Law Librarian Blog

Top 10 Crackdowns 2009, Chinese Style

China Daily has just published its year-end list of Top 10 Crackdowns. Yep, that's right. Crackdowns. Spoiler alert, spoiler alert! A crackdown on organized crime in Chongqing tops the list. Some other listed crackdowns deal with porn, human trafficking, and celebrity endorsements. The most surprising, however, is the crackdown on publicly wearing pajamas in Shanghai, China's most cosmopolitan and modern city. I taught English there for a year earlier this decade and saw many locals in my neighborhood (Puxi's Putuo District) publicly wearing pajamas almost daily. At first I thought it odd. But eventually I got used to it, although I never did it myself and never thought it would merit a crackdown. Anyway, it seems last week's free-speech crackdown in the form of an 11-year prison sentence for writer Liu Xiaobo came too late to make the list. [RLS]

Happy New Year to All

Remember, don't drink and drive practice law librarianship. [JH]

Best Notable Quotables of 2009 from the Not-Quite-Right's Media Research Center

"The mission of the Media Research Center, 'America's Media Watchdog,' is to bring balance to the news media. Leaders of America's conservative movement have long believed that within the national news media a strident liberal bias existed that influenced the public's understanding of critical issues." Apparently the Center doesn't know how to tune into Fox News. The Center has issued its 22nd annual awards for the year's "worst reporting." To determine this year’s winners, a panel of 48 radio talk show hosts, magazine editors, columnists, editorial writers, and media observers selected their choices. Radio talk show hosts, now there's a well-qualified group of experts! The award catatogies, below, should give you a clue where all this is heading. Amusing until you realize these folks are uber serious.

OK, I do like the winner of the "The Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award for Celebrity Vapidity." Before rabid left-wing comments start flowing in -- stop; please note I contributed to Obama's campaign (until my Red State wife said "stop") and voted for him (to cancel out her vote). [JH]

Categories for "America's Media Watchdog's" 2009 Annual Worst Reporting Awards:

• The Coronation of the Messiah Award for Fawning Inaugural Coverage
• Master of His Domain Award for Obama Puffery
• The Crush Rush Award for Loathing Limbaugh
• Damn Those Conservatives Award
• The Poison Tea Pot Award for Smearing the Anti-Obama Rabble
• Spread the Wealth Award for Socialist Sermonizing
• Long Live Camelot Award for Lionizing Ted Kennedy
• The Half-Baked Alaska Award for Pummeling Palin
• The Un-Fairness Doctrine Award for Slamming Media Conservatives
• Let Us Fluff Your Pillow Award for Obsequious Obama Interviews
• Barry’s Big Brain Award for Journalists Bedazzled by Obama’s Brilliance
• The Audacity of Dopes Award for Wackiest Analysis of the Year
• The Obamagasm Award for Seeing Coolness In Everything Obama Does
• Michelle, the Media Belle Award
• Media Hero Award
• The Barbra Streisand Political IQ Award for Celebrity Vapidity

Learning technologies that became obsolete this decade past

This list from Inside Higher Ed not only makes me feel old, but also out of touch (since when did DVD players and photocopiers become obsolete?).  The IHE list was inspired by Silicon Alley Insider's list of 21 things that have become obsolete in the past 10 years (e.g., getting film developed, dial-up internet connections, and maps, among others).  Here are the learning technologies that are so 2000:

1. Scantron Sheets

2. Overhead Projectors and Transparencies

3. Classroom VCR/DVD Players

4. Course Packs and Course Readers

5. Photocopiers

6. Microfiche

7. Language and Computer Labs

8. Paper Journals and Periodicals?

You can read the explanation about why each one of these made the list here.

Next up - "15 gadgets that changed everything."

