BC Law IPTF Blog

As the American Bar Association Journal eReport e-reports, the Supreme Court in Scott v. Harris refers to the URL of an online video of evidence from the case. The Supreme Court web site also hosts this video.

In a footnote to the opinion:

JUSTICE STEVENS suggests that our reaction to the videotape is somehow idiosyncratic, and seems to believe we are misrepresenting its contents. See post, at 4 (dissenting opinion) (“In sum, the factual statements by the Court of Appeals quoted by the Court . . . were entirely accurate”). We are happy to allow the videotape to speak for itself. See Record 36, Exh. A, available at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb and in Clerk of Court’s case file.

Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. ___, at 5 n.5 (2007).

Further, from the ABA report:

A lone dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens said the case [Scott v. Harris] should have gone to a jury for decision. “The court has usurped the jury’s fact-finding function,” he wrote, since “whether a person’s actions have risen to a level warranting deadly force is a question of fact best reserved for a jury.”

Stevens challenged the majority’s interpretation of what the video shows, and he referred to his fellow justices as “my colleagues on the jury.”

(See, also, SCOTUSblog for a more substantive look at the decision.)

I’m wondering what technical infrastructure the Supreme Court web site has in place to start hosting video or other electronic content in the future. It seems fairly ad hoc at the moment. If you look at the file structure for serving the opinions, it looks like this:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-1631.pdf

So all the opinions go into the “opinions” directory, and the PDF versions from 2006 go into the “06pdf” directory. Then the file is identified by the Supreme Court numbering system (”05-1631.pdf”).

On the other hand, the videos go into a “video” directory, with the filename as the case name:

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb

This shows that the sysadmin is OK with the “video” directory just being a flat index of video by case name (and not the unique Supreme Court number), most likely meaning that they don’t plan on putting that many videos there in the first place. This means that this is a “one off” kind of thing with plans to add some video in the future, but not much. Furthermore, the naming convention only assumes one video per case.

So while the addition of a video URL may be interesting, they apparently don’t plan on doing much of the same in the future. If they did, then they should really change their file structure and naming systems to scale into the future.

As a quick suggestion, scalability is simple enough:

/opinions/06video/05-1631-01.rmvb

Better yet, as I prefer semantic filenames over “code” and non-proprietary formats, it *should* be

/opinions/06/video/scott-v-harris-05-1631-01-car-crash.avi

Today, my buddy Adam and I presented at a roundtable at MiT5 about Adam’s project, Edtags.org. Here’s the abstract from the presentation:

Identifying Online Experts, Paul Ham, Adam Seldow
Our research involves building a community of experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education around a socio-semantic networking web site, Edtags.org. Through our work with the web-site, we have come across a recent set of questions regarding the make-up of the community and culture. How do we ensure that populations of participants are “experts” in a field? Is it a matter of “numbers” or must there be a screening process to verify the users for participation? Should we screen the content for our specific field, and if so how? What is the critical mass of endorsed sites on a socio-semantic network that changes it from a place where educators save bookmarks to a place where educators save bookmarks and discover new ones? Lastly, how can search engines best distinguish “credible” sites from “socio-spites” (socio-semantic networking spam sites)?

We presented alongside sam smiley, a professor at Lesley College, and ended up having a great discussion about ownership, copyright, content management, as well as identifying experts in an online community site. We also got to show off the latest version of Edtags.org, which just keeps on getting better and better.

Our biggest questions were regarding how to identify experts: are they self-identified (I’m a professor or through self-tagging), community-identified (through votes or friends), or moderated (by Adam)? Though we didn’t end up with concrete answers, we did receive a lot of feedback on how to think about expertise on-line and safe ways of developing community.

One thing that I’m definitely going to keep track of is avoiding “forcing” people to have friends. You can suggest friends and explain why: these are users who are similar to you based upon their tags or their bookmarks; these are bookmarks recommended to you based upon your bookmarks; etc. But don’t force people into communities.

Also, it sounds like right now that self-selection and organic-selection of experts seems to work and won’t inhibit our user growth.

Adam also announced our new project, through Seth, to open source and distribute the Edtags code hopefully by the end of the summer.

Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, has launched a pilot site to rival Wikipedia: Citizendium:

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

Sounds look a good idea–but they’re late in the game, late on the meme. It just reminds me of so many examples in technology where “better” just doesn’t win. Mac lost to PC. Friendster lost to MySpace. Et cetera.

The beauty of Wikipedia is ease of participation–anyone can do it. But to use Citizendium, I *have* to register with my name and seek the approval of a “gentle” guide? I just don’t think they can achieve the growth that will drive it off the ground the same was as PCs and MySpace. Wikipedia wins because of its growth–I have a better chance of finding at least *something* there that I can’t find in an encyclopedia.

Maybe Citizendium should just grab all the Wikipedia content and use that as their base. It’s like using a public domain dictionary and adding all your new words to it or fixing the old definitions. That way, they have the size and content, and they can work at their slow growth rate to complete their content in quality.

I remember that Nupedia (the Wikipedia predecessor) had an editorial process involved–but they were just trying to streamline articles for releases. And they ditched this for the anti-editor process involved with Wikipedia.

