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LAW PUNDIT Tuesday, August 26, 2008 8/26/2008 04:33:00 PM [Home]
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Conservatives Liberals Libertarians and the Art of Seeing and Believing
Liberal: Believing is Seeing
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/26/2008 04:33:00 PM
Conservatives Liberals Libertarians and the Art of Seeing and Believing
A fried of mine sent me the following bumper sticker:
Conservative: Seeing is BelievingLiberal: Believing is Seeing
Our reply went something like this:
The distinction between Seeing and Believing is an artificial one.
Belief, verily, is the Absence of Proof.
Not Everything we Believe is True.
Not Everything we See is Accurately Perceived.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson so accurately observed:
"People only see what they are prepared to see."
Belief and Seeing are thus two sides of the same coin, toss it as you will.
To take a line from computer-speak:
The human doesn't see things as they are, but as HE is. - Racter
Such is man's attention to political issues that he neither sees nor believes that there is an invisible elephant. That is, unless of course, that elephant is standing on HIS own big toe.
Hence, people with no income do not complain about taxes. People with income do.
The Conservative "Sees" the Past. Usually, with an outdated pair of spectacles.
The Liberal "Sees" the Future. Usually, with a buggy beta-version of the newest sight improvement gizmo.
The Libertarian prefers to go blind throughout the world rather than accept the obvious.
The REALIST sees the world from the perspective of age, experience, necessity and wishfulness.
In other words, we live in an imperfect world. And thank goodness for that. It makes things ever so much more interesting.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/26/2008 04:33:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT Sunday, August 24, 2008 8/24/2008 07:07:00 PM [Home]
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How is the Economy Doing? One Way to Judge is to Check Out the Increasing Crowds at Discount Supermarkets : German Discounter ALDI Surges in the USA
When world leaders or Presidential candidates in the USA make statements about the state of the economy, who is telling the truth?
One way to judge how the economy is doing is to look at the clientele shopping at discount supermarkets. This Week in Germany points to the rising success of food discounters ALDI and Lidl throughout Europe:
"Rising food costs surely explain much of the discounters' success: As in America, the middle classes are trying to save money and are flocking to the cheaper stores to buy their groceries, which can cost some 30 to 50 percent less than at ordinary supermarkets."
But there is also an upcoming surge of ALDI in the United States, starting this fall in Florida, as written at Shopping Centers Today:
"In August Aldi announced a major U.S. expansion, promising at least 20 new stores for the central Florida cities of Orlando and Tampa."
Supermarket News calls it the Florida Invasion, with 100 new stores planned in the US this year, and Texas next in 2010.
Doris Hajewski at JS Online pointed to the state of the US economy in connection with the new Aldi surge:
"The low-profile, no-frills German grocery chain sees opportunity in the sagging U.S. economy, and Aldi is stepping up both its U.S. expansion plans and its profile."
One US Aldi shopper has described her shopping experience at Aldi this way:
"I can honestly say, after that first shopping experience to my local Aldi grocery store, I changed the way I looked at grocery shopping forever. My husband and I left Aldi that day with a loaded shopping cart full of grocery items as well as an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables. Our grocery receipt was almost half of the amount we would have normally spent for the same amount of groceries."
We can confirm that this is also true in Germany, where the current economic realities are the same as in the USA. As written by Carl Cronan:
"“People are focused on saving money, and Aldi is perceived as good value,” observes Patrick Berman, senior director, retail brokerage with Cushman & Wakefield of Florida Inc. in Tampa."
David Behm, vice president of Aldi’s Florida division, based in Orlando is quoted as follows:
"“Once people see the way we operate our stores and the success of our stores....” he says. “We’ve never pulled out of a single market in the United States.”"
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/24/2008 07:07:00 PM
How is the Economy Doing? One Way to Judge is to Check Out the Increasing Crowds at Discount Supermarkets : German Discounter ALDI Surges in the USA
When world leaders or Presidential candidates in the USA make statements about the state of the economy, who is telling the truth?
One way to judge how the economy is doing is to look at the clientele shopping at discount supermarkets. This Week in Germany points to the rising success of food discounters ALDI and Lidl throughout Europe:
"Rising food costs surely explain much of the discounters' success: As in America, the middle classes are trying to save money and are flocking to the cheaper stores to buy their groceries, which can cost some 30 to 50 percent less than at ordinary supermarkets."
But there is also an upcoming surge of ALDI in the United States, starting this fall in Florida, as written at Shopping Centers Today:
"In August Aldi announced a major U.S. expansion, promising at least 20 new stores for the central Florida cities of Orlando and Tampa."
Supermarket News calls it the Florida Invasion, with 100 new stores planned in the US this year, and Texas next in 2010.
Doris Hajewski at JS Online pointed to the state of the US economy in connection with the new Aldi surge:
"The low-profile, no-frills German grocery chain sees opportunity in the sagging U.S. economy, and Aldi is stepping up both its U.S. expansion plans and its profile."
One US Aldi shopper has described her shopping experience at Aldi this way:
"I can honestly say, after that first shopping experience to my local Aldi grocery store, I changed the way I looked at grocery shopping forever. My husband and I left Aldi that day with a loaded shopping cart full of grocery items as well as an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables. Our grocery receipt was almost half of the amount we would have normally spent for the same amount of groceries."
We can confirm that this is also true in Germany, where the current economic realities are the same as in the USA. As written by Carl Cronan:
"“People are focused on saving money, and Aldi is perceived as good value,” observes Patrick Berman, senior director, retail brokerage with Cushman & Wakefield of Florida Inc. in Tampa."
David Behm, vice president of Aldi’s Florida division, based in Orlando is quoted as follows:
"“Once people see the way we operate our stores and the success of our stores....” he says. “We’ve never pulled out of a single market in the United States.”"
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/24/2008 07:07:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT Friday, August 15, 2008 8/15/2008 05:15:00 PM [Home]
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"Rise Up!" and be Queen or King for a Day : Badoo Makes it Possible for its Users to Announce "I am here"
One of the rising stars in social networking is the London-based website Badoo. As written at the Wikipedia, Badoo has a number of interesting features, with the outstanding one being its method of finance:
"Badoo is a multi-lingual, London based, social networking website....
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/15/2008 05:15:00 PM
"Rise Up!" and be Queen or King for a Day : Badoo Makes it Possible for its Users to Announce "I am here"
One of the rising stars in social networking is the London-based website Badoo. As written at the Wikipedia, Badoo has a number of interesting features, with the outstanding one being its method of finance:
"Badoo is a multi-lingual, London based, social networking website....
Unlike other social networking services, Badoo does not incorporate advertising in any part of the site, thus a user's profile contains only user-generated content. It generates income through a "Rise Up" feature which allows users to pay to have their profile given more prominence on the site for a limited time. 20% of Badoo's 12.5 million users access this function once a month."
We find that to be an intriguing business model, which, it would seem to us, could also be used to sell goods and services online. We joined Badoo to try it out, but it seems to be very much directed at a much younger audience than yours truly. Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/15/2008 05:15:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/15/2008 03:52:00 PM [Home]
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The United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts
Via the August 2008 edition of Law@Stanford, a monthly e-newsletter for alumni and friends of Stanford Law School, we were directed to an article by Jeffrey Rosen at the New Republic on the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts, suggesting that Roberts is becoming more successful in getting a more united Supreme Court in terms of their decision-making.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/15/2008 03:52:00 PM
The United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts
Via the August 2008 edition of Law@Stanford, a monthly e-newsletter for alumni and friends of Stanford Law School, we were directed to an article by Jeffrey Rosen at the New Republic on the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts, suggesting that Roberts is becoming more successful in getting a more united Supreme Court in terms of their decision-making.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/15/2008 03:52:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT Thursday, August 14, 2008 8/14/2008 09:44:00 PM [Home]
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Landmark Federal Circuit Decision holds that Open Source Copyrights are Legally Enforceable
Here is a great Federal Circuit decision on Copyrights in Open Source which the New Media & Technology Law Blog (Jeffrey D. Neuburger) describes as follows:
"There are so few judicial opinions dealing with open source licenses that any single one is of great interest, but the pro-open source ruling of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Jacobsen v. Katzer, No. 2008-1001 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 13, 2008) easily goes to the top of the charts of this small category. This is a highly significant opinion that will greatly bolster the efforts of the open source community to control the use of open source software according to the terms set out in open source licenses."
Straight from Information Week by Paul McDougall , Information Week, August 14, 2008, and read the rest there:
"Open Source Copyrights Legally Enforceable, Appeals Court Rules
The federal appeals court said open source users that do not comply with the software's strict licensing terms can be sued for copyright infringement -- even if the software is free.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/14/2008 09:44:00 PM
Landmark Federal Circuit Decision holds that Open Source Copyrights are Legally Enforceable
Here is a great Federal Circuit decision on Copyrights in Open Source which the New Media & Technology Law Blog (Jeffrey D. Neuburger) describes as follows:
"There are so few judicial opinions dealing with open source licenses that any single one is of great interest, but the pro-open source ruling of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Jacobsen v. Katzer, No. 2008-1001 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 13, 2008) easily goes to the top of the charts of this small category. This is a highly significant opinion that will greatly bolster the efforts of the open source community to control the use of open source software according to the terms set out in open source licenses."
Straight from Information Week by Paul McDougall , Information Week
"Open Source Copyrights Legally Enforceable, Appeals Court Rules
The federal appeals court said open source users that do not comply with the software's strict licensing terms can be sued for copyright infringement -- even if the software is free.
A federal appeals court has struck down a lower court ruling that found that open source copyrights may not be legally enforceable if they're licensed under terms that are "intentionally broad."
