Aspen doesn’t want you to own your own casebooks (Laboratorium, 6 May 2014) – Aspen imprint is a leading publisher of law school casebooks. Over the years, it’s built a reputation for high editorial and design standards. Some of its casebooks, like Property, by the late Jesse Dukeminier et al., are perennially popular. I like to tell new Property professors that no one ever got fired for assigning Dukeminier. Unfortunately, Aspen has chosen to use Dukeminier’s Property in launching a disturbing new program: the “Connected Casebook. The official website isn’t live yet, but law professor Josh Blackman blogged about an email he received from Aspen describing the program. My account follows his. In brief, students, will be required to “buy” a Connected Casebook, which consists of two pieces. First, there is “lifetime access” to a digital version of the casebook, together with various supplementary materials. Second, there is a bound physical version of the casebook, which students can highlight and mark up freely, “but which must be returned to us at the conclusion of the class.” The obvious goal is to dry up the used book market by draining the supply of used copies. But as Josh points out, it seems unlikely that every student will return the physical book. Rather, reading between the lines, Aspen may argue that the physical book is “licensed” rather than “sold” under the reasoning of cases like Vernor v. Autodesk. The result would be that first sale (the right of the owner of a book, or a DVD, or any other copy of a copyrighted work to resell it freely) would never attach, since the students wouldn’t be “owners” of their physical copies. [Polley : this seemed ill-conceived when announced, and Aspen was back-peddling within a day; Prof James Grimmelmann @grimmelm led the forces, and routed Aspen; it was a nice Twitter feed to watch unfold.]

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KKR adds cyber-risk score to its assessment of companies (Bloomberg, 11 April 2014) – How important is cybersecurity to investors? The private equity firm KKR (KKR) just provided its own answer to that, adding a cyber-risk score to its assessment of the companies in its portfolio. About a year ago, KKR officials decided they needed to find a way to understand the current state of security at the companies they were invested in, as Chief Information Office Ed Brandman tells it. That goal might sound simple, but how to get there wasn’t obvious for a diverse set of 90 companies across a range of industries and regions. KKR worked with BitSight Technologies to come up with what amounts to a credit score for cyber risk. BitSight, based in Cambridge, Mass., collects Internet traffic flowing to and from tens of thousands of companies. Its staff members analyze risky behavior, such as communications with spam networks or servers known to be controlled by hackers and cybercriminals, to come up with a score for cyber risk on a scale from 250 (worst) to 900 (best). Subscribers to the service use it to help assess the security at third parties with whom they may share sensitive data and to benchmark their own performance, says Stephen Boyer, chief technology officer at BitSight. Bitsight did the same for 70 of KKR’s private equity holdings-excluding some in the portfolio that KKR was about to sell or had just bought.

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4 accused in law firm fraud ignored a maxim: don’t email (NYT, 6 March 2014) – Several former leaders of the once-high-flying law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf apparently violated a cardinal rule that lawyers always tell their clients: Don’t put anything incriminating into an email. Four men, who were charged by New York prosecutors on Thursday with orchestrating a nearly four-year scheme to manipulate the firm’s books to keep it afloat during the financial crisis, talked openly in emails about “fake income,” “accounting tricks” and their ability to fool the firm’s “clueless auditor,” the prosecutors said. One of the men even used the phrase “cooking the books” to describe what they were doing to mislead the firm’s lenders and creditors in setting the stage for a $150 million debt offering that was supposed to solve the firm’s financial woes, according to the messages.

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