Laguna Roses

Stephanie Tai is still with us, but in a lower res version dictated by her (government) employers. Wish I could say we weren't likely to see more of this sort of thing, which only equates to (1) missed opportunities for the organization/institution, and (2) more anonymous/psuedonymous writers. *Sigh.* Thesis 29: "Elvis said it best: 'We can't go on together with suspicious minds.'" Thesis 87: "We'd like it if you got what's going on here. That'd be real nice. But it would be a big mistake to think we're holding our breath."

Jeff Jarvis has an interesting and encouraging report on a session held yesterday to preview AOL's forthcoming blogging tools. Among other things, Jeff details signs of intelligent life and cautions against knee jerk reactions: "If we are eager for Iraqis and Iranians to blog, we certainly should be eager for AOLers to blog." In the comments, Dave Sifry is good to go.

Very, very cool—Jerry "OYEZ" Goldman's interview with Laura Lynch of Creative Commons:

This month the OYEZ mission takes a new step forward with the release of hundreds of hours of MP3 versions of their archived audio under a Creative Commons license.

Imagine having all your favorite hits by The Supremes tucked away in your tote for a leisurely beach listen. Ok, so it's not for everyone...but it's still sicknasty. Here's more information, and the initial MP3s available for download. Here also is Glenn Otis Brown's June 25 post about Creative Commons' new strategy for helping people associate license information with MP3s.

OYEZ presents: the Portable Court

[Update] Joe Germuska has more, including links to OYEZ RSS feeds, its iCalendar for the Supreme Court (!!), and this: "I used to work with Jerry at Northwestern University, and he always liked to be on the 'bleeding edge.' So far he's the only person who turns up in my iChat AV buddy list with an AV-enabled icon." (See also the OYEZ Features page.)

An executive summary of D: All Things Digital is scheduled to air on CNBC starting today (7:00, 10:00, and 1:00 a.m. Eastern; 4:00, 7:00, and 10:00 p.m. Pacific). Check your local listings and set the TiVo so you can go off and watch the fireworks.

Jack Balkin has a great summary of the 9th Circuit's recent Batzel decision (PDF) and its implications for bloggers:

This does not mean that bloggers are immune from libels they themselves write. It means that they are immune from (for example) libels published in their comments section (if they have one) because these comments are written by other people and the blogger is merely providing a space for them to be published. Congress wanted to treat operators of chatrooms and other interactive computer services differently from letters to the editor columns in a local newspaper.

So if bloggers defame somebody, they can still be sued for what they say, just not for what someone else who publishes on the blogger's site says. The Ninth Circuit extends this immunity to people who run e-mail lists and republish the e-mails they receive to the list, even if they edit the e-mails a bit or do not republish every e-mail they receive. That is different from the rules that apply to print journalism. A newspaper is responsible for defamation in letters to the editor or op-ed columns that are published in the newspaper.

Jeff Jarvis rightly tells blogging attorneys and law professors, "It would be a tremendous contribution to your community to put up on the web a guide to libel, defamation, copyright, and other legal highlights for bloggers." Too true. I'd be happy to take part in such a project, but fear that in order for it to truly shine we'd need to find a coordinator who works for someone like IBM (see Tim Bray's discussion of Sam Ruby's work on Echo). In the meantime, at least it now can be said there are hundreds of blawgers out there, with a broad range of legal expertise, who help shed light on these sorts of issues post by post. That wasn't the case just a couple of years ago.

Sally Field (as "Rep. Rudd") in Legally Blonde 2: "Never underestimate a woman with a French manicure and a Harvard law degree." Heh.*

A Netscape movie reviewer fears further sequels: "Please tell me this won't turn into a series like the 'Crocodile Dundee' movies, where she keeps doing the same shtick in different cities. I can see it now: 'Legally Blonde 3: The Blonde Apple' ... 'Legally Blonde 4: The Blonde Rose of Texas' ... "

*I can "heh" because
while my keratinized epithelial cells
routinely are Francophiles—sorry Halley—
I didn't go to Hahvahd.

This e-greeting from "Everyone at Reed Smith (UK)" tickled the heck out of me (the "no hard feelings" part). But then, I'm easily entertained.

AP writer Juliana Barbassa, "Sites win blogger ruling:"

Other cases have said commercial service providers on the Internet are not responsible for information posted by a third party. And this decision says non-commercial Web site hosts are only liable when they post information that a reasonable person would have known wasn't meant to be published.

The decision is a relief for bloggers and other online publishers.

Good quotes from Jeralyn Merritt—who writes the excellent Talk Left blog— too, check it out.

Ed Stoner, the head of my firm's higher education practice group, participated this afternoon in a live Web chat/colloquy hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the subject of the Michigan affirmative action decisions. Ed fielded a variety of questions from university representatives, students and others around the world about how the U.S. Supreme Court's reasoning and conclusions may affect issues such as faculty hiring, scholarships, recruitment, and much more. I know I'm tooting a colleague's horn here, but this is a wide-ranging exploration of issues you may not yet have thought of or seen addressed in the coverage about the cases. I found it very informative, and I recommend it. Ed wraps up with a reminder that he will have more along these lines at an upcoming seminar:

I will be talking about this on August 13 when Reed Smith does its complimentary Higher Education Law all day seminar in Warrendale, just north of Pittsburgh. If you'd like to attend, it is open to all higher ed administrators. You may find out more by e-mailing spetrakis@reedsmith.com or visiting our website.

