Stanford Law School, EFF and Creative Commons hosted grand and glam book (slash recruit JZ for Stanford Law School) party at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. The book was for sale but the edible cookie replicas were free! As usual, Jonathan gave a fabulous talk to the several hundred technorati and fleece-o-nistas from the Bay Area and a good time was had by all!
by Bill Marriott
Famous lawyers from both fiction and reality have always relied on a variety of tools to persuade judge and jury: surprise witnesses; dramatic closing arguments; reenactments of the crime scene.
But first and foremost, a good lawyer must be a master of logic. So it might not be such a surprise that a group of law school students have embraced Revolution Studio as yet another tool in their arsenal that helps them learn technology, teach law, and win cases.
Revolution’s popularity endures because it is the one programming system that enables content experts to focus attention on their areas of expertise, without the distractions of mastering the arcane syntax and byzantine rules of other languages. With Revolution’s natural language, anyone can break a complex problem into smaller pieces and arrive at a solution using logic that mirrors the way the human mind works.
In this way, Revolution reinforces the core analytical skills needed to be successful with large, complicated litigation.
Although New York Law School in Manhattan is one of the oldest independent law schools in the United States, it’s also one of the most innovative. Students use Revolution not just to sharpen their minds, but also to get things done. Recently, NYLS students have used Revolution to:
"Without any training, the Runtime Revolution environment permitted our research team to quickly develop working prototypes of (i) interactive analytical flowcharts, (ii) statutory compliance tools and (iii) collaborative project management utilities for distributed environments.” -- Nick Nicolakis
And the list of potential applications of Revolution just gets longer as students and educators are inspired by the possibilities presented by the language.
“Faculty and students already have experience with using Revolution Studio to build interactive learning software, interactive diagrams that illustrate legal doctrines or explain statutory provisions, client counseling simulations, graphical courtroom demonstrations, and software kiosks to help pro se litigants,” said David Johnson, a Professor at the NYLS Institute for Information Law and Policy.
Because of the creativity with which NYLS has applied Revolution to so many aspects of everyday coursework, and the importance of educating future lawyers, lawmakers, and judges about technology issues, Runtime Revolution has gifted a copy of Revolution Studio to each faculty member, staff, and student of the school.
“Good software code, like good legal code, is precise and understandable to everyone,” said Kevin Miller, Runtime Revolution CEO. “We want everyone at NYLS to benefit from our unique language and its ability to create courseware and legal simulations.”
Miller added, “With Revolution, you have the ability to express complex algorithms and implement analysis strategies not possible with databases or spreadsheets.”
A legal compliance tool developed at NYLS, considered by the team as a "clickable statute," implements the "CAN SPAM" Act of 2004 as software code.. in a way that unambiguously determines whether an email passes muster with federal regulations.
Rick Matasar, NYLS Dean, expressed his appreciation of the gift and discussed the impact it will have on the quality of the school’s curriculum. “Increasingly, lawyers use technology in every area of practice. Familiarity with the basics is essential for the well-trained lawyer and for the law student who wants a “leg up” in the marketplace. Lawyers practicing in fields that relate to technology directly, such as intellectual property, must understand how computer systems work. Every lawyer, whether doing transactional work (e.g., using software to generate deal documents) or litigation (with its increasing use of electronic discovery) needs to be able to evaluate technology tools used in practice. We live in a world in which rights and obligations are importantly influenced by computer systems – so lawyers must understand not only legal code but also software code.”
Brent Schulkin in San Francisco has launched the first "Carrot Mob." What's a Carrot Mob? Well, it's a way to use the "carrot" of consumer buying power to encourage small businesses to help the environment. The idea is to use web-based tools to organize a consumer flashmob that channels business to stores that commit to environmental improvements.
Here's the catchy video of the first Carrot Mob "Make It Rain" campaign in San Francisco's Mission District last month. In short, the Carrot Mobbers asked local businesses how much they would be willing to invest in environmental improvements if the group were to organize a buying spree directed at that business. The result for the winning bodega? More than triple the sales of an average Saturday, lots of free advertising, oodles of community goodwill and a scheme to pay for improvements that, in turn, save the business money over the long run.
It's a great example of use of new media technologies to convene and organize a group of people that, working together, is more powerful at bringing about social change than any individual acting alone. It takes the traditional boycott model and turns it on its head (a girlcott?) to create incentives for good rather than an injunction against bad action. It's a collaboration between the business and the consumer to everyone's benefit. The video is really useful for creating a sense of that group and community and allowing people to feel themselves to have been part of something. And, it demonstrates that civic activism can be fun!
Microsoft announces that it will no longer issue DRM keys for music purchased on its now defunct music service. As CNET explains: "This means that, while former customers can listen to their music on authorized computers for as long as the hardware lasts, they won't be able to transfer songs to a new PC after that deadline." In other words, since the DRM won't work, you'll have to throw away the song. Good grief!
The Federal Communications Commission comes to Stanford this Thursday to hear from two panels of experts and members of the public on issues related to broadband network management practices.
