FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

PLI Offers its Law Books on Kindle

Practising Law Institute is now offering its publications on Kindle.  More than 65 PLI titles are available.

Read more about it in the ABAJournal Law News Now.

Visit the PLI site.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Yahoo to Launch New Research Tool

Yahoo's Search Pad was released Tuesday July 7th.  Search Pad allows users to save and take notes on search results which they can revisit later. 

Read about Search Pad on the WSJ Blog Digits here.

Try Search Pad here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

National Institutes of Health Guidelines on Human Stem Cell Research

In March of 2009 President Obama signed the executive order Removing the Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells.  The National Institutes of Health has issued guidelines on Human Stem Cell Research that become effective July 7, 2009.

The guidelines can be viewed here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Bing searches Twitter

Microsoft Bing now searches Twitter in real time.  Twitter has become increasingly important for keeping up on breaking news.  Many corporations provide press releases via Twitter.   LegalNews is available on twitter.

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

Text Messages are Calls

Text messages to cell phones in regards to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act are calls.  The case arose from Simon & Schuster sending text message advertisements to cell phones.  According to the recent case Laci Satterfield v. Simon and Schuster under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act "call" should  encompass both voice calls and text calls.  The TCPA prohibits automatic phone dialling to cell phones. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Michael Jackson Patent

Did you know Michael Jackson has a patent on a shoe that allows the wearer to lean forward beyond their center of gravity thus creating an anti-gravity illusion?   You can read about the patent on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website.

See the patent here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Google Translate

Google Translate is now translating Persian to English.  Try it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Battle of the Ducks

An interesting article in the ABAJournal Law News Now reports that two companies that provide amphibious vehicle rides in the San Francisco Bay area use Kazoo like quackers to attract attention.  One company has sued the other contending that it owns the sound mark to the quack.  The article reports that only about 150 sound marks have been registered.

Read about it in the the ABAJournal Law News Now. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye

J.D. Salinger has sued to stop the publication of a sequel of sorts to his novel Catcher in the Rye.  The new novel is titled 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye and written by John David California.  Is the character Holden Caulfield copyrightable?  Is the new novel a parody? 

Read the Wall Street Journal Law Blog for more information.

See the complaint here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

bing

Try the new Microsoft search engine (Microsoft calls it a decision engine) bing.  Microsoft describes the decision engine this way:

We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Quantitative Finance Community

Interesting website, Wilmott.com on the quantitative finance community.  It requires registration to see some content. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009

The Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 (S. 386: FERA) was passed by the Senate and signed by the President on May 20, 2009.  Among other things the Bill makes changes to the False Claims Act.

See more here from govtrack.us.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Credit Cardholder's Bill of Rights Act of 2009

The Credit Cardholder's Bill of Rights Act passed the Senate by a vote of 90 to 5.  See the vote on Govtrack.us here.  The House version of the Bill is here.

Posted by Jon Lutz 

WolframAlpha

WolgramAlpha a new search tool has been released.  Here's an excerpt from their website:

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

Try it here: 

Read more about WolframAlpha: 

WolframAlpha and Legal Questions

WolframAlpha & Legal Research 

WolframAlpha is a Great Resource --

Posted by Jon Lutz

Employer's Access of MySpace Group Page

Interesting article on issues of freedom of speech and privacy relating to a password protected MySpace page.  Two employees of a restaurant were fired after management gained access to a password protected MySpace account where employees had made derogatory statements about the restaurant and management.  Here's an excerpt:

The court also found that there were jury issues on the
plaintiffs’ privacy and public policy claims. The New
Jersey Supreme Court has held that New Jersey
employees have a right of privacy in the workplace. That
right of privacy extends to any areas in which employees
have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, i.e., to areas
where it is reasonable to assume that the employer will
not have access. In Pietrylo, the District Court ruled that
there was an issue of fact as to whether the plaintiffs, as
members of the MySpace group, had a reasonable
expectation that no one outside the invited group would
ever gain access. The court recognized that any member
of the group could lawfully reveal the contents of the
MySpace page to any other person. The court reasoned,
however, that a jury must decide whether it was
reasonable to assume that others would gain access to
group through duress. Since the court found a factual
issue on duress, it also found a factual issue on whether
the company violated the plaintiffs’ right of privacy.

Read the whole article here:

Posted by Jon Lutz

Swine Flu Updates

Swine Flu updates are available from Ebscohost: http://www.ebscohost.com/dynamed/h1n1/

Posted by Jon Lutz

Chrysler Ch. 11 Proceeding

The Chrysler Ch. 11 petition is available from Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/14802124/Chrysler-Ch11-Proceeding .

