Harvard Student: We motion for a continuance so we can file an appeal to this decision.
What will happen is probably more like:
Judge: Motion denied, and here is an 11(c)(1)(B) motion for you to show cause why I shouldn't smack your ass around for causing unnecessary delay.
Yes, I know you were making a joke, but I'm taking Civil Procedure, and we just covered sanctions.
Completely OT: the Supreme Court declared the tomato a vegetable in Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893), in response to a dispute over the Tariff Act of 1883, which taxed vegetables but not fruits.
You have a valid point. The psychological effects of incorporating both sound and video into a single presentation are different from those using either separately. The movies I mentioned were designed to use both senses.
I have no quarrel with the position that special effects spectaculars are entertaining. I prefer, however, more subtle entertainment than just big explosions. DNA created just that sort of subtlety and complexity in his work, and I have no doubt that a thoughtful scriptwriter could make his humor play on the big screen. I believe that it is possible to translate from one medium to the other with sufficient forethought and analysis of the critical elements. I don't claim that it is easy, only that it can be done with careful thought. Granted, the focus of attention is different between reading a book and watching a movie. I believe nonetheless that H2G2 could be made into a stunning movie. The article writer seemed to think that quite a lower level of achievement was reached, and given Hollywood's performance over the past several years, I am inclined to believe the author. Only time will tell if he is right.
You are, of course, correct. There are some things which cannot be easily converted into audiovisual form. Hollywood has made quite a living out of trying, using special effects. They can go ahead and try if they want. I'm happy so long as they don't spend all the money on SFX, instead of on, say, the script. It sounds like the H2G2 director spent his money in the wrong place. If scriptwriters got multi-million dollar budgets like SFX departments do, we'd have quality movies all the time.
Maybe people would rather see a mind-numbingly slow paced film than gratuitous and vacuous eye candy? Maybe people aren't as shallow and drool-ridden as some Hollywood directors seem to think? Maybe good movies can be made with million-dollar special effects augmenting dialogue and character development instead of replacing it entirely? Watch "Casablanca" again. Then watch "On the Waterfront". Then watch "Citizen Kane". Then watch "Seven Samurai". Keep watching them until you reach enlightenment. For a recent example which didn't completely fail, watch the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, although it too felt, a little too strongly for my taste, the temptation of big budget special effects at the expense of story.
[OT philisophical waxing] Perhaps this very issue is what drives many to watch so much anime. One of the features which drives some Americans away from Japanese 'cartoons' is that they don't have great animation. In fact, the animation is quite minimal. While this may have been done from budgetary necessity early on, some recent successful anime have been just as minimalist. Lack of sophistication in animation technique forces the viewer to concentrate on other aspects of the show, like plot and character. Ask anyone who's into Cowboy Bebop or GITS why they like it. Heck, even.hack//SIGN had a half-decent story with believable characters. If these elements don't stand, you end up with a crappy product. Alas, even the Japanese anime industry sometimes sacrifices plot for explosions. For an example, see Dragonball Z. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I like spacing out and watching mutated muscle-men blow each other up. I just want to have alternatives. [wax off]
Who knows, maybe this Hitchhiker movie will be a success. But I've resigned myself to expect very little from it.
Timeline of capital punishment in the UK. Includes cattle stealing and arson. Britain had public hangings until 1868. Coining wasn't classified a non-capital crime until the 1830s.
I've said this before. It's apples and oranges. His crime wasn't violent, but it was incredibly expensive. Don't compare spam to violent crimes like rape and murder, compare it to corporate crime. How much lost productivity did he cause by making all those millions of people go thru their email for hours and hours? And do you really think he can afford to pay that much money? That might make you feel a bit better about the jail time.
Disclaimer: IANAL, and this is not legal advice. I'm not even going to cite authority correctly, so nyah.
In order to understand 17 USC 107, you have to read the interpretations given by the Supreme Court in the Sony-Betamax case. Basically, it comes down to interpreting 107 in light of the four factors laid out by Congress:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
(Thanks for the link, btw.) Sony won because the Court found that: (1) time-shifting was a noncommercial use, (2) broadcast TV programs could already be seen free of charge, (3) copying the entire program didn't matter (see (2) above), and (4) incentive arguments don't apply to timeshifting because they were giving it away for free already. Sony-Betamax pp. 448-50. This part of the analysis is directly analogous to the use of P2P software for legitimate, noncommercial, nonprofit purposes (distributing Linux ISOs, etc).
