ReDigi hopes to sell used ebooks

Publishers Weekly reports that internet company ReDigi, which currently sells pre-owned digital music, hopes to do the same with pre-owned ebooks. The question that arises, of course, is whether we consumers actually own the apps, music, ebooks, and other content we have paid for, and whether we can legally resell them. ReDigi is currently involved in a copyright infringement case filed by Capitol Records in the US District Court in Manhattan involving their resale of digital music and whether the first-sale doctrine applies to digital content. ReDigi claims that it is just the cyber-version of a used record store and everything it does is lawful because its technology first validates, then transfers your music to its servers without copying. If ReDigi prevails, it will "upend the way e-books and other digital products are sold, since such products would get a second life on the resale market and provide a new revenue stream for publishers and authors."

Judge issues order in precedent-setting GSU case

Publishers Weekly reports on the final order filed by Judge Orinda Evans in the Georgia State University copyright case in a story titled "Final Order in GSU E-Reserves Case Is a Rebuke to Publishers." The case, Cambridge University Press et al v. Patton et al, featured three academic publishers (Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publications) alleging that GSU administrators systematically encouraged faculty to commit copyright infringement via GSU’s e-reserve systems as a no-cost alternative to traditional coursepacks. The judge had found for the publishers on just five of ninety-nine counts of copyright infringement claims. Now with her order she not only rejected the publishers request for relief on the five counts but also (in what PW terms a "stunning development") ordered the publishers to pay the defendants' attorney costs. Georgia State University has prevailed in what is seen as a precedent-setting lawsuit that will help determine the future of copyright law in the digital age.

Google tweaks algorithms to include copyright removal requests

Information Week has an article,  "Google Joins Copyright Police Force", about Google's announcement last week that it will start demoting sites in search results that receive large numbers of valid copyright-infringement notices. A Google official is quoted as saying "Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily — whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed from Spotify." The Information Week article, however, see this as a bad idea, saying that "Google Search should not participate in copyright enforcement any more than a hardware store should restrict the sale of hammers to prevent a potential crime. It should not circumvent the judicial process by passing judgment on websites just because someone complains. The legal system presumes innocence until guilt is proven; Google should make the same presumption."

Digital legal resources: India

The Foreign, International and Comparative Law (FCIL) SIS of the AALL has posted an interesting and useful PowerPoint presentation given by Priya Rai at the recent AALL Conference in Boston. Ms. Rai is is the Deputy Librarian In-Charge at the Justice T.P.S. Chawla Library, National Law University Delhi, India. Her presentation,  Access to Legal Information in the Digital Age: A Comparative Study of Electronic Commercial Databases and Public Domain Resources in Law, was made possible by a grant from FCIL. The presentation contains information about the use of digital legal information resources in India, the commercial and public domain resources that are available for Indian law and an evaluation of the competing commercial and public resources.

St. Louis Law dean resigns in protest

The Wall Street Journal law blog has a post about the abrupt resignation of Annette Clark as Dean of St. Louis University School of Law. Her scathing letter of resignation was posted to the Above the Law Blog and has pretty much gone viral.  In her letter she accused the president of St. Louis University, Rev. Lawrence Biondi of taking law school money and using it for general university purposes, contrary to agreements made with the law school. She also complained about being left out of key decisions and said that she has no confidence the university's president or vice president for academic affairs.
She remains a tenured faculty member of the law school.

Online training in the new ProQuest Congressional

ProQuest Congressional is rolling out a new user interface, and they are offering free online sessions with ProQuest trainers "for a first look at the new interface and to discover what is NEW, BETTER, and DIFFERENT. We will also answer any questions about contacting technical support, accessing online help, and more."  The list of scheduled trainings is available on the ProQuest website; the webinars are free but they do ask that you register ahead of time. 

OR judge says inmate can choose to be executed

The ABA Journal reports that An inmate in Oregon who was sentenced to death after his second murder conviction,  and who has asked to be executed, has won a round in court.  The governor of Oregon, John Kitzhaber, had vetoed the death penalty for inmate Gary Haugen. Marion County Civil Court judge Timothy P. Alexander said in handing down his opinion that " "clemency is an act of grace, and the recipient is not obliged to accept it."  The state is expected to appeal the ruling. 

Digital Preservation made easier

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Outreach working group (an initiative of the Library of Congress)  has created a helpful website called "Digital Preservation in a Box", a "gentle" introduction to the concepts of preserving digital information. It provides a set of resources to support introductory-level information and education for those who may have little to no knowledge of digital preservation and digital curation issues, to help them with stewarding their digital information. It provides resources for preserving digital info in a variety of formats:  Photos, Audio, Video, Email, Personal documents, and Websites. There are links to other useful  digital preservation websites as well.  

Survey looks at smartphones and perceived/real privacy

A fascinating article in Technology Review looks at a recent study done by researchers at the University of California -Berkeley law school and published on SSRN. The paper is titled "Mobile Phones and Privacy" and the researchers report that there is a disconnect between user perception of the security and privacy of cellphones and the reality. For example, over 75% of people surveyed for the study believed that law enforcement needs special permission to access cellphone information; in fact, In fact, law enforcement can guess a password to unlock a confiscated device, and can impersonate the phone's owner by sending texts if the phone is unlocked. Neither activity has been struck down by the courts.

Storing files in the cloud

In his Personal Technology column this week, Walter Mossberg compares four of the leading online file storage repositories: Dropbox, SugarSync, Microsoft SkyDrive and Google Drive. As he says, "this type of service is useful for anyone with many computers and devices, either for personal or group use".  

Summer reading?

