Daily Archives: June 25, 2008

Bloomberg Law Reports

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I’ve raved about the Bloomberg Law Reports; now you can all see for yourselves just how good they are.  This is from an e-mail I received today from Bloomberg:

Bloomberg Law Reports® can now be found at:
Bloomberg Law Reports are comprehensive legal analyses targeted to the legal and financial communities. Bloomberg Law Reports examine recent legal and regulatory developments covering a wide array of topics including: Antitrust & Trade, Asia Pacific Law, Banking & Finance, Bankruptcy, Corporate Law, Director & Officer Liability, Employee Benefits, European Law, Executive Compensation, Health Law, Immigration Law, Insurance Law, Intellectual Property, Labor & Employment, Litigation, Mergers & Acquisitions, Privacy & Information, Risk & Compliance, Securities Law, and Sustainable Energy.

To find out more about Bloomberg Law Reports—or if you are interested in contributing an article to Bloomberg Law Reports—please contact one of the legal analysts listed at the bottom of the relevant report.

To view enhanced versions of Bloomberg Law Reports, including hyperlinks to cited materials, please access the reports on the Bloomberg Professional® service (BBLR <GO>). For more information on BLOOMBERG LAWSM (BLAW) and the Bloomberg Professional service, please contact us:

In the U.S.

blaw_us@bloomberg.net

And here is a list of their titles — so far to date, as they continue to add new ones — along with frequency of publication noted:

Antitrust & Trade -Monthly
Asia Pacific Law – Quarterly
Banking & Finance – Weekly
Bankruptcy – Weekly
Corporate Law – Weekly
Director & Officer Liability – Monthly
Employee Benefits – Bi-weekly
European Law – Monthly
Executive Compensation – Monthly
Health Law – Monthly
Immigration Law – Monthly
Insurance Law – Weekly
Intellectual Property – Weekly
Labor & Employment – Weekly
Litigation – Weekly
Mergers & Acquisitions – Monthly
Privacy & Information – Monthly
Risk & Compliance – Monthly
Securities Law – Weekly
Sustainable Energy – Monthly

Copyright Renewal Records

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From Inside Google Book Search

“How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn’t digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly corrected the OCR.”

“Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we’ve gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.”

[Hat tip to BoingBoing for this news!]

More Free Stuff

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We love free things here at LegalResearchPlus….

And, thanks to the Center for Governmental Studies, an interesting free resource is now available.  The folks at CGS have just created the PolicyArchive.

According to the PolicyArchive website:

“PolicyArchive is an innovative, new digital archive of global, non-partisan public policy research. It makes use of the power, efficiency, and economy of modern Internet technology to collect and disseminate summaries and full texts, videos, reports, briefs, and multimedia material of think tank, university, government, and foundation-funded policy research. It offers a subject index, an internal search engine, useful abstracts, email notifications of newly added research, and will soon expand to offer information on researchers and funders, and even user-generated publication reviews. Over time, it will grow to include policy content from international and corporate organizations.”

They ask that you register on the front page. But take a look at the site. You can view 12,000 plus documents, including some CRS reports. There are also handy indexes, too. Take a look and if you have research to contribute to the site, they have a link for adding content. I also signed up for the free newsletter for the latest policy additions to the collection.

Hat tip to the terrific Sunlight Foundation blog for spotting this new resource.

New Panamanian Criminal Procedure Code

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Panama is the latest Latin American country planning to introduce accusatorial reforms to its criminal procedure regime. A draft Criminal Prodecure Code (Código Procesal Penal) is currently being discussed in the National Assembly. If the draft becomes law, Panama will join over a dozen other Latin American countries that have moved from inquisitorial systems to accusatorial ones. The new Panamanian code includes oral proceedings at trial and the separation of prosecutors and judges.  A Spanish version of the draft Criminal Procedure Code is available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3182192/proyecto-de-ley

Internet for Everyone

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Two of our law professors, Barbara van Schewick and Larry Lessig, among others, are driving a new campaign to ensure universal high-speed Internet service.  Today’s San Jose Mercury News has a story by Frank Davies about the Internetforeveryone.org campaign, “Broad coalition backs universal broadband.” From the story:

Better broadband access and quality can be a boring and technical issue, fraught with bureaucratic complications, admitted the organizers for InternetforEveryone.org. But they also see it as crucial to the future of the U.S. economy, education and even the health of democracy.

At a news conference in New York, the group warned that the United States is falling behind European and Asian nations with Internet access that is more limited, more expensive and slower. . . .

 

Zipcar founder Robin Chase, also a member of the coalition, is quoted as comparing high-speed to a utility:  “Maybe it’s not as basic as water, but it’s as basic as hot water.”

The campaign is also the subject of an item in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Wired Campus today, “Higher Education Groups Become Part of Broad Internet Coalition.”