The UDRP: A Guide for SMEs and Consumers on Domain Names and Domain Name Disputes

See their announcement for the link.

Blog: The UDRP – A Guide for SMEs

Wonder how IP will factor in if it comes into existence? IP rights — patents and copyrights — are in the US Constitution.

the site is intended to serve as a forum for referrals, discussion of professional issues and information-sharing

I actually use the ABA’s excellent email discussion list SOLOSEZ for this kind of information gathering. But discussion lists are somewhat limited, and it will be good to see if LawLink can develop into the kind of community that makes SOLOSEZ such a wonderful resource.

(I like the new logo!) For those of you back in Texas, EFF-Austin is having a meetup:

EFF Austin is renewing the practice of monthly supporter meetings.  The first in this series will be held at 7pm on Thursday, July 5th at Progress Coffee (see links below for maps and additional information).  This first meeting will feature a discussion with Will Hurley about the future of Open Source software.

Will Hurley is the Chief Architect of Open Source Strategy at BMC Software and the author of the recently launched but oft discussed “Opensville” blog.  “Whurley” has also been instrumental in bringing the BarCamp phenomenon to Austin.  At the upcoming meeting he will lead a discussion about the direction that the Open Source movement is headed, touching on the possible legal pitfalls recently posed to the community by Microsoft.

Please feel free to contact me for any further details regarding the event.  All members of the community are welcome, and we hope to see you there!

-Matt Buck, EFF Austin

Links to further information:

whurley’s “Opensville” blog – http://www.opensville.org/
Progress Coffee website – http://www.progresscoffee.com/home.html

EFF Austin website -  http://www.effaustin.org/

In this issue:
Editorial

• “Douglas v Hello! – An OK! result”, Gillian Black

Peer-Reviewed Articles   

• “Do Asian Nations Take Intellectual Property Rights Seriously?” Assafa Endeshaw.
• “The day after the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive: who won the battle and when shall the war end?”  Konstantinos Fotinopoulos.
• “Without Walls: Copyright Law and Digital Collections in Australian Cultural Institutions” Emily Hudson and Andrew T Kenyon.

Analysis  

• “Patenting programs as machines”, Philip Leith.
• “Keep on hacking: a Finnish court says technological measures are no longer “effective” when circumventing applications are widely available on the Internet”, Mikko Välimäki.
• “Copyright and research: an academic publisher’s perspective”, Kevin Taylor.

Book Reviews  

• The Law and Ethics of Medical Research: International Bioethics and Human Rights, by Aurora Plomer. Reviewed by Shawn H.E. Harmon.
• The Intellectual Property Debate: Perspectives from Law, Economics Political Economy, Edited by Meir Perez Pugatch. Reviewed by Jordan S. Hatcher.

The reasons for these retirements are both practical and principled.

The practical reason is simple lack of interest: From the start,
Creative Commons has promised to keep our family of licenses as
simple as possible. Actual demand has been one of the key indicators
of how simple things can be. We estimate just 0.01% of our existing
licenses are Developing Nations licenses, and 0.01% are the version
of the Sampling license that we are retiring. Those numbers say that
these licenses are not in demand.

Here he notes the open access publishing movement and conflicts with the DevNav licence:

The principled reasons are different with each license. The
Developing Nations license is in conflict with the growing “Open
Access Publishing” movement. While the license frees creative work in
the developing nations, it does not free work in any way elsewhere.
This means these licenses do not meet the minimum standards of the
Open Access Movement. Because this movement is so important to the
spread of science and knowledge, we no longer believe it correct to
promote a stand alone version of this license. Later this month, we
will begin a discussion about adding the terms of the Developing
Nations license to 5 of the other CC licenses, and giving users the
option to include those terms in their license. (So, for example, you
could select a BY-NC license for the developed world, but offer a BY
license for creators within Developing Nations.) Because such an
option would be attached to a standard CC license, it would not
conflict with the principle we are announcing here. Based upon the
feedback we get to that idea, we will decide whether to implement it.