Jacob Loshin's talk in the IP Surprise Lecture Series is now up online for viewing here.
His article: Secrets Revealed, How Magicians Protect Intellectual Property Without Law is available for download here.
The Ninth Circuit handed down its decision in Fair Housing Council v. Roommate.com last week. Chief Judge Alex Kozinski authored the 8-3 en banc opinion upholding the three-judge panel’s finding that Roomate.com is not shielded from liability under the Communications Decency Act because the design of the website renders Roommate.com an information content provider (aka an author) rather than a publisher. The site’s required drop-down menus where users must specify answers to questions about sex, sexual orientation and presence of children offend anti-discrimination laws, says the majority. The Website’s search facilities enable users to search based on the same criteria. The court found that Roommate is not entitled to CDA immunity for the operation of its search system either, because it “directs emails to subscribers according to discriminatory criteria. By contrast, the dissent argues that providing drop-down menus should not be deemed to constitute “creating” or “developing” information.
The holding of the case centers around the design -- drop-down menus instead of free-form questions -- not the content of the Website. According to the court, it “designed its system to use allegedly unlawful criteria so as to limit the results of each search, and to force users to participate in its discriminatory process. In other words, Councils allege that Roommate’s search is designed to make it more difficult or impossible for individuals with certain protected characteristics to find housing—something the law prohibits."
Naturally, reading the opinion, I was struck by the similarities to the Grokster and other peer-to-peer file sharing cases where the finding of indirect copyright liability turns on the design of the communications protocols, which induced others to infringe, or the P10 cases and Arribasoft cases where the technological architecture is crucial to determining if the technology itself was fair use or aided and abetted infringement. Two years ago, the Sixth Circuit in Stewart v. Blackwell held that: the use of punch card and other outdated voting technologies that fail to provide notification and confirmation of a vote to the voter in certain Ohio districts but not in others led to “statistically significant disparities between the levels of residual voting among African-American and non-African American voters." The court recognized that the choice of technology can mean the difference between the right to vote and disenfranchisement.
Yet despite this recent attention to technology design in the jurisprudence of cyber- and IP law, the discipline has, for the most part, taken little interest in design projects. Though the law is centrally concerned with the regulation of social relationships that create the conditions for freedom of expression and human flourishing, technology design has largely been regarded as the purview of computer scientists, engineers and interface designers.
In the digital age, legal rules and legal doctrine, however, are not enough to protect civil liberties. The rights and freedoms of free speech are protected by software code as much as by legal code. We have seen that the copyright act itself is powerless to protect the user's right to read in the face of strong digital rights management technology. We have seen the constitutional rights to privacy and freedom of association eroded by new surveillance technologies. Yet the solutions we invent to these problems primarily focus on legal strategies. What laws can we pass to regulate the design of technology? How should judge’s rule to safeguard fair use freedoms? We turn the question of technology design, into one of legal analysis.
Cyberlaw has become co-opted and domesticated by traditional methods of legal inquiry, focused on the solutions offered by legal institutions.
Cyberlaw should meld the design of East Coast Code and West Coast Code. Instead of asking only how legal doctrines apply to new technological environments, we could be asking ourselves how legal principles might inform how we design those technological environments. As lawyers, we need to get into the business of doing design.
Law regulates construction yet lawyers do not need to learn engineering. We regulate food without becoming chefs. So why do lawyers need to learn and practice design?
First, I’m not sure that we don’t need to practice the epicurean and engineering arts more to serve clients better. On my first day in practice as a telecommunications lawyer, the partner in charge gave me two textbooks to read and learn about spin and yaw and transmission frequencies. But with the short shorts available to us in law school, self-evidently we cannot teach all subjects. Still - we should be teaching the importance of knowing and understanding how law does and does not condition behavior in other industries, whatever they might be.
Second, when we teach through cases rather than interfaces, we avoid the complex questions (and answers) at the intersection between computer science and law, between legal code and software code, between statutory construction and engineering. We are not giving students the toolkit to solve problems -- our highest and best use according to Brest and Krieger and the ABA. If code is law, lawyers need to start designing code.
Third, law school is professional school that is intended to teach future members of the profession a set of skills that serve the normative goals of social justice and democratic values. To complement the existing toolkit of lawyers. I'm not suggesting an interdisciplinary approach, whereby law taught with or informed by some computer science (“law and....”). Rather, I am suggesting that the professional training of cyber lawyers and the scholarly pursuits of cyberlaw academics should involve a central preoccupation with the design of technology. There is a critical media literacy as well as a critical media ability that we lack.
Fourth, if we are, indeed, interested in the pursuit of social justice -- and this is why tech design is different from engineering or cooking -- then lawyers and law schools need to be in the “business” of designing and architecting tools informed by these values. It is the technological intermediaries that are the strongest forces shaping expression in the digital age. The design of the interfaces determine what we and cannot do or say online.There are well-known exceptions but, for the most part, the new frontier of cyberlaw is tamed by the old conventions of the legal academy.
