release

Having trouble selling your home in this sagging real estate market? Clementina Marie Giovannetti of Ocala, Florida, apparently was, too.

So she’s decided to give her $1.25 million mansion away.

Crazy? Don’t answer yet.

She’s having a contest, and the submission of the winning “Pet Lover” essay gets the house. Contestants have to write a 300-word essay and submit a “4×6 color photograph of the pet” in question, and… a $200 entry fee.

Still, $200 for a shot at winning a mansion? Could be a great deal. But here’s the catch. The contest only goes on if 6250 people enter. If not, she has the right to cancel the contest and return everyone’s application fees (minus a $20 “administrative fee” per Entrant.)

So let’s do the math. 6,250 entrants at $200 each yields - $1.25 million. (Hey! What a coincidence!) If the contest goes bust and she gets, say, only a thousand entrants, cancels the contest, and keeps the $20 administrative fee, that’s $20,000 (minus legal fees and postage, presumably.) And no matter what, this author gets a hell of a lot of publicity because she’s posted the contest information on her main web site where she hawks all her books.

Win-win-win, if you’re Giovannetti or her lawyer. I wonder if they came up with the idea, or, as seems more likely, they adapted it from something they found somewhere else.

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At 7:30 this morning I did something I haven’t done since I was in high school, and as far as I can remember, I’ve never done before breakfast.

I ran four miles. In a row. Without stopping.

On purpose.

No, there was no one chasing me. Near the end of February, I had taken the boys to watch a wrestling tournament at Brandon High School. (Yes, the same fateful tournament featured in The Streak.) Watching those matches, I felt some of the old competitive juices flowing again. What if I got back in shape? Could I maybe step back on the mat, reclaim a little bit of what I once had?

The first step was the hardest. I got on my running shoes, went out the door, and ran about two hundred yards before I stopped, wheezing and spent. But somehow, I kept going.

Week after week, I kept going out, building my endurance and distance. I’ve run in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening; in town and on the road; once, I even ran with a hangover. As of today I’ve run more than seventy-five miles in about ten weeks.

What does the future hold? Next week I run my first race, a 5K, with my dad. The week after that, another 5K race.

After that, who knows? More miles.

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There will be no stupid April Fools Day jokes on this site today. That is all.

(Mainly because all the good domain names are taken.)

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I wrote almost exactly a year ago about the lawsuit against Turnitin.com filed by several Virginia high school students, alleging that the anti-plagiarism service violated the students’ intellectual property rights. Then, I said, “Does Turnitin have a valid defense? There are two likely possibilities: fair use, and license.” My predictions (unlike, say, my stock picks) have turned out to be eerily prescient.

Andy Carvin reports today that the students have lost their suit, when U.S. District Court Judge Claude Hilton (Eastern District of Virginia) granted summary judgment to the defendants [PDF document] on the copyright claims of the students.

Technically, I was wrong about the license issue: to be precise, the court found that the “users” (i.e., the students) had agreed to a “click-wrap” contract which waived all liability of any kind by the defendants. (Note that the school required the students to do so.) So, not an express license to use the work, but a prohibitive contractual provision nonetheless. The court relied on one argument, though, which I think could be subject to attack on appeal: in order to enforce the contract, the court had to find that the students got some “benefit” out of the contract — in this case, the fact that they would otherwise have gotten a failing grade from the school. I’m not sure that the school’s requirement that the students sign up for the “service” is the same as receiving a “benefit” of the service. This court also seemed unconcerned that this school - a public school - required the students to sign up for the “service,” except to say that the students’ redress would be against the school, not Turnitin.com.

I did say that fair use would be a problem for the students to overcome, and i was spot-on about that. The judge took a pretty thorough look at the fair use analysis (using the four factors I mentioned last time) and found that the copying in this case was fair use. Predictably, the court focused - as most do - on the fourth factor, impact on the marketability of the work. Finding that Turnitin.com’s use of the works had effectively no impact on the prospective market for the students’ papers (aided in part by the students’ own concessions that there was no real market for them) was tantamount to finding for the defendants on the question of fair use.

So, while it’s a disappointing result, the court’s decision would probably be difficult to overturn on appeal. Maybe it’s time to take up the court’s suggestion that the students seek redress against the school district for compelling them to surrender their intellectual property rights in their work. I’m just glad I’m not the lawyer who would have to argue that case.

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If you run a business, and you have a website, you may or may not know whether disabled users - the blind, the mobility-impaired, and others - can access your web site with their helper technology. And, from a lawyer’s perspective, even more important, you may not know whether you are violating federal law if you fail to make your web site accessible to those disabled users.

Targeting Your Web Site: Accessibility Litigation Update

If you’re in Austin attending the South by Southwest Interactive conference this week, you’re in luck. I, along with my co-panelist Anitra Pavka, will explain how recent cases in the U.S. have changed the way disability law applies to private business websites, the potential pitfalls of violating the law, and some measures you can take immediately to make sure that your website is accessible for all users and fully complies with legal accessibility requirements.

(Room C at the Austin Convention Center, Level 1, 5:00pm, Monday March 10, 2008)

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