The seven new opinions released today were posted to newly-revised pages on the WV Supreme Court site, which marks the official debut of these new Radio-driven pages. I broadcast the new links to the 2100+ subscribers of my e-mail opinion summary list, so I'm anxious to see what kind of response this gets from the practicing bar and others. I'm posting the topical category and catchline in Radio's itemTitle, which will allow users to run a Google search for other relevant links to the opinion's main holding. If other courts would use this convention, we could bootstrap Google as a free legal research search engine!
As far as I know, this is the first public sector information site driven by weblog technology. If there are others, please let me know. [Rory Perry's Radio Weblog]
This is the kind of stuff every court should be doing. Go Rory Go!
9:56:17 PM
Macaulay on Copyright (too bad he can't argue the Eldred case)
The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom. [kuro5hin.org] via [McGee's Musings]
From MacCaulay's speech (delivered in 1841, and which address an effort to extend the term of copyright) we get these observations, which fit right into the Eldred case.
"On the twenty-ninth of January 1841, Mr Serjeant Talfourd obtained leave to bring in a bill to amend the law of copyright. The object of this bill was to extend the term of copyright in a book to sixty years, reckoned from the death of the writer.
Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly....
I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad....
A monopoly of sixty years produces twice as much evil as a monopoly of thirty years, and thrice as much evil as a monopoly of twenty years..."
7:20:40 PM
Geek Friendly Hotels in Louisiana (i.e. with high speed access)
Fifteen institutions across Louisiana have started The Louisiana IP Directory at http://louisianaip.org/. This site contains a directory of intellectual property managers at institutions in Louisiana as well as a directory of patents held by Louisiana institutions.
The patents can be browsed or searched. Browsing patents can be viewed in several categories including agriculture, optics, and sugar technology. Patents can be searched by abstract, inventor name, patent number, or title. [Via LLRX.com]
3:05:28 PM
Help your partner - help yourself. It seems obvious....
PwC's Saul Berman says cross-selling is an increasing focus of the firm and represents a growing element of the measurement of the partners' performance.
Today, a number of law firms are trying to focus on cross selling their services, without really thinking about what's needed to make it succeed. Aligning compensation - and focusing on the elements that make the practice measurable - is critical to success. PwC figured that out. Will the law firms? [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Rick and I could spend hours talking about this, and we've logged some significant time discussing it already. He looks at it from the outside (as a person who sells to law firms), and I see it from the inside (as a lawyer in a law firm). But we both see it the same way: it's a hard sell. Law firms, like other organizations, pay lip service to cross-selling, but when you analyze what actually happens it's a whole different story and that's too bad. When the pie grows, everybody wins. Why isn't that obvious?