"We consider here the ability of a copyright holder to dedicate certain work to free public use and yet enforce an "open source" copyright license to control the future distribution and modification of that work.....
Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material."
That takes care of that.
Ruling on an appeal brought by software developer Robert Jacobsen, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said Wednesday that open source users that do not comply with the software's strict licensing terms can, in fact, be sued for copyright infringement -- even if the software is free."
In the opinion for the Federal Circuit, District Judge Hochberg stated simply and clearly:"We consider here the ability of a copyright holder to dedicate certain work to free public use and yet enforce an "open source" copyright license to control the future distribution and modification of that work.....
Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control the modification and distribution of copyrighted material."
That takes care of that.
Read the rest at Information Week and at the New Media & Technology Law Blog.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/14/2008 09:44:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/14/2008 02:37:00 PM [Home]
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Medical Alert : Can Sweetener Aspartame Cause Depression after High Doses of 0%-Sugar Zero-type Soft Drinks? Can Phenylalanine Cause Seizures?
Sainsbury's large retail supermarket chain in the UK banned the controversial sweetener aspartame from soft drinks on its shelves in 2007, but aspartame-containing soft drinks are still readily available around the world.
Natural News writes about Aspartame as follows:
"The problem with aspartame lies in overconsumption....
Aspartame, the artificial sweetener that often flavors sugar-free drinks and foods, has been known to induce convulsions and grand mal seizures in certain individuals. So why is it still on peoples' shopping lists?"
Good question. One reason is that over 130 countries have approved aspartame for use in foods and drinks, as one can read at the Coca-Cola (TM) website. Aspartame is marketed as a sweetener, 180 times more powerful than sugar, under trade names such as Equal (TM) and Nutrasweet (TM). It is also added liberally to "diet" foods and "diet" drinks. Are there any dangers?
We think the answer is definitely yes. Let us look at the following - very personal, and quite recent - case study involving aspartame in a soft drink beverage.
The LawPundit is nearing age 62, and, yet, a fellow golfer recently stated to another player in our threesome that no golfer he had ever met over 45 years of age hit their drives longer than I do (that may be overstating it a bit). In any case, I am thus quite healthy and strong for my age and take no medication of any kind, although I have been struggling with moderate weight gain in recent years. The scales recently hit 215 pounds. For 6 feet tall that is not bad, but as you get older that added weight begins to settle in places you don't want it, ala John Daly, of whom I am a big fan when he is playing well, but health and performance tend to suffer from excess weight and from the kind of lifestyle that leads to weight gain.
Nevertheless, although over the years I have sampled an occasional "diet" food or have drunk - rarely - beverages containing an "artificial sweetener", I have stuck to eating and drinking normal foods and real sugar beverages (normal soft drinks), simply because I do not like the taste of artificial sweeteners. Really, that stuff tastes bad - of course to my personal and individual tastebuds.
By contrast, on a normal day I can without difficulty put away a couple of big bottles of classic Coca Cola (TM), or, in the USA, also those great root beers like Sonic, Mug, A&W and many more root beer brands that food chains - sadly - do not sell in Europe. I was told recently that drinking such large quantities of sugared soft drinks was a contributing cause to weight gain.
So, yesterday
- rather than buying a normal "sugared" Coke (TM) viz. Coca-Cola (TM)) or a lower-priced cloned natural-sugar cola (Edeka and Aldi in Germany e.g.) -
I purchased a large bottle (1.5 liters) of one of those 0% sugar ("zero type") cola drinks (in this case a non-Coca-Cola "Freeway 0%" cola from the food chain Lidl). Such a 0%-sugar cola contains no sugar but it DOES contain the artificial sweetener aspartame (ASP), an ingredient which is specifically designated as a source of phenylalanine on the German bottle label because of the danger of phenylalanine to people with Phenylketonuria (explained further below). The German label reads "Phenylalaninquelle".
Also Coca-Cola Zero (TM) (i.e. Coke Zero) (TM) from the Coca-Cola Company, the world's largest beverage company, contains aspartame as an ingredient.
The problem is that "coke drinkers", for example, who drink Coca-Cola Zero (Coke Zero) or a competing 0%-sugar cola know little if anything about aspartame or phenylalanine. How much is in any given soft drink batch or bottle? How much, if any, is harmful?
Today, due to the very unexpected and quite astonishing negative depressing effect of that aspartame 0%-sugar cola on me after drinking a full 1.5 liters of it, I thought I better check the soft drink ingredients online to see if aspartame had any known side effects like depression (it did - see e.g. one report here) .
In fact, aspartame is a substance which is broken down in the body into three substances, indeed, potentially VERY harmful substances. As written by Dr. Lendon Smith:
"This compound breaks down in the system to: * 1) phenylalanine (50%) which can be neurotoxic and in some susceptible people will cause seizures * 2) aspartic acid (40%) which can cause brain damage in the developing brain * 3) methanol (10%) which turns into formaldehyde embalming fluid an obvious toxin. They all have adverse effects, but not everyone is affected equally. This is why the scientific community is having trouble evaluating these anecdotal reports."
What is even more remarkable is that there is almost no evidence that aspartame has ANY beneficial effects when taken with foods or drinks. Quite the contrary, the Daily Mail in the UK writes Why low-calorie sweeteners are 'more fattening than sugar':
"One of the first rules of weight watching has always been: Put the sugar bowl at the back of the cupboard and use low-calorie sweeteners from now on.
No more aspartame for this writer. And no artificial sweeteners of any kind. The key to weight loss appears to be to just to cut down a bit on food, drink and sugar intake.
The food and drug authorities around the world should start looking into this matter of aspartame a bit more deeply and far more critically than they have done up to now.
______________
Please note that the author of this LawPundit posting, Andis Kaulins, is licensed as a pharmaceutical consultant in Germany, competent to advise even physicians about the effects and side effects of medicinal drugs.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/14/2008 02:37:00 PM
Medical Alert : Can Sweetener Aspartame Cause Depression after High Doses of 0%-Sugar Zero-type Soft Drinks? Can Phenylalanine Cause Seizures?
Sainsbury's large retail supermarket chain in the UK banned the controversial sweetener aspartame from soft drinks on its shelves in 2007, but aspartame-containing soft drinks are still readily available around the world.
Natural News writes about Aspartame as follows:
"The problem with aspartame lies in overconsumption....
Aspartame, the artificial sweetener that often flavors sugar-free drinks and foods, has been known to induce convulsions and grand mal seizures in certain individuals. So why is it still on peoples' shopping lists?"
Good question. One reason is that over 130 countries have approved aspartame for use in foods and drinks, as one can read at the Coca-Cola (TM) website. Aspartame is marketed as a sweetener, 180 times more powerful than sugar, under trade names such as Equal (TM) and Nutrasweet (TM). It is also added liberally to "diet" foods and "diet" drinks. Are there any dangers?
We think the answer is definitely yes. Let us look at the following - very personal, and quite recent - case study involving aspartame in a soft drink beverage.
The LawPundit is nearing age 62, and, yet, a fellow golfer recently stated to another player in our threesome that no golfer he had ever met over 45 years of age hit their drives longer than I do (that may be overstating it a bit). In any case, I am thus quite healthy and strong for my age and take no medication of any kind, although I have been struggling with moderate weight gain in recent years. The scales recently hit 215 pounds. For 6 feet tall that is not bad, but as you get older that added weight begins to settle in places you don't want it, ala John Daly, of whom I am a big fan when he is playing well, but health and performance tend to suffer from excess weight and from the kind of lifestyle that leads to weight gain.
Nevertheless, although over the years I have sampled an occasional "diet" food or have drunk - rarely - beverages containing an "artificial sweetener", I have stuck to eating and drinking normal foods and real sugar beverages (normal soft drinks), simply because I do not like the taste of artificial sweeteners. Really, that stuff tastes bad - of course to my personal and individual tastebuds.
By contrast, on a normal day I can without difficulty put away a couple of big bottles of classic Coca Cola (TM), or, in the USA, also those great root beers like Sonic, Mug, A&W and many more root beer brands that food chains - sadly - do not sell in Europe. I was told recently that drinking such large quantities of sugared soft drinks was a contributing cause to weight gain.
So, yesterday
- rather than buying a normal "sugared" Coke (TM) viz. Coca-Cola (TM)) or a lower-priced cloned natural-sugar cola (Edeka and Aldi in Germany e.g.) -
I purchased a large bottle (1.5 liters) of one of those 0% sugar ("zero type") cola drinks (in this case a non-Coca-Cola "Freeway 0%" cola from the food chain Lidl). Such a 0%-sugar cola contains no sugar but it DOES contain the artificial sweetener aspartame (ASP), an ingredient which is specifically designated as a source of phenylalanine on the German bottle label because of the danger of phenylalanine to people with Phenylketonuria (explained further below). The German label reads "Phenylalaninquelle".
Also Coca-Cola Zero (TM) (i.e. Coke Zero) (TM) from the Coca-Cola Company, the world's largest beverage company, contains aspartame as an ingredient.
The problem is that "coke drinkers", for example, who drink Coca-Cola Zero (Coke Zero) or a competing 0%-sugar cola know little if anything about aspartame or phenylalanine. How much is in any given soft drink batch or bottle? How much, if any, is harmful?
Today, due to the very unexpected and quite astonishing negative depressing effect of that aspartame 0%-sugar cola on me after drinking a full 1.5 liters of it, I thought I better check the soft drink ingredients online to see if aspartame had any known side effects like depression (it did - see e.g. one report here) .
