I had a great time at last year's INTA conference in Seattle, mixing and mingling with IP lawyers from all over the world. (INTA = International Trademark Association.) This year's conference will be held in Boston, a city where I recently spent three years attending law school. So for my out of town friends, especially those from other countries, I thought I'd post some information to help get people oriented. Feel free to add more information or post questions to the comments; I included only what I was most familiar with or could readily remember, since I don't live there now.
Facebook is always in the news for something or other, it seems. But this week it's in the news because of changes to its privacy model. Some of these changes are welcome and may even be effective, but many threaten to be disastrous for users' privacy, to the extent they haven't already been.
I myself do use Facebook, albeit reluctantly. It seemed like something I needed to do if I wanted to have any credibility as a cyberlawyer, to go there and see how it worked and what the appeal of it was. Because its appeal wasn't at all obvious to me: there was nothing Facebook offered in its closed, proprietary way that basic Internet technologies didn't offer in their more open and flexible way. I've never understood the point of closed systems. I didn't get them back when AOL was the closed system of choice either. As an Internet user, why restrict yourself to the finite universe of content and users AOL or Facebook provides when there is an unlimited universe just beyond its borders in the Web at large?
But perhaps I'm not sufficiently crediting individual preference. Just as I preferred a large university to a small college, many others prefer the exact opposite. Small feels safe. Predictable. Knowable. Limited. So perhaps that's why so many people have liked Facebook, because it felt like a quiet cul-de-sac away from the tumult of the information superhighway. A quiet place for just you and your friends. But maybe it's not the quiet, out-of-the-way place people thought after all, thanks to Facebook's inadequate privacy model.
There are lots of horror stories about Facebook users being "outed" in some unfortunate way in their real lives by something seen on their Facebook pages, like people being denied insurance coverage for looking too healthy, or even fugitives ending up captured because they posted about where they were. But interesting as those stories may be, what I want to focus on is the illusion of privacy Facebook fosters for its users, which thus enables so many to later be blindsided when content they thought was private is later proved not to be. In particular, I want to focus on the weakest link: friends.
Rwanda is sort of odd as a tourist definition. Its main city, Kigali, is a fairly clean, temperate, and orderly city by African standards, but it's spread out over several hills and valleys with no tourist-friendly mass transit system. Of course, apart from the genocide museum, there's not much to see in the city. It does have many quality hotels and restaurants (it even has a casino), but these mostly cater to the foreign ex-pats living and working in the country.
Rwanda's main tourist attractions lie outside the central capital, in the further corners of the country. To the east is Akagera, the portion of the country most similar to Kenya and Tanzania and home to the elephants, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, et al. that one would expect to see on a safari. To the southwest is the lush rainforest of Nyungwe Forest, and to the northwest Parc National des Volcans, which is home to Rwanda's share of the volcanic range that runs through the Rift Valley section of middle Africa. (Rwanda's volcanoes are all extinct, but some of the ones on the other side of the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo remain active.) Meanwhile, running along much of the country's western border is Lake Kivu, a sizeable lake separating Rwanda from the DRC. Several cities and towns dot the Rwandan coastline, including Gisenyi to the north.
Unfortunately I never made it to Akagera. By the time my schedule settled down it was too late to research and organize affordable transportation. (Nothing in Rwanda is more than a few hours away from Kigali, but unless you are prepared to take local buses or matatus, which still requires figuring out, the other options are to take an organized tour or organize your own transport. I think the latter, especially if you join up with others, makes the most sense. Private car rental may be possible in Kigali, but for sanity's sake it probably is a better idea to hire a driver with a car.) But for the second weekend we headed to points west.
I just returned from my first trip to Africa. I was mostly in Rwanda, but over the first weekend I was there we drove a few hours north to Lake Bunyonyi just beyond the border in Uganda.
Mike Semple Piggot, aka "CharonQC" has a post on his blog critical of the legal logic employed by Scotland in releasing and repatriating convicted Pan Am 103 bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi far earlier than his sentence otherwise would have allowed for. Having invited comments, I posted the following (with a few edits), suggesting that the role of retribution in justice has been seriously overlooked in this matter, and thus explains why America and Americans are so upset:
From time to time the legal blogosphere erupts into discussion about contract lawyering, or, more specifically, contract document review. And this week seems one of those times.
