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.
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.
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 the real purpose of copyright law is to “promote the progress,” then why not make sure it’s doing so? In […]
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.”
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