In fact, aspartame is a substance which is broken down in the body into three substances, indeed, potentially VERY harmful substances. As written by Dr. Lendon Smith:
"This compound breaks down in the system to: * 1) phenylalanine (50%) which can be neurotoxic and in some susceptible people will cause seizures * 2) aspartic acid (40%) which can cause brain damage in the developing brain * 3) methanol (10%) which turns into formaldehyde embalming fluid an obvious toxin. They all have adverse effects, but not everyone is affected equally. This is why the scientific community is having trouble evaluating these anecdotal reports."
This information was a possible explanation for my condition yesterday afternoon and still for the good part of today after having drunk 1.5 liters of that 0%-sugar cola quickly all in one afternoon sitting (it was hot). Was there a causal connection between my depressed state and the drinking of that 0%-sugar cola?
People who know me well know that I am not subject to any kind of depression, also not in combination with alcohol. Quite the contrary, I tend to get livelier as the evening wears on. As far as I know, I have never really been depressed a day in my life, until - that is to say - starting yesterday afternoon and continuing today, after I drank that whole bottle of the 0%-sugar cola the day before. Indeed, my sleep the entire night was very disturbed, until I got up this morning, feeling - for lack of a better word - depressed, although I am not sure that I am correctly defining my state, since it was foreign to me. Nor did I have any reason to feel depressed, which I equate with feeling senselessly "down" rather than optimistically "up", my normal state.
Although of course a causal relationship for this kind of event is very difficult to establish, whatever was in that 0%-sugar cola was - in my opinion - an almost immediate cause of that depression. This could only be caused by aspartame.
Most scientific studies seem to suggest that there are no grievous health effects to be feared from aspartame (e.g. the MIT CRC study ten years ago), but other independent studies and curious developments seem to point to a persistent and disturbing thread that not everything is quite right with aspartame. Indeed, in 2006 the Holland Sweetener Company, Europe's largest maker of aspartame, exited the aspartame sweetener business entirely. Indeed, some commentators think that fear of the aspartame carcinogenic study by the Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences in Italy was responsible for that development. The then parent company Royal DSM N.V. (22000 employees) in fact continues to make other sweeteners, but no longer aspartame. Why that?
The European Food Safety Authority considered but did not attach any significant weight to that above-mentioned report by Ramazzini, a study which seems to suggest that aspartame could be carcinogenic. The Daily Mail in the UK reported:
"Their report concluded: "In our experimental conditions, it has been demonstrated, for the first time, that aspartame causes a dose-related statistically significant increase in lymphomas and leukaemias in females at levels very near those to which humans can be exposed." "
Furthermore, phenylalanine, one of the byproducts of aspartame metabolism, is also definitely related to a heightened propensity for epileptic-type seizures in humans, a propensity also documented in monkeys.
In the United States, the FDA has thus far also seen no cause for concern. However, one of the products of aspartame, phenylalanine, is a deadly poison to people who suffer from Phenylketonuria (PKU):
"Phenylketonuria (PKU) is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder characterized by a deficiency in the enzyme phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH). This enzyme is necessary to metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine to the amino acid tyrosine. When PAH is deficient, phenylalanine accumulates and is converted into phenylpyruvate (also known as phenylketone), which is detected in the urine. PAH is found on chromosome number 12.
Left untreated, this condition can cause problems with brain development, leading to progressive mental retardation and seizures. However, PKU is one of the few genetic diseases that can be controlled by diet. A diet low in phenylalanine and high in tyrosine can be a very effective treatment. There is no cure. Damage done is irreversible so early detection is crucial."
To put it bluntly, phenylalanine does not look like the kind of substance you want to have in your body in large amounts as a byproduct of ingesting aspartame, even if you do not suffer from Phenylketonuria.What is even more remarkable is that there is almost no evidence that aspartame has ANY beneficial effects when taken with foods or drinks. Quite the contrary, the Daily Mail in the UK writes Why low-calorie sweeteners are 'more fattening than sugar':
"One of the first rules of weight watching has always been: Put the sugar bowl at the back of the cupboard and use low-calorie sweeteners from now on.
But researchers suggested yesterday that dieters might be better sticking with sugar after all.
They think that a sweet taste can prompt the body to prepare for a large intake of calories.
When this does not arrive, the body then becomes confused and either demands more food or burns less energy - with the result showing on the scales.
"The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharin can lead to greater body-weight gain than the same food sweetened with high-calorie sugar," say the U.S. team behind the research."
No more aspartame for this writer. And no artificial sweeteners of any kind. The key to weight loss appears to be to just to cut down a bit on food, drink and sugar intake.
The food and drug authorities around the world should start looking into this matter of aspartame a bit more deeply and far more critically than they have done up to now.
______________
Please note that the author of this LawPundit posting, Andis Kaulins, is licensed as a pharmaceutical consultant in Germany, competent to advise even physicians about the effects and side effects of medicinal drugs.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/14/2008 02:37:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT Wednesday, August 13, 2008 8/13/2008 01:50:00 AM [Home]
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Top 100 Most Prestigious Law Firms in the World According to Vault.com
[This posting has been updated from a previous version.]
Vault.com has just published its annual list
of the Top 100 Most Prestigious Law Firms,
as determined by the Vault.com associate survey.
Our former law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, which, in our opinion, remains the top litigation, telecommunications and entertainment law firm in the country, remained at the same overall 13th spot - in the eyes of the surveyed law associates everywhere - that it held last year.
The rest of the Top 100 can be viewed at Vault.com.
Many may want to buy Vault Guides (we have copied the descriptions and links below from the Vault.com site - see the originals with graphic here):
Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, 2009 Edition
Based on surveys of more than 18,000 associates at over 167 top law firms. It includes profiles of 167 of the nations' top law firms compiled for jobseekers, as well as exclusive Vault rankings of the Top 100 Law firms, the Best 20 to Work For, the Best 20 Law Firms for Diversity, and regional, practice area, and quality of life rankings.
Vault Top 100 Law Firm Survey Corporate Research Report, 2009 Edition
Get complete prestige rankings of firms by law school, location and practice area. See how your firm ranks against competitors at law schools, locations, and practice areas most important to your firm. Complete charts for salary, billable hours, bonus rate, and bonus policy with respect to billables, broken down by firm, location and department.
There are other Guides as well, such as these:
Vault Guide to the Top New York law firms:
Vault Guide to the Top Boston & Northeast Law Firms
Vault Guide to the Top Chicago & Midwest Law Firms
Vault Guide to the Top Washington, DC Law Firms
Vault Guide to the Top Southern California Law Firms
Vault Guide to the Top Northern California Law Firms
Other blogs posting on this topic:
Above the Law
MarketWatch.com
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/13/2008 01:50:00 AM
Top 100 Most Prestigious Law Firms in the World According to Vault.com
[This posting has been updated from a previous version.]
Vault.com has just published its annual list
of the Top 100 Most Prestigious Law Firms,
as determined by the Vault.com associate survey.
Our former law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, which, in our opinion, remains the top litigation, telecommunications and entertainment law firm in the country, remained at the same overall 13th spot - in the eyes of the surveyed law associates everywhere - that it held last year.
The rest of the Top 100 can be viewed at Vault.com.
Many may want to buy Vault Guides (we have copied the descriptions and links below from the Vault.com site - see the originals with graphic here):
Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, 2009 Edition
Based on surveys of more than 18,000 associates at over 167 top law firms. It includes profiles of 167 of the nations' top law firms compiled for jobseekers, as well as exclusive Vault rankings of the Top 100 Law firms, the Best 20 to Work For, the Best 20 Law Firms for Diversity, and regional, practice area, and quality of life rankings.
 | Get your guide now |
Vault Top 100 Law Firm Survey Corporate Research Report, 2009 Edition
Get complete prestige rankings of firms by law school, location and practice area. See how your firm ranks against competitors at law schools, locations, and practice areas most important to your firm. Complete charts for salary, billable hours, bonus rate, and bonus policy with respect to billables, broken down by firm, location and department.
| | Get the research report now" |
There are other Guides as well, such as these:
Vault Guide to the Top New York law firms:Vault Guide to the Top Boston & Northeast Law FirmsVault Guide to the Top Chicago & Midwest Law FirmsVault Guide to the Top Washington, DC Law FirmsVault Guide to the Top Southern California Law FirmsVault Guide to the Top Northern California Law FirmsOther blogs posting on this topic:
Above the Law
MarketWatch.com
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/13/2008 01:50:00 AM
LAW PUNDIT Tuesday, August 12, 2008 8/12/2008 01:44:00 PM [Home]
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The Million Dollar Blawg : Calculate the Value of Your Weblog with Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Blog Worth Calculator
Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog has a blog valuation service - the Blog Worth Calculator - whereby you merely plug in the respective URL and it calculates the value of almost any blog based on "Data from Technorati and inspired by research from Tristan Louis. Photo CC by Cmiper." The valuation is made on a "link to dollar ratio" based on Louis Tristan's Doing the numbers on the AOL-WeblogsInc deal.
We now apply the Blog Worth Calculator to a specific selection of blogs on the Internet.
The Million Dollar Blawg
is a near tossup between the Volokh Conspiracy, valued (today) at $1,300,135.62
and the Lessig Blog, valued at $1,243,681.62.
The Wall Street Journal Online Law Blog is stretching toward the million threshold value at $885,763.26 while Balkinization trails at $732,208.38 followed by Instapundit at a value of $597,283.32.
