MagicJack dials wrong number in legal attack on Boing Boing
via Slashdot
A win for the good guys, and all of us
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Tag Archives: law
An e-book is not a book
From How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow
When I buy a book, it’s mine. There’s no mechanism, not even in the face of a court order, whereby a retailer can take a book away from me, and yet Amazon—there’s the most extraordinary thing that they had to do in the United States—you’ve heard of course that someone put a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in the Kindle Store, and it wasn’t licensed for distribution in the U.S.—of course, Orwell is in the public domain outside the U.S., in copyright in the U.S.—and Amazon responded to this intelligence by revoking the book 1984 from its customers’ ebook readers. After they’d bought it, they woke up one morning to discover their book had gone. But Amazon was actually pretty good. After thinking about it for a day, and confronting the media storm, they decided to restore the books—they gave them back to the people, and they made a promise: “We will never ever ever ever ever give your books away again. Unless we have to.”
Now I worked as a bookseller for a number of years in this city, and I never had to make that promise to any of my customers when they bought books.
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Slashdot.
Stupidity correctly rewarded
Man Burned by Burning Man Can’t Sue Festival
“The risk of injury to those who voluntarily decide to partake in the commemorative ritual at Burning Man is self-evident,” Justice Ignazio Ruvolo wrote.
…”if there ever was a case to apply the assumption of risk doctrine, this is it. This is person who was a well-educated man and experienced with the festival and appreciated the danger, who voluntarily exposed himself to a much higher degree of risk by walking into the Burning Man.”
City of the big shoulders — and 20,000 eyes that never sleep
Surveillance cams help fight crime, city says: Goal is to have them on every corner.
Via A Surveillance Camera On Every Chicago Street Corner?
[The figure of 20,000 is my own SWAG, based on Chicago geography,]
I can understand the civil libertarian objections to this plan. However, having had much too close personal acquaintance with crime on a few of those corners, I suspect Mayor Daley has plenty of local support for implementing it.
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A note on Tuesday, especially for English majors and lawyers
Ann Althouse links to Oaf of Office
She then adds her own perspective from the legal world:
But let’s remember that Barack Obama was the president of the Harvard Law Review — that is, the editor-in-chief — while John Roberts was the managing editor. For those of you who know law reviews, that means a lot. The managing editor is typically the person with the most intense interest in the details of grammar and usage. It would be cool if we could know that when Barack Obama paused after John Roberts moved the “faithfully” that he was thinking: I can see what you’re up to, you old managing editor, and I know you are wrong.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 