Tech Law Prof Blog

Statistics, We Have Statistics: Apple and Firefox

Apple announced today that song sales on the iTunes store topped 5 billion tracks.  Reports are that the labels get around 70% of that.  Of course, they want more as the price of gas has gone up for all those trucks that carry the DRM-ladened bits from the factory to the Apple servers.  All in fun, kids.  Remember, stealing music is bad.

Firefox 3 was downloaded over 8 million times in the first 24 hours of availability, and almost 10 million times in the first two days.  Opera will try to find a way to use that figure against Microsoft in complaints about its low market share.  Should you want the new Firefox browser, you can join the frenzy here.  And while we're on the subject, the first vulnerability for version 3 has already been reported.

Harvard Journal of Law & Techonology (JOLT)

The Harvard Journal of Law & Technology is proud to announce that its new online companion, the JOLT Digest, is up and running after a short administrative hiatus. The Digest will continue to post law and technology news over the summer!

The Digest is an online-only resource featuring short synopses of recent events in the field of law and technology, including significant cases and legislation in the United States and abroad. The Digest is designed to provide academics, practitioners, and law students with timely access to important legal developments, coupled with links to in-depth commentary. We invite you to visit the JOLT Digest at http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest!

Recent Digest articles include:

Mars, Inc. v. Coin Acceptors, Inc.
Federal Circuit Clarifies Recovery for Lost Profits, Non-Exclusive Licensees: Parent Company Denied Recovery for Lost Profits of Subsidiary

Quanta Computers, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc.
Supreme Court Reinvigorates Patent Exhaustion

Introduction to Information Retrieval

The pre-publication text and companion PowerPoint slides to Introduction to Information Retrieval (Cambridge, 2008) by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze is available here. 

From the web page:

The book aims to provide a modern approach to information retrieval from a computer science perspective. It is based on a course we have been teaching in various forms at Stanford University and at the University of Stuttgart.

The authors are seeking feedback on the book's use as a textbook.  The site includes a table of contents and links to PDF chapters.

Another View of the Judge Kozinski Story

Computerworld has a good summary of of the developments in the story about Judge Kozinski and the case of the porn on his home server that was misconfigured to allow access from the web.

You can read it here.