I’m not a total nay-sayer. I think that CZ could become a valid rival. But it serves a different purpose than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is like having access to the “crowd”–like being able to talk to friends, friends of friends, etc.–whereas CZ will be more like being able to e-mail a professor who may have a response. With the former, I will probably get an answer, but I don’t know how correct, but if I ask enough I’ll probably get something close enough to correct. For the latter, I might not get a response, but I know the response will be right. This makes a great opportunity for a meta engine that searches CZ first and fills the gaps with Wikipedia.

See CZ’s thoughts on this Big Question on their blog.

Our humble blog made Inter Alia’s Blawg of the Day!

This week, Inter Alia’s covering wikis and law, which I’m pretty excited to hear about. Check out the ABA’s article on Wikis for the Legal Profession.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that anyone should feature the BC IPTF Wiki. I’m not even linking to it, it’s so crappy.

Also, ZiefBrief of the USF Law Library mentions this blog, even describing our posts as “thoughtful and fun.” Who woulda thunk it?

This, again, is another technology-related post, tangentially related to the law.

I’m using the Torbutton Firefox plugin to route my brower requests through Vidalia/Privoxy and onto the Tor network. Tor is a technical method of constantly re-routing your web (or other Internet-related) requests through different Tor servers such that each “server step” along the way doesn’t know where the original request came from. (That’s an attempt at a simplification.) Using Tor, you can anonymize your web traffic.

So when I tried to search on Google, I was a bit confused when I was at the Danish Google - google.dk. I tried again, and then I was at the German Google. And then I realized what’s happening. My web request was getting routed from a Danish Tor server, google.com recognized my Danish “origin,” and then served me the Danish home page.

So, if anything but a little bit of a pain, it’s at least proof that my Tor-surfing is working. And my anonymity is somewhat retained.

(I’m working on a paper including a practical guide for Fourth Amendment privacy-protection of electronic communication.  That’s my justification for this post.)

Luis Villa provides some links to this release, and the Center for the Study of Digital Property goes in-depth and explains the changes.

The main substantive change seems to be in preventing DRM from restricting the sharing or modification of GPL software. In other words you can protect and encrypt files and code, but not in a way that stops someone from viewing the source and modifying/sharing it.* It again clarifies the core of GPL–making software “free as in speech” and not making everything “free as in beer.”

GPL is not anti-DRM, though I’m sure many people really want it to be. The FSF realizes the commercial needs of the GPL community and needs to finely skirt that line between free software and free of cost.

* I hate the phrase “in other words” because it necessarily begs the question, “Why not just say Y instead of X and Y?” But with so many things legal, translating rules to reality demands specific facts which disinter latent exceptions and fence in the broadness of the rule. Blows.

One method of building a business around open source software is through charging for distribution and consultancy. An example of the first is by not selling the software per se, but selling the CDs. An example of the latter is charging for installation, maintenance, and documentation.

One of my primary interests is IP and technology in developing countries. While many people see that as “bridging the digital divide,” I’m more interested in “low technology.” Stoves, food storage, housing materials, sanitation, etc.

An issue with low technology in developing country contexts is that the cost of the product cannot be a barrier to distribution. If you have an idea, you want the idea, the knowledge, the philosophy of it all to be free–to reach the most people who need it. But then how do you establish a business so that you can make the most impact?

You follow an OSS model. BushProof, with its bio-sand filter is doing such a thing. The basic idea–filter and sanitize water through sand–is ingenious and open to anyone to use. They document and explain the process clearly. They promote community to help others out. All for free.

Then they sell consultancy and ready-made products for easy implementation. I think it’s going to work. It’s smart. It makes sense. It’s open source.

On other hand, think how many lives would go to waste if someone were to patent this technology and/or copyright the source.

From Reuters: Microsoft allows open document format for software.

In response to government pressure for greater inoperability with their office suite, Microsoft will open source translation tools that will allow Microsoft Office to read competitor’s document formats.

This is interesting in light of Massachusett’s recent pushes for adopting OpenOffice due to its interoperability and low cost. Now OpenOffice may only have a cost argument against Microsoft. But with Microsoft’s deep pockets, OpenOffice may also lose the relative-cost war.

The Monster Arrives: Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source Developers

Bruce Perens blogs on Technocrat.net about two new lawsuits against open source software developers.

One is Red Hat for their acquisition of a smaller company, jBoss. FireStar Software is suing them for violating their patent on object-oriented databases. The second is a lawsuit by KAM against an individual developer, Bob Jacobsen. KAM claims that Jacobsen violated their broad patent on a model railroad control system by releasing his open source control software. They’re charging him $19 per copy given away.

Perens also spends a paragraph on Intellectual Ventures, which he calls a “patent shake-down operation.”

Intellectual Ventures has been purchasing patents to construct a portfolio that it will then assert against someone, probably small and medium-sized businesses to start with. Most businesses, when faced with the prospect of an expensive patent infringement lawsuit, choose to pay a license fee, or shall we call it an extortion fee, rather than go to court and spend so much that even when they win, they lose. Income from license fees will fuel more attacks on more businesses. The effect of Myhrvold’s business on Open Source could be crippling. But Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, and eBay have nothing to fear. They invested in the company, and will be excluded from attacks.