Fifth, the best offense against an IP maximalist agenda is a good offense. The content owners are seeking to control our use of intellectual property, not only through lobbying and litigation, but through technological strategies. We need to focus our efforts -- as some do -- on developing counter-measures, alternative technologies that promote freedom.
Sixth, lawyers like coders think in terms of procedure. We are used to devising rules for social behavior and translating them into the text of legal code. First you file a complaint then an answer then a reply and then a motion to dismiss. This is not much different from coders who also devise a set of steps and then implement their work in software that controls and constrains some actions while enabling others. Our professional rhetoric is merely two different dialects of the same language.
Seventh, there are opportunities emerging to use technology to participate in the work of governance. By domesticating cyberlaw and limiting it to only a certain set of skills, we forego the opportunity to develop technologies for democracy. If we leave it to the techies, we risk the opportunity to inform their design with our values. If we do it by ourselves, however, we run the risk of not knowing all the options available to us.
All the details are here:
http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/23763/announcing_rebooting_democracy
Contributors include: Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Susan Crawford, Craig Newmark, danah boyd, Scott Heiferman, Tara Hunt, Josh Marshall, Howard Rheingold, Brad Templeton, Mike Turk, James Rucker, Morra Aarons, Patrick Ruffini, Lisa Stone, Joe Trippi and me offering ideas on how to reinvent democracy in America using the Internet.
Here's the posting.
Want to win a free pass to PdF 2008? Send us your ideas...
Today we’re happy to announce a new PdF book project called Rebooting America: Democracy in the 21st Century, an anthology of essays from leading thinkers and activists (check out the impressive list here) that we'll be publishing to coincide with this year's Personal Democracy Forum conference June 23-24 in New York City.
The anthology features our essayists' response to this challenge:
When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?
We’re quite pleased with the group of contributors we’ve lined up. But the collection wouldn’t be complete without reading your thoughts, too, so we’re inviting our readers to submit essays telling us how to make America better, stronger, more inclusive and participatory, and to vote on their favorite essays. Up to three winning essays will be included in the anthology.
Go here to submit your essay and to view previously submitted essays from other readers. If you like someone’s essay, vote it up, if you don’t, vote it down, and we’ll take your opinions into account. The book’s editors, Allison Fine, Micah Sifry, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy will be making the final decision.
Essays should run from 500 to 1500 words, and the deadline is May 1. If you’re interesting in submitting your ideas, go to http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com to get started.
If you've already registered for PdF 2008, don't worry--you can still submit an essay. If you win, we'll refund your fee.
Today Larry Lessig gave his inaugural Change Congress speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
I was struck when listening to it by the parallels (superb delivery) and the profound differences to Eben Moglen's talk last year to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. Nominally, a speech about the computer industry after GPL v. 3, it was, in fact, a disquisition about freedom and the opportunity to transform law into a collaborative act of creative people.
Not surprisingly, their intellectual approaches to politics mirror their political approaches to intellectual property.
For Moglen, the crusader for open source licensing, it's not about software but about freedom and societal reform writ large. He wants to upend the intellectual property regime as we know it and the monopoly industries that profit from it. "If it is easily possible to give to each human being who wishes it everything of utility and beauty at low or zero cost, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything she wants?”
By contrast, Creative Commons focuses on the individual. Give people the freedom to decide how to dispose of their own intellectual property. Preserve property but enable the means to give away the rights that we don't want to keep.
Now Powerpoint Goes to Washington, not to get rid of Congress, but to reform it. Get politicians to pledge not to take money form lobbyists and to commit to public financing for elections but preserve the status quo. Use wiki-based tools to deploy an army of collaborators to keep the politicians honest and accountable (though, I must add, that is not one of the better visualization tools available by a long shot!). It is the incremental approach, the practical approach, the doable reform. And like Creative Commons, it'll happen and will take off.
Moglen says “What the Net can do to politics in the YouTube, Wi-Fi, MoveOn, Facebook,the MySpace, FlashMob era remains to be written out in full.” He wants to move away from a political regime where governance is based on territoriality and, instead, let affiliation drive the legitimacy of governance. The audience of lawyers was expecting to hear about software contracts and, instead, was treated to a lecture about democracy. His vision is reflected in the verve he has brought to the free software movement which has fundamentally transformed innovation today.
While Eben is an optimist, inclined to trust people's ability to collaborate and work together, Larry is strikingly a pessimist, full of dismay at the state of the body politic. Yet while Eben is revolutionary, nay, evolutionary, in his take on government, Larry wants to preserve the status quo (or at least pretends to and it is one way to get things done).
My own view is that we need to combine both: Lessig's orientation toward action and pragmatism with Moglen's boldness of vision.
We need to stop viewing our institutions of government and governance as static and reified in their current form and, instead, start asking, not how to use technology to make Congress more transparent but how to use technology to make us more powerful.