In the dissent, Justice Blackmun points out that Congress did not make an explicit exemption for private use, when they easily could have. p 474. He claims that the majority ignored "the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work." p 484. He claims that VCRs take control away from the copyright holder, so time-shifting can't be fair use. p 486.
VCRs, recording broadcast TV, have the primary purpose of time-shifting. p 423. The 5-4 majority found that time-shifting was fair use, so VCRs are OK. The problem is that the Court didn't consider tape-to-tape copies, or technology whose primary use is copyright infringement. The Grokster decision said that the primary use of the software was infringement. The question for the Supreme Court to resolve is whether software which is dual-use (legitimate and illegitimate) should be legal. The answer will probably involve some fancy line-drawing, creating factors for consideration from policy arguments including: the ratio of legit to illegit use; providing incentives to innovate; protecting the rights of the copyright holders; the rights of people to freely communicate using the Internet; the potential or actual economic harm to copyright owners; the harm to other businesses which rely on P2P software to distribute their wares; and to what extent the Court itself shoud be deciding these issues, in the absence of Congressional action. In other words, it's a big, fuzzy hairball.
The point about Congress shouldn't be overlooked. Answering questions like "how many people bought a CD only after downloading a song" and "how much money is the recording industry really losing over this" are best answered by experts hired by a third party (Congress), not by courts who have limited fact-finding resources, and who can't take such independent action on their own. Courts have to respond to what the lawyers put in front of them, and nothing else. And it's much cheaper for the RIAA to go to Washington and have taxpayer money spent on such studies than for them to fund it themselves. Consider writing your Senators and Representative and asking them to audit the RIAA's books.
NASA and the Royal British Library's Division of Special Operations have teamed up on this one. Here is a pic of two Spec Ops agents tracking down a would-be terrorist on the new airplane.
It is faster to develop an application in VB than any other Language
Microsoft has built in a number of wizards to make building complete application templates with a few clicks.
Technically speaking, that just means that Microsoft's IDE is better, not the language. With enough effort, someone could write an Eclipse plug-in that would give you drag-and-drop Java browsers. It's got nothing at all to do with language superiority.
If you mean that VB's IDE is better, that's a separate debatable point unto itself.
Both sides lose in situations like this. I hope that, in the future, they can be avoided. I know of one possible solution: Microsoft explicitly tells its programmers not to even look at GPL software, to avoid this exact scenario. Perhaps such an approach in this case might have led to a better situation. Of course, as you say, I don't have enough information.
I am not a lawyer yet, but if all goes well I will be in Summer 2007. My background is software development, so please forgive any bias I have. I am slowly, but surely, learning to see all sides of an issue.
Assuming arguendo that he was hired for his open source skills, either his employer expected him to use his skills or they didn't. If they didn't, then they entered the employment contract in bad faith. If they did, then they bargained for him to use those skills in his work. In that case, they implied consent for him to use his open source tools and skills.
Daimaou's employer has put him in a very difficult situation as well. His expertise seems to be in open source tools and development. But the company's argument seems to be that he can't use that expertise, because of license conflicts. If he is not allowed to use the skills for which he was hired, it seems likely that he is unable to perform his contractual duties.
I am interested to hear how you respond to my argument (hypothetically speaking, of course).
Re:Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press
on
Is Blogging Journalism?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not everyone's speech is protected by the First Amendment at all times. The classic counter-example is that you can't yell "Fire" in a movie theater. Some speech is routinely regulated. For instance, parties, witnesses, and lawyers to a pending lawsuit aren't allowed to comment about it, lest they violate the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.
Journalists are given a wide latitude to speak, because they help keep our governmental processes open to public inspection, which is one of the policies behind having the First Amendment at all. Sometime when you have fifteen minutes to kill, read Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539 (1976). For a contrasting viewpoint severely limiting freedom of speech, read Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, 501 U.S. 1030 (1991), which specifically references Nebraska Press and says why it shouldn't apply to lawyers (skip to Rehnquist's opinion, part II).
