New legal blogging review by Charon QC
January 2, 2011 by Adam Wagner
Legal blogger Charon QC has published the latest Blawg Review, a comprehensive survey of the legal blogging world.It is a magnum opus, and in order to express just how large and comprehensive it is, I have borrowed an image from the Family Lore blog which shows the review in its entirety.
For more about legal blogging, see here.
Happy New Year and Welcome to the Public Domain
Holidays, festivals and parties abound as the year turns from one to another. As we recover from all the celebrating, let us not forget one of copyright’s biggest days buried in the midst of all the punch, eggnog and streamers: Public Domain Day.
As is usual for this most festive of IP days, many posts around the blogosphere are listing works that have entered the public domain, works that would have entered the public domain under previous copyright laws and parties and events celebrating it all.
Picture: A page from this blogger’s favorite public domain work
The “Fallacy of Intellectual Property” Fallacy
… Law professor Eric E. Johnson is currently writing a series of posts on “the great fallacy of intellectual property“. He describes this fallacy this way: “The long understood theory for why IP rights are necessary has been that people won’t invent useful technologies or create worthwhile art and literature without having the right to profit from their labors.”We can call this the “fallacy of intellectual property” fallacy.
It’s a fallacy because it doesn’t accurately state the theory behind copyright. The economic justification for copyright is that it is an incentive to create — not a necessary condition. True, there exists a base level of drive to create knowledge and culture. But, as knowledge and culture are fundamentally important to a democratic society, an incentive to create above and beyond this base level provides significant benefits to that society.
In addition, the “fallacy of intellectual property” fallacy fails to account for an arguably more important function of copyright. Copyright provides an incentive to invest in creation.
This is an extract from a long, fascinating and subtle discussion by of a very important issue.
Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Prosecute Assange–For the U.S.’s Sake, Not His
Marvin Ammori
… Many of our nation’s landmark free speech decisions are not about heroes–several are about flag-burners, racists, Klansmen, and those with political views outside the mainstream. And yet we measure our commitment to freedom of speech, in part, by our willingness to protect even their rights despite disagreement with what they say, and why they say it.
… I end up, with Assange, where I do with racists and Klansmen. Despite the damage he has caused, the costs to our nation of prosecuting his speech outweigh the benefits. I hope our nation’s lawyers consider the merits of this position in determining how best to respond to Assange and Cablegate.
This is an extract from a very long post which is well worth reading. It is a thorough, well-considered and compelling case. As with Marvin, I too end up with Assange where I do with racists and Klansmen: we can’t choose who should benefit from rights – they ought to be available to everyone, racists and Julian Assange as well as the people we like.
See also Wikileaks: International Free Speech Reps Urge Restraint (First Amendment Law Prof Blog) and WikiLeaks and our obligations to the web of tellings: the principles of free speech, discretion and bearing witness come into conflict when considering a case such as WikiLeaks by Nicholas Shackel in the Guardian.
Privacy vs. Security vs. Anonymity
posted by Sasha Romanosky
When I first began my PhD, I was keen to properly sort and define any new terms and reconcile them with my own education and experience. Three terms that always seemed to be intermingled were: Privacy, Security and Anonymity. Certainly they are related, but I wanted to be a little more specific and understand exactly when and how they overlapped.
First, let’s establish some basic definitions. For the purpose of this blog post, the following definitions will suffice (I’ll address alternative definitions later):
• Privacy: having control over one’s personal information or actions
• Security: freedom from risk or danger
• Anonymous: being unidentifiable in one’s actions
Note: this was my first post on Posterous, which is now long gone. I ported my Posterous posts into this blog. This is my ‘Hello World’ post for this blog.
In the time-honoured tradition, my first post here is under the venerable title above: Hello, world.
I’ve started this site as a companion to my blog at Cearta and my twitter at feed @cearta. As the ‘about’ panel says: anything that catches my eye on the wild wild web that’s too long for twitter but too short for cearta will (probably – eventually) end up here. I’ll tweet links to most of the posts here, and may even bring a few together under the Gallimaufry category on Cearta.
It’s an experiment in which I hope you will join me. With apologies to Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve:
…Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
From the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company:
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The text of the Legal Requirements of Christmas Cheer card pictured above provides: …
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