I don't want to blow up Congress (well, I do but that's for another day) but to extend its intelligence by connecting the power of the network to the structure of the institution and to change fundamentally the way government works. Michael Schudson writes about the "monitorial citizen" who, because she is so busy and overwhelmed (read: not too bright) should play the role of policing government and making it more accountable. This is what the Change Congress movement will do using the cool tools. It's important and useful but it's not enough and does not fully recognize the potential of ordinary people to do extraordinary things. It's pretty pessimistic, not about Congress, but about us.
The idea that all we are good for is to blog about what happens in Washington or even to make maps and mash-ups of when and with whom the politicians went to lunch is to ignore the larger opportunity to get involved with making the science that contributes to our understanding of public health and obesity, analyzing the data about global warming, participating in the drafting of policies about these and other fields and overseeing the work of those who implement them through citizen juries assigned to every official. I'm all for "change Congress" but then let's really change it for the better!
Craig Newmark sent around the link for Lessig's Sunshine Week lecture today on corruption and transparency.
Today, at a lecture here in Washington, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network, he's launching the ChangeCongress project where he'll focus his academic interests on the issue of the systemic corruption of American democracy. Lessig will outline his hopes for ChangeCongress and how it will help citizens reclaim their democracy from the culture of corruption.
Check that link for the webcast and more.
Ironically, I can't access the webcast. Despite 47 different downloads of various bits and bobs, the webcaster only wants to work with IE, which I don't have. Too funny. I'll wait for YouTube.
Historian of science, Arnold Pacey has written that the history of science and technology is the story of an evolution toward visual thinking and representations that render human understanding more visible.
It is perhaps, therefore, not surprising that Harvard historian, Peter Galison, author of two books I love, Image and Logic, and Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps that make the arcana of particle physics more visible and more intelligible should be making a documentary about secrecy.
As the Harvard alumni newsletter reports appropriately during Sunshine Week
"Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor in the Department of the History of Science and the Department of Physics, and Robb Moss, Rudolf Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, explore the shadowy world of concealment, classification, and cover-ups at the highest levels of American government in their new film, titled “Secrecy.” The film was accepted in the feature documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival in late January, and it will be shown at the Harvard Film Archive on Friday (Feb. 29)."
“There is no doubt that secrecy is one of the central issues of our time,” said Galison. “It raises important questions about how democratic institutions function when things aren’t known. When is government secrecy necessary? What are its problems? What does secrecy do to those who are close to it?”
The East Village Idiot is a popular blog for “bitching and whining, comically” about New York. It frequently features postings complaining about such things as the condition of New York City’s streets.
While the Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) provisions data about local conditions top down, New York City’s 311 is, at least in part, a bottom up solution to gathering information. New York City’s 311 service is a telephone hotline to access municipal government services. In addition to using the hot-line to request information or find out about City benefits, 311 also functions as a complaint hotline to report street conditions, such as broken street lights and severe potholes. South Korea offers a similar one-stop-shopping for public complaints as does the UK ePetitions website. The City then reports out annual statistics on the most frequent inquiries on an aggregated and neighborhood basis.
FixMyStreet is a beta project in the UK developed by mySociety.org, a charitable project which builds demonstration websites for civic and community purposes. FixMyStreet, which also created the ePetitions website, allows a resident to enter a UK postcode or street name, to pinpoint a problem on a map of that area, attach a photo of the broken street light or pothole or protruding tree roots and enter details of the problem. MySociety then sends the reported broken paving or abandoned vehicle complaint to the appropriate town council for repair and resolution.
Launched almost a decade ago, Connecticut Policy and Economic Council’s CityScan project, does not simply encourage complaining. It goes beyond the “bitching and whining” of the blogs and the hotlines and online petitions and, though the much older project, did more than simply channel complaints to government like FixMyStreet.
CityScan did one better by actively working with the institutions of local government in Connecticut’s most troubled cities. Instead of dumping information on them, the group worked out a strategy for collaboration between the institutions of government and community members. City Scan asked town officials to tell them (not the other way around) the number of derelict land-use sites, graffiti-defaced buildings and run-down parks the municipality will clean up each month. It them mobilized young people and seniors in their own neighborhoods to use digital cameras and handheld computers to hold the city accountable to its promise. City Scan used the state of the art technology — which at that time were digital cameras and first-generation PDAs — to prepare visual reports and maps created from the data. The City of Gainesville, too, gives citizens the technology to create geographic maps and plot crime incidents from the community policy blotter. City Scan does not view citizens as simply passive consumers of information but as active collaborators in the work of governance. The CityScan neighborhood groups worked with and held local government officials accountable while collaborating on the clean-up effort. CityScan offered the additional benefit of bringing youth and seniors together towards a common goal.