Posted by Jon Lutz

End the University as We Know It

Interesting article in the New York Times, End the University as We Know It.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody

The Senate Armed Services Committee released the report Inquiry onto the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody on April 21, 2009.

It can be viewed here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Juror Tweets During Trial

From the ABAJournal Law New Now a story of a juror who twittered about the case during the trial.  Here's an excerpt:

"Juror Johnathan" may have been a bit of a twit, as the N.Y. Daily News said in a headline, for posting tweets on Twitter.com while awarding a $12.6 million verdict in an Arkansas case.

But his real-time brief posts to the Internet social networking site about his work as a juror don't require a mistrial, a judge in the Washington County Circuit Court case decided Friday, the Associated Press reported.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Iftikhar Chaudhry reinstated

Iftikhar Chaudhry has been reinstated as Pakistan's Chief Justice. See earlier posts on Iftikhar Chaudhry here and here. 

More information on his reinstatement here and here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Psion counter-sues Intel over trademark infringment

Thinking about buying a netbook, you might have to call it something else.  Psion trademarked the name 'netbook' back in the early 2000s on a series of notebook computers. They didn't sell well and the line was ultimately discontinued in 2006.  Now other companies such as Dell, HP, MSI, Asus, Acer and others are selling small notebook computers and calling them Netbooks. Psion is claiming this infringes on their trademark. Intel and Dell have insisted that the name "netbook" has been abandoned and should be considered generic and have made a legal request that Psion be stripped of the trademark.  Psion is counter suing.

Read more here and here.

See Psion's countersuit here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Google Target of Antitrust Lawsuit

Trademark.com has filed suit against Google claiming they violated the Sherman Act by attempting to quash smaller company's business by raising search rates when keyword searches reach a certain number.

You can read more about this here, here and here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Textual Misconduct

A recent article in Slate discusses the legal implications of sexting.  Sexting is the name for sending nude photos via a cell phone.  In a recent case in Greensburg, Pa. three teenage girls were arrested for sexting their boyfriends.  The girls were charged with child pornography and the boys with possession. Teenagers participate in this behavior without realizing the potential legal consequences.  But there are concerns about applying child pornography laws to this crime.  Here's an excerpt from the article:

The argument for hammering every such case seems to be that allowing nude images of yourself to go public may have serious consequences, so let's nip it in the bud by charging kids with felonies, which will assuredly have serious consequences. In the Pennsylvania case, for instance, a police captain explained that the charges were brought because "it's very dangerous. Once it's on a cell phone, that cell phone can be put on the Internet where everyone in the world can get access to that juvenile picture." The argument that we must prosecute kids as the producers and purveyors of kiddie porn because they are too dumb to understand that their seemingly innocent acts can hurt them goes beyond paternalism. Child pornography laws intended to protect children should not be used to prosecute and then label children as sex offenders.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

The End of BitTorrent?

Some of the people who run the BitTorrent site Pirate Bay are going on trial for copyright infringement in Stockholm Sweden.  BitTorrent is a massive peer to peer download site.  Here's an excerpt: (Read the whole article here.)

"It's not merely a search engine. It's an active part of an action that aims at, and also leads to, making copyright protected material available," Roswall told Reuters in January 2008.
The Pirate Bay argue on their web site that, “only torrent files are saved at the server. That means no copyrighted and or illegal materials are stored by us. It is therefore not possible to hold the people behind The Pirate Bay responsible for the material that is being spread using the tracker.”
Defendant Sunde was defiant when he told Reuters, "it's idiotic. There is no legal ground (for the charges)."
Premises connected to The Pirate Bay were first raided in 2006. The complexity of the case led to delays in charges being filed and the case being bought to court.

Posted by Jon Lutz

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

The compromise Senate stimulus bill can be viewed here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Digital Television Transition Extension Act of 2009

The House has voted to delay the analog to digital TV transition from February 17 to June 12.  You can see the bill here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Google Executives Face Jail Time for Italian Video

An interesting article posted in the New York Times reports that several Google executives may serve jail time for a video posted to Google Video.  Here's an excerpt:

The case involves a three-minute cellphone video, posted in 2006 to Google Video, in which four youths in Turin tease a boy with Down syndrome. After an Italian advocacy group complained that the video was objectionable, Google quickly removed it from the site. Prosecutors argue that the video should not have been published at all.

***
It is rare for Internet company executives to face personal criminal charges and possibly jail time for the actions of their companies. “To our knowledge, this is the first time an individual has been criminally charged for violation of data protection laws that occurred by the company he or she works for,” said Trevor Hughes, the executive director of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, which wrote about the case in its newsletter Monday. “This suggests that privacy is going to be more of a battleground.”

