BC Law IPTF Blog

Just two quick comments that have very little, substantively, to do with either topic:

1. I’m going to start podcasting. It’s about time. I don’t know if the podcasting will be hosted on this blog, but it will have to do with topics on legal aid cases I’m working on. I always wish there were more “legal topics” podcasts out there, or just more and more resources on specific problems, that are searchable and accessible. It’s time to put my money where my mouth is, and start adding to the legal aid content out there.
2. I just got a new laptop. Pretty robust. Good graphics card, 1 GB RAM, etc. But Second Life still runs so slowly on it. Second Life didn’t run on my old PC, and my Powerbook doesn’t quite cut it either. This is a problem with user acquisition that they’re going to have to solve. Until then, I’m going to look around for another community as a backup.
3. Did you ever notice how whenever you say you have two things to say, it always ends up being at least three?

The New York Times is running an article on the man and the company behind sudoku. Interestingly, the brain power behind sudoku, Mr. Kaji, wasn’t able to make much money because he didn’t trademark the name “sudoku,” but because the IP wasn’t protected he feels that popularity of the game exploded:

While no one knows how much revenue is generated by the global sudoku business, most agree it has easily topped $250 million over the last two years from an estimated 80 million devotees. The New York Times syndicate provides a variety of logic puzzles, including sudoku, kakuro and others, for newspapers and Web sites around the world.

Nikoli received only a sliver of that money. Mr. Kaji says his private company, with just 20 employees, had annual sales of about $4 million.

Sudoku’s popularity in the United States caught Mr. Kaji by such surprise that he did not try to get the trademark there until it was too late. As a result, Nikoli receives no royalties from sudoku-related sales overseas by other publishers.

In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku’s intellectual property rights let the game’s popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says. Nikoli does not plan to trademark other new games, either, in hopes this will also help them take off.

“This openness is more in keeping with Nikoli’s open culture,” said Mr. Kaji, who sat on a sofa in his Tokyo office among pillows adorned with printed faces of racehorses. “We’re prolific because we do it for the love of games, not for the money.”

While this might just be a good marketing face to show, it’s core aligns with the philosophy of open source, copyleft, GNU, etc. If you don’t control the IP, a product has a chance to explode. If you do it for the love of the product, then maybe your reward will be greater in the end.

I’m writing an Agreement for Judgment, and we want to set out a payment plan for some back rent. I struggled with the difference between using “shall” versus “will.” My first instinct was that “shall” is a stronger command, and that “shall” should be used all the time, even in place of “will.”

But then I came upon this realization: “Shall” is what people do, whereas “will” is what objects do.

For example, “Defendant shall continue to pay rent…” But: “The monthly rent will be $1,000.”

This reasoning stems from the thought that people “should,” therefore they “shall.” Things or objects “are,” and therefore in the future “will be.”

Whew. I feel good about this now. Now I just have to wait for my ulcer to settle down, and then I can get back to work.

Maybe less about the general depth of globalization in our society exampled through rap lyrics, and maybe more about just how complex Clipse’s lyrics are, here’s a bit from Malice in “Wamp Wamp (What it Do),” off of Hell Hath No Fury (2006):

…The Family’s close-knit
And deep like the Hutu—you cockroaches!
Just like the flow, the foe’s ferocious
I’ll tuck you in, homey, buenos noches.

So here, a reference to the Mafia (”the Family,” a common hip-hop reference to gang life), the Rwandan genocide (the Hutu referred to the Tutsi as cockroaches), and a little bit of Spanish at the end.

Just a neat little sumptin-sumption: A Google maps mash-up with the locations of all the Boston murders for 2007.

Looks like they also use Drupal for their CMS. From the same guys as the Universal Hub blog.

Wordpress has always had trouble with interpreting the “–” or the em-dash. You use em-dashes to separate phrases. In traditional typography, this was an extra-long dash with no spaces between the dash and the surrounding letters. Then the modern typewriter came out, and one used two short dashes, or hyphens, to create the em-dash effect. En-dashes would be a single hyphen with spaces around it, and would be used to connote a “through” effect, as in “July 5 - 6.”

Wordpress doesn’t like the “–” with no spaces. If you take a look at wp-includes/functions-formatting.php, Wordpress does this:

$curl = str_replace('---', '—', $curl);
$curl = str_replace(' -- ', ' — ', $curl);
$curl = str_replace('--', '–', $curl);

So if you want an em-dash, you either use three dashes with no spaces, or two dashes with spaces. You’ll get ASCII #8212, the proper em-dash. Two dashes with no spaces–the traditional way of creating the em-dash–results in ASCII #8211, or the en-dash.

