Via a story by John Kennedy in Silicon Republic, I learn that Irish practising lawyers will soon be able to meet their continuing professional development requirements by downloading lectures onto their mp3 players. It’s all a far cry from the apocryphal English judge in the 1960s posing the famous question: “Who are the Beatles?” (and equally silly enquiries or admissions). Now, it seems that Ireland’s barristers and solicitors will be able to listen to learned lectures on recent legal developments and then segue straight into Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles‘ site | wikipedia) or Justin or Rihanna or Wolfgang or Ludwig.

In Ireland, both solicitors and barristers have continuing professional development obligations, to maintain, develop, improve, and broaden their professional and personal knowledge, skills and abilities. It basically boils down to attending conferences to keep up to date. Now, according to Silicon Republic, a joint venture between Irish e-learning firm Prime Learning and legal publishers First Law means that, since 23 July last, relevant courseware is accessible and audio downloads are available at FirstCPD. From FirstCPD’s “About Us” page:

FirstCPD is Ireland’s first dedicated website for the delivery of leading-edge, online education for professionals in various disciplines. Busy practitioners who do not wish to spend time and money travelling to CPD-qualifying events can avail of our “one-stop shop� solution, providing the course credits they need, when they need them.

It’s early days yet, and we will have to see how it goes; but I think this is a great idea, and I wish them well with it.

At present, at Irish law, the basic copyright term is the life of the author plus seventy years (see section 24 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (see also here)).

We have come a long way from the eighteenth century’s 14 year term (renewable once). Or have we? Peter Black points to the following story in Ars Technica in which an economist is now arguing that 14 years is the optimal level for copyright protection [with additional links]:

Researcher: Optimal copyright term is 14 years

By Nate Anderson | Published: July 12, 2007 – 01:36PM CT

It’s easy enough to find out how long copyrights last, but much harder to decide how long they should last—but that didn’t stop Cambridge University [link] PhD candidate [link] Rufus Pollock [link] from using economics formulas to answer the question. In a newly-released paper, Pollock pegs the “optimal level for copyright” at only 14 years.

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