The past couple of weeks have offered an amazing ringside view of an unusually public and acrimonious debate over software patents.

First, This American Life aired When Patents Attack, a fantastic expose of Intellectual Ventures, a patent holding company owned by Microsoft’s one-time CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The episode leads listeners to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that companies like Intellectual Ventures are at the root of all that’s wrong with the US patent system. It’s a must-listen for anyone involved in, or merely interested in, intellectual property law.

Then, last week, after losing out on a huge bidding war for . . . [more]

These are notes are from a panel presentation session at the American Bar Association 2011 conference in Toronto last Thursday. Panelists included lawyer/librarian Matthew Braun, Legal Reference Specialist at the Law Library of Congress in Washington, DC, Sara Sommarstrom, Program Director, Minnesota Justice Foundation, and Prof. Nanette Elster, Vice President, Spence & Elster and Adjunct Faculty, The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, IL. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own. I welcome your comments and follow-up thoughts!

This session was made up of three very different presentations exploring . . . [more]

Here’s the promised post on the iPad apps recommended, or mentioned warmly, by Tom Mighell and Nerino Petro during the ABA session on Thursday that discussed the use of tablet computers in the practice of law. Some of the those identified as “free” also have a beefed up version offered for sale. As I’m sure you’ll understand, there are literally thousands upon thousands of iOS apps now, and it was only possible for the panel to discuss a very few in the time allotted. And, as I’m sure you’ll also understand, all kudos goes to the two expert panelists and . . . [more]

As a follow up to my post on J. E. McEneaney’s Web 3.0, Litbots, and TPWSGWTAU, here is an interesting and brief piece in Nature on what’s lacking in search engines. Turns out the author, a computer scientist at the U of Wash., thinks it is a machine capable of reading our sentences for meaning, not keywords.

There is a good summary of the article on the NYT blog.

As a side note, the fact that his academic homepage is in Comic Sans has new implications for me, after having read this epic defense in McSweeney’s. . . . [more]

One-term searches in Google will no longer offer a link to Google’s dictionary website. It’s been shut down.

The preferred behaviour is now to have users:

1. Conduct a single-term search;
2. Click on More search tools in the left-sidebar;
3. Click on Dictionary in the left-sidebar.

Or perhaps mildly quicker, include the word ‘definition‘ next to one’s search. The results returned will include a short dictionary entry, along with links to various online dictionary websites.

Some of the responses to this change can be found via the Google search forums. . . . [more]

A short while ago the US House Judiciary Committee amended House bill H.R.1981 “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011” so as to require ISPs in the United States to retain for 18 months a broad range of data about customers and their online activity. (It would seem that the version currently available on LOC’s Thomas does not yet reflect the changes.) To quote from the brief story by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

…the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along

For the last few months a colleague from our marketing department and I have been attending SMBYEG. This is the 140 character form of Edmonton’s (Edmonton International Airport code being YEG) combined with the abbreviation for Social Media Breakfast. Not everyone who attends has a Twitter handle, but #SM users are certainly in the majority.

Social Media Breakfasts serves two main purposes:

• Face-to-face networking: Bring together marketers, PR pros, students, entrepreneurs, and social media practitioners and enthusiasts of all stripes over breakfast.
  
• Education: Through panel discussions, presentations, case studies, debates, and breakout sessions … teach, share, and learn social

In this ten-minute video, best-selling author Seth Godin talks about a fundamental shift in today’s business world that includes marketing, social media and a move toward openness. He says: “You are going to have to change if you want to be there too.”

Yahoo! Futurist: Seth Godin

Some food for thought. A quick summary:

1. Marketing needs to be responsible for the product.
2. You need to measure interaction.
3. The only asset that gets built online is permission to talk to people.

I wonder about the first point and how it can be applied to a law firm? I almost think . . . [more]

It used to be that packet ships would carry the post across the ocean, always running the risk that they might founder and take messages — and lives — with them. Now we only have to worry about routers and servers, and rarely if ever are living beings harmed should one of these electronic packet pushers go down. But they do go down. And now, as then, it’s not always easy to figure out whether the break in communication is systemic or more personal.

Recently, for example, Netflix encountered serious problems with streaming that lasted, on and off, for a . . . [more]

Here’s a story pointing out that the phone ‘hacking’ that has caused so many headlines (and resignations) lately in the United Kingdom was possible because of a simple default setting on mobile phones sold in the UK, that no one took the trouble to fix and that no regulator was prepared to take responsibility for. It’s a fascinating sad story:

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-hacking-loopholes-remain-consumers-deserve-better/?elq_mid=15051&elq_cid=995446

As I understand the story, all phones provided by particular providers had the same default password for checking messages, so that if you called somebody and they didn’t answer, you could use the standard password to access their messages . . . [more]

With the Canadian Law Blogs List now surpassing 300 entries (100 in the past year), along with the continued growth of law firms and lawyers using Twitter, Canadian legal web-commentary is definitely on the rise. One segment that’s lacked exposure, however, is the number of in-house perspectives from north of the border.

Happily, that change has started, with the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (a Stem client) providing a foot in the Twittersphere door. Launched earlier this month to coincide with a website redesign, @CCCA_News will provide a mix of:

• news stories relevant to corporate counsel from Canada, the United

Google+ is the latest social media tool. It will take some time before we know how it will fit in with twitter, facebook and linkedin. Opinions range from it being a nuisance as it is just another thing we need to follow, to being a superior tool that will supplant other social media. But for now its growth rate has been phenomenal – 20 million users in 24 days.

So I thought it would be interesting to look at what I would have learned so far this week from Google+ if that was my only source of information. These are . . . [more]