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JURIST: Legal History in Action
No full text“The fun never stops!” So says University of Pittsburgh law professor Bernard Hibbitts, founder, editor, and publisher of JURIST: Legal News and Research, (http://jurist.law.pitt.edu). JURIST is the 2006 winner of the People’s Choice Webby Award for the best law Website. Prof Hibbitts has found a few minutes to talk about JURIST and his vision of what the Web can do. The rest of his day is being spent in the “fun” of managing a complex Website, run primarily by a staff of students, academic volunteers, and “commentators” from around the world. On this day, those commentators include bloggers, academics, and lawyers from both sides of the conflict between Israel and Hizbollah. The ability to get content and comment from both sides of a conflict or issue, enhance that content, and publish it without bias is the hallmark of what makes JURIST one of the most unique and respected legal content providers on the Web. Not too bad for a Website that was created on one cold, Pittsburgh morning in February 1996, by a man known primarily as a law professor and legal historian
Legal Issues: Lawsuit Threatens BlackBerry Shutdown
No full textFor over four years a dispute has raged between Research in Motion (RIM), the Ontario, Canada based manufacturer of the BlackBerry, and NTP, a Virginia company which holds several patents covering wireless e-mail technologies. NTP sued RIM claiming that the BlackBerry infringes on eight of NTP’s patents. A trial court agreed and awarded damages to NTP and issued and injunction preventing RIM from continuing to use the patented technology. So far, the injunction has been delayed by the courts. However, following four years of trial and appellate court decisions generally favoring NTP, a federal court in late November denied a proposed settlement. The court also agreed to consider imposing the long delayed injunction, which would prevent RIM from using the patented technology. Such an injunction could shut down the BlackBerry communications network. The lawsuit highlights the incredible complexity of patents governing the technology that we have come to take for granted. It also represents the difficulties associated with applying patent law to those patents
Discovering the Relativity of Simultaneity How did Einstein take "The Step"?
No full textIt is routinely assumed that Einstein discovered the relativity of simultaneity by thinking about how clocks can be synchronized by light signals, much in accord with the analysis he gave in his 1905 special relativity paper. Yet that is just supposition. We have no real evidence that it actually happened this way. In later recollections, Einstein stressed the importance of several thought experiments in the thinking that led up to the final theory. They include his chasing a light beam thought experiment and his magnet and conductor thought experiment. They do not include thought experiments on clocks and their synchronization. My goal here is to show that other pathways to the relativity of simultaneity are quite plausible. In several places Einstein stressed the importance in his discovery of special relativity of stellar aberration and Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in moving water. The results can be seen as direct observational expressions of the relativity of simultaneity, if one knows how to read them. I will suggest that, thanks to his knowledge of Lorentz's 1895 Versuch, Einstein did know how to read them, and that it is quite possible that these observations first led Einstein to the relativity of simultaneity
BlackBerry: Lawsuit and Patent Reform
No full textIt appears that your BlackBerry is safe. After more than four years of litigation and a threatened shutdown, a settlement was reached between Research in Motion (RIM)–the manufacturer of the BlackBerry–and NTP the holder of several patents that RIM had allegedly infringed. There were a number of questions underlying this lawsuit. However, the core question that emerged in the final stages of the suit, when a shutdown was considered imminent, was whether the patents that NTP held were valid. Even though a federal court established in 2002 that RIM had infringed the patents, a review of the patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2005 and 2006 had declared at least some of the patents to be invalid. While RIM and NTP were in court dealing with a possible shutdown, and conducting behind-the-scenes settlement negotiations, a possibility existed that the entire exercise might be irrelevant
An Update on Orphan Works
No full textCopyright law seeks to find a balance between opposing interests. On the one side are the interests of copyright owners, those who have created works and are seeking both commercial return and creative control over those works. On the other side are the interests of users of copyrighted works, those who seek to use existing works to build and create new works. The Constitution, in permitting Congress to create copyright law, recognized this balance in its pronouncement that the purpose copyright is to “Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Over the last two centuries Congress has passed a number of copyright statutes to attempt to maintain this balance. The Copyright Act of 1976–with some changes such as the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)–is the current law. It replaced the earlier Copyright Act of 1909 as new media technologies and a changing society purported to upset the balance that had existed. But since the 1976 Act went into effect, technology and changes in our more media-driven society have made the copyright balance more difficult to achieve. In many respects, changes such as the CTEA and the DMCA have added to the difficulty. The issue of orphan works is one area where finding a balance within copyright law is proving challenging
