The Wall Street Journal Law Blog reported last month that a class action suit against legal forms provider Legal Zoom survived a motion for summary judgement and will proceed to trial in a Missouri federal court. In rejecting the defendant's motion, Judge Laughrey allowed the plaintiffs to move forward with their complaint…
Articles Posted in Technology
Last Friday, Governor Brown signed California Assembly Bill 141 into law. AB 141 formalizes long-standing informal rules banning the use of social media and electronic devices (including smart phones) by jurors to discuss or research cases. As well, the bill forbids jurors from using electronic or wireless devices to contact court…
A hat tip to Rob Richards at the Legal Informatics Blog for alerting us that the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform Laws (NCCUSL) will meet on July 7th to consider adopting The Uniform Electronic Materials Act (the Act). As Rob notes in his post, the Act aims to "establish…
In Mexico, a common line of thought is that projects funded with government money must be a public good. However, Mexican copyright laws challenged this perception after the government-funded Enciclomedia project failed due to fuzzy contracts, political conflicts and a lack of infrastructure. Initially, the goal of Enciclomedia was to…
Note: I wrote this post to help explain the concept of metadata and how it can be used to improve free primary law sources. This post focuses on statutes, next week I will discuss applying these principles to opinions. The simplest way to explain metadata is “data about the data.”…
In an enlightening decision, a federal judge ruled this week that Las Vegas-based copyright litigation enterprise Righthaven had no legal basis to sue one defendant, Democratic Underground, because it didn't even own the copyright it was suing over. Chief U.S. District Court Judge Roger Hunt was particularly peeved to learn…
America's chief driving safety regulator effectively told a crowd of telematics executives that the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration ('NHTSA') doesn't like social media tools in your car. "I'm not in the business of helping people tweet better. I'm not in the business of helping people post on Facebook…
The Administrative Office of the US Courts issued a press release last week announcing that a "New Pilot Project Will Enhance Public Access to Federal Court Opinions." According to the statement, select federal appellate and district courts will make their published opinions available on FDSys, as "FDSys can provide the…
Unless your head has been stuck in the sand over the last week, you've probably spent some time wondering about how 77 million Sony PlayStation Network gamers had their online data hacked, and their credit card information possibly stolen. What if a hacker got a hold of your law firm…
There's been a huge hullabaloo this week about a discovery by two engineers that Apple iPhones and 3G iPads log users' locations with geo-coordinates and time stamps. A day later, it was revealed that Google's Android operating system can store two files tracking users' travels: one based on WiFi, and…