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Senate Stimulus Bill

You can see the Senate Stimulus Bill S.336 here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Google Book Settlement

Information about the Google Book Settlement has been posted on the web.  Here's a statement from the Google Book Settlement site:

This is the settlement administration website for the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement. The purpose of this website is to inform you of a proposed Settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, claiming that Google has violated their copyrights and those of other Rightsholders of Books and Inserts (click for definitions), by scanning their Books, creating an electronic database and displaying short excerpts without the permission of the copyright holders. Google denies the claims. The lawsuit is entitled The Authors Guild, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc., Case No. 05 CV 8136 (S.D.N.Y.) The Court has preliminarily approved the Settlement. For further information, please review the Notice.

The Settlement Agreement is here.
More documents relating to the Google Book Settlement can be found here.
A statement by the President of the Authors Guild is here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Legal Education Commons

CALI has created a Commons for sharing legal education materials.  Here's an excerpt from their web page:

The Legal Education Commons (LEC) is the place to find and share legal education materials including syllabi, podcasts, presentations, and more. Faculty and librarians from CALI member schools can upload materials under a Creative Commons license that allows colleagues and students to find and use the materials.

The LEC also offers access to over 700,000 federal court opinions from the public.resource.org collection. As with other resources in the eLangdell system, these cases can be re-edited and incorporated into course materials.

Faculty, librarians, and staff of CALI member schools are free to contribute, via upload, MS Word, Powerpoint, Wordperfect, PDF, RTF, or text files as well as MP3 audio files.  The maximum size for any file is 50 megabytes.

See the CALI Legal Education Commons website here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Annotated Justinian Code

For those interested in Civil Law, the University of Wyoming is hosting an English translation of the Justinian Code with annotations. 

See it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

What's a Legal Simulation

Law School Innovation has an interesting post titled What's a legal simulation?  Here's an excerpt:

If Paul Maharg has his way, American law professors may soon have as much in common with the game referees in World of Warcraft than Prof. Kingsfield from The Paper Chase. Maharg, author of Transforming Legal Education, is working with CALI to distribute and support software that enables legal educators to run legal practice simulations. SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Legal Education) provides a framework for students to engage in transactions typical of real-life legal practice, providing the kind of contextualized knowledge and skill that the Carnegie Study and others have demanded.

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law Schools Customize Degrees to Students' Taste

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses how law Schools are customizing law degrees.  Here's an excerpt:

The curriculum at law schools has undergone a major transformation in recent years, as many have set up niche programs to attract students. A few critics, however, are beginning to speak out against the trend, arguing that it is driven largely by marketing considerations and hurts legal education.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Barack's BlackBerry

Obama may get to keep his BlackBerry after all.  See an earlier post here. 

Read an update here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Survey Gets Law-School Students' Thoughts on Laptops

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article titled: Survey Gets Law-School Students' Thoughts on Laptops, Writing, and Ethics. The article discusses the role of laptops in law schools as well as writing and ethics and was based on a report titled: The 2008 Law School Survey of Student Engagement. Here's an excerpt:

Students who used laptops for class-related activities, like reading case briefs or taking notes, were more likely than students using laptops during class for other purposes to be engaged in classroom discussions, synthesize concepts from different courses, and work hard to meet faculty expectations, the survey found.

The trick for professors, of course, is to ensure that students are actually using computers to study law.

The survey, now in its fifth year, is administered by the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University at Bloomington and measures various aspects of the law-school experience, including how students spend their time and how well they have learned. Participating schools use the information to assess their performance and develop practices to better teach law.

Read the Chronicle article here.

There's more information on the report here.

The survey results are here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

MSE360 search engine

A new search engine mse360 is worth a try.  It displays Wikipedia and blog results to the left,  web results center and image results to the right. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Sony Digital Reader

The Kindle isn't the only digital reader, Sony also has an excellent digital reader.  Here are some of its features:

• 6" Display
• E-ink paper-like touchscreen
• Built-in LED reading light
• Search, annotation, and highlighting capabilities
• Adjustable text sizes
• Long battery life
• Holds approximately 350 books
• Thousands of eBooks available

See more here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Teknoids

Teknoids is a Drupal enhanced web site about technology use within a law school or law firm environment. It can be viewed at www.teknoids.net/. The site is brand new and while they are migrating content over from the old site, it's still available at ly.teknoids.net/.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody

Senators Carl Levin and John McCain on December 11th released the Executive Summary and Conclusions of the Report on Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.

Read the Executive Summary here.