(jbl)

Happy 100th Anniversary 1909 Catalogue

The Harvard Law School Library had not published a catalog in book format since 1846 when Assistant Librarian Charles F. D. Belden took up the task to produce a new printed edition in 1902. His efforts produced the now famous 1909 Catalogue of the Library of the Law School of Harvard University. Although limited to American law and English common law and the planned subject index volume was never published, the 1909 Catalogue was a much relied upon reference tool by academic law librarians across the country and is a classic in legal bibliography. HLS Library's Rare Books Cataloguer, Mary Person, celebrates its 100th anniversary in this Et Seq. blog post. [JH]

Friday Fun on Wednesday: The Muppets Perform Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Setting the mood for New Year's Eve festivities... Hat tip to Mark Giangrande for finding this gem! [JH]

The 10 Most Influential Internet Moments of the Decade

According to the Webby Awards, they are:

• Craigslist expands outside San Francisco (2000)
• Google AdWords launches (2000)
• Wikipedia launches (2001)
• Napster Shut Down (2001)
• Google IPO (2004)
• Online video revolution (2006)
• Facebook opens to non-college students and Twitter takes off (2006)
• The iPhone debuts (2007)
• Internet alters presidential politicking (2008)
• Use of Twitter to organize demonstrations protesting the Iranian election (2009)

Hat tip to Lance Whitney's Digital Media post, Judging the top 10 Internet moments of the decade. Whitney lists some additional Internet-related moments and developments including the debut and growth of Foxfire use, the arrival of blogging, the surge of broadband availablity and the arrival of cloud computing, to name just a few. [JH]

Above the Law's Top Five Motions of the Year

Topping ATL's list is Best Motion to Continue. Ever. -- "In Alabama, Lady Justice may wear a cheerleader’s uniform. Crimson Tide-loving defense attorneys asked for a time delay on their trial due to a BCS Championship Game. The judge granted it. Even though he’s an Auburn fan."

Also on ATL's list a Plaintiffs’ Motion for a [sic] Honest and Honorable Court System and a Motion to Compel Defense Counsel to Wear Appropriate Shoes at Trial. The complete list with comments and links to the motion at Kashmir Hill's The Five Best Motions of the Year.

See also the 10 most popular posts by ATL in 2009, "a mix of humor, tragedy, and gossip" from the self-styled legal profession's tabloid blog. [JH]

What Microsoft Did Right and Wrong in 2009

On Betanews, Joe Wilcox offers his opinion on what Microsoft did right (e.g., flawlessly launched Windows 7) and wrong (e.g. offered no direct Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade) in 2009. [JH]

Is Wi-Fi Becoming Standard Equipment in Automobiles?

CNN is reporting that select models of Ford automobiles will come equipped with USB mobile broadband modems. The automobiles will be mobile Wi-Fi hotspots with secure connections that can support several devices simultaneously. What an exciting development with many benefits for passengers -- roadtrips will never be the same again. The major drawback is the concern for safety if drivers partake. Despite the problem of driver cell phone use, implementation of state cell phone driving laws has been slow. Hopefully surfing while driving laws won't be far behind. [BA]

Death of Tethered eBooks: Replacing Bezos' "Dead Technology," Amazon's Licensing Agreement for Kindle, With the epub Format

Responding to Jeff Bezos' self-serving prediction that print is a dead technology [reported at Amazon's Jeff Bezos: eBooks Will Replace Physical Books (Kindled Editions and eReaders, Too?)] Edward Tenner writes "the rhetoric of an inevitable future can be a great marketing weapon on the high-tech battleground" in Is It Time to Kindle Print? on The Atlantic. "Sales of electronic books are indeed climbing rapidly now, but all trends level out. E-books and electronic subscriptions will reach some balance of market share with print, a proportion nobody can predict. ... Meanwhile paper has remained surprisingly resilient." Tenner adds a cautionary observation about replacing the products of a so-called dead technology with a licensing agreement:

Whatever your reading preference, there's more than tradition and habit at stake. The Kindle e-book is not a product but a license, and not even a done deal. Before you buy a Kindle, read the whole contract that you are signing. Especially this paragraph:

Amendment. Amazon reserves the right to amend any of the terms of this Agreement at its sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the Kindle Store or the Amazon.com website. Your continued use of the Device and Software after the effective date of any such amendment shall be deemed your agreement to be bound by such amendment.

Addressing the Consequences of Content Tethered to Licensing Agreements. On Dec. 26, 2009, Amazon reported that for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle edition books than physical books and Kindle became the most gifted item in Amazon's history, confirming Conrad J. Jacoby's prediction that thousands of people will find themselves new owners of eBook readers. Replacing the First Sale Doctrine that applies to hardcopy books with a licensing model for the distribution of eBooks, Jacoby observes that this considerably limits what consumers can do with their new digital files. However there is some hope for change in the marketplace for eBooks.

