release

Race Report: Miles for Moffitt 5K

This was my first race, and I picked it because Dad, a lifelong runner, had this weekend free to run it with me. Miles for Moffitt is in its third annual running at the University of South Florida, and benefits the Moffitt Cancer Center which is affiliated with the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.)

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, […]

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 […]

Nader voters are not necessarily Dem voters
Common wisdom blames Ralph Nader for swinging enough Florida votes to cost Gore the election in 2000. The underlying assumption that Nader drained votes from Gore is just that - an assumption. Nader got voters to the polls who, in all likelihood, wouldn’t have bothered but for […]

Anyone who works with the Federal courts will be familiar with PACER, the federal judiciary’s electronic public records system. The great thing about PACER is that any current (I’m not sure how many years are encompassed) court case is in the system, allowing the public to access any document filed in any federal court […]

Florida allows voters to march into select centralized polling places days before the scheduled election and cast their votes. Today, because I won’t be able to vote on the scheduled date next Tuesday, I did just that.
I haven’t spent a lot of time writing about the primary this year, in part because […]

Nate loves music. Everything from Christmas carols to heavy metal gets him dancing, with head bobbing and arms waving. And when he loves a song and the song ends, claps his hands and shouts, “Yay!”
This morning at mass, the last notes of the first hymn had just finished echoing through the church when […]

As Lewis Black once said:
The only thing worse than a Republican or a Democrat, is when these two pricks work together! Basically how it works in congress is that a Republican stands up and says ‘Hey, I got a really bad idea’, and a Democrat stands up and says ‘And I can make it […]

The Oregon Attorney General’s Office has asked a federal court to require the RIAA to tell the state who is downloading information from computers belonging to students at the University of Oregon. In proceedings to determine whether the University must reveal the names of its students in response to the ex parte subpoena issued […]

OK, I admit I’m back-dating this. November 19 came and went and I didn’t even notice. So why bother to go back and add something now? Because, eight years after my very first weblog post (hello, awful pseudo-futuristic “interface”!) the very notion of a “blogiversary” has ceased to […]

A moment of levity

Originally uploaded by Dineen

Congratulations to Katie and Paul!

Of the twenty-thousand or so (I’ve heard higher) people who have been sued by the RIAA in the past four years for file-sharing, not one has ever gone to trial before this week. But this week in Duluth, Minnestoa, Capitol Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas is just about to go to the jury. […]

I’ve got three:

Rage Against the Machine: RIAA Litigation Update
The recording industry has ramped up its litigation campaign against peer-to-peer file sharing suspects, with cases now numbering in the high thousands. This session explores recent developments in the various cases nationwide and how someone caught in this driftnet litigation might defend themselves.

Among Thieves: Preventing Online Copyright […]

I haven’t been one to do video here, but I thought this well-presented opinion warranted an exception. A response to Senator Obama’s criticism of the recent partial birth abortion ruling by the Supreme Court:

This neatly sums up the debate between liberals and conservatives on the judicial function. Via RedState.

In the great file-sharing war, it looks like the tide may be turning. Deborah Foster, the defendant in a peer-to-peer file-sharing case out of Oklahoma, not only got the records companies to dismiss their case against her, she got a court award of $68,000 for attorney’s fees - the cost of defending her lawsuit.
The […]

A few months ago, Google announced that its Calendar app would be accessible by PDA-based web browsers. It worked like a dream. And for someone like me, a lawyer on the go, it was a great tool.
Suddenly, sometime last week or so, it just stopped working. Instead of the nice neat rows […]

I recently asked one of my clients to provide for me the contact information for a prospective witness. I got back name, last known address, and MySpace alias.
Good thing I know how to use that MySpace thing.