BC Law IPTF Blog

I’ve decided to give the Apple iWork Pages ‘08 a fair shake in the word processor wars. It’s taking me a bit to get used to it. But my first impression of the cleanliness of the interface and the way it aesthetically “fits in” with the Mac environment assisted my persistence with the new world. (The biggest thing, immediately, was that it “knew” how to size the page and text to my 12″ Powerbook screen. Word always felt a bit uncomfortable: Was the page screen in the middle of the screen or to the left? Normal view or Page view? Zoom at 115% or 135%? Things like that.)

Let’s start by saying that it’s been about a month, and I’m still using it in lieu of Microsoft Word.

There’s no default font setting in Pages. So if you want all your documents to *not* use Helvetica 12-pt, then you have to create a new “Blank” template. (My font is Georgia 11-pt, for the record.) I can handle that.

You create shortcut keys for special characters in the Preferences… menu option. For example, in Word I’d map option-6 to the “section” symbol; option-shift-p to the “pi” symbol for “plaintiff,” etc. In Pages, I map things differently. Instead of key combinations, I use typed macros: “-s” for section, -pp for pi. Fine.

What kills me is that two dashes doesn’t auto-correct to an em-dash without a trailing space in Pages. (”Dash dash space” instead of just “dash dash.”) And when I insert mathematical symbols, the leading gets screwed up. And the bullet schemes are weird; I like the Word filled bullet on level one, then hollow bullet on level two. And their nice thick bullets, not the anemic ones that Pages uses.

But there are smart things in Pages. (Like the many more smart things in Numbers, the Excel rival.) I just tried a spell-check. In Pages, it’s called Proofread. And you know what it proofread for me? It told me that “prior to” is too wordy, and I should just use “before.” Ah, proofreading only a lawyer can love! And then it told me that I should limit my usage of the word “input” to computer and other technical uses. Kind of groovy, if you ask me. It’s the touch of an actual editor and proofreader, and not just some linguistically brute-force algorithm that makes vague suggestions insulting your style a la Word.

And so I’ll continue to plug away with Pages. Hopefully I don’t get stuck with Betamax on this one.

Looking at the Twitters, the Facebook statuses, the Tumblrs, and all the other micro-content services that broadcast your state of mind to your network, I can’t help but be nostalgic and hearken back to the we-knew-it-way-back-when of the .plan file.

Back in the day, when all you had was UNIX, and you used mh or mail or elm or pine to access e-mail, you could create a text file called “.plan.” Then, when anyone “fingered” you (similar, at least by metaphor, to the “poke” functionality in Facebook), they could see when you last logged in and what was written in your .plan file (and also your .project file).

If you were crafty, you’d run as a daemon “masterplan” which did a DNS lookup whenever someone fingered you (i.e., read your .plan file) and then tried to tell you what username fingered you and when. Masterplan ultimately died because of the number of DNS lookups it had to perform to determine your fingerer—it would take ages and bog down the system. (This was also possible back then because fingering was limited to user accounts on the same system. It wouldn’t work with the multiple servers and clients model of the current Internet.)

But the .plan and the .project had purpose: Really, what is your current “plan,” and what is the current, smaller “project” that you’re working on? It ultimately morphed into the “plan” being a quote from a song or some funny quip that communicated to the other semi-anonymous, obfuscated user (Who the hell is “97psh” or “burble chips”?) what your predilection of mood or drunkenness was at at the moment. It also worked because, unlike perhaps Twitter, you were *always* UNIX to read your e-mail. You couldn’t “background” the OS like you can close or background the Twitter Firefox window. It was more like your status while you were cruising around Facebook.

But just like .plan and .project had purpose, maybe Twitter or Facebook or Google Talk can have purpose as well.  It’s an area where you can tell people what you’re working on–and whether you are interruptable or not, in general, or for a specific purpose.

Working in a law firm, I keep track of my time by client/matter number. What if that client/matter topic was posted on a Twitter? Then when someone wants to contact me, say, by IM, they can mouse over my name and see that I’m working on a certain C/M. Then they can say, quietly to themselves, “Hey, I’m working on that right now, too, so maybe I should IM him now!” Or alternatively, “Eh, he’s working on something else, so maybe I won’t bug him now.” And then have an application—yet to be written—where it matches my Twittered C/M with every else’s Twittered C/M and shows me who else is working on my project at that time.