But these are mere valuation lightweights compared to popular political, technological or homespun mass media blogs such as these below (values are subject to change, day to day):
Business Opportunities Weblog - $2,832,297.18 (this amount conflicts with blog's own widget)
Gawker - $3,929,762.94
Official Google Blog - $4,713,909.00
Seth Godin - $4,802,541.78
Gigazine （ギガジン） 携帯電話を無線LANルーター化してFONのアクセスポイントにできるソフトウェアが登場 - $5,516,120.34
Smashing Magazine - $5,686,046.88
Daily Kos - $5,757,178.92
ReadWriteWeb - $5,963,236.02
Mashable - $6,204,294.60
icanhascheezburger - $6,672,298.26
Ars Technica - $8,185,830.00
Lifehacker - $8,918,602.92
Tech Crunch - $12,785,701.92
Engadget - $11,516,616.00
and, the champion under all blogs,
The Huffington Post - $15,457,669.74
- at least we were unable to find any blog that was valued higher than that:
update, unless one values the worth of Bloglines - $27,878,678.82,
but that is not really a pure blog but rather a blog service)
- using the Blog Worth Calculator, we could not, however, get values for sites like e.g. Gizmodo, Boing Boing, NYT Caucus Blog)
More on this topic at Susan Gunelius, Have You Calculated Your Blog's Worth?
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/12/2008 01:44:00 PM
The Million Dollar Blawg : Calculate the Value of Your Weblog with Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Blog Worth Calculator
Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog has a blog valuation service - the Blog Worth Calculator - whereby you merely plug in the respective URL and it calculates the value of almost any blog based on "Data from Technorati and inspired by research from Tristan Louis. Photo CC by Cmiper." The valuation is made on a "link to dollar ratio" based on Louis Tristan's Doing the numbers on the AOL-WeblogsInc deal.
We now apply the Blog Worth Calculator to a specific selection of blogs on the Internet.
The Million Dollar Blawg
is a near tossup between the Volokh Conspiracy, valued (today) at $1,300,135.62
and the Lessig Blog, valued at $1,243,681.62.
The Wall Street Journal Online Law Blog is stretching toward the million threshold value at $885,763.26 while Balkinization trails at $732,208.38 followed by Instapundit at a value of $597,283.32.
But these are mere valuation lightweights compared to popular political, technological or homespun mass media blogs such as these below (values are subject to change, day to day):
Business Opportunities Weblog - $2,832,297.18 (this amount conflicts with blog's own widget)
Gawker - $3,929,762.94
Official Google Blog - $4,713,909.00
Seth Godin - $4,802,541.78
Gigazine （ギガジン） 携帯電話を無線LANルーター化してFONのアクセスポイントにできるソフトウェアが登場 - $5,516,120.34
Smashing Magazine - $5,686,046.88
Daily Kos - $5,757,178.92
ReadWriteWeb - $5,963,236.02
Mashable - $6,204,294.60
icanhascheezburger - $6,672,298.26
Ars Technica - $8,185,830.00
Lifehacker - $8,918,602.92
Tech Crunch - $12,785,701.92
Engadget - $11,516,616.00
and, the champion under all blogs,
The Huffington Post - $15,457,669.74
- at least we were unable to find any blog that was valued higher than that:
update, unless one values the worth of Bloglines - $27,878,678.82,
but that is not really a pure blog but rather a blog service)
- using the Blog Worth Calculator, we could not, however, get values for sites like e.g. Gizmodo, Boing Boing, NYT Caucus Blog)
More on this topic at Susan Gunelius, Have You Calculated Your Blog's Worth?
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/12/2008 01:44:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/12/2008 12:54:00 PM [Home]
[Print]
Networking for the Legal Profession + Ways to Get Wild About Work, Increase Energy, Raise Kids & Improve the Environment, Reducing a Family Footprint
Building a Solo Practice has a posting titled Networking for Shy Lawyers, linking to 25 posts as compiled by the M.A.P. Maker on networking for shy people.
DO LOOK at both those websites.
Building a Solo Practice by Susan Cartier Liebel is very popular among solo practitioners
while M.A.P. Maker Curt Rosengren is a self-named Passion Catalyst
who has written a book aptly titled 101 Ways to Get Wild About Work
and links to blogs like Organicasm
which posts about things like
69 Natural Ways to Increase Your Energy
or (to improve family life after days in the office)
Go Green Early: 100 Tips, Resources, and Networks for Raising Kids the Environmentally-Friendly Way
or (to do your share to improve the environment)
Consumption Culture: 50 Easy Ways to Curtail Your Family’s Footprint
Our favorite in that last list is number 41,
which applies to nearly EVERYONE,
as a means to do a little bit against climate change:
Travel light:
Whenever possible,
walk or bike instead of taking your car.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/12/2008 12:54:00 PM
Networking for the Legal Profession + Ways to Get Wild About Work, Increase Energy, Raise Kids & Improve the Environment, Reducing a Family Footprint
Building a Solo Practice has a posting titled Networking for Shy Lawyers, linking to 25 posts as compiled by the M.A.P. Maker on networking for shy people.
DO LOOK at both those websites.
Building a Solo Practice by Susan Cartier Liebel is very popular among solo practitioners
while M.A.P. Maker Curt Rosengren is a self-named Passion Catalyst
who has written a book aptly titled 101 Ways to Get Wild About Work
and links to blogs like Organicasm
which posts about things like
69 Natural Ways to Increase Your Energy
or (to improve family life after days in the office)
Go Green Early: 100 Tips, Resources, and Networks for Raising Kids the Environmentally-Friendly Way
or (to do your share to improve the environment)
Consumption Culture: 50 Easy Ways to Curtail Your Family’s Footprint
Our favorite in that last list is number 41,
which applies to nearly EVERYONE,
as a means to do a little bit against climate change:
Travel light:
Whenever possible,
walk or bike instead of taking your car.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/12/2008 12:54:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/12/2008 11:24:00 AM [Home]
[Print]
HEADLINE UPDATE : Russia Ends War with Georgia over South Ossetia : The Roots of the Conflict by Anatol Lieven
UPDATE : RUSSIA ENDS WAR
Just minutes ago, via CNN from Moscow:
"Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced Tuesday that he has ordered an end to military operations against Georgia. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has called a halt to the advance of Russian troops in Georgia.
The announcement came minutes before French President Nicolas Sarkozy was to land in Moscow to meet with Medvedev to negotiate terms for a possible cease-fire.
__________
The best analysis that we have seen in discussing the immediate origins of the conflict between Georgia and Russia is found at the Times Online in an August 11, 2008 article by Anatol Lieven titled Analysis: roots of the conflict between Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia. Lieven is "a professor at King’s College London and a senior Fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington DC. In 1990-96 he was a correspondent for The Times in the former Soviet Union, including Georgia".
Lieven writes in conclusion of his article, which should be recommended reading for all the ill-informed commentators one currently finds on the web:
"Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin made it clear again and again that if Georgia attacked South Ossetia, Russia would fight. Georgian advocates in the West claimed that Moscow was only bluffing. It wasn’t."
Many Europeans think that Georgia was at fault for the war, having intentionally and unforgivably chosen the opening days of the Olympic Games (when Bush and Putin were in China) to attack Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia .... thinking they could get away with it.
The Russian response was quite clear and expected. The actions of Georgia really left the Russians no other choice. Putin had been quoted as saying that the Russians would take this matter to its "logical conclusion". There is no way that the Russians could tolerate the destruction of Tskhinvali in this manner and the killing of thousands of people, many of them civilians, that it regards to be its citizens. It had no option but to take measures to protect South Ossetia and also Abkhazia.
Some of the responsibility for this entire conflict can be placed right at the feet of Western politicians, who, through their naive and gullible NATO posturing, led the Georgian regime into a sense of security that the actions that they took against Tskhinvali were not dangerous to them, because the West would protect them (the Baltic nations in past history always made this mistake of relying too much on the West for protection), and this would mean that the Russians would not or could not retaliate as they must do if they are to retain respect in their own immediate geographic region.
Unfortunately, this kind of numb diplomacy by the United States has precedent. The entire matter reminds one of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which would not have happened if the USA had not given Iraq the wrong diplomatic message:
"On Wednesday July 25, 1990, the U.S. Ambassador in Iraq, April Glaspie, asked the Iraqi high command to explain the military preparations in progress, including the massing of Iraqi troops near the border. The American ambassador declared to her Iraqi interlocutor that Washington, “inspired by the friendship and not by confrontation, does not have an opinion” on the disagreement which opposes Kuwait to Iraq, stating "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts". She also let Saddam Hussein know that the U.S. did not intend "to start an economic war against Iraq". These statements may have misled Saddam into believing he had received a diplomatic green light from the United States to invade Kuwait (New York Times, September 23, 1990)."
We need a higher learning curve in world politics in the Western nations.
__________
UPDATE
CNN picked up on this LawPundit posting at their featured From the Blogs (we clipped part of that CNN page and present it below):
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/12/2008 11:24:00 AM
HEADLINE UPDATE : Russia Ends War with Georgia over South Ossetia : The Roots of the Conflict by Anatol Lieven
UPDATE : RUSSIA ENDS WAR
Just minutes ago, via CNN from Moscow:
"Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced Tuesday that he has ordered an end to military operations against Georgia. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has called a halt to the advance of Russian troops in Georgia.
The announcement came minutes before French President Nicolas Sarkozy was to land in Moscow to meet with Medvedev to negotiate terms for a possible cease-fire.
"I have reached a decision to halt the operation to force the Georgian authorities to peace," Medvedev said. "The aggressor has been punished and has incurred very significant losses. Its armed forces are disorganized."
...
The Russians say Saakashvili attacked first in an attempt to gain control of South Ossetia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an earlier news conference Tuesday that Russia wanted a demilitarized zone to be created in Georgian territory before a cease-fire took effect."__________
The best analysis that we have seen in discussing the immediate origins of the conflict between Georgia and Russia is found at the Times Online in an August 11, 2008 article by Anatol Lieven titled Analysis: roots of the conflict between Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia. Lieven is "a professor at King’s College London and a senior Fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington DC. In 1990-96 he was a correspondent for The Times in the former Soviet Union, including Georgia".
