Why would they spend money on a frivolous case they have no chance of winning? Lawyers, dragon or no, are expensive, and people in prison don't exactly make money. Conversely, abuse of prisoners is endemic in America. I find this all extremely plausible.
I think contingencies are common in cases like this? The lawyer gets paid iff their client wins.
In that case, you not only have to convince a judge that your case has merit, you also need to convince the lawyer.
They aren't going to work on contingency if they think your case is frivolous.
This seems like a good spot for the link to @patio11's "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
I get what he's doing, but some of these are not actionable: > People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points. So... what? What do I do with this? My program has to use something to represent text, and since I fail to be a large multinational consortium, I can't invent my own character set and expect it to work. Also: > Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly acc…
Unicode is not the only character set (or the best one); this is a falsehood programmers believe about character sets (I wrote a list of this too but I do not remember if I had published it). However, that is not the most severe issue, due to the other things mentioned, such as if people do not have names (or if there are multiple ways to enter them, or if people sometimes change their name, or have the same name as other people, etc).
The "outcome" is simply that the judge simply directed the attorney to stop using the dragon watermark. Whats the problem? And, by the way, I'd recommend a bit less credulity about this kind of lawsuit. While there is no doubt that a lot of terrible things happen in America's prisons, it is also extremely common for inmates and former inmates to file exaggerated or even frivolous claims about the conditions of their…
If a prisoner in America says they are being deprived of adaquate medical care, it's safe (for people generally, not the legal system) to assume it's true until proven otherwise. Maybe they're healthy and are complaining about nothing, but if they aren't healthy then it is almost certainly the case that their medical care is substandard if it exists at all.
It's crazy that people treat prisoner complaints from the American gulag as if everyone is just whining. We have some of the worst conditions in the developed world.
The problem doesn't even seem to be the dragon. The problem is you don't "watermark" court filings in the first place. That's generally not a thing. Court filings have strict requirements around formatting. This isn't any different from trying to file in Comic Sans or a 48-pt font. Unfortunately this stunt is functioning as free publicity for this firm, because it's getting written about...
What’s the purpose of the format requirement? To enable ocr or to just prevent silly games like this one?
Any image in this position would be distracting. However, I have never understood notions like this: “it is juvenile and impertinent. The Court is not a cartoon” Is like my great grandpa scolding us at the dinner table for laughing and talking.
It does sound like something Mr. Milchick would say. You must abandon childish things, and all that [defiant] jazz
I used to sysadmin for a law firm that used watermarks for draft filings as they went through the internal workflow on the theory that nobody would be stupid enough to actually file something with a translucent toucan on it, so it would make accidentally filing a draft less likely.
I used to put a diagonal light gray huge "DRAFT" across pages of certain documents for which it was important that a working draft not be interpreted as final. What would've been a great use for the lawyer's dragon documents would be to clearly mark incomplete/unapproved drafts, for internal review only. Because, obviously, there was no way that you would accidentally submit a filing to the court with a huge purple c…
I also think the dragon could be used for such drafts like you describe, although that should not substitute for writing DRAFT on the document, but instead the dragon would be in addition to writing DRAFT on the document (perhaps in the header and/or footer, since the dragon means not room for that in the middle of the document). Both the DRAFT label and the dragon (or other pictures in the watermarks) would only be used in drafts and both omitted for the final version.
I used to put a diagonal light gray huge "DRAFT" across pages of certain documents for which it was important that a working draft not be interpreted as final. What would've been a great use for the lawyer's dragon documents would be to clearly mark incomplete/unapproved drafts, for internal review only. Because, obviously, there was no way that you would accidentally submit a filing to the court with a huge purple c…
Text watermarks can be a PITA when they cover the page and the PDF reader prioritizes them for text selection rather than the top layer text.
Perhaps the watermark could be made as a picture even if it contains text, so that it cannot be used with text selection.