I had my first deposition today, and it’s left me mildly
depressed.
No, I didn’t screw up. But it made me think about my own
mortality.
The plaintiff has a fatal disease, that will slowly and painfully kill
him during the course of the next year. Despite this one year
death sentence, he’ll spend at least 10 days of his life stuck in
a conference room in Oakland with attorneys like me interrogating him
about every intimate detail of his life for hours on end. Then,
if he survives to his trial date, he’ll spend another month or so
sitting in a courtroom.
So, how, I’m stuck thinking, if you had only one year left to live, why
the hell would you waste 10% of it dealing with the legal system?
No wonder people hate lawyers.
**
The second part of this post goes completely against the tone of the
first half, but I cannot resist. Hilary Rosen, former head of the
RIAA, has written not-quite a screed against Apple’s iPod where she advocates violating the DMCA:
you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from
another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will
go into the iPod. But then you have also degraded the sound quality.
How cruel.
Something tells me that she’s on Microsoft’s payroll (even though the big MS is pro-DRM too).