Year: 2014

Lawyer Creates Platform To Track U.S. Government

January 15, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Tech

Voxgov aggregates and analyzes government news and media (Robert Ambrogi, 27 Dec 2013) – Keeping track of an issue within the U.S. government can be daunting. The government is gargantuan, with thousands of entities publishing a constant flow of news and information across many thousands of websites and social media platforms. Say you have a client who has an interest in food labeling law. To track everything concerning food labeling that the government is putting out through press releases and policy statements and speeches and through Twitter and Facebook and YouTube would be a full-time job, if even that would get it done. A new web platform developed by a lawyer, Voxgov , aims to make it easy for users to track and analyze this constant flow of U.S. government news and media. It describes its mission as becoming “the established site of record for unedited media, news and information from all official government sources.” What that means is that it aggregates in real time all the information flowing out of the federal government and delivers it to you in a single platform. If the Federal Trade Commission posts a press release, it shows up in Voxgov within three minutes, they say. Voxgov came out in beta six months ago. It will formally launch out of beta on Jan. 6. And while it currently collects only federal government information, it plans to add all 50 states by the end of March.

Provided by MIRLN.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/renjith krishnan.

Law School Takes A Step Into The Future

January 13, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Education

Law school’s online-hybrid degree program gets first-ever approval from ABA (ABA Journal, 19 Dec 2013) – In September, the American Bar Association Task Force on the Future of Legal Education called on law schools (PDF) to innovate and embrace technology as a means for educating future attorneys. William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., has answered the call. The ABA Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has approved the school’s plan to offer a hybrid curriculum, scheduled to begin in 2015, that includes both online and in-person classes. School officials met with the council two weeks ago to request a variance from ABA accreditation standards (PDF) which state that no more than one-third of an accredited law school’s curriculum can take place outside of the traditional classroom setting. The council announced yesterday(PDF) that it had granted the variance to William Mitchell’s proposed program, which provides for a 50-50 split between online and in-person class work. The program, which has a four-year duration, will be offered alongside the traditional full-time and part-time J.D. programs. In addition to web-based lectures, discussion boards and chat rooms for students and faculty, the program will emphasize skills training over lectures. Classroom sessions will include simulations as to what law students can expect when they’re practicing attorneys. The program will also include externships. Under the terms of the ABA’s variance, the school will be allowed to admit four entering classes of students under this program, and must limit individual class sizes to 96 students. The school must also provide detailed reports to the council, providing information such as applications and admissions, attrition, course evaluations and skills training. Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education, says they considered several factors before granting the variance, including the school’s 113-year history and experience with part-time law students. Currier said that the school’s application for a variance was highly detailed and very well-thought-out, and it was clear to him that the school was extremely dedicated to making the program work.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/hyena reality.

The Ethics of Online Marketing

January 8, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Ethics

Florida allows competitive keyword advertising by lawyers (Eric Goldman on Forbes, 18 Dec 2013) – In March, the Florida State Bar’s Standing Committee on Advertising proposed an ethics opinion (Proposed Advisory Opinion A-12-1). The opinion was designed to help Florida lawyers understand what they could ethically do with online marketing. It targeted a melange of now-outdated search engine optimization (SEO) practices, such as hidden text and keyword metatags. It also restricted competitive keyword advertising-“[l]awyers may not purchase the name of another lawyer or law firm as a key word in search engines”-even though it’s becoming increasingly clear over the years that such competitive keyword advertising purchases are legal and legitimate (see, e.g., Habush v. Cannon ). Rather than enlighten attorneys about their ethical obligations, this proposal was both hopelessly antiquated and potentially detrimental to legitimate competition. Normally, a proposal like this get rubber-stamped through a state bar’s review process, so its approval seemed inevitable. Nevertheless, working with two law professors in Florida, Faye Jones and Lyrissa Lidsky , and my student research assistant, Jake McGowan, we submitted comments opposing the proposal . My prior blog post . I also made two telephonic appearances before one of the reviewing bodies, the Board Review Committee on Professional Ethics (the BRC), and Google submitted comments as well. Last week, in a surprising development, the BRC rejected the proposal (voting 6-2), and the Florida Bar’s Board of Governors-the ultimate decision-maker-accepted that conclusion (voting 23-18). As a result, the Standing Committee on Advertising’s proposed opinion is dead. The Florida Bar’s Ethics Counsel explained that the BRC: is of the opinion that the purchase of ad words is permissible as long as the resulting sponsored links clearly are advertising, and because meta tags and hidden text are outdated forms of web optimization that can be dealt with via existing rules prohibiting misleading forms of advertising. Still, much work remains. North Carolina has a similar ban on lawyers’ competitive keyword advertising that was quietly enacted last year ( 2010 Formal Ethics Opinion 14 ). I’ll be tackling that next. And Florida has plenty of other ill-advised restrictions on Internet marketing by lawyers, such as restrictions on lawyers making “garden-variety” descriptions of their practices on blogs and websites (see the complaint ) and letting LinkedIn members endorse the lawyer for “skills and expertise” (although at the same Board of Governors’ meeting, that position was reversed and sent for further study).

