June 21, 2010 by Dick.

I am not a lawyer. Nor do I play one on TV. On the other hand, I am uniquely qualified to offer this legal advice because I wrote a rental contract while in college that the landlord’s lawyer could not break. Sam the Landlord learned from that experience (he never signed a contract again that his own lawyer hadn’t written) and I learned how much fun teaching can be.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I are following in the footsteps of 60 Minutes’ Shana Alexander and James Kilpatrick in paired blog articles. After reading this article, please go read Not Much Obliged for the counterpoint argument.]

Over on the other blog, Nancy was spurred by a Safari program called Reader.

Reader is really neat. It strips the page of all the advertisements, sidebars, and inconsequential stuff, and pops up just the text in a translucent overlay. That scares the advertisers who believe they have a contract with the viewers, readers, or users on the site; seeing all the ads is the price they charge us to see the content.

Gekko thinks the contract is not between us readers and the fodder provider. The contract, she says, is only between the content provider and the advertiser.

Contract is an important legal term. A contract is actually “just” an agreement between thee and me to trade something I have for something you have. To be valid, the contract must be (1) enforceable by law and (2) equitable.

Trade? That sounds like business and it is. I might have a book you want. You might have a dollar I want. We can contract to trade my book for your dollar and both walk away happy. Even if our contract is no more than this conversation:

“Hey, you got that book?”

“Yup, Cost you a buck.”

That fulfills the basis for a legal contract.
<pedantic mode> Both of us must old enough and not impaired to buy or sell that book and the contract must be neither trifling, indeterminate, impossible, or illegal.

As long as the good or service we trade is legal, our oral agreement can constitute a binding legal contract. In practical terms, written contracts are more enforceable because they list all the terms we decided on at the time we made the agreement.

Enforceable means that we each promise to do something for the other guy and that the other guy has specific legal remedies if we breach that promise. A “compensatory remedy” means the Sheriff will make me pay what I said I would and maybe more besides. An “equitable remedy” usually means the Sheriff will stand over me to make sure I perform what I agreed to do and reneged on.

Equitable means fair to both parties. A court would accept as equitable the sale of a used copy of Pocket Shakespear for a buck — both parties benefit more-or-less equally. A court ought not accept as equitable the sale of an original signed manuscript of Macbeth for a buck — here the seller takes it in the ear. </pedantic mode>

Back to the Safari Reader.

Reuters reports that “the Internet is [now] by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the United States.”

There are two contracts in play. In the first, the advertiser contracts with the Internet content provider (the fodder we want to read) to place the ads and other links on the content page so the viewer/user will see them. Nancy contends that’s The One. In the second, the viewer/user agrees to view the ads and other links on the page in order to see the fodder we want to read. I maintain that’s The Other One.

In many ways, this is exactly the same model we have used for “free” radio and television broadcasts since 1920 when KDKA went on the air in Pittsburgh.

Nancy believes the second contract does not exist, partly because we the viewer/user never agreed to it.

<pedantic mode> An implicit contract (A.K.A. an “implied-in-fact contract”) is one agreed by our conduct, rather than by the words we say. The U.S. Supreme Court defines it as an agreement “founded upon a meeting of minds, which, although not embodied in an express contract, is inferred, as a fact, from conduct of the parties showing, in the light of the surrounding circumstances, their tacit understanding.” </pedantic mode>

So. Does watching American Idol on Fox or reading the New York Times online mean we agree to watch or read the commercials that support it?

Yes.

TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch). The writers and publishers of the information we absorb so easily offer it in exactly the same way I sold you the book and for exactly the same reason you go to work each day. Paying the writer is at least as important as paying your mechanic to tighten the lug nuts when he changes a tire on your car.

I traded the book for a buck. You trade your hours at desk or workbench for, I hope, more than a buck. You may have no written contract with your employer but your boss offered you the position, salary, and appropriate working conditions in return for your appearance on time and performance of the assigned duties. That’s an implicit contract.

VCRs, DVRs, other recording devices, and now Safari’s Reader allow us to breach that contract with the broadcaster or website. The fact that we can breach the contract does not mean we should breach the contract any more than we should rob the gas station down the street just because the President did.

The contract hinges on enforceability but in this day of a Democratic President and Congress ignoring the law or changing it to fit their whims, I would not be a bit surprised to find the Library police reassigned to ad watch duty.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I have written paired blog articles. After reading this piece, please go read Not Much Obliged for the counterpoint argument.]

I have no advertising on this page, so there is no implicit contract that you, dear reader, will pay for these words. OTOH, donations via the Tip Jar are always welcome.

Posted in Business, Politics & News, Geekery, Random Access | 15 Comments »

June 16, 2008 by Dick.

A friend emailed me this Care 2 Make a Difference presentation. “Gotta love the punchline,” he wrote.

Even if you don’t recognize the voice, the credits show it is Eric Idle singing. Yup, that Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame.