Great place for someone to build on Jabber for a law-firm specific IM system.

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?

The ABA Journal has 101 tips, tricks, and tools—”law hacks”—to help make lawyers (and lawyers-to-be) more productive. Quite a few of them focus on smaller offices and solo practitioners.

They mention using personal wikis, which I’ve always been a big fan of.

I don’t consider my setup that “unique” in that it would differ greatly from what I would regularly use. But there are nuances that help me with my legal work that I’d like to document.

Del.icio.us

You *should* use Google as your first step in researching an issue. It’s fast, free, and helps you get background and narrow your research tasks. And as you use Google, you run across web pages that need to be bookmarked for later reference (or citation). You need a bookmark manager that you can access across computer (at work, school, and home) that allows you to describe, tag, and find your saved bookmarks. That’s what del.icio.us is for. You can see an example of how I used it for some of my corporate research.

The problems with del.icio.us are numerous, though. The tagging functionality is too basic: you can’t have multiple words in a tag (e.g., “Rule of Law” has to be RuleofLaw or ruleoflaw), you can’t browse on multiple tags (e.g., I want all bookmarks tagged “work” and “afghanistan” because I have bookmarks tagged “education” and “afghanistan” that I don’t want to see). It also can be slow. And it’s not private in that I can’t tag my bookmarks with a client name.

Also, I should note that Zotero (a free Firefox plugin) has awesome capabilities for this type of thing. It’s specifically made for academic and legal on-line research. I’d use it more, but for me, right now, it’s a overload. Del.icio.us, while technically and functionally lacking, does what I need simply and fast.

Firefox

Tabbing in Firefox is crucial. Tabs are the step before bookmarking—you “save” searches and web pages as tabs in the background while you’re browsing other branches of your thought-process. The plugins and bookmarklet support are crucial (see Zotero and del.icio.us above). Also, it “works around” some of the little things that Westlaw and LexisNexis do with Internet Explorer that can slow down your research and make it more expensive. (I don’t know 100% because I pretty much use Firefox all the time, and the few times I have used IE I’ve experienced frustration with what I can’t do.) You can open up multiple Results from searches in multiple tabs and browse them all at once, instead of one at a time. You can background Results pop-up windows. I think you can print from the browser in some instances where you can’t with IE.

Launchy

Launchy replicates the functionality of Mac’s Quicksilver or Spotlight onto the PC. I hit alt-space and a translucent box appears in the middle of my screen. I start typing the name of an application I want to launch (e.g., f-i-r, and it finds Firefox, and I hit enter to launch it), or a Firefox bookmark (e.g., w-e-s and I get my Westlaw bookmark), or a filename or folder, or I start typing in a math calculation (e.g., 162/6, and I get the my billable hours for a project), and Launchy finds and executes it for me.

Freemind

Freemind is a mind-mapping tool that makes nice charts and graphs easy to make, but it’s also great for note-taking. Let me tell you, it’s a lot better than Microsoft Word for outlining your ideas. And when you create presentations with this people always ask, “Does PowerPoint do that? How’d you make it look like that?” To which you answer, “No, and I can’t tell you.”

Here’s a mind-map that I just created about Demand Resources in energy auction markets:

Use a Wiki

I use my own personal installation of MediaWiki, but I have used hosted services like the excellent PBWiki. It basically use it for to-do lists and for notes that I want to access and edit anywhere in the world. They’re not super-fancy, but they’re functional and fast and easy to use. You can collaborate via them, but I don’t.

Google Desktop Search

I save nearly all my cases as PDFs onto my hard drive for later reference. With Google Desktop Search, you can search all these PDFs. Very useful.

I’ve recently been using del.icio.us a lot in keeping track of bookmarks for my legal research at work. When you’re doing Google searches all over the place, the bookmarking in-browser isn’t sufficient. Yes, you can put bookmarks into folders. But you don’t get the snapshot view that you can create with the description and tags in something like del.icio.us.

So, for example, I have a list of bookmarks I’ve saving for the corporate work I’ve been doing lately.  Pretty nice, if you ask me.

I’m not sure, though, if del.icio.us is the best bookmark manager. I think the code is a bit clunky, and it’s made to be a social bookmarking tool—and I’m doing nothing social with this. I use edtags.org for my law school and education-related tags, for bookmark managing and for the social aspect, but I don’t think that bookmarks on corporate and real estate law would be of interest to teachers.

