When a pizzaiolo puts a 3 meter pizza on the table and says: “help yourselves but only to half of it”, there always appear the malcontents who ask: “why a half only?” “a half of 3 is more than 2?”, “and what will you do if I eat a half plus one fifth?” The best illustration of the phenomenon is the repetitive and inevitable Internet discussion on what could possibly have been Knuth's intentions when he wrote: \errmessage{This manual is copyrighted and should not be TeXed}\repeat – could it be that deep inside of him he wanted something totally opposite? Or could it be a joke? And how to beat this errmessage?

One can frequently meet ad hoc theories on the natural right to 2 meters of pizza, on Robin Hood and other nonsense. Usually the transgressors want the best of both worlds: the security for the electronic transmission of their own data and the right to put on one's plate anything caught in the Net.

When authors put their materials on their home pages, which are the most common attitudes? And how have I reacted? I don't know how to take arithmetical mean of plus and minus infinity, so I consider it necessary to comment some types of positions that tend to repeat.

• When I could not find any indication of the authors on the legal position of the materials I used to write them. If no reply appeared I took my decision thinking on the interests of the reader. In one case the reply obliged me to remove one text. In dozens of other cases I've got the full support of the authors, on the understanding that it was not a commercial initiative.
  Sometimes the situation was so clear (for example: the materials are at arXiv) that I did not contact the authors leaving it like that because of my lack of time. On the other extreme, having equally clear situation of the generalized interdiction, I tried initially to get from the authors a permission to have the page mirrored on the server of our Department. In none of those cases I've got any response …

• You are [...] welcome to use these notes in any way you see fit [...] If you use the notes in seminars or courses of your own, I would greatly appreciate hearing your reactions. I have a great debt of gratitude and would love to find some free moments to inform the authors that assume this position: I've carried it further, I've tried to leave untouched the visible side of your effort. I will encourage the users of the CD-ROM (the ones I know, at least) to send every now and then their `thanks' to the authors – I know only too well the importance of a readers' feedback for the author.

• In any case, it would be very uncool to publish, or to use for profit, any or all of these notes. At the very least, I would have a conniption and never speak to you again. Take it easy, if “profit” means money then this game cost me over $500 (payed to telephone companies) during a year and half of my work. Well, I've payed in order to unstupify me, if I may use the neologism of T.Kotarbinski).

• Unaltered copies of the article text files may be freely distributed for personal and classroom use. The way I see it, “to respect the authors” means preserving the outlay and original interconnections between texts – but this may force some modifications in the HTML source of the text (necessary in order to have pointers indicating the right position of texts and images, be it on the winchester, be in on the Net).

• Do not redistribute this page or its content for private or professional use, as it will generally discourage the author into no longer developing it. But the page stayed unaltered for an infinite period (measured in the scale of the Internet). Perhaps encountering its contents the readers will express their appreciation and support?

• You may print one copy of these materials but you may not store copies of these files on your disk. It is a way (involuntary, I presume) to turn everybody a transgressor. When I send a command (typing or clicking) to follow the link I activate the mechanism to that stores texts and images in my computer.

• You can keep one copy of this article on your computer. And if one copy is in /home/me/.netscape/cache/ and the other in /tmp? The other manifestation is not a xerox copy of the first one.

• [...] these pages may not be copied, mirrored, or reproduced [...] If you want your own copy, please consider buying the hardcover and/or CD-ROM [...] Some materials constitute part of collections to be bought. Bringing them to my computer I go against the author's wish; still, I think that my position can be defended.
  1. The reason to give away a piece was to encourage buying the whole cake? Fine, it's up to me whether I eat my piece still in the supermarket or carry it home to share it with my family.
  2. With all possible care I keep the pointers to the place of shopping. Well, if the publicity was repeated in 800 texts then I left it in strategic places only; we're after the information, not brainwashing, right?
  3. Our students could enter the Net to read easily all of the articles? Sure, they could, if they could afford time and money. The bitter joke on the World-Wide Wait is the precise description of the phenomenon – and the cost of modem connections is obscene. Under “globalization” scheme the pricing of connections has been planned on the level of the US practices but nobody has planned anything about salaries. The very barrier of the language is a serious problem for quite a few of our students (spelling of classical names, traditional references to events). Now, to say that they may find the material on the Net is pure hypocrisy.

