauty have decided to release the film in theaters and on The Pirate Bay at the same time.

Most interesting of all may be the statement of the filmmaker, about the power of using BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay to reach a wider audience -- and how all the works of filmmakers in the past who never got the attention they deserved can now have a new life:

"Sometimes I think about all the filmmakers and musicians who passed away. Those who never got to be a part of the world wide web. No matter how hard they worked or no matter how much money they put into distribution, they couldnt reach more than a small part ofthe world.

Now their work have the opportunity to get new life. The possibility to be rediscovered by a new generation. A new world. To reject that,to prevent that from happening, is a sin. I think Charlie Chaplin would have one thing to say to all those people who do: Idiots.

Die Beauty is my first feature and releasing the film here is an obvious thing to do. And the fact that The Pirate Bay decided to give the film a world wide premiere on the frontpage makes me speechless. It's a privilege to be able to introduce the film to the greatest audience in the world."

Nice to see more filmmakers embracing what's possible, rather than hating what's possible.

Filed Under: attention, debut, movies, sweden
Companies: the pirate bay

Even If You Know About The Gorilla, You Might Not Catch The Unexpected

from the did-you-see-it? dept

There's a very famous perception experiment, which many of you have probably seen. If you haven't, you should watch it here before reading on: I will admit that the first time I saw it (at a conference), I totally missed the gorilla. Totally. Of course, once you've seen it or know about it, it's hard not to see it. And, by this point, so many people have seen it, that the overall video test has lost much of its power. So the folks behind it decided to see what would happen if they knew you were looking for the gorilla, and came up with the following: Basically, they assumed that people were now looking for the gorilla, and got people to more or less focus on that, and miss the "new" changes. Once again, I have to admit I totally missed the changes. As the researchers are pointing out, this suggests that even if you're "expecting the unexpected," it's often difficult to notice it actually happening. As the researchers behind the videos note, many of the folks out there who use their original video to teach people to "expect the unexpected" are missing the point:

"A lot of people seem to take the message of our original gorilla study to be that people don't pay enough attention to what is happening around them, and that by paying more attention and 'expecting the unexpected,' we will be able to notice anything important," he added. "The new experiment shows that even when people know that they are doing a task in which an unexpected thing might happen, that doesn't suddenly help them notice other unexpected things."

The guys behind the videos have done some other unique experiments as well, which you can find on their website. The other one I really like is this experiment involving a guy asking a pedestrian for directions, where the guy asking for directions is secretly "switched" with someone else in the middle, and 50% of people don't even notice:

Filed Under: attention, perception, unexpected

Chamber Of Commerce Sues Yes Men; Someone Just Gave Protestors A Lot More Attention

from the a-lot-of-happy-yes-men dept

While we weren't sure that the EFF was correct in suggesting the Yes Men's fake U.S. Chamber of Commerce website was a parody, we did think that it was rather short-sighted of the CoC to try to takedown the site, since it would only serve to give the Yes Men and their anti-CoC campaign more attention. Apparently, the folks at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce still haven't quite figured this out. They've now gone a step further and are suing the Yes Men for trademark infringement. Again, the trademark claim is probably stronger than the original copyright claim, but this is a really dumb move. All the Yes Men want is more attention in their campaign against the CoC's stance on climate change, and you know what gets them a lot of attention? Getting sued. Of course, given how backwards the Chamber's views on intellectual property are, perhaps it's no surprise that they wouldn't realize how such a plan would backfire.

Filed Under: attention, copyright, lawsuit, prank, trademark, yes men
Companies: chamber of commerce, yes men

LeBron James Discovering What Happens When You Try To Suppress Something

from the calling-attention... dept

Every time you think people understand that trying to suppress some kind of information only draws more attention to it, it happens again. The latest, as pointed out by Tim O'Reilly is that basketball star LeBron James had videos confiscated after he was dunked on by a college sophomore -- and because of that it's now being written up on various news sites and blogs. If he'd just let the video go out it may have amused a few people but no one would have thought any less of James, one of the best players ever to play the game. Instead, even more people are finding out about it and makes James look really insecure and controlling. In fact, the Rivals.com points out that because the video can't be seen, people will just assume it makes James look as bad as possible:

The Crawford dunk would have been a temporary embarrassment for LeBron. Let's say the video was put on YouTube. It blows up for a bit, dominates blogs for 36 hours, everyone has a good chuckle and then it's forgotten about.

But by censoring the tape, LeBron turns the dunk into a legend. On video, it's just a dunk. Without video, the jam can reach mythic proportions. Because nobody can see it, the story of the dunk will grow in stature with each telling. Today, it was a simple two-handed slam. In a few days, it will be a 360-degree windmill. By the time Crawford makes his Xavier debut in October, he will have jumped off LeBron's shoulders, flipped in the air, slammed the ball home with his left pinkie and then handed LeBron $3.99 for his dry cleaning.

One day, perhaps, people will learn...

Filed Under: attention, lebron james, streisand effect, suppression

Cheap Trick: More Afraid Of Being Ignored Than Ripped Off

from the indeed dept

Last week on the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert did a gag about the new Cheap Trick album coming out on 8-track. I assumed it was just a joke, but apparently it's real. The band, as a little marketing gimmick is actually releasing the album as an 8-track (for you kids out there, the 8-track was a briefly popular form of cassette music, though it lived on at radio stations for years after it disappeared from public use). But, much more interesting is a quote at the end of the article about plans to offer the digital tracks at a steep discount from the typical iTunes price:

"We're kind of more worried about being ignored than being ripped off."

Indeed. This is just another way of saying that "obscurity is a bigger fear than piracy." And while such things are usually applied to new, up-and-coming artists, it's nice to see that more well known artists recognize the same formula applies to them, as well.

Filed Under: 8-track, attention, cheap trick, obscurity, piracy