Monday, October 14, 2002

It's hard to predict the benefits of this sort of activity in connection with the war on terrorism or the impact on the competition between the open source movement and individual proprietary-software companies. http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4260499.htm Noel Humphreys 10:49:50 PM    comment []

Different search engines produce different results, as we all know. I typed "Lawrence Lessig" into various search engines on October 14, 2002, a few days after he argued the Eldred case in front of the US Supreme Court. I've read that www.Google.com is the most popular search engine. I tried that one first. The first outcome was cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig. On the new news section of Google, the first response was to a posting on slashdot. AskJeeves also produced cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig as the first result. However, AlltheWeb, Overture, AltaVista and Lycos (which, I think, uses the same search engine as AlltheWeb) featured as the first response www.lessig.org. In fact, at AlltheWeb,com cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig made the list at #8. AltaVista and Overture also showed "Books by Lawrence Lessig at Amazon.com" as the first result overall, each noting that sponsored links come ahead of unsponsored links. Google said it found 43,200 hits from "Lawrence Lessig," but AltaVista showed 12,588 hits. This kind of thing makes you wonder whether there is a systematic way to take advantage of these differences. Without paying for better placement, you presumably can insert metadata or codes or terms that make a particular site show up more prominently in connection with particular searches. Is there a systematic way to make a site show up more prominently usually or always (compared to the placement without those terms)? Noel Humphreys 9:12:06 PM    comment []

Lessig's blog summary of the Eldred case written after the oral argument: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2002_10.shtml#000531 The impact of the term extension act (the "CTEA") on many realms of modern life makes the Eldred case important. But the impact is not the basis for the Contitutional argument that the Supreme Court hears. The shape of the arguments comes from the Supreme Court's own prior decisions. The impact on copyright law of Eldred's outcome is disinct from the impact the outcome will have on Constitutional jurisprudence. One crux of the Eldred case is the CTEA's effect on copyrighted works created prior to the CTEA's effecive date. A decision involving that part of the case may not affect the length of copyright monopoly that subsequent works enjoy. In other words, the court could refuse to apply the CEA to pre-existing works only, while leaving the statute's new, longer periods intact for later works. Of course, you have to admire the skill of Lessig as a lawyer, working with his allies. The simple argument is that the statute does limit, in a literal way, the term of the copyright monopoly. The CTEA's foes have maneuvered the argument so that the discussion transcends that literal limit. Lessig and his allies have vaulted the argument into the realm of making a limited period (say, 95 years) seem unlimited. That is a high-level legal accomplishment. Noel Humphreys 8:40:41 PM    comment []

Recent articles on ASP's, privacy and B2B sites of which Noel Humphreys was "the" or "a" principal author are shown on this page: http://www.akingump.com/publication.cfm?practice_id=111&action=practice. Noel Humphreys 7:10:19 PM    comment []

The Humphreys IP Buzz is a Radio Weblog devoted to copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, patents and legal issues centered on software, knowledge management, outsourcing, virtual organizations, ASP's and contracts---plus whatever else is interesting. This is NOT legal advice. Nel Humphreys 6:27:35 PM    comment []

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