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Here’s the relevant purpose regarding copyright from our publication agreement:

1. I, ___________________, hereby represent and affirm that I am, or am authorized to act on behalf of, the copyright holder[s] of the Article, that I submit the Article for publication to the Forum, and grant the Forum a perpetual, world-wide, sublicensable, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to publish the Article electronically on the Forum, to reprint the Article or portions thereof in any medium now in existence or later invented, to cause the Article to be republished on electronic legal research services, including but not limited to LEXIS and Westlaw, to excerpt from the Article, to distribute, reproduce, transmit, and display the Article, to add hypertext links, graphics, images, and formatting to the Article, and to use the author’s name and likeness in promoting the Forum.

2. The Licensor retains the right to register, in the Licensor’s name, the Licensor’s copyright in the Article with the appropriate governmental office.

3. The Forum agrees to include in its publication of the Article, a notice of the Licensor’s copyright ownership. Notice will be in the form, “© YYYY [Licensor’s name]. Published with permission of the copyright holder.” Upon the Licensor’s request said notice will also include a restriction on use by guests to the Forum.

4. This agreement does not require that the Forum be the first publisher of the Article.

5. If, after the Forum’s publication of the Article, the Licensor subsequently causes the Article to be published, the Licensor agrees where reasonable to include or have included in such publication an acknowledgment in the following format: “Reprinted from the Intellectual Property and Technology Forum at Boston College Law School, YYYY B.C. Intell. Prop. & Tech. F. MMDDXX.” and, if published in electronic format, a hypertext link to the Forum. (YYYY B.C. Intell. Prop. & Tech. F. MMDDXX. is the chronological citation assigned the article during publication on the Forum.)

I wonder if we should just instead consider incorporating a Creative Commons license–or option for other licensing if appropriate–within our license? Here’s Lawrence Lessig’s quick take on the whole copyright licensing of law journal articles.

Ran across this article from August, 2006, on 3L Epiphany about law articles citing legal blogs:

Law Review Articles Citing Legal Blogs

The blogger compiled a list of 75 blogs and ranked them by number of citations to them. Here are the top five:

• Sentencing Law and Policy (78)
• The Volokh Conspiracy (62)
• Balkinization (32)
• SCOTUS Blog (32)
• How Appealing (30)

If you look at the list, you’ll see that the BC Law IPTF Blog is not there. And, so, injustice continues to exist in this world.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I was hyperactive child. (Is that what they used to call ADD?) But today I stopped for a burrito and decided to take a look at my paper on privacy and electronic communications. I’ve been editing this paper that I finished last semester, and updating some of the law, cleaning it up, and adding some stuff on MMORPGs. It’s been slow, what with all the classes and clinic and such.

But at the burrito joint, I cruised through 10 pages and wrote about a page extra in about half an hour. There’s something about me where it’s hard for me to just sit down and work. I need to be doing something else.

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Wikipedia to seek proof of credentials - Yahoo! News

But anonymity is also considered one of the main forces behind Wikipedia’s astonishing growth, to nearly 1.7 million articles in English and millions more in dozens of other languages. Wales has said he is an “anti-credentialist” — because anonymity puts a reader’s attention on the substance of what people have written rather than who they are.

Wales said Wednesday that belief is unchanged. But, he said, if people want to claim expertise on Wikipedia, they ought to be prompted to prove it. If they don’t want to give their real names, they shouldn’t be allowed to tout credentials. Had that policy been in place, Wales said, Jordan probably would not have gotten away with claiming a Ph.D. in religion.

This is, whether purposeful or not, a cue taken from Citizendium.

But for a different reason. Honesty and credibility, somewhat paradoxically, is encouraged through anonymity because anonymity means that you aren’t liable for what you think is right and you’re more likely to contribute *anything* rather than your *best*.

This is why blogging is more widespread than essay-writing for magazines. When people blog, they are trying to write things they believe or would stand by in a casual conversation, but they don’t want to be held to the same standard they’d be held by if they were writing for, say, the New Yorker.

Furthermore, the lack of a login requirement and an attribution makes it real easy for me to just hop on and fix something or add something or make a new page. I don’t have to go through any embarrassing

On the other hand Citizendium looks to attribution for credibility and honesty. I wonder if this will discourage participation in the opposite way that anonymity encourages it on Wikipedia.