Filed under The Man by adam | May 19, 2005 | 3 comments
I keep intending to write my omnibus Verizon gripe entry, but small Verizon gripes keep getting in the way.
The latest: I’ve had crippled DSL service for over a week now. At best, I’m getting 80 KBps down and half of that up, while I’m supposed to be getting 300-400 KBps down and 80-90 KBps up (still nothing to write home about). When I called over a week ago, they said they were in the process of fixing it and usually these outages were just several hours but this one might be a day or two.
The problem is actually at Verizon’s “trunk.” When I do a speed test on the Verizon site, it’s fine—in other words, my Internet connection to Verizon is full speed. Somewhere after the packets reach Verizon’s routing area it slows to a crawl. It would seem like this would be much easier to fix than a problem closer to the edge, but so far no luck.
The Verizon support person I just spoke with said they only just became aware of it because of the phone calls coming in. They had one team working on it, but now that they realize it’s a “big” problem, they have three teams working on it.
Do they really rely on subscribers to call in to find out their network is down? Don’t they monitor this kind of thing? Why is Verizon not able to deal?
Okay, gripe out.
Filed under The Law by adam | May 19, 2005 | 0 comments
Noted IP practitioner and scholar William Patry started a blog. One thing I love about the blog so far is that he doesn’t write with the careful restraint of many active practitioners. He’s quite willing to talk about how badly courts bungled the law—which I suppose is justified, since he drafted some of the legislation at issue when he was the copyright counsel to the House of Representatives.
My favorite recent bit is from this commentary on the Bootleg Statute, which many—including some courts—have criticized as being unconstitutional under the Copyright Clause:
In 1994, I had been practicing copyright law for 13 years. I was well aware of the limited Times restriction. Everyone involved was aware of it. Do critics think that in making the bootleg right perpetual we meant to legislate under the Copyright Clause but just had a memory lapse, or that we said, “Hell, let’s draft an unconsitutional provision; why not, its bound to be fun?” The answer is, no, we didn’t draft a copyright or copyright-like provision at all. We drafted a sui generis right under the Commerce Clause. (For those who are wondering, Congress is not in the habit of saying in a statute, “hey this is the power we are legislating under.” See also Woods v. Taylor, 333 U.S. 138 (1948)).