On a going-forward basis, a number of publishers and distributors have begun supporting a common eBook format (the "epub" format) that can be read by competing devices and multiple platforms, but the market remains fragmented. Amazon.com, for example, has not joined this initiative, and its Kindle devices cannot natively read epub files at this time. As can be expected, of course, a growing number of vendors offer conversion services of eBooks from one format to another, though it's unclear whether this process is both cost-effective and in full compliance with the user licenses under which most eBooks have been obtained.

In his excellent LRRX article, Understanding the Limitations - and Maximizing the Value - of eBooks, Jacoby offers eBook consumers some strategies to increase the long-term utility and value of their eBook collections: (1) purchasing eBooks from a multi-format distributor; (2) maintaining eBook archives on multiple devices; and (3) choosing an eReader that supports multiple mainstream formats. [JH]

Google's search engine dominance threatens web neutrality

Here's an interesting Op-Ed from the New York Times suggesting that Google has achieved such dominance as a search engine that for most it has become the de facto gateway to the web.  The implications are so serious that the author thinks it poses a credible threat to net neutrality. 

Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include “search neutrality”: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.

The need for search neutrality is particularly pressing because so much market power lies in the hands of one company: Google. With 71 percent of the United States search market (and 90 percent in Britain), Google’s dominance of both search and search advertising gives it overwhelming control. Google’s revenues exceeded $21 billion last year, but this pales next to the hundreds of billions of dollars of other companies’ revenues that Google controls indirectly through its search results and sponsored links.

One way that Google exploits this control is by imposing covert “penalties” that can strike legitimate and useful Web sites, removing them entirely from its search results or placing them so far down the rankings that they will in all likelihood never be found. For three years, my company’s vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively “disappeared” from the Internet in this way.

You can read the rest of the editorial here.

(jbl)

News Industry Media Content Trends in the Social Media Era

According to Mashable's Vadim Lavrusik, "news in 2010 will blur the lines between audience and creator more than ever in an era of social media." Lavrusik identifies 10 trends in content distribution and presentation that we will likely see more of in 10 News Media Content Trends to Watch in 2010. Here's two:

Living Stories. "[A] recent collaboration between Google, The New York Times, and The Washington Post on the Living Stories project, an experiment that presents coverage of a specific story or topic in one place, making it easy to navigate the topic and see the timeline of coverage on the story [is an example]. It also allows you to get a summary of the story and track the conversations taking place. This format contextualizes and personalizes the news."

Real-Time News Streams. "The move toward real-time news is increasingly important, and media critics and professors like Jeff Jarvis predict these streams will replace web sites. That change may not come in 2010, but streaming news elements will become a an integral part of traditional news sources. We’re already seeing Twitter streams and other visualizations incorporated into news home pages with updated financial and market information from new sources like Google Finance."

See Lavrusik's Mashable post for more. [JH]

Blogging as Thinking Out Loud Sometimes

Way, way back in 2006, I attended the "Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship" conference at Harvard Law School. Law profs had discovered blogging beyond the instant pundit genre but there were still plenty of raised eyebrows in the legal academy. I, for one, knew some tenure-track law profs who wanted to blog for our Law Professor Blogs Network but were worried about doing so until they had tenure.  

The big issue at the conference was, is blogging a scholarly (read respectable) activity that contributes something intellectually beneficial to legal discourse? OSU law prof Douglas Berman weighed in saying blogging certainly could make scholarly contributions. His conference paper, Scholarship in Action: The Power, Possibilities, and Pitfalls for Law Professor Blogs, is still the best analysis in my opinion and his long-running Sentencing Law & Policy is an excellent example of a blog doing so. At the time Orin Kerr and many others were skeptical. See Kerr's conference paper, Blogs and the Legal Academy. But recently he changed his mind: "I now think my old self was wrong. Or at least a bit off. I now think blogging actually does provide an effective way to present new scholarly ideas in many cases." Kerr explains why in his Rethinking Blogging-as-Scholarship post on The Volokh Conspiracy.

About Kerr's post, Berman writes "the commentors to Orin's post usefully note that it seems what has really changed is how blogs are perceived as much as whether this medium of expression has changed.  Thus, I will stick to my view that thoughtful blogs always were (or could be) a form of scholarship, just like any other form of communication can be a form of scholarship if deployed effectively to that end." (Due note the comment trail for Berman's post.)

