Download It While Its Hot: Open Access and Legal Scholarship by Georgetown University Law Center Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 10, p. 841, 2006 Illinois Public Law Research Paper No. 07-03 U Illinois Law & Economics Research Paper No. LE07-11 Abstract: This Article analyzes the shift of legal scholarship from the old world of law reviews to today's world of peer reviews to tomorrow's world of open access legal blogs. Number of Pages in PDF File: 28 Keywords: law reviews, open access, peer-edited, blog, blogging, disintermediation Accepted Paper Series Suggested Citation Solum, Lawrence B., Download It While Its Hot: Open Access and Legal Scholarship.
SeriesSeed.com For Law Nerds As we mentioned in our previous post, most of the edits to Version 3.0 of Series Seed are formatting related. This section of the blog will break down most of our edits, and for those of you not ready to take the plunge into GitHub, we have included Word documents and redlines against Version 2.0. First and foremost, the largest formatting change is the merging of the previous Investors’ Rights Agreement and Stock Purchase Agreement into one new document called the Stock Investment Agreement, which covers all of the provisions of the previous two documents. Second, we have moved all of the variable definitions in the Stock Investment Agreement up to the front of the document, which allows for easier editing of the “fill in the blank” definitions that previously appeared throughout the documents. Third, we have updated references to written signatures and communication to allow for electronic methods like email. For Real Nerds Pull requests Issues
AllofMP3.com Responds to RIAA Lawsuit The legal wranglings of various file-sharing developers has created several common response patterns from those unfortunate enough to face litigation from the RIAA (Recording Industry Associate of America.) If you're of the LimeWire ilk, your response may be to stay and fight. If you're from the BearShare clan, you may wish to settle. Then there's the Ares Galaxy option; a tactic that focuses on apathy in the face of potential litigation and carrying on business as usual. AllofMP3.com appears to have chosen the third option in response to a lawsuit filed by the RIAA on behalf of its member companies. The RIAA charges that AllofMP3.com is an illegal service and infringes on their member company's copyrights because they have yet to see any of the fees collected by the Russian music store. AllofMP3 countered the music industry’s claim, stating the service is completely legal in Russia as all necessary fees have been forwarded to the Russian royalty collection firm, ROMS.
A VC Microsoft Tries To Patent RSS Readers - Mashable! It seems that the US patent system is regularly abused, so it's no surprise that Microsoft think they can patent the some of the technology related to feed readers, the handy little applications that some of you are probably using to read this post. Microsoft has filed for two patents covering the technology used to organize and read syndicated Web feeds - these patents were made public today after an 18-month period during which applications are kept secret. That means Microsoft filed the patents way back on June 21, 2005. A few days later, they announced a plan to include RSS support in Windows Vista and Internet Explorer. The two patents (here and here) cover the ability to "subscribe to a particular Web feed, be provided with a user interface that contains distinct indicia to identify new feeds, and...efficiently consume or read RSS feeds using both an RSS reader and a Web browser." That would all be great, if it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft didn't invent this stuff. [via]
Hackathon Winner Docracy Is A GitHub For Legal Documents One of the winners at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is Docracy, an open source site where users can share and sign legal documents, similar to what GitHub provides for code. The site is the brainchild of mobile app developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson, who are the founders of app development startup Larva Labs. Docracy is an online, opensource hub for quality legal documents like contracts, NDAs, wills, trusts and more. Hall and Watkinson were recently were signing an NDA with a client and wasn’t sure if there were any terms in the NDA that should be flagged, or that were out of the ordinary. It’s a great idea and certainly one that many bootstrapped startups, freelancers or individuals can use in a pinch.
The Social Psychological Approach to Influence & Persuasion You, the reader, may be an influence expert. You may work in politics, advertising, sales, law, or any number of other careers that require you to persuade people in the course of your daily life. You may be very successful, too. If so, you have an intuitive feel for what moves people. And you probably enjoy thinking about how persuasion works. You may occasionally find yourself in the situation of the lawyer in the following story. During the weeks before the vote, attorneys were volunteering to speak to just about any group of people who would lend them an ear. Our lawyer friend is asking the right questions, but coming to exactly the wrong conclusions. He is guessing that rapid speech makes one sound credible. What he doesn't know, however--what he can't know--is that there are several variables in this scenario interacting with each other that are making the relationship between his advocacy and persuasion a complex one.
