Legal extortion by lawyers?

by srqpix

The RIAA? Amateurs. Here’s how you sue 14,000+ P2P users
[Via Ars Technica]

The big music labels and movie studios have stepped back from the lawsuit business. The MPAA’s abortive campaign against individual file-swappers ended years ago, while the RIAA’s more widely publicized (and criticized) years-long campaign against P2P swappers ended over a year ago.

So why have P2P lawsuits against individuals spiked dramatically in 2010? It’s all thanks to the US Copyright Group, a set of lawyers who have turned P2P prosecution into revenue generation in order to “SAVE CINEMA.” The model couldn’t be simpler: find an indie filmmaker; convince the production company to let you sue individual “John Does” for no charge; send out subpoenas to reveal each Doe’s identity; demand that each person pay $1,500 to $2,500 to make the lawsuit go away; set up a website to accept checks and credit cards; split the revenue with the filmmaker.

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Threaten to sue 10,000 people or so. Even file the paperwork, because in this country you do not have to file suit individually, you can add thousands to a single suit. Threaten to sue for over $100,000 but say you will take $2000. Make it easy for them to pay to make you go away.

Previous stats indicate that 90% or so will settle, since they could easily spend over $2000 if it goes to trial. That gives them a cool $18 million just for sending some threatening letters out.

Now they may never expect the cases to go to trial. There is no way it would be economic for them to prepare for 5000 defendants. In fact, if a few of the defendants banded together and got a good lawyer, they might easily stop this madness.

Maybe not. while this may be legal, it is really just a shakedown. Even if someone is innocent, it may be cheaper to settle. Of course, by playing hardball, you could be more trouble than you are worth and they could drop you. After all, every letter they need to send to you, every time the really have to appear in court, every time they have to act as real lawyers, is costing them real money.

Big disasters will always happen unless we expect them to

NASA last flight of Atlantis

Can We Do Better at Managing Rare, Big Risks?
[Via Dot Earth]

Can humans overcome traits that lead to well blowouts and other foreseen disasters?

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No matter how great the process is, humans will act to increase the failure rates unless there are strong incentives not to.

It seems to be a basic part of human nature to slowly become more and more lax when it comes to processes that have very low probability of producing a disaster, even when the disaster can be of horrific extent. When nothing bad happens, people ask why they have to follow procedure. Since the process has acted to prevent a disaster and because the disaster has a low probability of happening at any one time, the answer is usually unsatisfactory, especially when the question is being asked by someone who wants to cut costs or has other pressures to bear.

Basically people just do not understand probability. They do not understand how their behavior can take a process with a very small probability of failure and substantially increase the chances that something catastrophic can happen.

Good biologists almost intrinsically know about how probabilities can be altered. They know all about the effect time and large numbers can have on low probability processes. And not only with evolution.

Almost every biological process is based on stochastic processes, that is, random ones. Some important biological events are based on incredibly small probabilities but when that event happens a whole cascade of actions occur. With enough cells and enough time, even extremely low probability events can happen, even one in a million. Sometimes the cascade is beneficial, allowing us to fight off infectious disease. Sometimes, the cascade is harmful, creating cancer.

We can do things to reduce the likelihood of harmful biological events, often by essentially reducing the probability of the cascade getting started. But if people make decisions that alter the odds, then it becomes even more likely that a low probability event will happen. Thus smoking so substantially increases the odds of lung cancer that it actually becomes the single major cause.

Let’s take a look at some numbers using well known mathematics, in order to understand why some of this happens.

Take solid fuel boosters. According to Wikipedia, these have a 1% failure rate. While a 99% success rate sounds great, doing it enough times produces a very different result. Simple math shows that the chances of having 50 successful launches is 0.99 X 0.99 X 0.99 … for fifty times (0.99 ⁵⁰). Using a calculator, we find an overall success rate of 61% – a failure rate of 1- 0.61 or 39%. It is even money that there would be one failure after 70 launches. One hundred launches would reduce the chance of all the launches being successful to 37%. The chances of having about 230 successful launches without a failure would be less than 10%.

The more times you do an event, the greater the chance that at least one event will result in failure.

The Challenger tragedy happened on the 25th mission of the shuttle. There are two solid rocket boosters on each mission. The chances that a catastrophic failure of the solid rocket boosters would occur in the first 25 missions of the Space Shuttle (50 solid rocket boosters) is thus 39%. Unfortunately, that particular shuttle mission did not beat the odds. But the chances were that some mission was going to fail catastrophically, even with a 1% failure rate.

Yes, the chance for any one particular launch failing might be 1% but the chance of all the missions succeeding drops quite rapidly. The goal is not necessarily making sure a specific mission is a success but all the launches. If the loss of even one launch could be catastrophic, either in personnel or material, then the best thing to do is really work at reducing the failure rate below 1%. Make it 0.1% and it would take about 2400 launches before the the chance of at least one failure occurring reached 90%.

A success rate of 99.99% would mean that is would take almost 24,000 launches before the chance of one failure was greater than 90%.

So, even with a 1% failure rate, the chances are almost certain that if you do enough missions, there will be a failure. And, while reducing the failure rate can have huge effects, given enough time and scale of the enterprise, disasters will still occur.

Let’s do some more math. I’m making up some of these numbers just to give you an idea of how large numbers and time can change the odds. Let’s say that there are 6000 offshore wells around the world and that the chance one of them will have a catastrophic blowout, as we see in the Gulf, in any one year is 0.000001 – a failure rate of one in a million. So the chance of any failures worldwide in any year works out to 0.6%, not quite as thrilling as one in a million but pretty low. I mean we ran the entire Space Shuttle program for almost 30 years with worse odds than that.