Lieven writes in conclusion of his article, which should be recommended reading for all the ill-informed commentators one currently finds on the web:
"Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin made it clear again and again that if Georgia attacked South Ossetia, Russia would fight. Georgian advocates in the West claimed that Moscow was only bluffing. It wasn’t."
Many Europeans think that Georgia was at fault for the war, having intentionally and unforgivably chosen the opening days of the Olympic Games (when Bush and Putin were in China) to attack Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia .... thinking they could get away with it.
The Russian response was quite clear and expected. The actions of Georgia really left the Russians no other choice. Putin had been quoted as saying that the Russians would take this matter to its "logical conclusion". There is no way that the Russians could tolerate the destruction of Tskhinvali in this manner and the killing of thousands of people, many of them civilians, that it regards to be its citizens. It had no option but to take measures to protect South Ossetia and also Abkhazia.
Some of the responsibility for this entire conflict can be placed right at the feet of Western politicians, who, through their naive and gullible NATO posturing, led the Georgian regime into a sense of security that the actions that they took against Tskhinvali were not dangerous to them, because the West would protect them (the Baltic nations in past history always made this mistake of relying too much on the West for protection), and this would mean that the Russians would not or could not retaliate as they must do if they are to retain respect in their own immediate geographic region.
Unfortunately, this kind of numb diplomacy by the United States has precedent. The entire matter reminds one of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which would not have happened if the USA had not given Iraq the wrong diplomatic message:
"On Wednesday July 25, 1990, the U.S. Ambassador in Iraq, April Glaspie, asked the Iraqi high command to explain the military preparations in progress, including the massing of Iraqi troops near the border. The American ambassador declared to her Iraqi interlocutor that Washington, “inspired by the friendship and not by confrontation, does not have an opinion” on the disagreement which opposes Kuwait to Iraq, stating "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts". She also let Saddam Hussein know that the U.S. did not intend "to start an economic war against Iraq". These statements may have misled Saddam into believing he had received a diplomatic green light from the United States to invade Kuwait (New York Times, September 23, 1990)."
We need a higher learning curve in world politics in the Western nations.
__________
UPDATE
CNN picked up on this LawPundit posting at their featured From the Blogs (we clipped part of that CNN page and present it below):
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/12/2008 11:24:00 AM
LAW PUNDIT Monday, August 11, 2008 8/11/2008 10:21:00 PM [Home]
[Print]
Usefulness of Expert Witnesses in Trade Mark Disputes
All things in law and life are decided upon facts or evidence, at least what we view to be facts or evidence, or the absence of same.
Throughout our professional life, we have been very skeptical of "experts", especially if this involves any of the humanities. In the physical sciences, an engineer's motor is subject to testing. Either it runs or not. This is often not true for expert testimony in other less exact fields, however, where witnesses seek to exert their alleged "authority", without any better proof for their opinions than those held by normal citizens.
In this regard, it is thus interesting to read Lady Justice Arden's UK ruling in Judge says expert witnesses are rarely useful for trade mark disputes. As the ruling clearly demonstrates, it is all really rather a matter of opinion...but there are SOME facts.
Hat tip to Out-Law.com.
OK, this posting ends our experiment with Zemanta. Some interesting ideas, but not yet that useful to us in terms of links or the photo gallery provided.
UPDATE ON EXPERT WITNESSES
Martha Neil at the ABA Journal News may have the "down under" solution in her posting today, When Expert Witnesses Disagree, ‘Hot-Tubbing’ is a Possible Solution, where she writes:
"When expert witnesses have opposing views of the same evidence, even the judge can be daunted.... Australia, however, has successfully pursued a different path toward resolution: "hot-tubbing." Putting the experts together and allowing them to question each other, rather than making their reports in isolation, can eliminate many disagreements. The Australian approach also accords with the established American system of allowing each side to present its own case."
Sounds good.
A SECOND UPDATE ON EXPERT WITNESSES
It is sometimes remarkable how some topics seem to surface concurrently on media. Adam Liptak at the The New York Times also has an article on expert witnesses, as his article In U.S., Partisan Expert Witnesses Frustrate Many targets the major weakness of the US expert witness system, which is that expert witnesses tend to take the side of the party who is paying them, leading to biased testimony on both sides of a legal case.
Again, we think that "hot tubbing" would also be a recommended solution for the problem we see in peer-reviewed academic journals especially in the humanities - but also in the physical sciences, which is that there is primarily a one-sided presentation of issues, rather than a balanced handling of important scientific questions.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/11/2008 10:21:00 PM
Usefulness of Expert Witnesses in Trade Mark Disputes
All things in law and life are decided upon facts or evidence, at least what we view to be facts or evidence, or the absence of same.
Throughout our professional life, we have been very skeptical of "experts", especially if this involves any of the humanities. In the physical sciences, an engineer's motor is subject to testing. Either it runs or not. This is often not true for expert testimony in other less exact fields, however, where witnesses seek to exert their alleged "authority", without any better proof for their opinions than those held by normal citizens.
In this regard, it is thus interesting to read Lady Justice Arden's UK ruling in Judge says expert witnesses are rarely useful for trade mark disputes. As the ruling clearly demonstrates, it is all really rather a matter of opinion...but there are SOME facts.
Hat tip to Out-Law.com.
OK, this posting ends our experiment with Zemanta. Some interesting ideas, but not yet that useful to us in terms of links or the photo gallery provided.
UPDATE ON EXPERT WITNESSES
Martha Neil at the ABA Journal News may have the "down under" solution in her posting today, When Expert Witnesses Disagree, ‘Hot-Tubbing’ is a Possible Solution, where she writes:
"When expert witnesses have opposing views of the same evidence, even the judge can be daunted.... Australia, however, has successfully pursued a different path toward resolution: "hot-tubbing." Putting the experts together and allowing them to question each other, rather than making their reports in isolation, can eliminate many disagreements. The Australian approach also accords with the established American system of allowing each side to present its own case."
Sounds good.
A SECOND UPDATE ON EXPERT WITNESSES
It is sometimes remarkable how some topics seem to surface concurrently on media. Adam Liptak at the The New York Times also has an article on expert witnesses, as his article In U.S., Partisan Expert Witnesses Frustrate Many targets the major weakness of the US expert witness system, which is that expert witnesses tend to take the side of the party who is paying them, leading to biased testimony on both sides of a legal case.
Again, we think that "hot tubbing" would also be a recommended solution for the problem we see in peer-reviewed academic journals especially in the humanities - but also in the physical sciences, which is that there is primarily a one-sided presentation of issues, rather than a balanced handling of important scientific questions.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/11/2008 10:21:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/11/2008 06:10:00 PM [Home]
[Print]
Email Archiving and Hosting Outsourcing Solutions for Firms and Businesses in Compliance with Legislation : SEC CFTC Sarbanes Oxley NASD NYSE FRCP
Is your professional, firm or business email archiving in compliance with legislation in force? SEC? CFTC? Sarbanes-Oxley? NASD? NYSE? And what about the FRCP? And what about email hosting outsourcing?
GFI Software, a software company specializing in content and network security, messaging and compliance solutions for SMBs, at very competitive prices, has compiled various documents focusing on email archiving laws affecting businesses in the United States.
One such particular document by GFI is a short article on Email archiving in the US : The key laws that affect your business covering the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
One of the products of GFI is the GFI MailArchiver, designed to comply with legislation covering email archiving, and we find that it can be downloaded on a trial basis at ZDNet. It claims to be the number one email archiver for SMBs.
ZDNet also has an interesting article on Email value management, referring to InBoxer, which has on its website several white papers on: FRCP IT Obligations for Email, Email Harassment, Email Retention, Email Archiving for Schools and Local Governments, and Discovery involving Email.
ZDNet also links to Arcmail, a higher-end and pricier solution, which also points to the need to comply with email archiving requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, HIPAA, the Freedom of Information Act and other regulations.
Business.com lists not only GFI Software as an email archiver, but also refers to Symantec email archiving as also to FuseMail, the latter of which offers high quality email hosting outsourcing with e.g. sync clients for Outlook and Blackberry at a very reasonable price. See their blog posting about their New HTML Editor in Webmail v2.0.
That is not an exhaustive treatment of the subject, nor are we expressly recommending any of the email services linked above, but they are a good place to start for those in need.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/11/2008 06:10:00 PM
Email Archiving and Hosting Outsourcing Solutions for Firms and Businesses in Compliance with Legislation : SEC CFTC Sarbanes Oxley NASD NYSE FRCP
Is your professional, firm or business email archiving in compliance with legislation in force? SEC? CFTC? Sarbanes-Oxley? NASD? NYSE? And what about the FRCP? And what about email hosting outsourcing?
GFI Software, a software company specializing in content and network security, messaging and compliance solutions for SMBs, at very competitive prices, has compiled various documents focusing on email archiving laws affecting businesses in the United States.
One such particular document by GFI is a short article on Email archiving in the US : The key laws that affect your business covering the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
One of the products of GFI is the GFI MailArchiver, designed to comply with legislation covering email archiving, and we find that it can be downloaded on a trial basis at ZDNet. It claims to be the number one email archiver for SMBs.
ZDNet also has an interesting article on Email value management, referring to InBoxer, which has on its website several white papers on: FRCP IT Obligations for Email, Email Harassment, Email Retention, Email Archiving for Schools and Local Governments, and Discovery involving Email.
ZDNet also links to Arcmail, a higher-end and pricier solution, which also points to the need to comply with email archiving requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, HIPAA, the Freedom of Information Act and other regulations.