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Stuart Miles.

Reconsidering Resale Royalties

January 7, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Copyright

Copyright Office calls for congress to reconsider royalties for artists (NYT, 16 Dec 2013) – The last time the United States Copyright Office examined the issue of whether visual artists should receive a share of the profits when their work is resold, in 1992, it concluded that resale royalties – known internationally by the French term droit de suite – were not a good idea. Now, after a recent re-examination of the issue, the Copyright Office has reversed itself. In a report issued Friday, it recommended that painters, illustrators, sculptors, photographers and the like deserve a royalty when their work is resold at a profit. Acknowledging that the current system leaves visual artists at a practical disadvantage relative to other creators such as writers or composers, the office urged Congress to “consider ways to rectify the problem” and give artists a financial interest in the future sale of their work. The office noted that in the past two decades, resale royalties have become more common around the globe, with more than 70 countries adopting some version of the droit de suite rule. A bill to institute a resale royalty was introduced in 2011 by New York Representative Jerrold Nadler, but it failed to gain support. Mr. Nadler is supporting a revised version of his bill, named the Equity for Visual Artists Act. The only state to have a resale royalty law was California, but in 2012, a federal judge struck down the law as unconstitutional.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Grant Cochrane.

NSA Fallout- An Economic Perspective

January 6, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Economy

The foreign policy essay: Cheng Li and Ryan McElveen on “NSA revelations have irreparably hurt US corporations in China” (Lawfare, 8 Dec 2013) – Lawfare readers have followed and discussed the Snowden revelations with a mixture of dread and excitement. Our focus, understandably, is on the impact of the leaks on the intelligence community and on U.S. national security policy. The seemingly endless disclosures and associated news stories, along with the many declassified documents from the ODNI, have sparked discussions on technological change, government accountability and oversight, FISA reform, and other important issues. For many Americans, however, the bigger problem is the leaks’ impact on the U.S. economy and on American businesses-many of whom do business overseas. European allies may eventually shrug off their frustrations with the NSA, but my Brookings colleagues Cheng Li and Ryan McElveen argue that China is far less likely to do so. The revelations are leading to a policy shift that may hinder U.S. technology firms in China for years or even decades. Cheng Li is director of research and a senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings, and is a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Ryan McElveen is a research assistant at the Thornton Center.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Keattikorn.

Livestreaming the 9th Circuit

January 3, 2014 Administrator Leave a comment Tech

9th Circuit to provide live Internet coverage of en banc oral arguments (ABA Journal, 4 Dec 2013) – In what is believed to be the first such effort by a federal appeals court, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will launch live streaming Internet coverage of its en banc oral arguments in San Francisco on Monday. “The 9th Circuit has a long history of using advances in technology to make the court more accessible and transparent,” said Chief Judge Alex Kozinski said in a written statement provided to Courthouse News . “Video streaming is a way to open the court’s doors even wider so that more people can see and hear what transpires in the courtroom, particularly in regard to some of our most important cases.” A page on the court’s website provides further details.

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/Kookkai_nak.