Articles Posted in Technology

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 that consumers have been harmed by the company’s unauthorized practice of law in the state.

For an overview of the litigation and the recent order, see Venkat’s post on Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog. We’ve pulled the filings on Justia Dockets, and you can follow the case there.

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 officials. While existing laws require a court to remind and admonish jurors to refrain from conversing about a case during trial, the bill:

[W]ould require the court, when admonishing the jury against conversation, research, or dissemination of information pursuant to these provisions, to clearly explain, as part of the admonishment, that the prohibition applies to all forms of electronic and wireless communication. The bill would require the officer in charge of a jury to prevent any form of electronic or wireless communication.

Beginning in January, if a juror disobeys such an admonishment, he or she will face contempt of court charges.

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 uniform legal standards for the authentication and preservation of U.S. state legal information in digital formats.” The Act also touches on issues around accessibility, noting its importance in helping create informed citizens.

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 incorporate content from several different government educational programs and Microsoft Encarta into an educational multimedia resource for Mexican public schools. After the project closed, an ex-developer on the Enciclomedia team created Encicloabierta, which published the Enciclomedia content online.

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.” Metadata can describe, among other things, the purpose, date of creation, location, means of creation, and standards used in the data. For example, when you take a picture with a digital camera, the image also contains information about the camera used to take the picture, the time and date, image resolution, etc. When you upload that picture to, say, Picasa, you’ll see this information. Picasa knows what type of camera you used because that data is embedded in the image itself.

The Dewey Decimal System is an example of metadata. Along the spine of a book is a number. That number is associated with a classification system – placing it within a catalog of records that contains “data about the data” (subject, author, title, number of pages, publisher, ISBN number, etc.) which in turn helps patrons find what they’re looking for.

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 that Righthaven was trying to engage in legal slight-of-hand by purportedly having publisher Stephens Media, LLC assign it any right to sue for copyright infringement. This was impossible, the court concluded, because copyright law forbids assigning the right to sue over alleged infringement; “only the owner of an exclusive right under a copyright may bring suit.”

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 better,” NHTSA Administrator David Strickland told attendees at Telematics Detroit 2011.

Nothing like a little convention tension to keep particpants on their toes.

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 public with a robust search engine that can search common threads across opinions and courts.” FDSys is run by the Government Printing Office (GPO), which issued a similar statement.

Let me start by saying I think this is a good thing. PACER has a lot of limitations, and moving opinions into a better search engine that is free to use and search is quite helpful. I like the idea of putting the bulk of government legal material (cases, codes, memos, etc.) into one database. It helps that the database will have the imprimatur of government on it, which will quiet the concerns about authentication that always pop up in these discussions.

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 data. You know: client names, addresses, and social security numbers, their bank information, your bank account, your court calendar, and — Holy $&@*#%! — your time and billing information.

Yeah, we know: you’d scream like a 2-year-old. But then what?

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 the other based on cell tower triangulation.

Oh, and one more thing. There is no federal law concerning GPS tracking, and state laws on location tracking vary.

But doesn’t turning off any location-based settings on your phone take care of the problem? Maybe.