Projects like CityScan that directly connect the communities to the institutional decision-makers are still the rarity. Despite technological advances, entrepreneurs are still creating complaint websites and blogs largely because we still cannot imagine for ourselves that WE not government are the locus for social change and innovation. Benedict Anderson in his influential book, Imagined Communities, writes of the need to transcend geography or other equally artificial boundaries and instead to imagine who needs to be part of a community. This is consonant with a systems approach to envisioning who is motivated to want to solve a problem. By starting with the problem (not with the jurisdiction of a particular agency) and thinking across disciplinary boundaries, institutional scale and silos, we can solve a problem in myriad ways, bringing law and technology to bear in tandem. An environmental effort to improve land use conditions can be tackled both through traditional rulemaking and legislation but change would happen faster — and be less fraught by political manipulations — by also by using software to do the practices of environmental action, including information gathering, evaluation, drafting and organizing collective action.
As CityScan demonstrated, the question of land use is not only an issue for lawyers, government officials or even relevant industries but one that could be addressed to the unlikely community of teens and seniors. They were able to participate in solving the problem as well as pointing it out. Now imagine adopting an approach like that of CityScan but using the latest tools available to us today, replacing old cameras with Microsoft’s Photosynth technology.
Jeff Jonas beat me to the punch by writing about Photosynth. the coolest tech thing since sliced virtual bread, which we were discussing at Legal Futures. Take a look at this video about “Photosynth” presented by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at a TED conference last year.
Breath-taking.
Photosynth
seamlessly stitches together photos taken by any photographer with any
equipment and at any scale (from detailed to panned). Photosynth, for
example, can assemble a large collection of photos from Flickr or any
source, analyze them for similarities (it doesn't need tags) and
assemble them to create, effectively, a three-dimensional recreation of
a space. Here's what Microsoft Live Labs, which acquired Photosynth, says about the project:
* Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
* Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it's megapixels or gigapixels in size.
* See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
* Find similar photos to the one you're currently viewing.
* Send a collection - or a particular view of one - to a friend
The uninteresting reaction to Photosynth is to say: monumental privacy, copyright and trademark issues. Oy! But who cares.
As Jeff writes: "Now imagine the process of stitching together not just digital images … but all available data – across disparate data types (e.g., structured, unstructured text, images, video, audio, etc.)."
This is the future of the multiverse or, as Richard Bartle once put it at the State of Play conference (here more precisely) the Microverse, the ability to create our own virtual worlds. Its just a matter of time before I can walk through and interact in the spaces created and re-created by photosynth and can integrate more than just visual information.
I can't help but think about the civic applications of this photo-documentation technology, which could create the ability for communities to record and document their own environmental and land-use conditions at any scale.
Photosynth recognizes patterns and edges in order to align the images and create lifelike three-dimensional experiences of a place, allowing easy zooming to show the neighborhood and the smallest details of graffiti and garbage. Photosynth and the evolving visual technologies make it easy to do photo-documention of a community without any prior coordination or even tagging and labeling of the photos. Meanwhile the Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) furthers the development and use of neighborhood information systems — databases and mapping systems about local conditions — in local policy making and community building. With partnerships everywhere from Des Moines, Iowa to Camden, New Jersey, the aim is to revitalize local communities. But NNIP delivers data “top down” and does not involve communities in gathering data for themselves as they could do more effectively with Photosynth.
Because the software itself recognizes that a disparate collection of images are all of the same subject, puts them together, it creates an easy way not only to grow the store of data but to produce accountability and target clean up efforts like CityScan. Meanwhile Helping Hands: Computer Support for Community-Maintained Artifacts of Lasting Value, a research project launched by Prof. John Riedl of University of Minnesota aims to make it easy for communities to create and maintain valuable resources like Wikipedia. They deploy a recommender system to help people find parts of the project they will be most able and willing to improve. State laws requiring assessment of environmental impact or impact on community character may offer a useful framework and guideline for collection and a benchmark against which to measure improvements.
Neither law nor technology alone are enough, however, but a systems approach allows both to be brought to bear to create greater effectiveness and opportunities for engagement, not for its own sake, but to solve a problem in the world at scale.
Right Coast blogger and author of the article, Web of Law on legal citation networks, Thomas Smith, launches Precydent.
Here's an interview by Law Librarian Blog with Thomas Smith about the project.
And here's his email, inviting participation:
PreCYdent is a free legal research site that applies new search technology to law, which is much, much more effective at finding authoritative and relevant cases than Westlaw or Lexis. The idea is that anybody, whether they are a lawyer or not, and whether or not they can afford what the big companies charge, ought to be able to do effective legal research online.
PreCYdent was founded by me and Antonio Tomarchio, a mathematician from the Politecnico di Milano (and my co-author) to remedy the deplorable state of the search technology that lawyers have to use in their online research. The online legal research industry is dominated by a couple of big players that make billions of dollars a year offering obsolete technology at high prices to lawyers who don't have much choice. This relative lack of competition is responsible in my view for the backwardness of the technology.
But it also turns out that making search technology that works well in legal databases is really, really hard. Existing technologies, including Google's PageRank, do not work very well in legal authority networks. But we created something that does work well. If you are used to Westlaw or Lexis, I think you will notice the difference right away. Our tests show we return relevant cases at something like 4 to 5 times the rate of Westlaw and Lexis. But let us know what your impressions are.
