Squabble in a billionaires’ playground

In most sports, referees are the final arbiters of disputes. Apparently in sailing, it’s the courts.

Shown above is Larry Ellison’s futuristic looking trimaran, boat with a large main hull with two smaller flaking hulls. He’s suing a competitor for a chance to compete in America’s Cup, sailing’s top prize. Don’t ask me the specifics of the case since the article conveniently fails to mention any… However, while poking around for an answer, I discovered some other interesting things.

The structure of the Cup makes it inevitable that the winners will be those with strongest negotiating skills and deepest pockets — in other words, a perfect climate for billionaires. The key difference from many other sports is that there is no centralized organizing commission. Instead, it’s administrated by the winner of the previous match with only an ambiguous document, the Deed of Gift, as guidance. One of the few specifications in the document is that all disputes are to be settled by New York’s Supreme Court (you can see where this is going…). Other than this, the winner is free to set the rules however they want.

Imagine the chaos if the NY Giants had the right to change the stadium size, specify the number of players, and change the scoring rules simply because of their previous Superbowl win.

Surprisingly though, things were fine for many years — 113 years to be precise — because the New York Yacht Club won every time, the longest winning streak in sports history. However, In 1983, the Australians won and the cup has moved around since. Along with this shakeup has come a steady stream of intrigue, politics and legal drama. For instance, one winning team changed the rules to allow for a team to use foreign nationals; they promptly scooped up the top New Zealand sailors.

This latest case is no exception to this trend. The real winners — no surprise — are the lawyers:

The idea 120 years ago was for the America’s Cup to create “friendly competition between foreign countries,” but in this case, it has led to enough billable hours for lawyers to buy boats of their own.

• Link: Billionaires’ Yacht Rivalry Spills Into Courtroom

Wikipedia: it’s not just for plagiarizers anymore

In what comes as great news to anyone who runs a web site with user generated content, a federal judge ruled that a site is qualified under “safe harbor” protection and not liable for what’s inside. The lawsuit was brought by a porn-producing company which had had some of its videos uploaded to Veoh.

This is a great precedent but what popped out at me was the judge’s researching techniques. He used Wikipedia to investigate such things as IP addresses, concluding that they could be shared between users. But that’s not all:

The judge also consulted Wikipedia to better understand what “Flash” might be, and he concluded that it is “the name of a file format used to transmit videos over the Internet.”

I’d love to see what else the judge researched on Wikipedia but unfortunately, you have to go through an arcane and and almost anachronistic procedure to get access to the full ruling. Hopefully, the document will pop up on here soon.

Update: the actual document popped up here. Unfortunately, no other wikipedia references. Here’s one of the footnotes from page 16:

The court takes judicial notice of the Wikipedia definition of “IP address” as to the fact that an IP address may be shared by multiple users.  This is not a matter that is subject to reasonable dispute.

• Link: Veoh Safe Harbor ruling could help YouTube in Viacom battle