In American litigation there's always a stage known as "discovery," where parties request documents from each other. In commercial litigation these requests often result in voluminous productions of documents, which require review at least twice: once before it's produced, to ensure that the documents being disclosed are responsive to those requests and also not privileged, and once when it is received by the requesting party to see if it is helpful to its case. Both reviews (though particularly the former) can be extremely labor intensive. While they used to be done in vast warehouses of bankers' boxes, thanks to advancements in technology the reviews can now be done electronically, by clicking through documents on a computer screen. (On the flip side, however, this same technological innovation has also increased the workload, as the ease of emailing and electronic document creation has vastly expanded the universe of documents that need to be reviewed.)
So to handle the workload, many law firms turn to contract lawyers to help them. As I've written before, I think contingency work should be a perfectly legitimate way for licensed attorneys to make a living. In fact, I think contingency work should be a legitimate way for nearly everyone to make a living. Instead of employers having to guess at their workloads and permanently staff up in order to cover the busier periods, bearing all that overhead for salaries and benefits, they can bring on people as needed, who get paid more cash for their time in lieu of the stability and benefits of a permanent position. As long as the contractor prefers this arrangement -- and many, for many reasons, do -- everyone wins.
Or can win. But clearly not everyone does, and a few blogs have sprouted to lament the plight of the contract doc reviewer.
As someone who has done contract document review I sometimes follow these blogs in order to keep abreast on the industry, but at the same time I'm often put off by the overwhelming bitterness they espouse. At the same time, underneath the anger I think they reveal some valid, and unfortunate, points about this aspect of the legal profession. So I was moved to answer some of the recent criticism of these blogs I saw on another.
This past week we celebrated an important anniversary. That's right: July 5 was Huey Lewis's birthday.
Though other 80s rock stars have been in the headlines of late, I've been plotting planning this Huey Lewis and the News-themed Blawg Review for quite some time now. People who know me know I'm a big fan of Huey Lewis and the News (hereinafter "HLN"). People who know me know their music has been a big part of my life, particularly in recent years as I've pursued my legal career.
But while I had the prescience to become a fan some 20+ years ago, obviously not everyone has been so fortunate. It would therefore be very wrong of me to waste this opportunity to share all the great things I know about this band and their music.
So join me in this week's Blawg Review as I share the latest in legal blogging along with this crash course in HLN appreciation.
The Telegraph in England is reporting on a school in Wales that has banned kids from using goggles during their swimming lessons on the grounds that they are unsafe.
As a swimming teacher -- in fact, one who doesn't actually like her students to use goggles -- I feel competent, and confident, in saying this school is insane.
On June 1, quite a few years ago, President Monroe asked Congress to declare war on England. "CharonQC" reminds us of this fact in this week's Blawg Review, along with many other facts surrounding this date in history.
In all seriousness, I find the history of US-UK relations to be a source of tremendous optimism about the world, showing how two enemies can eventually come to be close friends -- as governments, and as peoples. And people. This week's Blawg Review collects posts from lawyers on both shores (including my "Sticks and Stones" one).
Of course, given the state of UK politics -- with the predilection of its governing officials to underwrite, with the public fisc, their extensions of their homes to house their servants, the constructions of islands in their lakes to house their ducks, and the maintenance of their houses' moats -- it's probably just as well that the US went its separate way all those years ago...
Brian Cuban has been in the news a lot lately for spearheading a campaign to get FaceBook to ban groups of Holocaust deniers. I fear I may have inadvertently picked a fight with him on Twitter however when I recently tweeted:
"Can't support (@bcuban's efforts to force FBook to purge Holocaust deniers. Suppressing those who were X in '30s enabled what happened in 40s."
Of course, as I also tweeted later, "Nothing like tweeting about the Holocaust 140 characters at a time..." While I know what I meant by my tweet, so compressed my meaning might not be clear to others. So I'll elaborate here.