Here's an interesting post about us by a technology blogger in Southern California (as you can tell, it's a candid, non- sock puppet review): http://www.techcoastreview.com/2008/03/precydent-setting-precident.html
We are trying to get the word out about PreCYdent as efficiently as we can. If you know lawyers or others interested in law, or people interested in web apps and technology, we'd be grateful if you would forward this message to them. The site is free, and we are not trying to sell anything to anybody, unless you count the ads in the margins. We are committed to bringing free law to everybody interested in it.
Wiesbaden, Germany, April 19th, 2008
www.see-conference.com
IP SURPRISE!: IP in Unconventional Industries
March 10, 2008 | 4:30–6:00 p.m. | New York Law School, Room A900
GOLF
“Intellectual Property from Tee to Green – Applying the Art of Law to the Business of Golf”
Lecture by James H. Schnare II
Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Nicklaus Companies, LLC
Everyone knows what the “intellectual property industries” are—or do they? Intellectual property today plays a leading role in some unexpected areas. Today’s hoteliers and sommeliers need to know their trademarks and copyrights; game designers and golfers are playing with patents. The Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School presents IP Surprise!—a lecture series about the new intellectual property industries.
In his current position and as a member of Haile, Shaw & Pfaffenberger, P.A., in North Palm Beach, Jim Schnare has been responsible for all legal aspects of the planning and execution of a variety of business activities related to the sport of golf and the Nicklaus endorsement and trademarks, including golf course design, real estate development and licensing, golf equipment manufacturing, golf marketing and promotions, and brand licensing and management since 1985. During Schnare’s association with Jack Nicklaus, who was named “Player of the Century” by Golf magazine in 1986, Mr. Nicklaus has built his Nicklaus Design firm into a position of world leadership in golf course design and promotion and has been recognized for the last four consecutive years as “The Most Powerful Person in Golf” by Golf Inc. magazine for his influence upon and contributions to the sport and related industries.
Attendance is open to the public and the New York Law School community on a first-come first-served basis. Seating is limited. Please RSVP at www.nyls.edu/ipsurprise or e-mail ipsurprise@nyls.edu.
A few days ago, I posted an excerpt from an editorial by two Yale students (David Manners-Weber and Justin Kosslyn) who, inspired by the Obama campaign rhetoric, put out a challenge to their peers to take action in their own neighborhoods. (Incidentally, there's a new site called The Point, which is designed to help people issue challenges, to others. I'll do X if 10 other people do Y.)
The Yale article intrigued Princeton graduate student Arvind Murugan, who wrote about the article on a few listservs which were, in turn, read by Philadelphia area residents who started collaborating through emails and impromptu meetings to launch a grassroots movement dubbed Obama Works. ObamaWorks is a means to create visible public service projects and inspire collective action.
On March 1, Philly residents will hold a "Philly Sweep" and it is expected that other neighborhood clean-ups will take place around NYU and Yale, too. As one of the authors wrote me, "I couldn't be more thrilled to let you know that, with the help of people I've never even met, words are getting turned into action."
Manners-Weber goes on to say in his email about my earlier blog posting: "In your post, you wrote of "people collaborating to improve their own social conditions." Well it looks like folks are starting to do just that - within 24 hours, 100 people signed up to participate in the "Obama Philly Sweep," where volunteers will be cleaning up the streets around the Graduate Hospital area."
Here is their press release:
Philadelphia, March 1, 2008... Within only 24 hours, 100 supporters of Barack Obama signed up for the first Obama Philly Sweep, which kicks off at 2227 Christian St. in the Graduate Hospital area on Saturday, March 1st, at 1:00 pm. Street cleaning tops the agenda for this community service event - signaling the start of a new breed of political campaign that brings volunteers together around a constructive purpose. The Obama Philly Sweep is the first local event hosted by Obama Works, a grassroots organization currently taking shape in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Obama Works intends to implement Barack Obama’s message of change through community service projects. According to organizer Amirah Naim, the group is “working to transcend our differences and transform our country.”
Obama Works will sponsor additional clean-up efforts in other Philadelphia neighborhoods prior to March 24th, the voter registration deadline for the Pennsylvania primary election. After the primary, Obama Works will continue to develop and organize a variety of community service outreach projects.
""Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will
not be written for us but by us....by all those men and women who are
not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to
remake the world as it should be," said Obama in his Iowa victory speech on January 3, 2008. "Together ordinary people can do
extraordinary things."
Justin Kosslyn, a junior in Ezra Stiles College at Yale University and David Manners-Weber a sophomore in Yale's Calhoun College take the message to heart. In an article the Yale Daily News, Kosslyn and Manners-Weber imagine that, instead of simply getting out the vote, young people follow Obama's exhortation to make change happen in the world.
We have three examples of what such projects might look like. The first is simple: neighborhood cleanup. Residents driving through town squares and walking through local parks would find groups of enthusiastic Obama volunteers picking up cigarette butts and candy wrappers. The volunteers on this project, and all such projects, would be decked out in Obama T-shirts, stickers and buttons."
