Pokemon Go legal issues?

The ABA Journal has an article titled "Pokemon Go spurs lawyers to stop and consider legal issues." If you have been caught up in the Pokemon Go craze, there are several legal issues raised in the article; and  the article also mentions the general problem of wandering around through the physical world while staring through a phone screen.”

SBA book exchange group re-started

The Pitt Law Student Bar Association is reviving a book exchange group to help reduce the cost of law school books for students. You can sell your 1L books to new students or buy books for this year on the cheap.  Check out the information on the SBA Book Exchange Facebook page. 

New Westlaw rep for Pitt Law

We recently heard from Westlaw that they have appointed a new law school representative for Pitt Law:

"I am pleased to announce that your new Westlaw Academic Account Manager is Samuel Berbano. Samuel is a graduate of Drake Law School. While at Drake, Sam argued criminal appeals with the school’s appellate clinic and was a Westlaw Student Representative. After graduation, Sam continued his career with Thomson Reuters first as an Inside Account Manager. His next position at Thomson Reuters was Senior Associate of Product Management and Editorial. Sam brings a wealth of product knowledge to his new role in Academics. Sam also brings energy and expertise. Sam’s first day with Academics was Monday, June 27th. For the next few weeks Sam will be in training. I hope to fully transition Sam to his schools by mid-July. Many thanks to Erica Hines for her coverage and continued support as we make the transition."

Sam also has a LinkedIn profile. 

new app for mapping the world

The Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog has 2 posts, here and here,  about a new project to create memorable "addresses" for every (3 x 3 meter) spot in the world.  It's called what3words and the project is dividing the world into 3 x 3 meter square blocks and then giving each a unique 3 word name or address.
Sounds pretty crazy, but it turns out that Mongolia is now adopting the system and using it for its postal system.
You can register to use it and then download the app. And pull up a map that will give you a three word address for your location. For example, "the Capitol Rotunda is in “shall.spider.bake” and the Empire State building in “heaves.wipes.clay.”

free webinar from GAO

A free webinar, "GAO Podcasts and Social Media," will be offered on Wednesday, June 22, 2016. Jacques A. Arsenault, Digital Communications Manager, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) will take you through GAO social media initiatives, including their great podcast GAO Watchdog Report. Jacques will also offer tips on how to set up a podcast.
This webinar is brought to you courtesy of the U.S. Government Publishing Office's FDLP Academy. Register here. 

CMS can help identify students needing help

Inside Higher Ed has a story today titled "Logging Off, Dropping Out." The story reports that knowing how often students log onto course management software sites is "one of the best ways to predict whether they will stick with their studies or drop out." A study looked at how often students logged on to their course management system (such as Blackboard or TWEN) during the first two weeks of classes. It found that the student "persistence rate" (percent of students who remain enrolled after their first year) was 98% for students who used their CMS at least five days during the first two weeks; for students who used the CMS one day or fewer the persistence rate was 48%, meaning more than half did not continue in college. 

New PLI titles

Listed below are the Practicing Law Institute Course Handbooks published in May 2016; these are available via Barco's PLI subscription:
 CORPORATE LAW
• 21st Annual Consumer Financial Services Institute 2016
• Antitrust Institute 2016: Developments & Hot Topics
• Enforcement 2016: Perspectives from Government Agencies
• Financial Services IT 2016: Avoidance of Risk
• Fourth Annual Institute on Corporate & Securities Law in Hong Kong 2016
• Leveraged Financing 2016
• The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and International Anti-Corruption Developments 2016
• The Volcker Rule 2016: What it Means for Financial Institutions and Markets
• Venture Capital 2016: Nuts and Bolts
 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
• 10th Annual Patent Law Institute
 • Fundamentals of Patent Litigation 2016

ProQuest training

For those of you who are interested in our trial of ProQuest's Reguatory Insight, they are offering a training Thursday June 9, 2016) at 1 pm with the always excellent Andrea Sevetson. You can view this and other upcoming webinars, as well as recordings of past webinars, here.

Twitter search tips

The Digital Inspiration blog, by Amit Agarwal, has a post titled "The best Twitter search tricks." The post provides a list of search operators that will help you "search Twitter like a pro."

North Carolina helps faculty publish diy textbooks

The Chronicle of Higher Educations reports that the University of North Carolina Press recently opened an Office of Scholarly Publishing Services that will assist faculty with editing, layout, distribution and seed money for creating their own course materials - rather than using expensive textbooks. The article says that this new role for the UNC Press is " an opportunity for professors to seek advice on various materials they may have kept tucked away but would like to publish online or digitize...(and) as a way to collaborate on open educational resources." The Press's website has a list of FAQ's, as well as easy-to-complete forms for faculty who are interested in publishing a book or an article.

