New York Times Opinion
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2017–2025
7:10 · 3.1M views · Apr 28, 2014
A New York Times Op-Docs short in which actors perform a real legal deposition transcript. A lawyer gets tangled in an absurd argument with a county employee about what counts as a photocopier, in a dispute over fees for public records.
Commenters share it as a funny, memorable example of evasive depositions and of obstruction over public records requests.
9 comments from Hacker News
> Over time, the meaning of the word 'Xerox' changed. More specifically, it gained a new meaning. For a long time, Xerox only referred to a company named in 1961. Some time in the late 60s, it started to be used as a verb, and as I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the word 'Xerox' was overwhelmingly used in its verb form. this video I don't think this dramatization (of a court proceedings from 2010) is related to Xerox's plight with losing their trademark, but said dramatization is brilliant nonetheless
I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good. What Is a Photocopier? this video
There is a similar story about an office worker not knowing what a photocopy machine is. The New York Times did an amazing reenactment from transcripts of the legal deposition this video
The NYT has an amazing video where they got actors to play out the transcript of one of these sorts of depositions. this video
Its probably safe to assume that the person you're recommending this to has absolutely no idea about the general concepts of software development, or the rough orders of magnitude of information that is reasonable to store and serve with modern infrastructure available to nearly any small business. Its reminiscent of the willful ignorance displayed by the Cuyahoga County Recorders Office, in Ohio. The office responded to FOIA requests by demanding $2 per photocopy, even though the documents were already stored on CDs. They hoped they could simply make freedom of information too expensive. Their legal argument was that the files could be semantically thought of as photocopies of the documents. Here's a verbatim reenactment of a deposition in the case where a county employee puts on a charade of not knowing that a photocopier is. this video