Except you have to worry about not qualifying for the patent bar. Notice that little asterisk next to the CS major in the latest bulletin? If your school isn't listed, you have to qualify under Category B. Good luck if your school wasn't strong on lab classes in things other than CS.
Juries sometimes make mistakes, and misapply the law to the facts. Juries also sometimes act deliberately against their duty, and find some facts to be true which can't possibly be true, or ignore crucial facts, just because they want to convict (or free) a person. See this definition of JNOV.
Before anyone gets too worried, JNOV is clear grounds for appeal.
As someone who is currently in law school, I feel I am in an appropriately authoritative position to comment.
Ask many lawyers what their favorite moment in court would be, and they will respond "the chance to make new law." That doesn't make sense, does it? Only legislatures make law. But the laws need to be interpreted by you and me, and by everyone else. It's the lawyers and judges that interpret, and people pay good lawyers so much money because they can convince the judge that their interpretation is better than the other lawyer's. Once that's done, their interpretation becomes "the law" that everyone else has to live with.
Two rational people often differ with respect to what any given phrase means, and laws are no exception. The key question is, what is the background against which the laws are read? What political, social, economic, and moral criteria do we use to interpret the laws? Those criteria are what really drive "the law" forward. In this administration, those criteria are fear, paranoia, and distrust. Hence, we have laws that fear and distrust citizens, and citizens that fear and distrust the law.
Terrorism succeeds when it instills fear in our hearts. The only way to beat it then, logically, is to not fear it. As Franklin Roosevelt so eloquently said: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Until we remember that, and stop our unreasonable fear of fear, invisible laws will continue to be passed and enforced. It's up to you.
You are, of course, correct. I avoided such details in the interests of simplicity. The pocket veto can still overcome a close 2/3 majority, if there is enough turnover in an election year. It can also buy time for the Presedent to negotiate with Senators and Reps who are running close races in the election (we won't run a legit candidate against you if you vote NAY). All sorts of crazy things happen.
I would have paid money to see them in high resolution and with better sound, but these executives just don't seem to get it.
Actually, they do get it. Their advertisers will pay them more to stretch out the showings over several weeks, than you will to have them show all the eps back-to-back.
The House of Representatives doesn't enact laws. This has to pass committees in the House and Senate, full votes in the House and Senate, and then the President has to sign it before it's an enacted law. Before all that happens, it's just a bill. (More information here.)
Basically, after the bill is signed into law, it becomes a public law and is printed as a "slip law" which can be cited in court. After every 2-year session of Congress, the slip laws are compiled in chronological order in the Statutes at Large. Every three sessions (six years), the at-large statutes are organized topically in the United States Code. The last US Code came out in 2000, so the next one is scheduled for 2006.
We just started the 109th session in January (2005 - 1789 = 216 years = 108 sessions prior to this one). That means that if you want to get print copies of laws passed in the 107th and 108th sessions (since 2000), you have to go to the Statutes at Large in your local law library. If you want laws passed by this Congress, you have to go to the slip laws. So far this session, there's only been one: Pub. L. 109-1, "To accelerate the income tax benefits for charitable cash
contributions for the relief of victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami."
We'd like to believe that lawyers in this country only take cases that their ethics dictate, because we hold lawyers to such a high standard of trust. Unfortunately, it's simply not true. If lawyers refused cases because of ethics, people like Charles Manson and Larry Flynt wouldn't have legal representation. If we really believe that everyone deserves a lawyer, no matter how distasteful or evil they might be, then we'll have to admit that lawyers take cases without consulting their personal ethics. Either that, or we would have to start assigning agendas to lawyers that would undermine our entire justice system.
Personally, I think that these aggrieved relatives are a hell of a lot more sympathetic than Charles Manson. They're not as holy as the Pope, but they don't have to be. Either way, it's not the lawyer's job to care. They take their client as they come, and do their best to zealously advocate their client's position. You cannot ask for less, because less would mean a half-assed prosecution or defense, and that is unjust and oppressive on its face.
If you still think I'm full of crap, take a day off from work and go down to your county courthouse when there's a criminal trial going. Judge for yourself if the defense lawyer believes his or her argument. I'll bet you can't tell. Then ask one who isn't working on a case, what percentage of the clients they got acquitted actually committed the crime.
Which is more likely: all of these lawyers are unethical, or they're all just doing their job as best they can?