Our second sample service project is a 5K run through Main Street to raise money for a local charity. In Connecticut, our state, we could support Operation Fuel, which subsidizes heating for low-income families. Obama has spoken about the impact of high fuel prices on working families, so this type of service complements Obama’s message.
Finally, Obama volunteers could work through local YMCAs to further a myriad of small-scale local projects. These range from re-tiling the bathroom in a local women’s shelter to distributing children’s books from the local book bank. Though often less visible than traditional campaigning, these efforts have the potential to generate tremendous word-of-mouth credibility and support for Obama.
They have the right idea. Unlike the Republican leaders who after 9/11 called for us to shop as a sign of patriotism, these Yale students, inspired by Obama's leadership, talk of becoming engaged and involved. They do not ask what Washington will do for them nor do they contentedly envision their role as passively voting every fourth year. These are the young people who want to make change happen for themselves in their own communities. Working together, people have the ability to do what they cannot do alone and the projects they envision imagine people collaborating to improve their own social conditions. Obama's message, strongly echoed in the Tech Plan's new vision for government, puts inspired students like Kosslyn and Manners-Weber at the center of the solution.
Lessig is not running.
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/02/on_why_i_am_not_running.html
Music, movies, book publishing, computer software, pharmaceuticals.
Everyone knows what the “intellectual property industries” are—or do
they? Intellectual property today plays a leading role in some
unexpected areas. Today’s hoteliers and sommeliers need to know their
trademarks and copyrights; game designers and golfers are playing with
patents. Meanwhile, haute couture and haute cuisine have built
innovation-intensive industries just outside the limits of formal
intellectual property protection. Intellectual property is now showing
up in some surprising places, and intellectual property issues are
increasingly part of the daily work of counsel to a wide variety of
industries. The Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York
Law School presents IP Surprise!—a lecture series about the new
intellectual property industries.
RSVP required to IPsurprise@nyls.edu
February 26, 2008 - 5:00 PM
Dr. S Gregory Boyd, Associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, will discuss how the entirety of the video game industry is supported by protection of and investment in intellectual property.
March 10, 2008 - 4:30PM
James H. Schnare II,
General Counsel for Nicklaus Companies, LLC, will discuss the relevance
of intellectual property to the golf industry, from celebrity lifestyle
and marketing to protection of golf courses, and will identify
challenges and practical solutions to the application of traditional
legal theories to this unique business. This lecture is co-sponsored by
the Center for Real Estate Studies at New York Law School.
March 25, 2008 - 5:00 PM
Susan Scafidi, Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and author of the weblog Counterfeit Chic,
will discuss the increasing importance of intellectual property in the
fashion world, trademark protection for designers, and the debate over
copyright protection for fashion designs.
Closed to the public. Students only.
April 10, 2008 - 5:00 PM
Jacob Loshin, Law Clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and author of Secrets Revealed: How Magicians Protect Intellectual Property without Law,
will discuss the challenges magicians face in protecting their
intellectual property and the creative ways in which the magic
community has adapted to those challenges.
"There's chatter about the possibility that Professor Lessig would make a terrific member of Congress to replace the wonderful Rep. Tom Lantos, who recently passed away. This group is for anyone who thinks that Prof. Lessig would be a great candidate and an even better member of Congress," explains the new Facebook group set up by John Palfrey to launch the movement. I'm proud to have been among the first to join the now 2,000+ and growing number. Here's the website.
The special election is April 8th.
Sign up for the mailing list here.
And more important: here's the fundraising page at ActBlue.
I'll be co-hosting the New York Fundraiser. Date TBD.
As one mutual friend remarked: "what has he done to deserve this." It's true, we're not doing him any favors but we're doing one for ourselves and for future of politics and civil liberties in this country.
Last year, the Digital First Amendment class at Stanford reported about the new Wikileaks project and one team even made the legal issues surrounding wikileaks the topic of their final project. Sometimes a school paper is more than just a school paper.
Here's the injunction ordering the take down of the domain (2 pages). The order is to the domain name registrar to take down the domain and thereby effectively block access to the site.
http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/images/Dynadot-injunction.pdf
Then the Amended Temporary Restraining Order handed down later the same day:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/2008-02-15-Amended%20Order%20Granting%20Temporary%20Restraining%20OrderAgainst%20Wikileaks.pdf
The Citizen Media Law Project comments:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2008/court-orders-wikileaksorg-shutdown-then-grants-limited-reprieve
The new order "drops the requirement that Dynadot disable the entire Wikileaks.org domain. Among other things, the amended order enjoins the defendants from "displaying, posting, publishing, distributing, or linking to . . . all documents and information originating from [the plaintiffs' banks] which are internal non-public company documents and/or which contains private client or customer bank records." (I should note, however, that the original order is still listed on the court's docket and the amended order does not rescind -- or even mention -- the earlier order.)"
