BC Law IPTF Blog

Lifehack.org has an interesting post on Taking Notes that Work. Probably pretty applicable for law school students.

I think a lot of people, students and professionals alike, attempt to capture a complete record of a lecture, book, or meeting in their notes — to create, in effect, minutes. This is a recipe for failure. Trying to get every last fact and figure down like that leaves no room for thinking about what you’re writing and how it fits together.

I’m going to try the first bit which generally says to just focus on the new stuff you’re learning; don’t write down the stuff you already know.

Your focus while taking notes should be two-fold. First, what’s new to you? There’s no point in writing down facts you already know. If you already know the Declaration of Independence was written and signed in 1776, there’s no reason to write that down. Anything you know you know you can leave out of your notes.

Take old gift cards and turn them into coasters…

But don’t we have enough coasters in this world? And coasters that essential that we have to keep on making more? Can’t we just think a little harder and figure out other ways of recycling(or upcycling) our used materials than… Coasters?

Here’s a better idea, for saving paper: Reduce the margins in your word processor to save paper.

This is probably an old story, but I ran across it while doing a Google search. At the bottom of my Google search, I saw this line:

“ In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.”

The link takes you to this URL:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=937

Where Chilling Effects posts a letter to Google saying this:

Re: Transfer and removal of Blog
I have attached the court order which provides for the following:

The removal of all of the information about myself, and my companies from your search results.

The transfer of the blog known as MarkRoyAnderson, over to me and the immediate removal of that blog from your search engines. The reason that the blogname is being transferred to me, is so that it can not he used again by anyone but me.

I have already set up an account with the blogspot.com. It is under the name [private]. With my email address “[private]”

Let me know how we can get this coordinated so that this can get done once and for all. This court order is to be effective immediately.

Sincerely
Mark Anderson [private]
Email: “[private]@aol.com”

Looks like a fellow named Joe Gallant took it upon himself to research a venture capital firm named “Summit Ventures.” He found out that the owner, Mark Anderson, may have been sentenced for securities-based mail fraud. (You can read Joe Gallant’s blog, archived at the Internet Archive.)

The small claims court then ordered Joe Gallant to transfer ownership of markroyanderson.blogspot.com to Mark Anderson, remove the domain name, and then enjoined Google from displaying search results referencing: “MARY ROY ANDERSON, CAMDEN HOLDINGS, SUMMITT VENTURES AND SUMMITT OIL AND GAS INC.”

Looks like from the SEC filings that Mr. Anderson and his various companies were trying to enter into investment deals and “misrepresenting” and “non-performing.” See this 8-K filing.

Interesting that a California small claims court can wield such power over terms and searched on the Internet. It effectively removes from the Internet–by removing from Google search results–public information such as SEC filings, and not just Gallant’s blog-with-a-grudge.

Regarding the SEC filings: how else would you find this information? I suppose you could go straight to the SEC web site. I also wonder if they’re on Yahoo! or MSN or other search engines. If someone can monopolize access to certain information by having them removed from search engines through the small claims court… Where are we?

Let’s not make this a trend, but here’s another sex-related IPTF story. Yes, the infamous WTS (”Willing to Sell”) Epic Mount story.

Now, in the MMORPG World of Warcraft players of a certain level can earn “mounts” or animals they can ride so they look cool and move faster in the virtual world. Problem is, they’re hard to come by–they’re extremely expensive. So a presumably female WOW player posted on Cragslist, offering to sell her “services” for an hour for 5000 gold. (Today, 5000 gold could cost around US $685.) An epic mount for an “epic” mount, get it? Haha. Hahaha.

So the next obvious question after “Isn’t this illegal?” is “Is this a taxable transaction?” Here’s a Howstuffworks article about taxation of virtual assets.

Looking through the site logs (”blog logs?”), I noticed a short stream of incoming searches for, well, to avoid saying it again and fueling more searches driven our way, two four-letter words describing “illegal images of younger people” because of yesterday’s post on Commonwealth v. Maccini. Funny. Kind of. A bit scary.

Maybe then people looking for that kind of smut will now learn more about the state of technology and the law!

The shiznit’s going down on Todd Goldman and his company, David and Goliath. Essentially, Goldman decided to hire some artists to rip-off Threadless t-shirt designs.

For those who don’t know about Threadless (or D&G), it’s a community-based web site where t-shirt designers submit their work and people comment on them and then buy the final designs. They encourage participation by offering deals like if you upload pictures of you wearing their t-shirts, then you’ll get a discount. Great idea, very successful, and, best of all great, t-shirts. (I own a… Bunch.)

Since this has blown up on the Internet, Goldman’s lawyer has been e-mailing bloggers who are discussing this issue–”We have acquired articles posted on your website which contain defaming, derogatory and malicious statements about Mr. Goldman“–asking them to remove posts from their blogs. But now it looks like his lawyer is apologizing at least to the artists for the rip-offs.

Here are some of the rip-offs, posted on Penny Arcade:

I’m always impressed when I go through and moderate the sp*# on this blog that our sp*# filter has caught over 34,000 sp*# comments over the 9 or so months this has been up.

I’m also encouraged that at least when the sp*#-ers are looking for posts to comment on, they read through a bunch of pages before finding a choice one to post their comments on… And then have them hung up on the sp*# moderation queue. Thanks, guys!

The other thing that impresses me about this blog is how low the consistent readership is compared to how many people actually find the content from search engines. Most of the time when I look through the site stats, I click on the Google searches, and the BCIPTF blog usually shows on the first page of results.

This means we’re either doing a good job of writing about interesting things, or the things we write about are so obscure that no one else writes about them.

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.