Screw retail price, demand lawyer's fees and incidental damages (time spent on the phone with Blizzard / lawyers / etc, at whatever your hourly rate comes out to be). Or, if you've got a lot of time on your hands, start a class-action.
According to the lawyer's logic, four companies participated in training Devin to kill. Your next statement is that you aren't receptive to training, and that this kid is. So why does that mean those companies couldn't somehow train him, given the fact that he was already receptive? In fact, it might be in the lawyer's best interest to prove that Devin was susceptible to training of this sort, due to some sort of instability. As long as it's not enough serious enough for the companies to make it a defense (think 'troubled' rather than 'insane'), it's a good strategy.
Actually, the lawyer was hired by two of the relatives. I think what you are really saying is that the relatives have no ethics (or sense of responsibility). The lawyer is just a contractor here, nothing more. Let's not go bashing people just because it's fun or easy.
Slashdot Mirror
What will happen is probably more like:
Judge: Motion denied, and here is an 11(c)(1)(B) motion for you to show cause why I shouldn't smack your ass around for causing unnecessary delay.
Yes, I know you were making a joke, but I'm taking Civil Procedure, and we just covered sanctions.
Completely OT: the Supreme Court declared the tomato a vegetable in Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893), in response to a dispute over the Tariff Act of 1883, which taxed vegetables but not fruits.
I have no quarrel with the position that special effects spectaculars are entertaining. I prefer, however, more subtle entertainment than just big explosions. DNA created just that sort of subtlety and complexity in his work, and I have no doubt that a thoughtful scriptwriter could make his humor play on the big screen. I believe that it is possible to translate from one medium to the other with sufficient forethought and analysis of the critical elements. I don't claim that it is easy, only that it can be done with careful thought. Granted, the focus of attention is different between reading a book and watching a movie. I believe nonetheless that H2G2 could be made into a stunning movie. The article writer seemed to think that quite a lower level of achievement was reached, and given Hollywood's performance over the past several years, I am inclined to believe the author. Only time will tell if he is right.
You are, of course, correct. There are some things which cannot be easily converted into audiovisual form. Hollywood has made quite a living out of trying, using special effects. They can go ahead and try if they want. I'm happy so long as they don't spend all the money on SFX, instead of on, say, the script. It sounds like the H2G2 director spent his money in the wrong place. If scriptwriters got multi-million dollar budgets like SFX departments do, we'd have quality movies all the time.
[OT philisophical waxing] Perhaps this very issue is what drives many to watch so much anime. One of the features which drives some Americans away from Japanese 'cartoons' is that they don't have great animation. In fact, the animation is quite minimal. While this may have been done from budgetary necessity early on, some recent successful anime have been just as minimalist. Lack of sophistication in animation technique forces the viewer to concentrate on other aspects of the show, like plot and character. Ask anyone who's into Cowboy Bebop or GITS why they like it. Heck, even .hack//SIGN had a half-decent story with believable characters. If these elements don't stand, you end up with a crappy product. Alas, even the Japanese anime industry sometimes sacrifices plot for explosions. For an example, see Dragonball Z. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I like spacing out and watching mutated muscle-men blow each other up. I just want to have alternatives. [wax off]
Who knows, maybe this Hitchhiker movie will be a success. But I've resigned myself to expect very little from it.
Timeline of capital punishment in the UK. Includes cattle stealing and arson. Britain had public hangings until 1868. Coining wasn't classified a non-capital crime until the 1830s.
I've said this before. It's apples and oranges. His crime wasn't violent, but it was incredibly expensive. Don't compare spam to violent crimes like rape and murder, compare it to corporate crime. How much lost productivity did he cause by making all those millions of people go thru their email for hours and hours? And do you really think he can afford to pay that much money? That might make you feel a bit better about the jail time.
