Well, as you can see ((if you're not an RSS subscriber -- and if not, why not subscribe?)), we've been hard at work revamping the website. It's not just a new look this time, though. We've migrated away from WordPress.com and into our own server. Now, don't get me wrong, WordPress.com is great, but we're really excited about the new features we're able to provide by hosting our own blog. ((For instance, footnotes! What's a blawg with law review editors without footnotes?)) We now have a lot of freedom to pretty much do whatever we want with the site, and we're definitely open to feedback. Why not try out the new wall-esque widget and tell us what you think? Note: The blogroll will be fixed tomorrow.

Legal Geekery contributor Kim told me about the entertaining website of Marque Lawyers, who seek to revolutionize the legal industry. MARQUE exists!  We are Australia’s newest law firm, and we have the single ambition of completely changing the way that law is practised. We do not charge by the hour. We do not charge you when we pick up the phone or send you an email. We do not charge you for photocopying or travel time or any of that kind of stuff. We invest in long term relationships with our clients, and we measure the value of our services in the same way that you do. We have a lot to offer, and we provide it in a way that doesn’t hurt. There’s a lot more, but that’ll do for starters. So I laughed for a bit, but then recognized that the firm has a pretty sweet address for a non-traditional fee structure.  Granted they're up-and-coming, but that section of Sydney is somewhere I'd like to practice. And because of the the ongoing job search, I've been visiting a ton of firm sites recently, and have stumbled across some pretty great designs. Gibson Dunn - traditional styling, motivational text & artistic lawyer photos Cravath - ...

Wired Blog has this great story about the cartoon above that was distributed to 50,000 students to teach them that file sharing was illegal.  It seems to me that cartoons would be the best way to get substantive legal information across. [The cartoons were] produced by the National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit describing itself as an "organization dedicated to improving the administration of justice by providing leadership and service to court systems in the United States." But the story line here is a miscarriage of justice at best -- even erroneously describing file sharing as a city crime punishable by up to two years in prison. . . . . "The Case of Internet Piracy," however, reads like the Recording Industry Association of America's public relations playbook: Download some songs, go to jail and lose your scholarship. Along the way, musicians will file onto the bread lines. "The purpose is basically to educate kids -- middle school and high school-aged about how the justice system operates and about what really goes on in the courtroom as opposed to what you see on television," said Lorri Montgomery, the center's communications director. During my freshman year (2001) at Cornell, around fifty students were busted for downloading ...

The Tech Law Prof Blog and Ars Technica have been reporting on the MIT students who were enjoined from sharing their research into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's faulty "Charlie Card" system with hackers at Defcon. Specifically, the students were able to hack their Charlie Cards into reporting incorrect amounts of money. US District Judge Douglas Wood granted a preliminary ten-day gag order on the students on August 9th. As a result, the students were unable to present their paper as they had planned at Defcon, which took place between August 8-10. Meanwhile, MIT's student-run newspaper, The Tech, decided to publish the students' presentation (the document itself is actually a really interesting read if you can get it to load). At the hearing on Tuesday, Judge George O'Toole refused the MBTA's motion to extend the injunction by five months. Judge O'Toole did not consider the First Amendment argument presented by the Eletronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of the students. Instead, after reviewing evidence that the students did not actually abuse the system, but had simply discovered a theoretical exploit, the Judge found that the students had not violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That brings me to the one point that this ...

Interesting article in Saturday's Washington Post about how Pandora internet radio is facing heightened fees that might force them to shut down the site.  A good summary is provided here and quoted in part below. 1. The royalty payments at stake are supposed to compensate performers (and their record labels) for the use of their music, much as songwriters have long received a small royalty payment for the use of their work. 2. But unlike royalties paid to songwriters, these "performance royalties" don't apply to FM or AM -- whether analog or digital HD Radio broadcasts -- but do cover satellite, cable and Internet broadcasts. 3. Cable and satellite broadcasts pay a simple percentage of their revenues. 4. The proposals cooked up by the Copyright Royalty Board (a panel of judges appointed by the Librarian of Congress to settle certain intellectual-property disputes) and backed by SoundExchange, the theoretically nonpartisan group charged with collecting these royalties, would impose a per-song, per-listener fee that many Webcasters say would put them out of business. Tip of the hat to overlawyered.

As a research assistant, I find myself reading an insane amount of law review articles. Adding Law Review to the mix means that I'll be reading a super insane number of law review articles next year. I always read these articles and notice that they've been written in a nice outline format, but Lexis doesn't give you any kind of table of contents to quickly analyze the argument structure. Reading all of the headings can usually give you some idea of whether the article is going to be of any use, so why not have these headings given up front? LexisNexis, I'm looking at you. Anyway, I got tired of waiting for this feature, so I decided to write some python code to do it. OS X / Linux people, you're stuck downloading python and running python code linked above. If you need any assistance, feel free to ask. Windows people, you need to download and install python, and then download and install my program. After you install python, the outliner will run from your Start Menu or Desktop like any other program you've ever downloaded. It's real simple to use. Cut and paste everything from the Text Section of the law review article, and ...

Sometimes it dawns on me that I am getting older.  Preferences change over time, you fall into patterns and life slows down a little.  So it's late Friday night in a collegetown--I'm sipping a beer on my couch next to my girlfriend, and we're ignoring a movie in favor of our computers.  The twin 12" Lenovos that are perched on our laps let us explore the wireless internets. I figure I'd share an interesting article I found while procrastinating (writing cover letters).  Sidenote: sorry employers, but I can't find a tactful way of telling a firm that I think it's sweet that oral advocacy skills just saved your client $4 billion (scotusblog & o'melveny). Washington Post article about copyright infringement and the facebook craze Scrabulous.  This blog article has a description of the similarities w/ pictures, and a link to the complaint.

So I updated my iPhone from firmware 1.1.3 to 1.1.4 last night and found that Mail was constantly crashing, and Mail and my bookmarks wouldn't sync to my iTunes. After some messing around, it became apparent that this is just a permissions problem arising from the upgrade. Here's how to fix it (assuming you're Jailbroken):  ssh root@192.168.1.X (or your IP address -- note: default password is "alpine") cd /var/mobile/Library (note: I *think* that this may be /var/root/Library on iPhones prior to 1.1.3) chmod 0777 ./* Simple as that. Enjoy your new firmware.