But that is only over 1 year. Doing the math, there is only about a 50% chance of complete success over a 100 year period. That means that even with the odds being one in a million of a catastrophic failure occurring on any one offshore rig in one year, over time and given enough rigs, it is almost certain that there would be a catastrophic failure.

And that is for a one in a million chance. I don’t know what the odds really are but I have the feeling that the processes used on the Deepwater platform were not designed to produce the highest success rates.

In my experience, when a process is developed with a certain failure rate, human beings, unless strictly supervised, will act to cut corners or alter the process, in a way that increases that failure rate. As time goes on, they wonder why they have to keep spending so much time on things that may not appear to be really useful. They take shortcuts that create suboptimal circumstances. People not directly involved want to know why things can not be sped up.

With the Shuttle, the failure rate may have been 1% but some of the decisions made before the Challenger launch most likely increased that percentage. That is, if there is a 1% failure rate under optimal conditions what is does the failure rate become under suboptimal conditions? Well, obviously more than 1%.

From the data we have been seeing on the well in the Gulf, there seem to have been ample evidence that it was not a normal well and normal odds would not have applied. Thus, they should have taken even more precautions to prevent the catastrophe that, mathematically, will eventually happen.

But human nature being what human nature is, they did the exact opposite. They cut corners and tried to get an expensive well under control while doing even less than the minimal tests of safety.

So, in order to reduce catastrophic disasters we need to not only develop processes that greatly reduce the intrinsic failure rate. We need to include all sorts of human-based pressures to prevent people from increasing the rate of failure.

This is not an area to decrease regulation. At least if we want to prevent catastrophe.

How prosecuting Gitmo internees could boomerang against us

More Problems with Khadr Prosecution
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

Of all the various cases that may see military tribunals for detainees, the case of Omar Khadr may be the most difficult, both practically and morally. Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was only 15 years old when he was arrested for allegedly throwing a grenade at American troops, killing one and injuring several others. And it is clear now that he his interrogations included a good deal of abuse and coercion, if not outright torture.

Spencer Ackerman and Daphne Eviatar have already been at the Khadr tribunal and reported some of the many problems there as the military courts try to figure out a new set of rules that wasn’t even completed until the trial began. But now Scott Horton points out more problems in that set of rules that could scuttle the whole thing.

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This post discusses something I had not heard before – the drones that have attacked and killed people in Pakistan, and other places, are not operated by military personnel but by civilian contractors. But the military law we are using to prosecute some of those being held in Gitmo –such as Khadr, who at 15 in 2002 threw a grenade that killed an American soldier – could just as easily be applied to these civilian contractors.

Khadr was not authorized under the laws of war to use lethal force. But then, it appears that the same definition may also applies to civilian contractors.

From the Harper’s article:

I recently discussed Koh’s attempt to justify the use of drones for targeted killings. I noted that Koh had failed to address an obvious legal issue—that the drones were being operated by civilian contractors, not uniformed military personnel who are privileged to used lethal force under the law of war. The drone warfare raises the same issue that the Khadr prosecution does: if the operators of these systems are not privileged to use lethal force, are they committing a crime under the law of war when they do so? The language adopted in the manual for military commissions argues that they are, but the position taken by the State Department to justify the use of drones assumes the opposite. These positions are difficult to reconcile.

There are all sorts of laws regarding war, who is allowed to fight and who is not. It gets awfully sketchy when we try a teenager who threw a grenade because he was not a lawful combatant but we allow our own civilians to do similar things, just with higher levels of technology. I’m sure there are all sorts of ways to try to make this seem like completely different things – Lawyers love semantics. – but it does not really pass the smell test.

It is a peculiar sort of law that can result in severe penalties when done against us (Khadr has been locked up for 8 years – but is perfectly OK when we do it to others. It actually seems to be a sort of un-American style of law. It is interesting that it is the Canadian press that is discussing this.

It may well be that if we prosecute Khadr, the same law could be used against our own civilians who carry out military missions. Of course, it begs the question – why are civilians responsible for our military actions? Why do we continue to allow that?

One small way rapid DNA sequencing is revolutionizing our view of life

by YoTuT

Holy hybrids Batman! Caribbean fruit bat is a mash-up of three species
[Via Discover Magazine]

Most mammals can trace their origins to a single ancestral species. But in the Caribbean islands of the Lesser Antilles, there is a fruit bat with a far more complex family tree. Artibeus schwartzi’s genome is a hybrid mish-mash of DNA inherited from no less than three separate ancestors. One of these is probably extinct and the other two of which still live on the same island chain. It’s a fusion bat, a sort of fuzzy, winged spork.

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Sequencing of DNA and other technologies have become so cheap that we can now look at the genome information of large numbers of non-human animals. In this case, they looked at almost 240 different bats from 7 different species.

One in particular appears to be a hybridization of 2 different species. But, and here is where it gets interesting, this hybridization resulted in a bat with several characteristics that are quite different from either parent species.

The data indicate that this hybridization took place relatively recently, on geologic scale. The end of the Ice Age brought sea level rises that resulted in the isolation of different bat species on different islands. That is why islands make such great locations for evolution in action, because this isolation is a distinct event and one that is relatively recent.

This isolation disrupted the gene flow between the two parent species, permitting the hybrid of their union to develop into its own species – one that is the dominant bat on its island.

While a hybridization hypothesis had been postulated from this species, only having access to cheap sequencing technology allowed the hypothesis to be confirmed.

I expect to see more of this – evolutionary hypotheses being confirmed by hard genomic data.