release

Attorney General Bill McCollum clearly does not want to restrict Florida attorneys from helping Florida homeowners fight their foreclosures, and his recent letter to Florida Bar President Jay White may offer some cover to those attorneys who do.

NOTE: I’m writing more about this at the Florida Foreclosure Fraud weblog.
Florida’s new Foreclosure Rescue Fraud law
Last week, Florida Governor Charlie Crist signed a new law which imposes broad-ranging restrictions on so-called “foreclosure rescue” service providers. The well-intentioned bill is meant to curb the worst abuses by bottom-feeding predators who use foreclosure as [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

Justice Bedford:
After all, how many cases can be summarized by the Los Angeles Daily Journal as, “Government’s approval of ski resort to use recycled sewage effluent to make artificial snow on San Francisco Peaks violates Religious Freedom Restoration Act”?
That’s not even the good part.

Originally uploaded by CypherXero

According to Wired newly proposed legislation in Congress would lower the threshold for criminal prosecution (and, I think, for civil liability) for computer intrusion under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030.

RIAA Keep your Hands Off My iPod by (_nickd)

By the way, the site that led me to the previous post is a pretty good read if you’ve got a law degree and a strong sense of sticking it to The Man. Recording Industry vs The People chronicles all the [...]

Some people think all lawyers are scum. Then, once every 13 years or so, a lawyer does something that makes everyone stand up and say, “Well done, my good man!”
This news is a couple of months old by now, but it still is worth re-telling that Merl Ledford is a hero for standing up [...]

Do you know the significance of this number?
13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640
It’s currently at the heart of a battle over First Amendment rights. Some think it’s hexed.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Florida lawyer Michael Alex Wasylik announced that he has filed suit today in U.S. District Court in Tampa against Chicago-based web application firm 37Signals. The suit alleges trademark infringement of the Perpetual Beta name and seeks damages in the amount of 13 signals - just over one-third of the [...]

UPDATE (3/27/08): This case has been decided.
Ted Frank at Overlawyered weighs in on this Washington Post story about a lawsuit against anti-plagiarism service Turnitin:
There are entrepreneurs who come up with good ideas for services and products, and entrepreneurs who come up with good ideas for lawsuits against the first group.
Unfortunately, Ted doesn’t [...]