Elevator Pitch Nivi · November 2nd, 2007 “Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.” — Sequoia Capital Summary: An introduction captures an investor’s attention, but a great elevator pitch gets a meeting. Yo! If you’re building an interesting company, people will offer to introduce you to investors—it makes them look good. So, what should you send investors? Get a first meeting with an elevator pitch. A great elevator pitch is more important than your deck and less important than the “introducer”. An introduction sells the investor on reading the elevator pitch, which sells the investor on reading the deck, which sells the investor on taking a meeting. An elevator pitch. Send a brief email that the introducer can forward with a thumbs-up. Subject: Introducing Ning to Blue Shirt CapitalHi Nivi,Thanks for offering to introduce us to Blue Shirt Capital. Your email should be no longer than this example (which is already too long). Dissecting the elevator pitch. Let’s dissect this pitch:
Google Patents :: ArnoldIT A programmable search engine system is programmable by a variety of different entities, such as client devices and vertical content sites to customize search results for users. Context files store instructions for controlling the operations of the programmable search engine. The context files are processed by various context processors, which use the instructions therein to provide various pre-processing, post-processing, and search engine control operations. Methods and apparatus, including systems and computer program products, to provide clustering of users in which users are each represented as a set of elements representing items, e.g., items selected by users using a system. A programmable search engine system is programmable by a variety of different entities, such as client devices and vertical content sites to customize search results for users. Once a search query is received from a user, a standard index is searched based on the search query.
How much to raise? A good rule of thumb is to have a financial plan with 18+ months of runway after you raise a round. That is long enough that you can avoid worrying about raising money for a year while you just focus on running the business. Any shorter and you’ll find you are back in the market looking for more money after 6 months and are facing a “flat round” in terms of valuation because you really haven’t had time to achieve much. Note, in some industries (mobile is a good example) you want to have 24+ months of runway (because carrier deals take so long). However if you raise more then 24 months of money in an industry where things move fast and don’t cost much, then you’re likely just going to watch interest accrue at the stunning rate of 2% in your bank account while kicking yourself in the butt for “giving away” equity at such a low valuation. Another issue on deciding how much money to raise is related to investor capacity. Why?
AudioCaseFiles.com - Home Patently-O: Patent Law Blog Below is my account of the Patent Troll debate at PatCon 4. As those who were in attendance know, it was a dynamic, insightful, and interesting discussion about a very complex issue. Resolved: That hostility to patent trolls is not well justified theoretically or empirically and will likely result in bad law. Pro: David Schwartz, John Duffy Con: Michael Meurer, Mark Lemley John: Hostility to patent trolls unfounded as a theoretical matter. 1) Alienability of patent rights: this should not be changed. Consider AT&T research labs: better to have everything integrated into a massive corporation or to have rights spread out among lots of people. 2) Litigation costs are high. Mike – Three observations: 1) Relatively little troll activity at the start of the 20th century 2) Small businesses have motivated Congress and the White House to pursue a variety of reforms 3) Peter Detkin thinks that there is a lot of evidence that some folks are gaming the system. 1) Critical issue of what a PAE is.
Patently-O: Patent Law Blog: Supreme Court: Current Test of Obvi (Supreme Court 2006, Oral Arguments). The doctrine of nonobviousness is the cornerstone of American patent law. I was reminded today by Phil Swain that our nonobviousness statute, section 103(a) of the Patent Act, was drafted by Judge Giles Rich . Judge Rich is most celebrated patent judge of this century. His statutory masterpiece eliminated the amorphous concept of a “flash of genius” and replaced it with our now ubiquitous objective standard of a person having ordinary skill in the art. In Graham v. Later, as the Federal Circuit developed its own patent jurisprudence, the court hit upon the teaching-suggestion-motivation test as another anti-hindsight rule. In , the Supreme Court is questioning whether the TSM test should exist as the sole determinant of obviousness. Until a few months ago, the common of the TSM test was that it required at least some hard evidence that provided at least a minimal reason to combine various prior art references. J. J. Mr. Mr. Prediction Certiorari ;
Court says "no" to changing terms of service without n Many of us have seen service agreements that specify that the terms could be changed at any time without notifying the user. Well, a recent court decision could change all that. Service providers should not be able to change their terms of service arbitrarily without notifying their registered users, according to the judges in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The decision on the case of Douglas v. Talk America (PDF) could affect how web site operators handle changes made to user agreements, regardless of what the user originally agreed to. The case involved an AOL voice customer named Joe Douglas whose account was transferred to Talk America when Talk America purchased that segment of AOL's business. The Ninth Circuit disagreed heavily with the original ruling, saying that it was not reasonable to expect Douglas to check the company's web site every day just to see if the terms of service had changed.