In order to understand 17 USC 107, you have to read the interpretations given by the Supreme Court in the Sony-Betamax case. Basically, it comes down to interpreting 107 in light of the four factors laid out by Congress:
(Thanks for the link, btw.) Sony won because the Court found that: (1) time-shifting was a noncommercial use, (2) broadcast TV programs could already be seen free of charge, (3) copying the entire program didn't matter (see (2) above), and (4) incentive arguments don't apply to timeshifting because they were giving it away for free already. Sony-Betamax pp. 448-50. This part of the analysis is directly analogous to the use of P2P software for legitimate, noncommercial, nonprofit purposes (distributing Linux ISOs, etc).In the dissent, Justice Blackmun points out that Congress did not make an explicit exemption for private use, when they easily could have. p 474. He claims that the majority ignored "the potential market for or the value of the copyrighted work." p 484. He claims that VCRs take control away from the copyright holder, so time-shifting can't be fair use. p 486.
VCRs, recording broadcast TV, have the primary purpose of time-shifting. p 423. The 5-4 majority found that time-shifting was fair use, so VCRs are OK. The problem is that the Court didn't consider tape-to-tape copies, or technology whose primary use is copyright infringement. The Grokster decision said that the primary use of the software was infringement. The question for the Supreme Court to resolve is whether software which is dual-use (legitimate and illegitimate) should be legal. The answer will probably involve some fancy line-drawing, creating factors for consideration from policy arguments including: the ratio of legit to illegit use; providing incentives to innovate; protecting the rights of the copyright holders; the rights of people to freely communicate using the Internet; the potential or actual economic harm to copyright owners; the harm to other businesses which rely on P2P software to distribute their wares; and to what extent the Court itself shoud be deciding these issues, in the absence of Congressional action. In other words, it's a big, fuzzy hairball.
The point about Congress shouldn't be overlooked. Answering questions like "how many people bought a CD only after downloading a song" and "how much money is the recording industry really losing over this" are best answered by experts hired by a third party (Congress), not by courts who have limited fact-finding resources, and who can't take such independent action on their own. Courts have to respond to what the lawyers put in front of them, and nothing else. And it's much cheaper for the RIAA to go to Washington and have taxpayer money spent on such studies than for them to fund it themselves. Consider writing your Senators and Representative and asking them to audit the RIAA's books.
NASA and the Royal British Library's Division of Special Operations have teamed up on this one. Here is a pic of two Spec Ops agents tracking down a would-be terrorist on the new airplane.
Which is all the more ironic, because it comes without a media player.
Next Tuesday, March 29th, is also the day on which MGM v. Grokster gets argued. Two 9th Circuit Internet cases on one day.
Now we don't have to send that probe to Europa. We all know how bad that would be.
Microsoft has built in a number of wizards to make building complete application templates with a few clicks.
Technically speaking, that just means that Microsoft's IDE is better, not the language. With enough effort, someone could write an Eclipse plug-in that would give you drag-and-drop Java browsers. It's got nothing at all to do with language superiority.
If you mean that VB's IDE is better, that's a separate debatable point unto itself.
Both sides lose in situations like this. I hope that, in the future, they can be avoided. I know of one possible solution: Microsoft explicitly tells its programmers not to even look at GPL software, to avoid this exact scenario. Perhaps such an approach in this case might have led to a better situation. Of course, as you say, I don't have enough information.
I am not a lawyer yet, but if all goes well I will be in Summer 2007. My background is software development, so please forgive any bias I have. I am slowly, but surely, learning to see all sides of an issue.
Assuming arguendo that he was hired for his open source skills, either his employer expected him to use his skills or they didn't. If they didn't, then they entered the employment contract in bad faith. If they did, then they bargained for him to use those skills in his work. In that case, they implied consent for him to use his open source tools and skills.
Daimaou's employer has put him in a very difficult situation as well. His expertise seems to be in open source tools and development. But the company's argument seems to be that he can't use that expertise, because of license conflicts. If he is not allowed to use the skills for which he was hired, it seems likely that he is unable to perform his contractual duties.
I am interested to hear how you respond to my argument (hypothetically speaking, of course).
Journalists are given a wide latitude to speak, because they help keep our governmental processes open to public inspection, which is one of the policies behind having the First Amendment at all. Sometime when you have fifteen minutes to kill, read Nebraska Press Assn. v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539 (1976). For a contrasting viewpoint severely limiting freedom of speech, read Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, 501 U.S. 1030 (1991), which specifically references Nebraska Press and says why it shouldn't apply to lawyers (skip to Rehnquist's opinion, part II).