Stephen Bainbridge also chimes in. "I think [Kerr has] got a good point, but it raises the question of which blogs counts as scholarship." In Blogging as Scholarship Redux, he writes

I've puzzled over this problem ever since I started blogging. On the one hand, I do believe that blogging about corporate law and governance can be a useful companion to my scholarship. On the other hand, I'd be bored to tears by a blog that was only about corporate law. So, as I've said before, I like mixed blogging.

Mixed blogging is recreational (as Larry Solum opined). It's a hobby (as Larry Ribstein opined). Mixed blogging is fun. But is it scholarship?

If we leave the matter to be determined at the level of the specific blog as an individual publication, I think we are missing the point that it's the blog post, not the blog, that may be offering something intellectually stimulating by being "scholarship-in-action" as Berman characterizes it or by being something akin to "thinking out loud sometimes" as I view it. Because of search engines, focusing on the specific blog is so last century. Of course, Chicago law prof Brian Leiter may be right that law prof blogs "loomed larger as a window into the legal academy" for law students and potential law students than as a means of contributing to legal scholarship. See his post, The Most Important Developments (for good or ill) in the Legal Academy Since 2000.

The more interesting question may be what, if any, influence do law prof blogs have on the judicial process? See J. Robert Brown's The Race to the Bottom post. Or how does one turn blogging into a TV pilot? The Washingtonian is reporting that NBC is developing a TV series based on the life of SCOTUSblog founder Tom Goldstein. A partner at Akin Gump who has argued 21 Supreme Court cases, Goldstein spends about $150,000 a year of his own money to fund the excellent and rarely off topic SCOTUSblog. [JH]

Violent Crime Continues to Decline According to FBI Report

In its Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, the FBI reports that violent crimes declined 4.4 percent for the first half of 2009, following a 1.9 percent decline in 2008 and a 0.7 percent decline in 2007. All four of the offenses that make up violent crime (murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) decreased nationwide this year. Murder declined 10.0 percent, robbery fell 6.5 percent, forcible rape decreased 3.3 percent, and aggravated assault declined 3.2 percent. The FBI also reported that property crimes declined 6.1 percent for the first half of 2009. [Press Release | Link to Current and Past Uniform Crime Reports] [JH]

Will 2010 be the beginning of the end of free web news content?

The New York Times ran an article today called "Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites" about the possibility that more and more of the free news outlets we take for granted, including the NYT, may begin charging for content in the near future.  It's no secret that newspapers and magazines have taken a drubbing due to so much free web content.  The promise of making up that lost revenue through advertising hasn't panned out so now the many news media concerns are considering charging readers for the content they now get for free. 

Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.

Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.

Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.

But there are plenty of skeptics who don't think the public is going to want to pay for the content they've gotten for free for years. 

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, predicted that much of the talk of media’s mining the Web for new revenue would never become reality — and that if it did, free sites like hers would benefit. Some of the plans now being laid might work, she said, but many of them would just alienate the Internet users who click from one site to another, wherever links and their curiosity take them.

“I’m not minimizing the fact that there’s a need to experiment with multiple new business models,” she said. “I just don’t believe in ignoring the current realities.”

You can read the rest of the story from the New York Times here.  At the moment, it's still free.

(jbl)

Amazon's Jeff Bezos: eBooks Will Replace Physical Books (Kindled Editions and eReaders, Too?)

Newsweek's Daniel Lyons interviewed Amazon's Jeff Bezos about the Kindle, how the Apple tablet might affect it, and the next phase of digital distribution. Here's a snip from The Customer Is Always Right:

Lyons: Do you think that the ink-on-paper book will eventually go away?

Bezos: I do. I don't know how long it will take. You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world. That's not going to go away; that's going to thrive. But the physical book really has had a 500-year run. It's probably the most successful technology ever. It's hard to come up with things that have had a longer run. If Gutenberg were alive today, he would recognize the physical book and know how to operate it immediately. Given how much change there has been everywhere else, what's remarkable is how stable the book has been for so long. But no technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

LC's Digitizing American Imprints. Luckily that doesn't mean Kindle will necessarily be the primary mode of digital distribution (or Google Books for that matter). Nearly 60,000 American history books have been scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project of the Library of Congress. Many of the scanned books in LC's Digitizing American Imprints were published between 1865–1922. The oldest work dates to 1707. These and the other digitized books can be accessed through LC's online catalog and the Internet Archive. Details here.

