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“The releases are a response to a new European Union copyright law that will extend copyright protection to 70 years — but only for recordings that were published within 50 years after they were made. So in the case of the Beatles, the group’s 1963 debut album, “Please Please Me,” already benefits from the copyright extension, but the unreleased session tapes — unused versions of the same songs on the album — did not, hence the release. Similarly, the BBC performances released on “Live at the BBC” (1994) and “On Air — Live at the BBC, Vol. 2” (2013) — are protected, but they represent less than half of the 275 performances the Beatles recorded for the BBC between 1962 and 1965. Another 44 of those recordings are included in the set to be released on Tuesday.”

– http://app.nytimes.com/#2013/12/12/arts/european-copyright-laws-lead-to-rare-music-releases

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The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday put in place a major new policy to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens raised for meat, a practice that experts say has endangered human health by fueling the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance.

This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water. The waning effectiveness of antibiotics — wonder drugs of the 20th century — has become a looming threat to public health. At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections.

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– http://app.nytimes.com/#2013/12/12/nytfrontpage/fda-to-phase-out-use-of-some-antibiotics-in-animals-raised-for-meat

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Let me tell you a little story about innovation and creativity. Years ago, I worked on a wiki-based project to find the first instance of ideas/techniques in video games (like the first game to use cameras as weapons, or the first game to have stealth as a play element). It excited me to dig to give credit to those who laid the foundations of ideas that we now take for granted. I couldn’t wait to show the world how creative and innovative these unknown game designers/developers were.

I went into it with much passion and excitement, but unexpectedly, it turned out that there were almost no “firsts”. Every time someone put up a game that was the first to do/contain something, there was another earlier game put up to replace it with a SLIGHTLY less sophisticated, or SLIGHTLY different version of the same thing. The gradient was so smooth and constant that eventually, the element we were focusing on lost meaning. It became an unremarkable point to address at all. We ended up constantly overwriting people’s work with smaller, less passionate articles, containing a bunch of crappy games that only technically were the first to do something in the crudest manner. Sometimes only aesthetically.

After a lot of time sunk into this project, I came to the conclusion that I was mistaken about innovation/creativity. It would have been a better project to track the path of ideas/techniques than to try to find the first instance of an idea/technique. I held innovation so highly for years before that, but after this project, I saw just how small it was. How it was but a tiny extension of the thoughts of millions before it. A tiny mutation of a microscopic speck that laid on top of a mountain. It was a valuable experience that helped me very much creatively.

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– http://simondlr.com/post/49353423006/on-creativity-and-innovation

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The Federal Trade Commission, charged with protecting consumers and guarding against deceptive advertising practices, acknowledges it does not know.

But faced with a growing wave of digital advertising that is intended to look like the news articles and features of the publications where they appear, the commission is warning advertisers that it intends to vigorously enforce its rules against misleading advertising.

The practice of what is now known as native advertising or sponsored content — and has been referred to as advertorial or infomercial — has grown more aggressive on the Internet. That is because companies and brands have the ability to target specific audiences and individuals and to get instant feedback when consumers react to what is being shown.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/business/ftc-says-sponsored-online-ads-can-be-misleading.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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Isn’t it a bad idea to release two movies with similar titles in such short order? Asked that in an interview in August, Gary Barber, MGM’s chief executive, said he was not worried. “MGM has the title locked up,” he said with a smile. “They will have to change theirs.”

But the rival companies are not budging. “If ever there was a title available for general use, it is Hercules,” a spokesman for Lions Gate said on Friday. “It is not protectable.” Dozens of films with Hercules in the title have been released over the years, from “Hercules and the Big Stick” in 1910 to “Hercules,” Disney’s animated musical, in 1997.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/business/media/hercules-and-the-rival-studios.html?ref=todayspaper

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“If it is fortunate, a legal generation has a Tenth Justice. I invoke the phrase not as it is sometimes used, to denominate the solicitor general, but rather as it was used to refer to Learned Hand, the famed appellate judge who never warmed a seat on the Supreme Court. By dint of relentless merit, these individuals earn legal authority akin to that wielded by the Nine. In Richard A. Posner, our generation has its Learned Hand, its Henry Friendly. In complex times, we can take comfort in the simple fact of his existence.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/review/richard-a-posners-reflections-on-judging.html?pagewanted=2&ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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Umpires are already more closely acquainted with pitch-tracking technology than is often assumed. “We currently use technology for both evaluation purposes and training purposes,” says MLB spokesman Mike Teevan. “All umpires receive a computerized breakdown of their plate performances, including calls they got right and calls they missed.”

The Zone Evaluation system, as the league’s PITCHf/x-based balls-and-strikes review heuristic has been dubbed, is one component of a comprehensive umpire assessment program. The league claims an average ZE umpire accuracy rate of 95 percent or higher, although certain pitches on which the umpire — but not PITCHf/x — is blocked by the catcher are excluded from the count. Even so, with an average of 156 called pitches per game (between both teams), a 95 percent success rate suggests that eight incorrect calls still slip through, too many not to notice. The explanation, contrary to what you may have heard from hecklers, isn’t that umpires are incompetent. It’s that their job is impossible for human beings to do perfectly.

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– http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9940495/ben-lindbergh-possibility-machines-replacing-umpires

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CLASSES MY TOP-TIER LAW SCHOOL SHOULD HAVE OFFERED AS WARNINGS ABOUT THE PROFESSION.

BY E. NOAKES

Cutting and Pasting Legal Lingo

Explaining Business Associations to the People Who Are Running Them

4 A.M. Word Processing and the Law

Ethics of Conspicuous Consumption

Forwarding E-mails: Theory and Practice: Seminar

Arbitrary-Deadline Negotiation Strategies

Crying Quietly: Clinic

Jeans-Friday Advocacy Workshop

Cutting and Pasting II: Plural to Singular

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– http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/classes-my-top-tier-law-school-should-have-offered-as-warnings-about-the-profession?fb_action_ids=794091507178&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_ref=.UnrY_bnE3QM.like&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%22794091507178%22%3A10150285213609903%7D&action_type_map=%7B%22794091507178%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%7B%22794091507178%22%3A%22.UnrY_bnE3QM.like%22%7D

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Mr. Mosley argued that French law makes it illegal to take and distribute images of an individual in a private space without that person’s permission. But Google said that would limit freedom of speech, forcing the company to block search results without any person or court overseeing the context in which the images appeared.

Analysts said the ruling against Google could lead to greater restrictions on what was accessible through search results and could prompt more people to demand that the United States technology company remove references to their private activities.

“At this point in time, the pendulum is swinging toward individuals’ privacy and away from freedom of speech,” said Carsten Casper, a privacy and security analyst at the consulting firm Gartner in Berlin.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/business/international/google-is-ordered-to-block-images-in-privacy-case.html?ref=todayspaper

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Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has been variously described as characterized by shallow emotions (in particular reduced fear), stress tolerance, lacking empathy, coldheartedness, lacking guilt, egocentricity, superficial character, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and antisocial behaviors such as parasitic lifestyle and criminality.

So which professions (other than ax murderer) have the most psychopaths? What about the least?

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