One of the most interesting courses I took in law school was on comparative constitutional law, which I took during my semester in Germany. I think as Americans we tend to take for granted our federal constitution: that it exists, and how it exists. No matter what the school of thought behind how it should be interpreted, there's a reverence towards it that percolates through all of them. We therefore tend to expect that other modern democracies have their own constitutional equivalents -- an expectation that in reality is rarely met. Many democracies have no constitutions at all, or when they do, they don't necessarily map to our own.
Of course, we needn't look abroad to see these other examples of constitutions. Within our own borders each state bears its own constitution, which may greatly differ in form and substance from the one tying our nation together. Case in point: California.
It's Blawg Review, and once again I've been organized enough to contribute to it. Kevin Thompson at Cyberlaw Central is hosting and has composed his Blawg Review in honor of Towel Day, a day of tribute to Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That guide is known for its helpful travel tips, including that one must always be sure to have their towel.
Speaking of travel, my post about going to INTA is linked to this Blawg Review, but without the picture my friend took of me there holding a Travelodge towel due to some concern on my part that given the angle, lighting, and wardrobe choices (or lack thereof) I ended up looking too much like an artichoke in said picture. So instead I sent in a different one, one where there's no danger of me being confused for being a vegetable of any kind. (At least none known in this part of the galaxy.)
I suppose I have Jeremy Phillips, aka @ipkat, to blame. One of the legal folks I met in England earlier this year, it was he who first suggested I attend the annual INTA conference this year. INTA is an international trademark organization, and thus I might not have thought to attend given that I've typically focused more on copyright than trademark in my cyberlaw work. But cyberlaw is rife with trademark issues, and, like, copyright, trademark law deals with regulating expression -- which is what fascinates me about these areas of law generally. So perhaps it would be worth attending?
Of course, once I realized how many people from around the world I knew who would be there, there was no question.
The Inside Washington show today was talking about the popularity and potency of the Obama administration. Even people who don't like his policies seem to like him, which, they point out, poses a huge problem for his political opposition.
Count me among those people who like him, but are not quite behind all his policies. Make no mistake: there is no one else I'd want to have be president right now. His intellect, poise, thoughtfulness, meticulousness, etc., mean that although there's a slew of things going wrong in the world I can bear the news of them with so much less anxiety because I trust that someone capable is in charge of getting us through it. As I've said before, it's not policies I care about, per se, but the methodology by which they are developed. And his methodology I'm inclined to trust a lot.
And yet, on several big ticket issues I care about, I find many of his current policies coming up short in troubling ways. Stocking the DOJ with representatives of the content cartels and backing their litigation efforts against users, supporting the government's efforts to spy on citizens' communications with even greater zeal than even Bush had, taking a rather milquetoasty approach to the Bush administration's torture program, these policies all run completely contrary to everything I've endeavored to fight against in my personal and professional life. Moreover, they also run completely counter to the liberal ethos he espoused in his campaign, and, indeed, the values I suspect he truly believes in.
So I comfort myself with the thought that he is just getting started. It is a new administration, only slightly more than 100 days into his multi-year marathon, with an enormous list of crises and tasks to deal with. That he has already handled so many with the deftness someone with much more experience in his role could only hope to have is to his credit and inspires tremendous confidence. Thus I feel it's only a matter of time before he realizes the folly of some of his administration's positions, including how they may prove counterproductive to his larger policy goals. There are already some good and talented people in his midst ready willing and able to point this reality out to him, and others like me on the outside who will continue to advocate for these polices' reversal.
I still believe he's the kind of president who will hear us.
My earlier-professed interest in English law is under fire from the rather horrific state of English law. Every day it seems I read about some new ghastly encroachment of civil liberties in the UK that even Orwell himself couldn't dream up on his most cynical day.
Fortunately there is "Geeklawyer," a UK technology and civil liberties lawyer, to fight the good fight, however drunkenly and/or pseudonymously. This week he is the host of Blawg Review #203, a Bacchanalian tribute to the latest in law blawgs. Including mine, despite my recent lack of prolificacy. He was kind enough to include a vaguely recent post, the one on contract lawyering, whose relevance increases with each passing week as more and more Big Law firms lay off even more of their lawyers. The legal business model is very broken, and I'm increasingly convinced that contingent arrangements are the key to the future.
But more on this and other topics later. Although hopefully not too much later, as I'd like to be able to make the next Blawg Review...
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