Business.com lists not only GFI Software as an email archiver, but also refers to Symantec email archiving as also to FuseMail, the latter of which offers high quality email hosting outsourcing with e.g. sync clients for Outlook and Blackberry at a very reasonable price. See their blog posting about their New HTML Editor in Webmail v2.0.
That is not an exhaustive treatment of the subject, nor are we expressly recommending any of the email services linked above, but they are a good place to start for those in need.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/11/2008 06:10:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/11/2008 11:58:00 AM [Home]
[Print]
Russia Georgia Caucasus Ossetia Abkhazia : Ethnolinguistic Map : Empty Google Map : Ancient Peoples of Region : Jason and the Argonauts : Zemanta
What does your average Internet commentator know about the Caucasus? We think it is very little, but we leave you to answer that question as you read Internet commentary on the current situation between the Black and Caspian Seas. We hope to add a bit of knowledge below.
In addition, we have a map mystery. We wanted to look at Georgia on Google Maps today, only to discover that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are as good as blanked out. As written at Google Maps censoring the South Caucasus region?
"Take a look at this screenshot I took from Google Maps:
[see here for the screenshot]
Notice anything odd? The capital cities, or any cities for that matter, are not displayed for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. I know they were previously there because I often consulted Google Maps while planning my trip to the region a few years ago. So why, in this time of conflict when people might want to take a look at the region, has Google stripped out all the identifying information for these three countries?"
We will be interested in the ultimate explanation from Google for this unusual development.
In any case, rather than taking sides in the conflict, as most people on the web are doing, without knowing anything about this region of the world, we found an ethnolinguistic map from Wikimedia Commons at Wikipedia which shows at a glance the distribution of numerous ethnic groups in this bottlenecked region of the world between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and why peace in the Caucasus is such a difficult thing to achieve in this multicultural setting:
For those who might have an interest in the "speculative" far distant history of this region, which might have relevance to the issue of where peoples of this region belong in the political scope of things like national allegiances, take a look at our interpretation of the ancient dolmens found along the coast of Russia in the West Caucasus and running down to and including Abkhazia and ending at what we presume was the ancient border to the ancient peoples of Georgia.
The first map below shows the location of the dolmens:
The second map below shows our interpretation of the dolmens as a planisphere of the heavens, which we think were placed there in ancient megalithic days by astronomy as border landmarks for that region.
These dolmens could - very speculatively - have been placed by the perhaps more real than legendary group of Jason and the Argonauts, who, according to legend, and the fact that the Greeks called a part of this region Colchis, allegedly gave their name to the Ossetians:
"The Russians originally called the Ossetians Jas possibly related to their contact with Jazones.
Accordingly, there are historical reasons in this region for certain peoples tending to align with other peoples and not with others. Most commentary on the Internet makes this appear like a simple modern issue between Russia and Georgia, but it has far deeper roots than that, and can only be understood in a historical context.
_________________________
Please note also that we are also experimenting here for the first time with a fairly new add-on extension called Zemanta by which a blog posting can be "zemified", i.e. Zemanta in the course of our posting monitors our typed text every 300 typed characters and then makes suggestions as to possible links and graphics that could be added to the posting based on the text typed into the posting content. It is something like a real time research aid, although in this case we did not use any of the suggested graphics but rather found on our own. However, we did apply the labels as a test. We are not sure we will keep Zemanta, but we are going to give this add-on a fair trial. Also the labels for the posting are automatically suggested by Zemanta.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/11/2008 11:58:00 AM
Russia Georgia Caucasus Ossetia Abkhazia : Ethnolinguistic Map : Empty Google Map : Ancient Peoples of Region : Jason and the Argonauts : Zemanta
What does your average Internet commentator know about the Caucasus? We think it is very little, but we leave you to answer that question as you read Internet commentary on the current situation between the Black and Caspian Seas. We hope to add a bit of knowledge below.
In addition, we have a map mystery. We wanted to look at Georgia on Google Maps today, only to discover that Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are as good as blanked out. As written at Google Maps censoring the South Caucasus region?
"Take a look at this screenshot I took from Google Maps:
[see here for the screenshot]
Notice anything odd? The capital cities, or any cities for that matter, are not displayed for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. I know they were previously there because I often consulted Google Maps while planning my trip to the region a few years ago. So why, in this time of conflict when people might want to take a look at the region, has Google stripped out all the identifying information for these three countries?"
We will be interested in the ultimate explanation from Google for this unusual development.
In any case, rather than taking sides in the conflict, as most people on the web are doing, without knowing anything about this region of the world, we found an ethnolinguistic map from Wikimedia Commons at Wikipedia which shows at a glance the distribution of numerous ethnic groups in this bottlenecked region of the world between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and why peace in the Caucasus is such a difficult thing to achieve in this multicultural setting:
We have reduced the size of the much larger original map here in order to place it on this blog and have converted the vector graphic to a .png. The original title of the map is "Map on the Ethno-Linguistic groups in the Caucasus region (english version)" as a vectorisation of a 19/07/07 CIA map by Author/User:Pmx with permission for reuse of the image according to GNU Free Documents GFDL and Creative Commons CC-BY.
For those who might have an interest in the "speculative" far distant history of this region, which might have relevance to the issue of where peoples of this region belong in the political scope of things like national allegiances, take a look at our interpretation of the ancient dolmens found along the coast of Russia in the West Caucasus and running down to and including Abkhazia and ending at what we presume was the ancient border to the ancient peoples of Georgia.
The first map below shows the location of the dolmens:
Map of Dolmens in Western Caucasus. (c) archeo.ru - pictured at Sochi-Travel.info
The second map below shows our interpretation of the dolmens as a planisphere of the heavens, which we think were placed there in ancient megalithic days by astronomy as border landmarks for that region.
Interpretation of the Russian Dolmens in the West Caucasus by Andis Kaulins
These dolmens could - very speculatively - have been placed by the perhaps more real than legendary group of Jason and the Argonauts, who, according to legend, and the fact that the Greeks called a part of this region Colchis, allegedly gave their name to the Ossetians:
"The Russians originally called the Ossetians Jas possibly related to their contact with Jazones.
In Argonautica (of Apollonius of Rhodes) Jason's companions land on a beach of Colchis called Circea. They saw tamarisk and willow trees having corpses tied to the tree tops wrapped in an ox's skin. Apollonius explains that even in his day, when a male died, they hung him from a tree outside the town. The women, in contrast, were buried. In particular among the Ossetians, these funereal practices were still widespread up until a few decades ago. In Late Antiquity, records become much more diffuse, and the Iazyges generally cease to be mentioned as a tribe. In the Middle Ages an Iranian people appeared in Eastern-Europe, the Jazones (named in Latin diplomas also from Philistei/Filistei from the Biblical nation). Jazones, an Ossetic people migrated in Hungaria, are first mentioned in Hungarian records in the year 1318, and their name, spelled in Greek Language means "jason's" (Ιασονες)."
In the late 14th century adopted the Georgian name of the Ossetians and their nation. In the Georgian language, Alania and the Alans are known as "Oseti" (ოსეთი) and "Osebi" (ოსები) respectively. From the Russian language the names Ossetia and Ossetians came to other languages.
The Ossetians themselves refer to their nation as irættæ (maybe related to Aeetes or Iran)."
Wikipedia - Colchis Iberian Map Copyright © by Andrew Andersen
Accordingly, there are historical reasons in this region for certain peoples tending to align with other peoples and not with others. Most commentary on the Internet makes this appear like a simple modern issue between Russia and Georgia, but it has far deeper roots than that, and can only be understood in a historical context.
_________________________
Please note also that we are also experimenting here for the first time with a fairly new add-on extension called Zemanta by which a blog posting can be "zemified", i.e. Zemanta in the course of our posting monitors our typed text every 300 typed characters and then makes suggestions as to possible links and graphics that could be added to the posting based on the text typed into the posting content. It is something like a real time research aid, although in this case we did not use any of the suggested graphics but rather found on our own. However, we did apply the labels as a test. We are not sure we will keep Zemanta, but we are going to give this add-on a fair trial. Also the labels for the posting are automatically suggested by Zemanta.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/11/2008 11:58:00 AM
LAW PUNDIT Sunday, August 10, 2008 8/10/2008 11:40:00 PM [Home]
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Fair Use Reform in the Context of Overenforcement of Copyrights
This posting continues where some of our last postings at LawPundit left off, particularly concerning free speech and copyrights.
Solove's blog, Concurring Opinions, just posted links to articles in the last issue of the Iowa Law Review, Volume 93, Issue 4 (June 2008), including Fair Use and Copyright Overenforcement by Thomas F. Cotter, Briggs and Morgan Professor of Law and Solly Robins Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School.
In the Abstract to the article, Cotter writes :
"ABSTRACT: Economic analysis has long suggested that there are two distinct categories of cases in which the fair use defense, which permits the unauthorized reproduction and other use of copyrighted materials, should apply. First, fair use should apply when the transaction costs of negotiating with the copyright owner for permission to use exceed the private value of the use to the would-be user. Second, fair use should apply when the individual use is thought to generate some positive externality—such that the net social value of the use exceeds the value to the copyright owner of preventing the use—which in turn may exceed the value of the use to the individual user. Considerable anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that would-be users are often deterred from engaging in conduct that likely would fall within the ambit of fair use, due in part to concerns over incurring attorney’s fees and in part to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the fair use doctrine itself.