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.

I was browsing through Massachusetts Superior Court slip opinions during this mind-numbing LexisNexis training, and I came across Commonwealth v. Maccini, No. 06-0873, slip op. (Mass.Super. April ___, 2007). This is a typical child pornography case where a cop in Ohio entered a few chatrooms and was solicited by a guy in Massachusetts who then sent him child porn.

The defense is that the child porn should be suppressed because interception of that material is in violation with the Massachusetts wire tap statute. Well, that fails because the communications were “tapped” in Ohio, and therefore the Massachusetts statute doesn’t apply. Furthermore, generally e-mail is treated more like postal mail than phone conversations, and so most courts don’t apply wire-tap statutes anyways.

Here’s what Judge Fabricant thought about it:

The question presented by this motion is whether the defendant’s e-mail and instant message communications were unlawfully intercepted within the meaning of the statute. The Court concludes that they were not, for each of two distinct reasons: First, Haueter received and recorded the communications not in Massachusetts, but in Ohio, where he was not subject to the Massachusetts statute or any similar statute; and second, Haueter’s receipt and recording of the defendant’s communications was not secret, but rather was with the defendant’s knowledge and implicit consent.

In explanation:

In State v. Lott, 152 N. H. 436, 439-442 (2005), the Supreme Court of New Hampshire applied a statute similar to ours to facts virtually identical to those presented here. After thoroughly exploring the nature and characteristics of electronic mail and instant messaging, the Court concluded that the defendant there, by using those methods of communication, “as a matter of law, consented to the recording of his communications,” because recording on a computer is inherent in such communications. Electronic mail, the Court reasoned, is essentially the equivalent of leaving a message on an answering machine; one who sends an e-mail anticipates that it will be recorded. Lott, supra, 152 N. H. at 441, citing State v. Townsend, 57 P. 3d 255, 260 (Wash. 2002). See also United States v. Maxwell, 45 M. J. 406, 418 (U. S. C. A. Armed Forces, 1996) (likening e-mail to sending a letter; sender retains no control, and no expectation of privacy). Instant messaging, similarly, is automatically recorded on the recipient?s computer. The recording remains as long as the chat window is open, and may remain indefinitely if the recipient uses any of various options that are inherent in the instant messaging program to preserve it. Lott, supra, 152 N. H. at 441, citing State v. Bouse, 150 S. W. 3d 326, 329 (Mo. Ct. App. 2004). One who uses these methods of communication, the Court concluded, is on notice of the inherent recording, and implicitly consents to it. Lott, supra. The Lott case, although not binding on this Court, is persuasive, and this Court adopts its reasoning to reach the same conclusion.

So, again, it’s OK for the government to search and seize your electronic communications. Basically, once you send a message to someone else, you do it knowing that they are keeping a copy of it. But does that mean that it’s not private? Does that mean you don’t expect them to send it to the general public? This case doesn’t get into any “expectation of privacy” reasoning; it avoids it altogether. But it’s still a good summary of the current state of the law, pre-Long, and that’s why I’m posting on it.

I have to say that I was initially skeptical of Joost. Even though it’s an offering by the creators of Skype and Kazaa, a torrent-based method of delivering free video content, it sounds like the right stuff. But I was skeptical about how efficiently the content would be delivered and the quality of the content.

Not bad. I’ve only been watching “Stella” from Comedy Central, but it’s good. It halted a bit when I started, but I forgave it, and hit pause and walked away for a bit, and after a minute or two it cached enough content that the rest of my viewing time was pretty much seamless.

I get about 800×600 AVI-quality video, close to par with ripped video content. (Imagine that you rip a DVD to CD size (~700 MB), and that’s what you get—much better than YouTube Flash video.) The selections were well chosen for my personal demographic—definitely enough to keep me happy after I finished the second season of “The Office.”

I think this is going to be great—as long as it lasts. Pretty psyched.

Technically, I just want to add that I’m watching it on an Acer 5610Z laptop, which is an economy laptop, so not-too-high-powered. It doesn’t run on my Mac Powerbook—it only runs on Intel-based Macs. This is exciting. And I’m going to keep on watching Stella until it’s reasonably too late.

In regards to Stella: The guys from The State are there, and they’ve done a great job keeping the wit, humor, and style of The State going about a decade later. I’m also impressed by how racially integrated the cast is. Good show. Check it out on Joost, OK?

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