Lost Data: The Legal Challenges
No full textAnother day, another data breach, another lawsuit. On September 22, 2006, a lawsuit was filed against America Online over AOL’s release of 19 million search requests affecting 650,000 subscribers. The suit was filed by three AOL subscribers as a class-action lawsuit where they would represent all of the victims of the release. The AOL data breach is not the first such incident. In the September issue of Information Today, Phillip Britt reported that over 190 data breaches had been reported between February 2005 and June 2006. In February 2005, ChoicePoint reported that information on over 160,000 persons was leaked to criminals posing as legitimate businesses. In May 2006, a laptop computer containing access to over 26 million veterans and military personnel data was stolen from a VA employee’s home. At least two class action lawsuits are pending over that data breach. This article explores how the law is responding to the expanding quandary of data breaches and identity theft
Assessing “Off-the-Shelf” Software for Telerehabilitation: Guiding Principles and Best Practices
No full textAnthroTronix, Inc.’s Virtual CosmoBot™ is a motivating computer-based delivery system to enhance children’s communication skills and stimulate verbal interaction during the remediation of speech and language disorders via telerehabilitation. The University of Pittsburgh Research Engineering and Rehabilitation Center (RERC) on Telerehabilitation (supported by: US Department of Education- NIDRR) is developing a telerehabilitation infrastructure that employs Virtual CosmoBot™ to link distant speech-language pathologists and child participants. We present guiding principles and best practice systems to evaluate and leverage “off the shelf” educational/speech and language rehabilitation software for Web-based telerehabilitation delivery
Legal Trends (Part I): Patenting the Internet
No full textVirtually every window of time can be identified by its technological advances. The industrial revolution of the 1800's gave way to the transportation revolution of the early 20th century. The development of synthetics such as nylon and plastics were followed by an electronics revolution built on transistors and early computers. The silicon chip lead to personal computers and chip-driven devices as the 20th century wound down. But these technological changes pale to that which the Internet has brought to the information industry. After 500 years of building on print technologies, the Internet has restructured this industry in a way that is unmatched by other fields of endeavor. The transformation brought on by the Internet, occurring over a fraction of the industry’s life-cycle, has been nothing short of–to use the cliche–revolutionary. All of these technological transformations operate within a number of legal structures. One of the most critical of these structures, yet often least understood, is patent law. In this article, the author explores and explains the complexities involved in determining patentability for Internet-related technologies, such as e-mail, web browsing, TCP/IP software and e-commerce, and in particular, federated searching by WebFeat
Historical and National Background of Slovak Filmmaking
No full textPreceded by Slovak-related shorts, Slovak filmmaking started with the 1921 feature Jánošík (dir. Jaroslav Jerry Siakeľ) funded by the Slovak-American company Tatra Film from Chicago. Subsequent films mostly focused on folklore (including another feature about Jánošík in 1935, dir. Martin Frič) and newsreels until topics concerning World War II and the onset of communism launched a period of increased production, but also struggle with censorship. The Sun in a Net (dir. Štefan Uher, 1962) helped launch the Czechoslovak New Wave (Prague New Wave, Czech New Wave), and The Shop on Main Street (dir. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, 1964) became the first Central European film to receive an Oscar. The 1960s also saw socially committed and experimental filmmaking, which was reduced during the following decade of more restrictive censorship. The 1980s brought a enormously popular blockbusters, some of which combined popular appeal with cultivated content, while others foreran the collapse of communism by accommodating pop culture and seeking ticket sales
Legal Trends (Part II): Global Technology and Local Patent
No full textThe Internet is generally perceived as an American invention, and this is largely true. The global interconnection of computers using shared protocols was based on the cold war inspired ARPANET, developed by the U.S.’s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1960's. But as ARPANET evolved from a Department of Defense-oriented system to a research-oriented system, non-US research interests began to take a more active role in the development of the Internet’s protocols and features. The Worldwide Web and the first web browsers, for example, were developed at the CERN European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva Switzerland. Now, the Internet is truly global, both in its reach and in its continuing development. As outlined in last month’s Legal Trends: Patenting the Internet article, a very large number of the technologies and processes that underlie the Internet are protected by patents. Given a worldwide Internet, these patented processes control functions that operate both inside and outside U.S. borders. In a similar vein, there are a large number of Internet patents that were awarded outside the U.S. that impact Internet functions within the U.S. This article addresses the challenges presented by these cross-border patents