This Article presents a model of the private costs and benefits faced by would-be users of copyrighted materials in precisely those settings in which economic analysis suggests that the fair use doctrine should apply. The model demonstrates how, under current law, this balance of private costs and benefits may cause some users to forgo legitimate fair uses, particularly when those users are risk averse. It also suggests that, in cases in which fair use is justified by the presence of positive externalities flowing from the individual user’s use, the asymmetry between the individual user’s gain and the copyright owner’s loss may result in systematic copyright overenforcement. Put another way, the fair use doctrine suffers from an “appropriability” problem similar to that which is often cited as a justification for copyright protection itself. This Article then offers some observations on the likely effectiveness of six different types of fair use reforms."
Read Cotter's full article here.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/10/2008 11:40:00 PM
Fair Use Reform in the Context of Overenforcement of Copyrights
This posting continues where some of our last postings at LawPundit left off, particularly concerning free speech and copyrights.
Solove's blog, Concurring Opinions, just posted links to articles in the last issue of the Iowa Law Review, Volume 93, Issue 4 (June 2008), including Fair Use and Copyright Overenforcement by Thomas F. Cotter, Briggs and Morgan Professor of Law and Solly Robins Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School.
In the Abstract to the article, Cotter writes :
"ABSTRACT: Economic analysis has long suggested that there are two distinct categories of cases in which the fair use defense, which permits the unauthorized reproduction and other use of copyrighted materials, should apply. First, fair use should apply when the transaction costs of negotiating with the copyright owner for permission to use exceed the private value of the use to the would-be user. Second, fair use should apply when the individual use is thought to generate some positive externality—such that the net social value of the use exceeds the value to the copyright owner of preventing the use—which in turn may exceed the value of the use to the individual user. Considerable anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that would-be users are often deterred from engaging in conduct that likely would fall within the ambit of fair use, due in part to concerns over incurring attorney’s fees and in part to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the fair use doctrine itself.
This Article presents a model of the private costs and benefits faced by would-be users of copyrighted materials in precisely those settings in which economic analysis suggests that the fair use doctrine should apply. The model demonstrates how, under current law, this balance of private costs and benefits may cause some users to forgo legitimate fair uses, particularly when those users are risk averse. It also suggests that, in cases in which fair use is justified by the presence of positive externalities flowing from the individual user’s use, the asymmetry between the individual user’s gain and the copyright owner’s loss may result in systematic copyright overenforcement. Put another way, the fair use doctrine suffers from an “appropriability” problem similar to that which is often cited as a justification for copyright protection itself. This Article then offers some observations on the likely effectiveness of six different types of fair use reforms."
Read Cotter's full article here.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/10/2008 11:40:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/10/2008 11:27:00 PM [Home]
[Print]
Anonymous Heinous Postings Directed at Two Female Yale Law School Students Lead to Revelation of Poster Identities : Free Speech Law in Need of Change
This posting follows on the heels of our previous posting about the closing of the Patry Copyright Blog.
One of our pet peeves on the Internet is anonymous posting. It is one of the main reasons that we do not allow comments to this blog - due to negative experience in doing so previously - because we do not have the time to filter out spam or comment garbage by anonymous posters.
Our experience is that anonymous posting is sadly often relied upon by a large number of cowardly people who would otherwise never post the same materials under their own identifiable name. Internet anonymity appears to give people a blank check to publish harmful materials of all kinds with impunity, especially comments about other people, but as we shall see in this case of two Yale Law students, anonymity is no guarantee against ultimate detection.
Our view is that an identifiable person's free speech should be protected (within the the normal Constitutional free speech limitations), but less so that of his or her alias. We see nothing in the US Constitution which protects free speech incognito or alter ego. The fact that (allegedly) Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym Publius or that the Federalist Papers engendered anonymous comments from the Federal Farmer in rebuttal, does not mean that anonymity was thereby justified or sanctified as a core element of free speech in a democracy. Anonymous publishing yes, but vast free speech protection for that publishing, no.
Anonymous writing should of course be permitted in a free society, but the actual content which is expressed anonymously should be subject to greater judicial scrutiny and stricter legal standards because of its innate potential of inflicting harm, without the normal counterbalance of individual responsibility.
People post anonymously on the Internet because they think it gives them an advantage, otherwise they would post under their real names. By consequence, therefore, all those who are at the mercy of anonymous postings should not be left at a disadvantage in law or in fact, and must be granted countervailing power to protect THEIR rights as well.
To us, this means that anonymous postings which disparage another person or cultural group are to be treated as particularly heinous, because they are made in the expectation that legitimate rebuttal against an invisible opponent is much more difficult than an identified or identifiable foe. Indeed, the average citizen seldom has the means to track down invisible attackers who try to destroy another person's or group's reputation while at the same time not having to fear any negative consequences for themselves. This is the epitome of an unjust world.
Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court has thus far seen the anonymous free speech issue somewhat differently, focusing primarily on political speech, rather than on everyday speech, even though the latter is far more common and involves a different set of issues (see Anonymity at the EFF). As written in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections:
First of all, as to the need for anonymous political speech in the USA, if a man or a woman is unable in American society to express his or her political opinions openly, without the fear of tyranny of the majority, then there is in fact no free political speech in American society, and it is a fata morgana. Free speech means free speech WITHOUT anonymity, dear Justices.
Secondly, what the Supreme Court writes about political dissent has no application to the ruin of individual reputations on the Internet by anonymous posters. Indeed, the much acclaimed right of political dissent as a justification for anonymous free speech is not a specific mark of democracy by any means. It is, quite the contrary, the principle means available for dissent in TYRANNICAL countries, not in democracies. People resort to anonymity in political speech - in many countries outside the USA - as a NECESSITY, because they can not speak openly.
The US Constitution envisioned that a citizen SHOULD BE free to speak his mind and express himself openly about politics in the context of democratic society, without fear of retaliation, if that speech is lawful. The reality of life, however, is that - for most people - you better learn to keep your mouth shut if you want to get ahead in life and be an accepted member of society - or, the tyranny of the majority will indeed be brought to bear upon you, anonymity or no.
But "political speech" is an entirely different issue from "everyday speech".
Our view is that anonymous Internet postings involving everyday speech should be protected as free speech ONLY if there is a compelling and socially-supportable reason for anonymity in a particular case .
But such cases are in fact quite rare. Quite the contrary, the mass of anonymous posters uses anonymous aliases not to publish political dissent but rather as a coverup for their incognito and alter ego acts on the Internet. Indeed, they often publish that everyday speech in a manner that they would never dare to do under their own name. Here, in the case of everyday speech, the freedom of anonymity gives people the ability to act irresponsibly, without fear of detection and without being called to answer for their deeds. This is the opposite of democracy.
Everyday speech must thus be judged by different standards than political speech.
The running case of two libelled female Yale Law Students is a case in point, where heinous anonymous postings about them most certainly harmed them seriously during their period of law school education, and may also have harmed them in its aftermath. There is a curious posting at the Volokh Conspiracy about this case, which regrettably gets off on an obscure personal tangent, rather than concentrating on the important core issues.
As written cogently at Wired by Ryan Singel:
"Ann Bartow, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law ... believes the problem lies in technology outstripping the law and our cultural responses. George Washington University Law Professor Daniel Solove, who's been thinking about the issue long enough to have written a book called The Future of Reputation, agrees. He says the law needs to change.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/10/2008 11:27:00 PM
Anonymous Heinous Postings Directed at Two Female Yale Law School Students Lead to Revelation of Poster Identities : Free Speech Law in Need of Change
This posting follows on the heels of our previous posting about the closing of the Patry Copyright Blog.
One of our pet peeves on the Internet is anonymous posting. It is one of the main reasons that we do not allow comments to this blog - due to negative experience in doing so previously - because we do not have the time to filter out spam or comment garbage by anonymous posters.
Our experience is that anonymous posting is sadly often relied upon by a large number of cowardly people who would otherwise never post the same materials under their own identifiable name. Internet anonymity appears to give people a blank check to publish harmful materials of all kinds with impunity, especially comments about other people, but as we shall see in this case of two Yale Law students, anonymity is no guarantee against ultimate detection.
Our view is that an identifiable person's free speech should be protected (within the the normal Constitutional free speech limitations), but less so that of his or her alias. We see nothing in the US Constitution which protects free speech incognito or alter ego. The fact that (allegedly) Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym Publius or that the Federalist Papers engendered anonymous comments from the Federal Farmer in rebuttal, does not mean that anonymity was thereby justified or sanctified as a core element of free speech in a democracy. Anonymous publishing yes, but vast free speech protection for that publishing, no.
Anonymous writing should of course be permitted in a free society, but the actual content which is expressed anonymously should be subject to greater judicial scrutiny and stricter legal standards because of its innate potential of inflicting harm, without the normal counterbalance of individual responsibility.
People post anonymously on the Internet because they think it gives them an advantage, otherwise they would post under their real names. By consequence, therefore, all those who are at the mercy of anonymous postings should not be left at a disadvantage in law or in fact, and must be granted countervailing power to protect THEIR rights as well.
To us, this means that anonymous postings which disparage another person or cultural group are to be treated as particularly heinous, because they are made in the expectation that legitimate rebuttal against an invisible opponent is much more difficult than an identified or identifiable foe. Indeed, the average citizen seldom has the means to track down invisible attackers who try to destroy another person's or group's reputation while at the same time not having to fear any negative consequences for themselves. This is the epitome of an unjust world.
Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court has thus far seen the anonymous free speech issue somewhat differently, focusing primarily on political speech, rather than on everyday speech, even though the latter is far more common and involves a different set of issues (see Anonymity at the EFF). As written in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.Our first impression upon reading that opinion by Justice Stevens is intellectual astonishment, giving way to dismay. Is that why violent demonstrators mummify their heads entirely so as to avoid identification, as they engage in senseless destruction and violence? The Supreme Court in that quotation is long on theory and short on reality.