More information can be found here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Investment Deficit in America

The Campaign for America's Future Center has released the Report The Investment Deficit In America: Yesterday's Achievements, Today's Problems, Tomorrow's Solutions.  Here's an excerpt: 

America’s future growth and prosperity depend on a secure supply of affordable
and sustainable energy. With the price of oil likely to rise over time, instability
overseas, and a few entrenched interests dominating the market, this is a crucial
time for government intervention. Emerging new energy technologies promise
new possibility: scientific innovation, new jobs, and a rejuvenated industrial base.  Public support can help tip these fledgling industries from ideas to success stories of  green enterprise. Government needs to invest in research and development, create sound tax policy, and enforce the rules.

Read the report here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

FERPA

The Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, Department of Education has released the final FERPA regulation, effective as of January 8, 2009.  Here's an excerpt:

SUMMARY: The Secretary amends our regulations implementing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which is section 444 of the General Education Provisions Act. These amendments are needed to implement a provision of the USA Patriot Act and the Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act, which added new exceptions permitting the disclosure of personally identifiable information from education records without consent. The amendments also implement two U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting FERPA, and make necessary changes identified as a result of the Department’s experience administering FERPA and the current regulations.

These changes clarify permissible disclosures to parents of eligible students and conditions that apply to disclosures in health and safety emergencies; clarify permissible disclosures of student identifiers as directory information; allow disclosures to contractors and other outside parties in connection with the outsourcing of institutional services and functions; revise the definitions of attendance, disclosure, education records, personally identifiable information, and other key terms; clarify permissible redisclosures by State and Federal officials; and update investigation and enforcement provisions. DATES: These regulations are effective January 8, 2009.

Read the whole regulation here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Google wants its own fast track on the web

According to the Wall Street Journal Google is promoting a plan to the major cable and phone companies that would allow a fast lane for its own content.  Here's an excerpt:

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic the same -- nobody is supposed to jump the line.

But phone and cable companies argue that Internet content providers should share in their network costs, particularly with Internet traffic growing by more than 50% annually, according to estimates. Carriers say that to keep up with surging traffic, driven mainly by the proliferation of online video, they need to boost revenue to upgrade their networks. Charging companies for fast lanes is one option.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Google Books adds print magazines

From a Washington Post article:

Google took another step towards ingesting all the world's printed knowledge.  In addition to books and newspapers, Google Book Search now archives millions of pages of magazines from New York Magazine and Ebony to Popular Mechanics.

Read the whole article here.

Try Google Books here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Courtport

Courtport is a service for public record research.  It is free to academic users.  Here's an excerpt of what areas Courtport covers:

Case information, criminal records, liens, recordings, vital records, and more. Case information includes docket sheets, filings, rulings, calendars, motions, and other related documents vital to in-depth research. In addition to civil, criminal, bankruptcy, and other court case information, you can also search criminal records, such as prison and jail inmate logs, arrests and bookings, outstanding warrants, and sex offender registries. Our portal also helps you quickly access corporate records, UCCs, vital records, trademarks, and property records.

Try it here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

French Muslim Girls lose veil case at European court

STRASBOURG, France, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Europe's human rights court on Thursday threw out a complaint by two French Muslim girls who were expelled from their school for refusing to remove their headscarves during sports lessons.

France, which takes secularism in state schools very seriously, passed a law in 2004 banning pupils from wearing conspicuous signs of their religion at school after a decade of bitter debate about Muslim girls wearing headscarves in class.

Read the whole article here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

2008 ABA Journal Blawg 100

The ABA Journal has released its list of top 100 blawgs.  You can see the list here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Hillary Clinton and the Emoluments Clause

There is an interesting post on The Volokh Conspiracy Blog about Hillary Clinton and the Emoluments Clause.  The emoluments clause states:

No Senator or Representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time: and no person holding any office under the United States, shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office.*

The salary of the Secretary of State has increased while Hillary Clinton was Senator so this might make here ineligible to be Secretary of State. 

Read The Volokh Conspiracy post here.

Read more here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

GLOBAL TRENDS 2025: THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE COUNCIL'S 2025 PROJECT

Global Trends 2025 is a report prepared by the National Intelligence Council to look at global trends over the next 15 years.  Here's an excerpt of their preliminary assessments:

• The whole international system—as constructed following WWII—will be revolutionized. Not only will new players—Brazil, Russia, India and China— have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.
• The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.
• Unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources—particularly energy, food, and water—raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.
• The potential for conflict will increase owing partly to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East.

See more here.

See the Report here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Iftikhar Chaudhry

In late 2007 The National Law Journal chose deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry as its Lawyer of the Year for standing up for the preservation of the rule of law under the Presidency of Pervez Musharraf.  in November 2007 Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, suspended the constitution and arrested Chaudhry along with seven other justices.   See this earlier post for more information.  Chaudhry is currently in the US to receive awards from the New York City Bar Association and Harvard Law School.

See here and here for more information.

Posted by Jon Lutz