Are you all caught up on your reading and looking for something new?  There are still a few weeks to go in the summer. Publishers Weekly has some challenging reading suggestions for you: The Top 10 Most Difficult Books. 

Mind Mapping Software demonstrated

Are you interested in mindmapping software but you're not sure what it is? Does the word "mindmapping" make you a little leery?  Here's a clever little demo from Lucidchart, a mindmapping software company, that demonstrates how you can use mindmapping to diagram ... Hey Jude. 

We're not pushing this particular product but props to whoever thought up this video.

West eLearning webinars cover TWEN and WL Next

FYI, West is holding a series of free online webinars about TWEN (as well as WestlawNext) starting this week and continuing through July. The info is on their website. They make it quick and easy to register for one of the webinars and add it to your calendar. Note that there is also a pdf Quick Start guide that tells how to register, log in, and participate in a webinar. It also explains that if you register for the webinar but are unable to attend you will be able to access the recording of the webinar after the fact.
The webinar topics are:

• TWEN 101
• Transitioning from Westlaw Class to WestlawNext in 20 minutes
• TWEN: don't recreate the wheel
• The Key Number System on WL Next
• Top Ten WLNext features
• TWEN: how to add video and other cool stuff
• How TWEN makes information sharing easy

Comparing congressional bill versions

A query on the LLSDC listserv asked if anyone knew a good resource that would allow you to compare side by side amendments to a bill passed by Congress. One answer said that that while THOMAS does not yet have this feature, but CQ Roll Call's "Bill Compare" shows the version changes (unfortunately we don't have this resource because it is expensive). Then someone at Lexis chimed in with this helpful hint: "You can find bill text version on Lexis from 1989 forward (these are from CIS and are also in ProQuest Congressional, but only government, public, non-profit and law school libraries can access them on that platform), and then you can use a redlining program or even Word to highlight differences or changes in the versions from introduced through enrolled- you just get plain html text though, no interlineations or italics. The file is BLTEXT for current Congress, or the archives are BTX111, or BTXxxx back to 101. PQ Congressional is digitizing bills & resolutions back to 1789 as a new PDF collection."

Legal Information Institute releases first US Code ebook

Our friends at the Legal Information Institute at Cornell (LII) have announced that they have released their first title in eBook form: United States Code Title 17 – Copyrights. It's available for download from the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook stores for $5.99. The LII plans to offer full-featured primary legal materials in these two popular eBook formats. All LII titles will feature livelink cross-references with fully-functional navigation between references within each title. Out-of-title cross-references and references to supporting notes and documents link directly to the LII web site. Each eBook title is updated annually, but links to the LII web site put the most recent official version and an array of updating and research tools at your disposal. The text of LII eBook editions is beautifully formatted and indented, making it far easier to read than other e-book editions.

Hat tip: Katie Nye

Social Media simplified

This says it all.  Thanks to Pat Roncevich for passing it along. She got it from her friend Lisa Santucci, librarian at Miami University of Ohio. Before that, we're not sure.  

Changes to Google Scholar search interface

The Internet for Lawyers website reports that Google is testing a new interface design for their Google Scholar service. And according to the report, the redesign reduces the user's ability to do successful case law research because it's more difficult to find what you need. Fortunately, they point out, you can still access the "old" (better) interface either via the direct url or by clicking the link in the lower lefthand corner that says "revert to old venerable look".  

"Dr. Livingstone I Presume"'s field diary

The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that a group of scholars and archivists have been working to make legible an 1871 field diary kept by Dr. David Livingstone in Africa. Apparently Dr. Livingstone ran out of writing equipment and wrote some of his diary on old newspaper sheets with ink he made from berries. It has taken more than two years but with fancy scanners they have succeeded in making 99 percent of the diary legible. The article includes before-and-after images of one of the pages, and has a link to the entire Livingstone Spectral Image Archive which includes TIFF images, XML transcriptions, and metadata for the diary.

Supreme Court affirmative action case amici briefs

Inside Higher Education has an interesting article about an upcoming affirmative action case before the Supreme Court.  The case, Abigail Noel Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, challenges the right of the University to consider race and ethnicity in admissions when it has been able to achieve diversity through the race-neutral "10 percent" rule (assuring all graduates in the top 10 percent of high schools in Texas admission into any public university in Texas).  Now amici briefs have been or will be filed by Asian-American groups for both the plaintiff and the defendant. A brief supporting Ms. Fisher and arguing against race-based admissions was filed by a group including the 80-20 National Asian-American Educational Foundation and the National Federation of Indian American Associations. Four other groups including the Asian American Justice Center plan to file an appeal backing the University of Texas; they filed a joint brief when the case was considered by the Fifth Circuit. The Inside Higher Education article discusses more fully the Asian-American perspective on race-based admissions. 

Most cited law reviews

The Michigan Law review has published a new study (36 page pdf) of the most-cited law review articles of all times. The article (the abstract is also available) is an update by Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro, who first published such a survey in 1985,  and Harvard law librarian Michelle Pearse. The study compiles law review citation information in a variety of ways, and the authors say that "New research tools from the HeinOnline and Web of Science databases now allow lists to be compiled that are more thorough and more accurate than anything previously possible." The authors give a detailed and thoughtful analysis of trends in the data over the years. For example, they note that articles about law and economics have "been plentiful among the citation elite", continuing a trend seen in previous surveys, while articles about critical race theory and critical legal studies have "faded in acceptance" over the last decade.  The subject of intellectual property has also been increasingly the focus of scholarship, but the authors say that "this field's ascendance is more attributable to technological developments than to personal ones".