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Google+It could mark one of the biggest changes for lawyers joining the profession since the first U.S. bar exam was given in Delaware in 1763 — a single bar exam aimed at standardizing attorney credentials nationwide.
law
Modern media centers: the hard 20% is socio-legal
Cory Doctorow points out that the first 80% of creating a media center is easy: a decent computer (I used an old Pentium III and an old PowerBook, but you can use newer tech if you’re not a poor student), video out (S-Video to an old-school TV, VGA or HDMI to a new HDTV), big hard drives, maybe network sharing (I used an Airport Extreme I inherited) so you can access media from multiple rooms. But what about content — “the other 20 percent”?
Law school vs. graduate school
Last May I finished my 3L year, and am now the proud possessor of a JD. On Thursday I began my first year program as a graduate student in the history of science. The experiences, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been strikingly different: law school is, ultimately, preparatory to practicing law as an attorney, and much of its emphasis is on tracking students in that direction. Graduate school in the humanities and social sciences, meanwhile, is about training future academics.
Could you scrap Microsoft Office applications?
IBM’s Lotus Symphony is a free-of-charge alternative to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite, based on Sun’s open source OpenOffice software. It purports to remain compatible with Microsoft’s “.doc” format (and newer incarnations), while removing licensing costs (but, not of course, support costs, since people still need training, technical support still costs money, etc.). Now they’ve decided to walk the walk.
Lawyers should leave their laptops at home when traveling abroad
There has always been an exception to search and seizure law at border crossings. In theory, this is nothing new — attorneys traveling with confidential paper files could also have them searched. But the ease of carrying vast numbers of confidential documents in electronic form raises the bar on this.
Is virtual lawyering the future?
An interesting paragraph from an article dealing with the idea of “Good Enough” — services or products that may not have all the “bells and whistles” of their more-expensive competitors, but do enough at the right price to be runaway successes:
It turns out to be a remarkably efficient way of offering what Granat calls legal transaction services — tasks that are document intensive. For everything from wills to adoptions to shareholder agreements, elawyering has numerous advantages.
Court transcripts and copyright awards
Should a court reporter own the copyright on his or her work product, and be able to force everyone to pay for it into the future. “No,” says an appeals court, overruling a lower court decision to the contrary.
Google Books adds open-standard downloads
For anyone using any kind of electronic reader — including a regular computer — this addition to Google Books may well prove quite useful: EPUB as a download format.
What's the proper basis for copyright law?
Sometimes I feel that I spend an inordinate amount of time attacking copyright, as if I wished to eliminate it. I do not. But I do feel the balance is off. But how should we find the proper balance? If … Continued
The case of the disappearing case law
The cloud consists of data and services that live on someone else’s servers. Although the term itself is new(ish), the basic idea is embodied by traditional legal research services like LexisNexis and Westlaw — data lives on someone else’s servers, not your own. Thus, someone else controls the data, not you. And someone else can delete or modify the data, and you’d never know…
Should the government need a warrant to access your Google Books history?
Should accessing content via the Google Books service provide the same protections as one would receive when relying on a bookstore? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU say, “Yes.”
What modern copyright law means to our culture
What does it mean to our culture that we have imposed the most draconian restrictions on the reuse of intellectual creations than at any other time?
What does it mean to be in the public domain? Thoughts about the AP licensing scheme.
The AP has begin trying to license content through a payment scheme. Some of the content — as recently demonstrated by James Grimmelmann “purchasing” a Thomas Jefferson quote — is in the public domain. Does the AP have the right to sell/license this public-domain content? What does it mean to be in the public domain?
Can Amazon’s Kindle disrupt the current textbook market?
BizOp News asks the question: “Is the Kindle DX: Amazon’s 9.7″ Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation) a disruptive device for the textbook market?”
Applying DRM to the news
The AP wants to apply DRM to the news. It won’t work.
I get the frustration on the AP’s part. The world is changing, and they haven’t figured out to prevent that. They can try for legal changes, try DRM, or adapt. Adapting is hardest, but the only way to succeed long term.
Does selling access to court-filed attorney briefs violate copyright law?
California courts are turning over attorney work product to for-fee services like LexisNexis and Westlaw, which then resell them (or merely make them available?) to customers. Does this violate copyright law?