• Several times I had to recur to somewhat devious means to glue together a faithful copy of a material but only in one case I had met a hostile reaction with the menace to block the full subnet of my Department. (An attempt to talk to the author of the page has been fully ignored.) Ironically, the page, although frequently cited, praised and treated as a reference disappeared soon after. I've seen its materials recently, somewhat disordered, under the addresses not much publicized and that might suggest that the author had rethought the life and had also moved into underground.

I recall a one-semester course called “Encyclopedia of the Law” which made an impressive track through the theories of origins and origins of theories of the Law. I find it very exciting and promising for the future but these days, instead of developing one more (convenient) theory of the law I would rather talk about the lawyers. The reason is that in social life the value of a religion is delimited by the value of its priests. (Sure, the rule stands for the mathematics as well – the social decadence in applying mathematical reasoning is a reflex of the professional maladies of the majority of mathematicians: calculus tenonitis, rigoris nauseatis and applicational blindness.)

There is as much rage and bile in me as in any other madman of this world and I consider it important to put in written form my session of paranoiac accusations for the use of psychiatrists. I do it as an adult and sober educator because (as any other mature madman) I believe that it is the world and not me who is completely unbalanced – and I want to prevent the ones I educate from slipping into compliance, complacency and precocious conventionality.

Mathematicians and lawyers are very close cousins, though the former are frequently poor, the latter not infrequently rich. But the instruction that they receive is similar – for a long time it was only they who studied logic (well, plus the philosophers, other cousins, who are undecided whether they'd rather be rich or theo-rich). The examples of great lawyers-mathematicians (Fermat, Sylvester, Cayley) are famous but rare and do not make too visible the fact that in both professions the essence of labor consists in looking for tiny faults, quite unpretentious for a layman. But once the faulty data or reasoning is identified, for a mathematician it constitutes an enormous frustration and for a lawyer an enormous sum.

There are so many things that might be said on this subject that a selection is necessary. So now I will mention only that they disdain us quite a lot (in my professional class only the women display some elegance. Half of men seem to be coming back from a trip in the marshes and the others seem to be leaving for a barbecue party) and at the same time they envy us (as they know that one day we stand better chance to avoid hell's gates). And frequently they are profoundly grateful to their maths professors, as it was in their flight from mathematics that they landed in one of the courses of the Law.

In order to tell other things the style of “Blue Book” is necessary. So I begin following lessons of Master Zoshchenko: I have no general complaints about lawyers, I consider them just a marvel but. I've just recalled some isolated facts.

• You never forget your first lawyer. My one was helping me in my first days in Brasília to notarize some documents. At some point it became clear that I needed the stamp of a Brazilian consul on a Polish document and Dr.Vale (as my legal adviser wanted to be called) suggested that I should arrange this as soon as possible. I explained him that on its way to Brazilian consul the document would have to pass a line of clerks in Polish offices and as it was a problem of a political refugee, any chance of success was beyond reach. “Fine, I can help you” kindly said Dr.V. I asked him whether he had his contacts over there. “No” said Dr.V, “but I will make a quick jump in my car to the Alley of Embassies”. Seeing my state of stupor he took a ball-pen from his pocket and sketched a map of Brasília showing clearly ministerial buildings, embassies and his office. After some minutes I managed to understand: he believed that each of embassies had an extra room where a Brazilian servant, an aforesaid “consul”, stamped the documents that were leaving the offices.

• Some years later I've recovered my faith that Dr.V's law diploma wasn't bought at some flea market but that he really had finished a course in Law. Well, there were (in Brazil) cases like that: there is a public exam for a judge with 50 vacancies and there appear 5000 candidates. Only 15 are approved and newspaper notes suggest that majority of rejected candidates did not master sufficiently their own language.

