Articles Posted in December, 2010

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O Tannenbaum, a public domain Christmas carol, extols the venerable Christmas tree. While the lyrics may be seasonal, the melody is truly evergreen, having been remixed into other popular songs, such as Michigan, My Michigan. Now, you can hum the tune 365 days a year. Go Blue!

In the spirit of the holidays, let’s take a look at a few Christmas tree bills and laws:


Posted in: Legal News
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As the holidays get into full swing and folks begin to make their lists of presents for young and old alike, we thought it might be a good idea to point everyone to some helpful online consumer resources. In particular, we wanted to mention two Justia web sites which allow users to look-up information on recalled items and goods.

Recall Warnings

We created the Recall Warnings site with Nolo Press to provide easy access to thousands of product recalls and and consumer alerts from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The recalls cover a variety of products such as toys, child furniture and outdoor play items, adult clothing and accessories, products for pets, and household appliances and electrical equipment.  You can browse through various categories of goods or, if you are interested in learning more about a particular brand or item, you can also search the site.  In addition, you may create RSS feeds to help you be an up-to-date and savvy consumer all year round.


Posted in: Legal News
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A few weeks ago, a friend at Justia celebrated his birthday. And, you know how it goes. There’s a cake involved and everyone sings that special unique song known for that occasion: “Happy Birthday.” Well, it turns out that the Happy Birthday song is copyrighted. So, for any reproduction, one must ask for permission from the copyright holder or pay a licensing fee.

Now that the holidays are coming, I started wondering about the copyright status of several of the popular songs that we hear everywhere we go during the month of December. If you like to take holiday videos and share them with your family and friends on the web, you should be aware that since January 2009, YouTube has been silencing videos with copyrighted music. So, you cannot just add any song to give your video a touch of holiday spirit.


Posted in: Legal News
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It’s been a fun month at Justia. We launched our new Justia Legal Answers service, and we’ve been hard at work adding free law (shhh, we’ll tell you all about it soon). And of course, we’re still blogging and Facebooking [ed: not a word] away.

Here’s a sampling of the content that generated the most buzz on our Facebook page and this blog.

The highest number of page views and comments this month was for Nick’s Introduction to Wizarding Law. Everyone loves Harry Potter–and who knew there was a legal angle there? Great stuff!


Posted in: Justia News
Tagged: facebook, onward
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Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone, but there’s still time to get terrific gifts for lawyers and clients.  Here are some of our favs:

    iPad
  • The Apple iPad —  It’s sleek, small, and über cool. It holds nifty free legal apps like Fastcase to find state and federal statutes and cases and Oyez’s PocketJustice that let’s lawyers listen to Supreme Court oral arguments.  When your attorney friend is done raging at opposing counsel’s latest outrageous offer to their client, the attorney can vent his or her anger by playing Angry Birds or Star Wars Falcon Gunner. Plus, it makes them (and everyone they meet) think that they’re a swell lawyer, right?
  • Adopt a Volume of the Federal Reporter — No, we’re not crazy (at least not all the time)!  For $1,200, you can actually make a tax-deductible donation to Public.Resource.Org to support scanning a volume or two of the first series of the Federal Reporter of the United States in the name of your favorite lawyer or law firm.  The donation is to help them “adopt” a volume of federal case law  from 1880 – 1924 that is now in the public domain.

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Election Day 2010 is but a faint memory as we head towards the s-l-o-w end of the year. With Thanksgiving behind us and Christmas just around the bend, we all recognize that the abundance of joy and good tidings that this winter season brings comes only from hard work. After all, someone has to pay for all that online holiday shopping. And, as we seek to right the direction of our fair nation, we should certainly offer thanks to our dedicated members of Congress for not heading home early for the holidays. Proving that no lame ducks exist in a recession, our political class continues to put in an honest day for their six-figure pay.


Posted in: Laws, Legal News