Thanks, Mike, for being a wonderful host.

At the end of fall semester 2005, a few of us here at Lewis & Clark surveyed about 350 students in a variety of classes to gather some data about (a) how students use laptops in class and (b) the degree to which they find others’ use of laptops distracting or annoying. I’ll summarize some of what we found later. For now, let me pass along a short piece I wrote a few weeks ago, at the request of the student semesterly humor paper here at L&C known as Letter of the Law. The piece is after the jump.

Surf’s Up? Sadly, Yes.

First things first: If I could flick a switch to turn off internet access in the classroom during class time, I would. But I can’t flick such a switch today, and I have no reason to believe I will be able to do so any time soon. (We simply haven’t configured our campus computer network in this way, though some schools have.)

Don’t get me wrong. I think a laptop is a great tool. If laptops had been a bit cheaper when I was a law student back in the early 1990s, I’m quite sure I would have used one in class. Indeed, when I attend an academic conference, I usually bring a laptop with me and sometimes take notes with it during a panel discussion. More often, however, I use it around the conference hotel to connect to the internet … to use Lewis & Clark’s webmail client, to read the New York Times on line, or to check out a new blog someone has mentioned. As those who’ve taken one my classses know, each class has a supporting web page, and I distribute virtually all class materials through that web page. In short, I’m no technophobe.

So, if I like and depend on the internet so much, why would I turn off internet access during class time if I could? For much the same reason that, as Justice Holmes is often quoted as saying, the right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.

When you use a laptop in class to surf the internet – reading newspapers and blogs, checking out sports scores and playing video clips (even silently) – you go beyond getting yourself a bit of relief from classroom boredom. You impose distractions on others. Taking notes on a white screen, or putting up your own version of a PowerPoint slide that’s up at the front of the room, is not all that distracting … especially where the standard for “distracting” is set by flashing screens showing eBay auctions or intense play at the latest bit of downloadable fun from Yahoo! Games.

I’m responsible for providing a classroom environment where people can learn without gratuitous hindrances. Naturally, when I worry about such hindrances, my mind turns to web surfing. Wouldn’t turning off internet access be overkill? It’s an important question, and I think the answer is “no.” Here’s why: The costs of turning of internet access would be very small, and the benefits would comfortably outweigh them. On the cost side, students would occasionally be unable to engage in helpful class-related activities that the internet would enable (e.g., looking up a statutory section, or the definition of a word, mentioned in class discussion). Students would also feel displeasure at being forced back upon less flashy, and less distracting-to-others, forms of amusement (like pen-and-paper doodling, or crossword puzzles … both of which are, admittedly, so 1993). On the benefit side, the students sitting behind laptop users would be spared the now-ample doses of flashing screens and other distracting visual clutter. They would learn more, and perhaps contribute more to others’ learning too. In a classroom setting, that learning benefit is paramount.

Can’t the students who are distracted simply take care of themselves? It’s an attractive notion, and I think it likely solves some of the major problems that exist today. Students who find others’ web surfing truly distracting can balance that against their seating preferences and, perhaps, sit closer to the front of the room (where they will see fewer screens). This spring, I encouraged students in my patent law class to keep distraction avoidance in mind when they decided where to sit, and to move to a different seat if need be. All the same, web surfers are inflicting more gratuitous costs on others … this time, seating management costs. It’s not as good a fix as an off switch for classroom internet use, but I’ll take what I can get.

The off switch doesn’t exist here. So, the surf’s up, and will stay up. I ask one thing: Please try not to splash you classmates.

In passing, Baude makes the following observation: “[T]he translation of official texts is rife with all sorts of riddles. My dim recollection is that there were proposals in the First Congress to publish the U.S. Code in German as well as English. What a disaster that might have been for the field of statutory interpretation. It’s hard enough to be a textualist when the text is written in a single language accessible to all of the legislators.”

Disaster or not, the need to grapple with one law in many languages must raise fascinating questions. Of course, there are some nations that do so; Canada and Switzerland come to mind. There are also larger confederations, such as the EU, and treaty contexts that express one law in many lanuages. And even by describing the phenomenon as “one law in many languages,” I suppose I’m beginning to stake out a position. (I’m reminded of another of Baude’s recent posts, this one reporting on class discussion of the Seventh Circuit’s statement, speaking through Judge Easterbrook, that “[s]tatutes are law, not evidence of law.”)

Anyway, I thought I would pass along a few leads on the topic, for the curious to pursue at their leisure:
(a) Here’s a description of a conference in Germany, The Language and Law Conference, two weeks from now (with lots of prof names and paper titles).
(b) Here’s the list of podcasts from this past January’s annual AALS conference, including that of a fun panel called “Lost (and Found) in Translation” at which panelists discussed some one law/many languages issues.
(c) Here’s a summary of a day-long conference at Brooklyn Law School entitled “Creating and Interpreting Law in a Multilingual Environment,” which occurred on Sept. 19, 2003. The Brooklyn Law School page about the conference is here. The papers from the conference appear in Volume 29, Issue 3 (2004) of the Brooklyn Journal of International Law, and you can get them as pdfs here.

Dennis Crouch, at Patently-O, has the definitive post summarizing the issues and collecting all the key documents.

UPDATE 1: The patent cases on which the Court now has outstanding CVSGs are (1) FTC v. Schering-Plough Corp., No. 05-273; (2) KSR Int’l v. Teleflex Inc., No. 04-1350; and (3) Microsoft v. AT&T, No. 05-1056.

For today’s New York Times take on the humble Peep, we have this tidbit.

Of course, the best web resource about Peeps, other than the official Peep site, is the Peep Research site.

(Legal theory it ain’t. And this is the stuff that distracts me at semester’s end.)

I stand by my assessment in my earlier exchange with Mike: it’s a blockbuster, come what may.

UPDATE 1: And an interesting piece from Fortune magazine.

UPDATE 2: And this from c|net news.

UPDATE 3: The A.P. story.

UPDATE 4: Coverage of today’s oral argument from Tony Mauro, Lyle Denniston, and c|net news.

He’s recently prevailed against a print magazine in a copyright case in the Netherlands. The case is important, I think, because the magazine published photos that Curry had authored and then posted on Flickr, the photo-sharing-and- social-tagging site. (It’s easy enough to find photos of Curry on Flickr.) By including the photos in its commercially published magazine, the defendant used the photos in a way that went beyond the terms of the Creative Commons license Curry had put on the photos.

Prof. Bernt Hugenholtz, by way of Creative Commons Canada’s weblog, provides a translation of key portions of the Dutch trial court’s decision in Curry’s favor on the Creative Commons question. If you’re interested in efforts such as Creative Commons, it’s a must-read. Pamela Jones blogs the story at Groklaw, and Adam Curry blogs the story at Curry.com.