Except you have to worry about not qualifying for the patent bar. Notice that little asterisk next to the CS major in the latest bulletin? If your school isn't listed, you have to qualify under Category B. Good luck if your school wasn't strong on lab classes in things other than CS.
Juries sometimes make mistakes, and misapply the law to the facts. Juries also sometimes act deliberately against their duty, and find some facts to be true which can't possibly be true, or ignore crucial facts, just because they want to convict (or free) a person. See this definition of JNOV. Before anyone gets too worried, JNOV is clear grounds for appeal.
Ask many lawyers what their favorite moment in court would be, and they will respond "the chance to make new law." That doesn't make sense, does it? Only legislatures make law. But the laws need to be interpreted by you and me, and by everyone else. It's the lawyers and judges that interpret, and people pay good lawyers so much money because they can convince the judge that their interpretation is better than the other lawyer's. Once that's done, their interpretation becomes "the law" that everyone else has to live with.
Two rational people often differ with respect to what any given phrase means, and laws are no exception. The key question is, what is the background against which the laws are read? What political, social, economic, and moral criteria do we use to interpret the laws? Those criteria are what really drive "the law" forward. In this administration, those criteria are fear, paranoia, and distrust. Hence, we have laws that fear and distrust citizens, and citizens that fear and distrust the law.
Terrorism succeeds when it instills fear in our hearts. The only way to beat it then, logically, is to not fear it. As Franklin Roosevelt so eloquently said: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Until we remember that, and stop our unreasonable fear of fear, invisible laws will continue to be passed and enforced. It's up to you.
You are, of course, correct. I avoided such details in the interests of simplicity. The pocket veto can still overcome a close 2/3 majority, if there is enough turnover in an election year. It can also buy time for the Presedent to negotiate with Senators and Reps who are running close races in the election (we won't run a legit candidate against you if you vote NAY). All sorts of crazy things happen.
Actually, they do get it. Their advertisers will pay them more to stretch out the showings over several weeks, than you will to have them show all the eps back-to-back.
Basically, after the bill is signed into law, it becomes a public law and is printed as a "slip law" which can be cited in court. After every 2-year session of Congress, the slip laws are compiled in chronological order in the Statutes at Large. Every three sessions (six years), the at-large statutes are organized topically in the United States Code. The last US Code came out in 2000, so the next one is scheduled for 2006.
We just started the 109th session in January (2005 - 1789 = 216 years = 108 sessions prior to this one). That means that if you want to get print copies of laws passed in the 107th and 108th sessions (since 2000), you have to go to the Statutes at Large in your local law library. If you want laws passed by this Congress, you have to go to the slip laws. So far this session, there's only been one: Pub. L. 109-1, "To accelerate the income tax benefits for charitable cash contributions for the relief of victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami."
Personally, I think that these aggrieved relatives are a hell of a lot more sympathetic than Charles Manson. They're not as holy as the Pope, but they don't have to be. Either way, it's not the lawyer's job to care. They take their client as they come, and do their best to zealously advocate their client's position. You cannot ask for less, because less would mean a half-assed prosecution or defense, and that is unjust and oppressive on its face.
If you still think I'm full of crap, take a day off from work and go down to your county courthouse when there's a criminal trial going. Judge for yourself if the defense lawyer believes his or her argument. I'll bet you can't tell. Then ask one who isn't working on a case, what percentage of the clients they got acquitted actually committed the crime.
Which is more likely: all of these lawyers are unethical, or they're all just doing their job as best they can?
Screw retail price, demand lawyer's fees and incidental damages (time spent on the phone with Blizzard / lawyers / etc, at whatever your hourly rate comes out to be). Or, if you've got a lot of time on your hands, start a class-action.
According to the lawyer's logic, four companies participated in training Devin to kill. Your next statement is that you aren't receptive to training, and that this kid is. So why does that mean those companies couldn't somehow train him, given the fact that he was already receptive? In fact, it might be in the lawyer's best interest to prove that Devin was susceptible to training of this sort, due to some sort of instability. As long as it's not enough serious enough for the companies to make it a defense (think 'troubled' rather than 'insane'), it's a good strategy.
Actually, the lawyer was hired by two of the relatives. I think what you are really saying is that the relatives have no ethics (or sense of responsibility). The lawyer is just a contractor here, nothing more. Let's not go bashing people just because it's fun or easy.