What If Google Made Very Low Cost Touchscreen Web Tablets? "We can stop talking about eReaders," if Google would offer low cost touchscreen web tablets writes Jason Wilson in Why 2010 is going to be fun, citing to Brian Lam's Why Google Should Make a Tablet who writes:

The Most Direct Way To Get People Online is the Physical Manifestation of a Browser: And if Google wants more people on the web, a low cost, ad subsidized web tablet is probably the least complicated way to do it from a hardware, software and business partner standpoint. There's no competing operating system with native apps competing for attention with Google's web services, and there's not necessarily a need for a contract or carrier as on smartphones. This web tablet is a straight shot to the web. (I know its cheaper to let other hardware makers solve this puzzle, but android is just as confusing of a model.)

Software Is the Issue, and They've Already Got It Figured Out: Chrome OS is the perfect operating system for a web tablet. It's a fast operating system that's completely browser centric. While Tablet hardware is somewhat a commodity (Exception: touchscreens of the size used in JooJoo aren't super cheap yet), the big issue is software. And Chrome OS is ripe for a web surfing tablet.

[JH]

10 Best iPhone Apps for Dog Lovers

Want to locate an off-the-leash dog park in your zip code? Or use a social networking site for dog owners to set up doggy play dates? Check out the 10 Best iPhone Apps for Dog Lovers.  [BA]

Beware of Discrepancies Between Google SLOJ Opinion Texts and Texts from Other Sources

On Legal Writing Prof Blog, Nova's Jim Levy reports on how a Google SLOJ user found a discrepancy when he compared the Google-provided opinion text with the official text of the opinion he was using in his brief  -- the footnote numbers were off! How? Why?

The source of the discrepancy quickly became apparent. In the official version of the case (as in all official versions of Wisconsin cases), the filing of a petition for review in the Wisconsin Supreme Court gets noted in the caption with a footnote placed at the end of the name of the party that filed the petition.  The symbol for this footnote is a dagger, not a number.  Google Scholar, however, designates this footnote with a number (in this instance, the dagger became "1") and renumbers the remaining footnotes accordingly.

See Levy's To all legal researchers: Be aware of possible discrepancies between Google Scholar and commercial research tools for details. [JH]

Pew Survey Results: Good Riddance to the 2000s but Technology and Communications Advances Viewed Favorably

Results from The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey of the 2000s reveal that more people have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years. Current Decade Rates as Worst in 50 Years. "There is no significant generational divide in impressions of the current decade: Roughly half in all age groups view the 2000s negatively, while less than a third rates the decade positively. This is in stark contrast to generational differences in views of previous decades. ... Happy to put the 2000s behind them, most Americans are optimistic that the 2010s will be better. Nearly six-in-ten (59%) say they think the next decade will be better than the last for the country as a whole, though roughly a third (32%) think things will be worse."

On the plus side, Pew reports that major technological and communications advances are viewed in an overwhelmingly positive light. See graphic, left. Snips from the Report:

The Internet ... continues to be widely seen in a favorable light. About two-thirds (65%) say the internet has been a change for the better, while just 16% say it has been a change for the worse; 11% say it hasn’t made much difference while 8% are unsure.

Email ... is viewed as favorably as the internet itself. By an overwhelming margin, more say email has been a change for the better (65%) than say it has been a change for the worse (7%); 19% say it hasn’t made a difference.

Cell phones are broadly embraced by the public as a change for the better. Nearly seven-in-ten (69%) call cell phones a change for the better compared with just 14% who call them a change for the worse.

Smartphones ... handheld devices such as Blackberries and iPhones are seen as a good thing by most people (56%). However, a quarter (25%) says these devices have been a change for the worse.

Social Networking. The public is ambivalent when it comes to evaluating social networking sites such as Facebook. About a third (35%) call them a change for the better, 21% say they have been a change for the worse, while 31% say social networking sites have not made much of a difference and 12% are unsure.

Blogs. When it comes to internet blogs, the plurality opinion (36%) is that the emergence of blogs has not made much of a difference. Slightly fewer (29%) call them a change for the better, while 21% think they have been a change for the worse.

Also note the survey findings for green products, surveillance/security and genetic testing. [JH]