First of all, as to the need for anonymous political speech in the USA, if a man or a woman is unable in American society to express his or her political opinions openly, without the fear of tyranny of the majority, then there is in fact no free political speech in American society, and it is a fata morgana. Free speech means free speech WITHOUT anonymity, dear Justices.
Secondly, what the Supreme Court writes about political dissent has no application to the ruin of individual reputations on the Internet by anonymous posters. Indeed, the much acclaimed right of political dissent as a justification for anonymous free speech is not a specific mark of democracy by any means. It is, quite the contrary, the principle means available for dissent in TYRANNICAL countries, not in democracies. People resort to anonymity in political speech - in many countries outside the USA - as a NECESSITY, because they can not speak openly.
The US Constitution envisioned that a citizen SHOULD BE free to speak his mind and express himself openly about politics in the context of democratic society, without fear of retaliation, if that speech is lawful. The reality of life, however, is that - for most people - you better learn to keep your mouth shut if you want to get ahead in life and be an accepted member of society - or, the tyranny of the majority will indeed be brought to bear upon you, anonymity or no.
But "political speech" is an entirely different issue from "everyday speech".
Our view is that anonymous Internet postings involving everyday speech should be protected as free speech ONLY if there is a compelling and socially-supportable reason for anonymity in a particular case .
But such cases are in fact quite rare. Quite the contrary, the mass of anonymous posters uses anonymous aliases not to publish political dissent but rather as a coverup for their incognito and alter ego acts on the Internet. Indeed, they often publish that everyday speech in a manner that they would never dare to do under their own name. Here, in the case of everyday speech, the freedom of anonymity gives people the ability to act irresponsibly, without fear of detection and without being called to answer for their deeds. This is the opposite of democracy.
Everyday speech must thus be judged by different standards than political speech.
The running case of two libelled female Yale Law Students is a case in point, where heinous anonymous postings about them most certainly harmed them seriously during their period of law school education, and may also have harmed them in its aftermath. There is a curious posting at the Volokh Conspiracy about this case, which regrettably gets off on an obscure personal tangent, rather than concentrating on the important core issues.
As written cogently at Wired by Ryan Singel:
"Ann Bartow, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law ... believes the problem lies in technology outstripping the law and our cultural responses. George Washington University Law Professor Daniel Solove, who's been thinking about the issue long enough to have written a book called The Future of Reputation, agrees. He says the law needs to change.
"The internet isn't a radical-free zone where you can hurt people. But on the other hand, we can't have everyone rushing to the court, because the court is a blunt tool," Solove says. "We need something to help shape norms -- there needs to be some kind of push back against the notion that the internet is a place where you can say what you want and screw the consequences. That's not what free speech is about." [emphasis and links added by LawPundit]
Amen, Professor Solove, Amen.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/10/2008 11:27:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/10/2008 10:13:00 PM [Home]
[Print]
Mobile Phone Functionality Added to LawPundit (in the USA only)
Using MoFuse (Mobile Fusion) we have "mobilized" LawPundit so that our postings can be received by mobile phones, also iPhone (thus far, however, only in the USA). Mobile phone users in America can now view the mobile phone version of LawPundit by entering their MOBILE phone number in the appropriate box in the left column of this blog and sending it off. Here is what the mobile phone version of Lawpundit can look like:
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/10/2008 10:13:00 PM
Mobile Phone Functionality Added to LawPundit (in the USA only)
Using MoFuse (Mobile Fusion) we have "mobilized" LawPundit so that our postings can be received by mobile phones, also iPhone (thus far, however, only in the USA). Mobile phone users in America can now view the mobile phone version of LawPundit by entering their MOBILE phone number in the appropriate box in the left column of this blog and sending it off. Here is what the mobile phone version of Lawpundit can look like:
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/10/2008 10:13:00 PM
LAW PUNDIT 8/10/2008 12:12:00 PM [Home]
[Print]
William Patry Copyright Blog Gone With the Wind
Here today, gone tomorrow.
William Patry is closing down his copyright blog, the Patry Copyright Blog, for reasons expressed in his posting End of the Blog, which we summarize and comment below:
1. False identification of the Patry Copyright Blog with Google, plus crazies among the commenters. Patry writes:
"[When] I moved from private practice to Google I put a disclaimer to the effect that the views in the blog (as in the past) were strictly mine....
When other blogs or news stories refer to the blog, the inevitable opening sentence now is: "William Patry, Google's Senior Copyright Counsel said," or "Google's top copyright lawyer said... ." There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google's behalf. ...
On top of this there are the crazies, whom it is impossible to reason with, who do not have a life of their own and so insist on ruining the lives of others, and preferably as many as possible. I asked myself last week after having to deal with the craziest of the crazies yet, "why subject yourself to this?" I could come up with no reason why I should: My grandfather chose to be a psychiatrist, but I chose a different professional path, one that doesn't obligate me to put up with such nonsense."
2. The Depressing State of Copyright Law
Patry writes that he is a centrist but that the depressing development of copyright law makes him appear much too negative through his dissenting postings. Patry writes:
"[I]n my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits...."
Of course, we understand Patry's complaints completely.
One of the reasons that we do not permit comments to LawPundit is because (based on experience) we simply do not have the time or inclination to go through postings to remove spam and improper anonymous comments. Patry has allowed comments to his blog up to now. Rather than closing down the blog, perhaps it is time to remove the comment function or seek the services of a "comment filtering" program or service.
As far as Patry's affiliation with Google is concerned, it is a fact of life that our perceived identity in the public sphere, rightly or wrongly, is very much a function of our professional affiliation(s). Patry is not alone in this. A high academic or corporate legal position grants many benefits, but it also exerts its pound of flesh. You have to be able to take the good with the bad.
That not only copyright law, but also patent and trademark law, have gone far off the rightly charted course is one of the persistent recurring themes of LawPundit. The best (and probably only) way to move patent, trademark and copyright law in the right direction again is by strong, persistent, and vocal dissent.
This can be seen in the case of Europe, where the Proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions was rejected in the year 2005 by the European Parliament, largely due to strong, persistent, vocal dissent:
"The proposal catalyzed a campaign by diverse opponents of software patents, who took the opportunity afforded by the introduction of the proposal to argue that software patents are neither economically desirable nor mandated by international law. The FFII and the EuroLinux Alliance played key roles in coordinating this lobbying campaign, which drew support from some free software and open source programmers, some academics, some small business groups, and some proprietary software developers. Many of these organisations expressed concern over what they saw as abuses of the software patent system in the USA, and argued that although some software patents might be beneficial, the net effect of the Commission's proposals would be to suppress innovation and dampen legitimate competition."
"So we beat on, boats against the current...."
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/10/2008 12:12:00 PM
William Patry Copyright Blog Gone With the Wind
Here today, gone tomorrow.
William Patry is closing down his copyright blog, the Patry Copyright Blog, for reasons expressed in his posting End of the Blog, which we summarize and comment below:
1. False identification of the Patry Copyright Blog with Google, plus crazies among the commenters. Patry writes:
"[When] I moved from private practice to Google I put a disclaimer to the effect that the views in the blog (as in the past) were strictly mine....
When other blogs or news stories refer to the blog, the inevitable opening sentence now is: "William Patry, Google's Senior Copyright Counsel said," or "Google's top copyright lawyer said... ." There is nothing I can do to stop this false implication that I am speaking on Google's behalf. ...
On top of this there are the crazies, whom it is impossible to reason with, who do not have a life of their own and so insist on ruining the lives of others, and preferably as many as possible. I asked myself last week after having to deal with the craziest of the crazies yet, "why subject yourself to this?" I could come up with no reason why I should: My grandfather chose to be a psychiatrist, but I chose a different professional path, one that doesn't obligate me to put up with such nonsense."
2. The Depressing State of Copyright Law
Patry writes that he is a centrist but that the depressing development of copyright law makes him appear much too negative through his dissenting postings. Patry writes:
"[I]n my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits...."
Of course, we understand Patry's complaints completely.
One of the reasons that we do not permit comments to LawPundit is because (based on experience) we simply do not have the time or inclination to go through postings to remove spam and improper anonymous comments. Patry has allowed comments to his blog up to now. Rather than closing down the blog, perhaps it is time to remove the comment function or seek the services of a "comment filtering" program or service.
As far as Patry's affiliation with Google is concerned, it is a fact of life that our perceived identity in the public sphere, rightly or wrongly, is very much a function of our professional affiliation(s). Patry is not alone in this. A high academic or corporate legal position grants many benefits, but it also exerts its pound of flesh. You have to be able to take the good with the bad.
That not only copyright law, but also patent and trademark law, have gone far off the rightly charted course is one of the persistent recurring themes of LawPundit. The best (and probably only) way to move patent, trademark and copyright law in the right direction again is by strong, persistent, and vocal dissent.
This can be seen in the case of Europe, where the Proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions was rejected in the year 2005 by the European Parliament, largely due to strong, persistent, vocal dissent:
"The proposal catalyzed a campaign by diverse opponents of software patents, who took the opportunity afforded by the introduction of the proposal to argue that software patents are neither economically desirable nor mandated by international law. The FFII and the EuroLinux Alliance played key roles in coordinating this lobbying campaign, which drew support from some free software and open source programmers, some academics, some small business groups, and some proprietary software developers. Many of these organisations expressed concern over what they saw as abuses of the software patent system in the USA, and argued that although some software patents might be beneficial, the net effect of the Commission's proposals would be to suppress innovation and dampen legitimate competition."
"So we beat on, boats against the current...."
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 8/10/2008 12:12:00 PM
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