the Zealous

In the nineties, Saturday Night Live ran a series of skits centered around an unfrozen caveman lawyer, played by Phil Hartman. This was a typical episode:

Announcer:

One hundred thousand years ago, a caveman was out hunting on the frozen wastes when he slipped and fell into a crevasse. In 1988, he was discovered by some scientists and thawed out.

He then went to law school and became … Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.

Not-in-Index URLs

Google has critically expanded notice and takedown in another important way: We accept notices for URLs that are not even in our index in the first place. That way, we can collect information even about pages and domains we have not yet crawled. We process these URLs as we do the others. Once one of these not-in-index URLs is approved for takedown, we prophylactically block it from appearing in our Search results, and we take all the additional deterrent measures listed above. We recently discovered that some bulk submitters make very heavy use of this feature. In one sample we found that around 82 percent of the URLs we approved were not in our index (and have therefore never appeared in any search results). How this discovery will influence the further evolution of our processes, only time will tell. It does suggest that the number of takedown notices we get is not a good proxy for the number of allegedly infringing links we serve.

When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession. … The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is entrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees. People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared. The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.

Contract drafting is an exercise in prediction.