Month: November 2006
Pirates or just small-time criminals?
Peter Black, an associate lecturer in law at the Queensland University of Technology, hosts this month’s Blawg Review on his Freedom To Differ blog, which focuses on the legal regulation of the internet and the media, providing an extensive selection of great links for the IP/media lawyer in particular. One that caught my eye was […]
Adnonsense (2)
Kevin O’Keefe blogs sensibly that running Google ads is inappropriate on blogs marketing professional service or product, pointing out that at the very best you may earn only a few hundred dollars a month. If you’re a law firm or other professional service firm charging hundreds of dollars an hour for your time, do you […]
Law blog search
Two new (US-based) law blog search tools: Blawg.com is a relaunch of Blawg.org with 1233 entries in 26 categories. It remains a coventional searchable catalogue with brief descriptions and links to both the blogs and their feeds. BlawgSearch is a more advanced offering from Justia with 900 entries in 40 subject categories, 169 state law […]
Fun with numbers
Blog enthusiasts will be chuffed to learn that the blogosphere represents more than half of all websites. So bloggers rule! Or do they? Netcraft, in its November 2006 web survey reports that there are now over 101 million websites (hostnames), commenting that “Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, […]
Even bigots and boors have contractual rights (in good old Blighty)
Contracts again. Apparently it’s OK in the US to lie through your teeth to induce someone to sign a contract. Here in the UK it’s just not cricket. [Borat] is described as “a documentary-style film” that the producer “hopes to reach a young adult audience using entertaining content and formats”. Clause four states that the […]
Where culture comes from
I can’t do better than quote verbatim from Jack Schofield in the Guardian Technology Blog: Over at Slate, Paul Collins makes the reasonable point that lots of examples of plagiarism may well come to light as more old works are digitised for Google Book Search. I should hope so! What he doesn’t point out is […]
Opening up a new Vista
Computer lawyer Mark Rasch analyses Microsoft’s end user licence agreement (EULA) for the new Vista operating system and finds the boys in Redmond ready to help themselves, leaving you weeping on the floor. The terms of the Vista EULA, like the current EULA related to the “Windows Genuine Advantage,” allows Microsoft to unilaterally decide that […]
No sign of the Times
What’s happened to the TimesOnline Law Weblog which has disappeared from the radar? At the time of its launch I wondered how the TimesOnline Law section and the Law Weblog would co-exist, commenting that, compared to news sites, blogs “allow less formal reporting and comment, free from the usual editorial strictures”. Could it be the […]
Elvis is not going to produce any more recordings
In response to the proposed extension of UK copyright for recordings from 50 years to 95 years, Lawrence Lessig blogs on quantifying the value of the public domain pointing to this like-named paper by Rufus Pollock. He also refers indirectly to an article by Eric Flint for Jim Baen’s Universe Copyright: How Long Should It […]
How to spend the next 2 minutes
Visit the New Popular Edition Maps. Locate your home/office. Enter the post code. Tell your friends.
The new internet
Web 2.0 is not a technology or even a group of technologies; rather it is a buzzword describing the companies and ideas behind the emergence of a “new” internet built on the participatation of users. “Technology,” a sage once observed, “is stuff that doesn’t work yet.” That sounds like a joke, and it is, but […]
Community, democracy and the future of law publishing
First published November 2006 in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers. The rise of social software A phenomenon of the last two years has been the meteoric rise of services built on “social software” – services that enable people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities (popularly referred to using […]