• To fill the 35 vacancies left alternative methods are employed. In the past one interesting technique consisted in creating “class justices”. In order to prove that there had been the social justice, the syndicates were offered the right to indicate one person each, to become a judge in Courts of Labor Justice. The mechanism had very much activated the syndicate life of the Country, as in the most famous case of the creation of the Syndicate of Arab Horse Breeders.

• The pride of Brazilian science – the IMPA institute in Rio de Janeiro – had one day disappeared because in the frenetic action of reorganization of state institutions the principal lawyer, the very President of the Republic, unwittingly erased its legal existence. Which is, after all, just one institution confined to one building in the vastitude of the 8th economy of the world.

• A Brazilian multinational of Santa Catarina specialized in winged animals had sent a representative to a Parliament (technically speaking: “the people democratically elected a federal representative”) to carry on a linguistic mission. After a period of activity (of scratching and being scratched) he had his parliamentary project discussed, voted and approved. Due to his efforts, Brazil became the first country in the world where turkey and chester (the offspring of a hen and a vulture) carry under their feathers the swine's ass. The new law had determined that the industry may sell meat of those birds calling it ham.
  The invention is not fully original; in the past some rich people used to baptize beef meat as “fish” to be able to eat it on Wednesdays and Fridays. The difference is that then there were the rich who cheated their God and now it is the Parliament who cheats its people.

• As a homage to a law that abolished prison sentences for debts, on each anniversary of its promulgation law students of a traditional and renowned Brazilian Faculty invade the restaurants stuffing themselves with food to the limits of human capacity and then refuse to pay. They explain that it is the question of a tradition. Many a lawyer, famous and respected, called to a TV program to express his opinion, defended the students' action. There is the full consensus that the case does not resemble any theft of food in the least, after all nobody of those groups suffers from hunger.

• Does your map show the place called Brusque, somewhere down there in Brazil? Well, the map of New York City lawyers does. Once they descended on Brusque in great number, with the support of local police. Drugs? Children exploited in production of the shoes exported to the US? Governmental thefts? No, none of this. The problem was the sad smile of Donald Duck.
  Various textile manufactures of Brusque sell kids shirts with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other representatives of the culture of the developed world, with no blessing of the priests of the Law. Consequently, the lovely animals painted on the clothes are sold for one or two dollars a piece and it makes their smiles really sad. In order to bring back wide smile to the animals, rising the price of shirts and blouses to the level of $10 each, many tradesmen were arrested and manufactures closed. The operation is quoted as the greatest logistic US success since the invasion of the Island of Granada.

• To remain on the topic of the US successes: I adore to disagree with Noam Chomsky but in this case, when he talks about Kosovo and the international law, I really would not know how to do it.

• To cut this nonsense short (as I myself have tired of putting so much of it into bytes): I will form a incipient attitude of a measure of respect for international law when there is pronounced and observed some universal rule that describes the rights and the protections of women as being at least equal to those of men. After all, there was my risk of 50% of appearing in the form of a woman and I do not deem it just to simply rejoice in my good luck of escaping the hard fate at that instance. I think that each man should have a moment of reflection on the value of a world that permits the exploration, submission and mistreatment of a half of its population.

So, do whatever you want because the law is a joke? I think that I am talking about something different. If you get to the last part of my monologue you will see a confession of faith of someone who believes that ethics is inseparable from professional successes.
I'm talking about a sad aspect of our world. When I was young I was shown ten Laws, supposed to express moral rules that came from other worlds. Later I saw some beautiful proposals formulated in a legal language; they were said to be Laws emanating from the People. Nowadays the laws are numbered by many digits but I find it difficult to understand their connections to any ethics, other worlds or Peoples. The laws are pouring out of city mayors and presidents, policemen and directors, from town councilors meetings and the conferences of lawyers of multinationals. The identification of moral indications with the description of sales techniques of cosmetics is so advanced that one can expect new “Small Legislator” software, coming soon to your department store.