The BBC Story appears after the injunction and before the TRO:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7250916.stm
The Wikileaks press release follows.
Copied wholesale from ThinkProgress.......
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/13/economic-indicators/
"The U.S. economy is faltering. Family debt is on the rise, benefits are disappearing, the deficit is skyrocketing, and the mortgage crisis has worsened. Conservatives have attempted to deflect attention from the crisis, by blaming the media’s negative coverage and insisting the United States is not headed toward a recession, despite what economists are predicting.
The Bush administration’s latest move is to simply hide the data. Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. As Forbes explains, the government site provides an invaluable service to the public for accessing U.S. economic data:
This site is maintained by the Economics and Statistics Administration and combines data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, like GDP and net imports and exports, and the Census Bureau, like retail sales and durable goods shipments. The site simply links to the relevant department’s Web site. This might not seem like a big deal, but doing it yourself–say, trying to find retail sales data on the Census Bureau’s site–is such an exercise in futility that it will convince you why this portal is necessary.
Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1:
Economic Indicators is particularly useful because people can sign up to receive e-mails as soon as new economic data across government agencies becomes available. While the data will still be available online at various federal websites, it will be less readily accessible to members of the public.
In its e-mail announcement on the closing of Economic Indicators, the Department of Commerce acknowledged the “inconvenience” and offered “a free quarterly subscription to STAT-USA®/Internet™” instead. Once this temporary subscription runs out, however, the public will be forced to pay a fee. So not only will economic data be more hidden, it will also cost money.
It’s ironic that the Economic and Statistics Administration is facing “budgetary contraints,” considering Bush recently submitted a record $3.1 trillion budget to Congress for FY ‘09.
UPDATE: Steve Benen has compiled other examples of the Bush administration hiding inconvenient data.
UPDATE II: OMB Watch has put together an index to replace Economic Indicators, offering one-stop-shopping for economic data links."
Peer-to-Patent is hosting a number of applications that need your expertise! There are currently 12 applications covering a wide array of inventions, including one by world-famous cryptographer, Whitfield Diffie
Method for configuring a windfarm network
(Submitted by GE, available for review until February 21, 2008)
Technique to modify a timer
(Submitted by Intel, available for review until February 28, 2008)
Cross-cutting detection of event patterns
(Submitted by IBM, available for review until March 6, 2008)
User interface paradigm for manufacturing applications
(Submitted by GE, available for review until March 13, 2008)
Computer compliance system and method
(Submitted by GE, available for review until March 13, 2008)
Vector length tracking mechanism
(Submitted by Intel, available for review until March 27, 2008)
Method and apparatus for determining the switch port to which an end-node device is connected
(Submitted by HP, available for review until March 27, 2008)
System and method for managing virtual collaboration systems
(Submitted by HP, available for review until March 27, 2008)
Automatic tracking of user data and reputation checking
(Submitted by Microsoft, available for review until March 27, 2008)
Relocating page tables
(Submitted by Sun Microsystems, available for review until April 3, 2008)
Method for generating mnemonic random passcodes
(Submitted by Sun Microsystems, available for review until April 17, 2008)
Method for resource sharing in a multiple pipeline environment
(Submitted by IBM, available for review until April 17, 2008)
Descriptions for each of the applications can be found here.
The success of Peer-to-Patent depends upon participation from a knowledgeable, diverse community. If you know anyone who might be interested in these applications, please forward this on to them or ask them to visit www.peertopatent.org!
Participation rates in the recent primaries and caucuses are way up. Ten times the number turned out in Nevada yesterday than in the previous presidential election! A number of new tools that help people visualize and therefore make sense of the issues may be helping to spark Interest in the candidates and their positions.
Here are a few examples of the kinds of visual tools we see emerging to use the computer interface more effectively to help us understand who the candidates are. In another post, I'll talk about visual tools that help us see ourselves as part of a community of supporters and inquire as to whether this makes us give more, join sooner and be active in ways we wouldn't have done before the ability to imagine ourselves as part of the collective.
Minnesota Public Radio developed a quiz to help people identify which candidate is most closely aligned with their views. Other media outlets have copied the quiz to disseminate the tool to local viewers.
Connect2Elect has users select and order keywords or tags that represent the most important views they want their ideal candidate to have. The website provides a "visualizer" that shows the user's views at the center and the candidates arrayed around her (like pins on a map). The site will also provide a rank-ordered list of candidates based on preferences entered.
Smartvote asks a series of questions about issues and priorities and then also displays a Kiviat diagram or visual map of the candidates in upcoming Swiss races. The site operates in the four Swiss national languages: German, French, Italian and Rumantsch.
ChoiceRanker is designed to be a polling tool to enable "collaborative expression of converging and diverging opinion." The site presents candidates in random order and asks users to cast their ballot for first, second, third etc choice. Using these ranked preferences, the interactive ballot demonstrates instant run-off voting. This is not an issue-ranking tool like the others but enables users to understand something about the depth of popularity and likely viability of a candidate.