Got me to thinking, that did.

Actually pretty much anything will get me to thinking. A pair of white sox. Cornflakes. A boat wake which is not to be confused with a wake for a boat.

I got to thinking about the media my grandfather grew up with, the media my father grew up with, the media my son grew up with, and the media we are growing now.

My grandfather was born before Mr. Marconi plumbed the airwaves. He heard Edward R. Murrow broadcast the news during World War II and watched Mr. Murrow take down Senator Joseph McCarthy on television. He watched Walter Cronkite tell of men walking on the Moon. He saw the Tiananmen Square Massacre on television and he read my email about it. (As an aside, my great-grandfather was brought to us by a Pony Express rider because the Stork was busy. He lived to see jet aircraft but communications, for him were still by radio, telephone, and mail.)

Making the change from letters and newspapers to radio was life changing in the way the printing press changed lives. Making the change from the instant transmission of radio or television to the instant transmission of email is simply humdrum. I love technology, but email is just a new technology for the same old letters.

See, email is cool, but it’s not revolutionary. After all, email is just a badly spelled letter that gets there really really fast. Think Ben Franklin meets The Flash. Likewise, HDTV is a really neat media but it’s not revolutionary. After all, it’s just movin’ pitchers attached to your radio set.

But the YouTube digital movies and the Flash-based presentations like Mr. Idle’s, that’s a revolution. Thanks to advertising, we are overwhelmed by imagery in color and sound and motion. Like any predator, we need more and more and more color and sound and motion to retain our attention. Movies have color and sound and motion innit.

Oddly, the revolution isn’t the technology this time. The revolution is what we do with the technology that lets us make our own color and sound and motion and deliver it in almost real time to our viewers.

Darn it, now I need to relearn Flash. I’ll try to resist using it on this blog, though.

Posted in Society, Media, Geekery, Random Access | No Comments »

March 10, 2008 by Dick.

No. Bad for Us.

Are common baby lotions bad for babies?

A small study conducted by the University of Washington and the Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute showed that exposure to phthalates caused reproductive problems in mice.

Lotions made for babies (and grownups) include phthalates to add the fragrance or color that separates a Johnson and Johnson shampoo from a Proctor & Gamble product.

I looked on the back of a baby shampoo bottle and found cocamidopropyl betaine, sorbitan laurate, sodium trideceth sulfate, and even the dreaded polyquaternium. Say, what? The latter would be a quater that marries several iums.

“If it’s difficult to say and it’s not commonly known, it’s probably something we should wonder about,” Dr. Lori Racha of University Pediatrics told the local Channel 3 News.

Dr. Racha says it is too early to know if those products actually harm human babies but she wants us to switch anyway. “If it smells really sweet, it’s probably not something we should be using on our babies,” she said on the news.

Hello?

This is a medical doctor–a pediatrician–who wants us to make a crucial decision based on what she doesn’t know.

I can apply that technique in all facets of my life, can’t I?

The National Institutes of Health’s DailyMed reports that nadolol is a “nonselective beta-adrenergic receptor blocking agent.” It is chemically identified as “1-(tert-butylamino)-3-[(5,6,7,8-tetrahydro-cis-6,7-dihydroxy-1-naphthyl)oxy]-2-propanol.” It even contains microcrystalline cellulose.

Anybody here have any idea what all of that means? Any at all?

Yeah, yeah, I know somebody can answer yes, but Corgard® or nadolol, its generic equivalent, has been prescribed to thousands of people who have absolutely no clue about its chemical makeup, let alone any of the scientific names it has. In those patients it successfully treats their high blood pressure or prevents the chest pain called angina. A beta blocker, nadolol slows the heart rate and relaxes the blood vessels so the heart does not work as hard as it might.

I wonder. Should people with hypertension not take nadolol or its pharmacological stable mates because they cannot pronounce the ingredients?

consumersearch.com reports that experts choose the Graco SnugRide as the best infant car seat. One of the reasons is what Graco calls its “EPS Energy Absorbing Foam Liner.” EPS is the abbreviation for Expanded Polystyrene. Polystyrene is made from an aromatic monomer styrene.

Maybe that’s scary, too. Dr. Racha thinks that chemicals that smell good are bad for our babies. We’d better ban the Graco SnugRide. But, wait. Aroma therapy is all the rage. It’s supposed to be good for us. Or maybe that’s not what the aroma in aromatic means. Who knows?

What is going on here? Does Dr. Racha honestly believe that just because she thinks something might sound bad for us it really really is? When a second grader imagines that a dog ate his homework, he honestly believes that is true. One of the tests of growing up is that we stop blaming the dog.

The problem here is not whether babies should be exposed to phthalates or polystyrene.

The problem here is whether we should be exposed to fear mongering backed up by imaginary science.

Posted in Science (real), Science (not-so-real), PC, Geekery, Dick's Dumps, Random Access | 1 Comment »