HeinOnline to add UNC Press titles

HeinOnline has announced that they are adding more than 100 titles published by the University of North Carolina Press to their Core collection. Hein says ". A new collection will be created to house these titles, and they will also be added to subject-appropriate collections. For example, more than 50 of the titles relate to slavery and the law."

Legal Research Basics presentation

The North Carolina Library Association continued its excellent webinar series "Help! I'm an Accidental Government Information Librarian" last week with a presentation titled "Legal Research Basics Redux." The presenter was our friend Jennifer Behrens, a law librarian at Duke. Her presentation was well-organized and very engaging. And though okay - we should all be familiar with the basics of legal research- it doesn't hurt to have a refresher.
If you missed it, the NCLA has helpfully provided an online recording of the webinar, as well as the powerpoint slides from the presentation.

The GSU case and copyright monitoring

Prof. Pamela Samuelson has published an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Colleges Shouldn't have to Deal With Copyright Monitoring." She discusses the lawsuit against Georgia State University by several academic publishers that is now in its eighth year. The trial court has recently ruled that "...of the 48 claims remaining in the case, only four uses, each involving multiple chapters, infringed. The question now is, What should be the remedy for those four infringements?" The publishers involved in the suit are asking the court for a permanent injunction that would impose new duties on GSU and require close monitoring of the content of all online course websites, including giving the publishers access to the online course system. Eventually this would affect course content in course websites at all US colleges and universities. Samuelson outlines the specifics of the proposed injunction, and argues that "If the overwhelming majority of the university’s uses were fair, it doesn’t make sense to impose substantial and costly compliance measures on it."

WIRED on PACER

WIRED magazine has published an article about PACER titled "Here's the problem with the Feds profinting from court filings." The article explains how PACER works and the costs of using it and summarizes the problems with PACER. It looks at the class action lawsuit filed against PACER recently, with the claim that PACER profits far outweigh costs.

Robot Lawyer

Gizmodo reports that "A Major Law Firm Will Soon Be Using A Robotic Lawyer" , aka an "artificial intelligence attorney." The "robot" is named ROSS and was created using technology from IBM's Watson. It acts as an advanced legal research tool, providing more elaborate and intuitive advanced searching. The law firm Baker & Hostetler announced that they will use ROSS in their bankruptcy division. But the article adds that ROSS won't be appearing in court anytime soon.

Alliance for Justice sues over PACER fees

The ABA Journal reports that the Alliance for Justice, along with the National Veterans Legal Services Program and the National Consumer Law Center, has filed a class action lawsuit in federal court accusing the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts of illegally charging excessive fees to access court records through its online Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. The lawsuit charges that the Administrative Office is in violation of the E-Government Act of 2002, which mandated that the fees to access court records online cannot exceed the amount needed to maintain the system itself. The lawsuit (15 page pdf) was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. A press release announcing the lawsuit says “Faith in our judicial system depends on transparency and uninhibited access to court documents for all Americans, regardless of the ability to pay. It’s particularly disturbing that the courts themselves are violating a plainly written law, especially one designed specifically to promote public confidence in the judicial system.”

Update on the baby Bluebook

Another event in the Carl Malamud and Baby Blue saga.. the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog reports that Carl Malamud has alerted the Harvard Law Review Association that his alternative version of the Bluebook has been renamed  "the Indigo Book ."  This should avoid any confusion over the use of the word "Blue." 

Short fast books

The EBook Friendly website points out that "Reading for 6 minutes can reduce stress by 68%. It's three times more effective than video games... Reading a book, even for a couple of minutes, can increase self-worth and trigger imagination" (no argument from librarians). The site has a helpful infographic with "24 Books You Can Read In Under An Hour"...  all by respected authors like E.A. Poe, Annie Proulx, R.L. Stevenson, Nick Hornby and Nikolai Gogol. So no excuses, get reading!

Authors Guild v. Google: the end

Inside Higher Ed reports that a United States Supreme Court order issued today ends a more than a decade-long legal battle between Google and the Authors Guild. At issue was whether Google's book digitization project, in which millions of copyrighted books are being scanned without the authors' permission, is legal. The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case, allowing the Second Circuit's opinion of the case to stand: see Author's Guild v. Google, Inc., 804 F. 3d 202, 2015. The scanning project is considered "fair use."

LLOC signs on to Perma.cc

The DigitalGov blog posts that the Law Library of Congress is now using Perma.cc as the solution to the problem of "link rot" in all its reports. The blog post says "The Law Library’s discovery regarding the extent of link rot in its own reports led to the search for an archiving solution that would allow readers of those reports to access linked content in real time, as they were reading, without having to jump out of the report to search a database of archived material. The exploration of options ultimately lead to a solution known as Perma.cc, developed specifically for the legal community by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. Perma.cc allows authors to archive documents referenced in their work as they are writing and simultaneously generates a permalink to the archived document for inclusion in the work." The University of Pittsburgh School of Law's Barco Law Library is, of course, also a "member" of Perma.cc.

hat tip: Karen Shephard