[links added]

On deck for the day: an outing with the summer associates to El Cholo and the Natural History Museum, which now through September is home to "[t]he largest exhibition of Inca treasures ever assembled in the United States." (Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas)

...and this week, for guest blogger Ted. Karen Robinson-Jacobs has an article in today's Los Angeles Times called "Lawyers Putting Their Weight Behind Obesity Cases." A *taste*:

Last week, behind closed doors, veteran attorneys of the tobacco wars taught a class on how to attack what they say is the nation's latest health affliction: fast food.

The session at Northeastern University was as secretive as McDonald's has been about the special sauce on a Big Mac.

Thanks too to Ernie—who I'm guessing is already putting Chris Pirillo's law books feed to good use—for the write up on Walter's new book.

My husband just sent me SMS. (This from the guy who made me explain again last night why he should right-click things.) I felt certain I'd first experience fully realized cold fusion.

Marketing Fix is now Up2Speed, having been purchased ("yes, we sold out") by ClickZ co-founder Andy Bourland. I think this kind of LBO (leveraged blog out) is what I had in mind back in April last year, when James Miller was writing about blogging from an economist's view. "Signing up" need not mean "selling out," and Rick Bruner's honest-to-god press release about the post-purchase relaunch (and shameless begging for Slashdottage) seems like proof positive: "[P]aragraph transitions are hard" —etc. Rivaled only by the genius of Ms. Sessum and her progeny...

While you're at it, be sure to check out Up2Speed Contributing Editor Steve Hall's excellent Adrants, as well as Chief of Product Marketing Olivier Travers at Web Voice, and Contributing Editor Robert Loch at Viral Planet.

Lileks: "my wife was sacked."

[A]nyone need a lawyer? Three years Department of Justice in DC, eight years Assistant Attorney General for the State of Minnesota. Smart as they come, rigorous and diligent, astonishingly hardworking, and a you-can-turn-the-world-on-with-your-smile smile that makes Mary Tyler Moore look like exhibit A at a dental convention's "Crones and Gingivitis" seminar.

[Thanks Kevin, for the heads up.]

Read about it, at Jack Bog's Blog. A happy eightieth birthday to Judge Alfred T. (Ted) Goodwin!

Writing In Orange does not, it turns out, refer to one's Crayola preferences. Instead, it's an interesting new blog devoted to encouraging random and not so random acts of prose and poetry from and about Orange County, CA. Orange County has much more going on than one might gather from the movies. It is a post-suburban laboratory, swimming in cultural pluralisms and dissonances, heats and beats, live bait and dead presidents. I learned the other night that I know people who know people who hire people to drive their children's car pools—car pool chauffeurs, if you will. I learned the night before that 16% of the county seat lives below the poverty line. Orange County fairly bursts with writerly inspiration. Kudos to Joel Sax for his efforts to let it loose on the Web.

Legally Blonde 2 is now in theaters and has a good cast, including Bob Newhart, Sally Field and Regina "I'm just a little pregnant here" King

Hi! I've managed to get through a ton of backlogged work over the last couple of days, but concomitantly it has meant sparse blogging. I'll see what I can do about that in the next hour or so, but while I'm cobbling together some more posts check out these two very wonderful developments to which people have been paying attention while I wasn't paying attention:

Dave Winer is mulling over how one would create a Subscriptions Harmonizer. Knowing that Dave is thinking about this has put a big ol' silly grin on my face. Reason being, there are at least four computers in my life I rely on to get things done (I say at least four, because if I'm working in one of our other offices I'll often just use a "visiting attorney's" setup there rather than tote along a laptop). Some run OS X (mine), others run Windows (hubby's; the firm's). The real reason I've never gotten hooked on this whole aggregator thing is it's simply too big a headache to (1) install an OS-appropriate aggregator on each machine, and (2) customize each aggregator on each machine with my subscriptions. If Dave's Harmonizer pans out, this will be SOOOOOO CONVENIENT. I can't stand it, I can't wait. Go, Big D!

Hugely exciting in a different way is the fact that Daubert on the Web, a site that already was an invaluable resource for any lawyer who deals with expert witness issues (that's most of us), now has Blog 702. The name's a reference to the fact that in the U.S. federal courts Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence is the basis for admitting expert witness testimony. I give you Peter Nordberg's inaugural post:

It is the year 2001, and you think yourself modern. So you labor mightily, tirelessly poring over dusty volumes, to build a web site on Daubert. It is a daunting and transforming task. You confront the mysteries of html. You start having opinions about things like javascript. Abandoning your shame over self-promotion, you link and struggle to get linked in return. You even somehow manage to get yourself crawled by Google.

It is the year 2002. At long last, all your efforts have paid off. Not monetarily, mind you. But spiritually. Your handiwork is finally available to people around the globe, at the merest click of a mouse, and a few people have actually noticed.

Quite a bracing feeling.

But now it is the year 2003, and as it turns out, nobody cares these days, unless you have a blog. So here you are.

Hee! (Just one thing: Give us an R! Give us an S! Give us another S!...) [via Ernie, via Ed]

Just about to grab lunch and settle in with the 78-page Intel v. Hamidi (PDF) decision issued by the California Supreme Court today. Coverage:

• How Appealing
• San Jose Business Journal ("State's high court upholds right of ex-Intel mass mailer")

Cheddar Triscuit. (As an attorney, I always wrote and snacked. As a pregnant attorney, I've gone pro.)

Doorknob Spam. Where's the National Do Not Hang registry, hmm? (As a citizen, this stuff always annoyed me. As a pregnant citizen, I no longer am responsible for the severe bodily harm to be inflicted on any culprit caught in the act.)