The Sampling licence was discontinued because it allows remixing but not sharing:

The Sampling License presents a similar concern. Until today, we have
offered three versions of the Sampling license. Two of those versions
permit noncommercial sharing of the licensed work (SamplingPlus, and
Noncommercial SamplingPlus). One (the Sampling License) only permits
the remix of the licensed work, not the freedom to share it. There is
a strong movement to convince Creative Commons that our core licenses
at least permit the freedom to share a work noncommercially.

Creative Commons supports that movement. We will not adopt as a
Creative Commons license any license that does not assure at least
this minimal freedom — at least not without substantial public
discussion. We are grateful for the feedback, and for the
understanding of those who helped us craft the sampling licenses,
both of which got us here.

This change does not affect any existing licensed work. The links to
these licenses, and every Creative Commons license, will always
remain valid. The only change we’re making today is that we will no
longer offer these licenses on our licensing page.

To read more about these retirements, please visit our retired
licenses page at

http://creativecommons.org/retiredlicenses

Lawrence Lessig

More thoughts to come…

The goal is to concentrate on procedure (in both the court of appeals and the district courts) but not to cover substance. We aren’t interested in comments about the meaning of ERISA or the Internal Revenue Code and will take down any pages that go beyond the scope of practice and procedure (including jurisdiction).

So only practice and procedure are the goal of the wiki, which is an appropriate goal for a wiki by a court. Carolyn Elefant mentions in her Law.com post on how she sees the wiki being used:

What a terrific tool, both for lawyers who don’t know what they’re doing, as well as for lawyers who do. Experienced lawyers can use the wiki to share procedural tips and, thus, place their name in circulation as resident experts, which can generate clients. And lawyers who are first-timers can use the wiki as a resource to figure out how to file an appeal without committing malpractice or looking foolish. My only question is, how long until other circuit courts follow suit?

Undoubtedly this idea — lawyers sharing in a collaborative environment to improve practice — fuels the rationale behind the 7th Circuit putting up the site. I’m sure at least part of the goal is to reduce common errors that the court has to deal with on the part of new appellate lawyers, and thus reduce the court’s workload (or at least streamline it). I just wonder how much people are going to use it as a wiki, and not just as a graphical version of the Practitioner’s Handbook (pdf file).

The Practitioner’s Handbook, a guide produced by the 7th Circuit for attorneys handling appeals in the Circuit, appears to be the only content (or at least the main content) on the wiki. The Handbook, rather than the wiki, is the real tool that allows newbie appellate lawyers “to figure out how to file an appeal without committing malpractice or looking foolish”. The Handbook is dated from 2003, and so this might be a way to collaboratively note changes between official versions, or could, conceivably, supplant the Handbook in the future.

I think that the real problem is getting people to contribute. Lawyers are very busy people, and I’m not sure how many of the appellate lawyers in the 7th Circuit are going to pitch in to create some amazing resource. Think about the audience demographic for a minute: Lawyers in three states — Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin — who practice in federal court and who handle the appeals in their federal cases. You then have to slice out of this pool of 7th Circuit appellate lawyers those who have time, are familiar with a wiki (and editing one), and desire to contribute.

This isn’t to say that I believe that collaborative tools couldn’t help lawyers out in their practice before the 7th Circuit (and elsewhere). I’m just not sure that a wiki is the right way to do it, or more precisely, not simply a wiki version of the Practitioner’s Handbook. Perhaps paying someone to monitor and build up the community behind the wiki could be an additional step — an active and dedicated community is after all how wikis work. Perhaps some other social networking tools to help build the community in the first place, though probably not a Myspace for 7th Circuit Appellate lawyers. Rather than assuming that “If you build a wiki, they will come”, find out what your audience wants, and how they want to access it. Looking at the recent changes in the wiki, confirms that, at least as of now, the few edits that are present are extremely minor. [Link to recent changes].

It will, however, be one to watch. See the discussion on technorati.

Other coverage at Robert Ambrogi’s blog, and original story in the National Law Journal (subscription required).