For a recent, thoughtful article on Open Source Software and the major issues related to evaluating and implementing it — plus some practical tips — see Phillip A. LaPlante’s “Open Source: The Dark Horse of Software?” in Computing Reviews (July 15, 2008).
Law librarian Paul Callister (UMKC School of Law) has written “Books Above the Throne: Geopolitical and Technological Factors Exalting Textual Authority in Seventeenth-Century England“
Actualization of the rule of law necessitates more than the enumeration of individual rights and the careful articulation of divided powers, but the presence of an information or media environment conducive to such rule. Specifically, in the case of seventeenth-century England, it is the ascendancy of the printed book, as characteristic of the information environment, that effectively establishes a limitation on royal power.
The article applies geopolitical, temporal, and technological factors of media theory to seventeenth-century England in order to understand the effects of the information environment upon legal institutions and government. It considers factors such as the textuality of the reign of King James I, effusive spread of printing throughout Europe, smuggling of political and religious texts from overseas, citation to a much broader base of textual of authority, and developments in stabilized texts and cross-referencing to create a web of authority. Each of these factors affected the development and independent standing of legal and authoritative works, such as Lord Edward Coke`s Institutes, the English Bible, and political tracts. In turn, the influence of such works on legal and political developments curtailed absolute monarchy and led to the onset of roles for public opinion and political discourse.
A presentation, based upon this paper, was originally made at the 5th International Conference of the Book, Madrid, Spain (Oct. 2007).
Source: LSN Law & Humanities Vol. 12 No. 28, 07/30/2008
Yesterday’s mail brought along Vol 3, No. 1 of the Journal of Business & Technology Law. This issue contains a Google symposium, “Google: An Intersection of Business and Technology,” which includes these articles:
Google and Fair Use, Jonathan Band
Information Policy for the Library of Babel, James Grimmelmann
The Google IPO, Matthias Hild
Asterisk Revisited: Debating a Right of Reply on Search Results, Frank Pasquale
From Making Money without Doing Evil to Doing Good without Handouts: The Google.org Experiment in Philanthropy, Shruti Rana
Google Benefits or Google’s Benefit?, Susan J. Stabile
Privacy on Planet Google: Using the Theory of “Contextual Integrity” to Clarify the Privacy Threats of Google’s Quest for the Perfect Search Engine, Michael Zimmer
Clearly an issue for us to take with us on our summer vacations for beach or pool-side reading!
James Grimmelmann’s article, published under a Creative Commons license, sets “out a few principles of sensible information policy for the Library of Babel.” Here are the article’s concluding principles:
III. THE INTERNET
As it announces in its very first sentence, The Library of Babel is an allegory for the universe. This essay has also treated it as an allegory–and an anachronistic and transparent one at that. For “Library of Babel,” read “Internet.” For “book,” read “Web site.” And for “Book-Man,” read “search engine.” It’s almost a cliche to assert that the Internet is like a vast library, that it causes problems of information overload, or that it contains both treasures and junk in vast quantities. Looking at it through the lens of Borges’s Library amplifies these themes to their utter limit, and thus makes them fresh again. The ten principles set forth above are completely serious. Here they are again, using the proper terminology:
1. The public interest means readers’ interest.
2. Infrastructure matters.
3. Censorship is usually irrelevant.
4. The problem is access, not creation.
5. The Internet is nearly, but not completely useless.
6. Search engines make the Internet useful.
7. An impostor could not pretend to have a good search engine.
8. Search engines could keep secrets from us and we’d never know.
9. Search engines can play favorites.
10. The more search engines the better.
The Library of Babel provides an exhilarating and frightening metaphor for the Internet. Exhilarating because it reminds us that we are all now “the possessors of an intact and secret treasure” of knowledge beyond compare. Frightening because it reminds us that that knowledge is shut away in a “feverish [place], whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others, so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity.” Only the god-like Book-Man, whose knowledge of the Library is an “honor and wisdom and joy,” can make sense of it for us. In the Library of Babel, the Book-Man is but a “superstition,” but on the Internet, his name is Google.
Associate Professor of Law, New York Law School. As of January 1, 2009, this Article is available for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/.
OK, I’m catching up on my blog reading and a million kudos to the folks at FreeGovInfo for the tidbits that they share. But here is a really interesting site that they recently wrote about, the Memory Hole (by Russ Kick, editor and publisher).
According to the Memory Hole site:
“The Memory Hole exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known. This includes:
• Government files
• Corporate memos
• Court documents (incl. lawsuits and transcripts)
• Police reports and eyewitness statements
• Congressional testimony
• Reports (governmental and non-governmental)
• Maps, patents, Web pages
• Photographs, video, and sound recordings
• News articles
• Books (and portions of books)
The emphasis is on material that exposes things that we’re not supposed to know (or that we’re supposed to forget).”
I’m excited to follow this site — with recent entries focusing on leaked documents and a scoop on NSA forms – this should be habit forming.
“While researching my book on the history of presidential libraries, I discovered a shocking but perhaps not surprising situation: the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is improperly withholding its own records. Theoretically a non-partisan as well as non-political agency, NARA is at the center of some of the most controversial issues of our time, including government secrecy, executive privilege, and timely access to presidential records. Rather than abide by legislative requirements and professional standards, NARA has chosen to avoid accessioning and processing many (if not most) of its own records dating back more than forty years. Worse, officials have blocked access to the records, perhaps due to concerns over possible criticism of the agency. “
Many thanks to the great folks at FreeGovInfo for writing about this and sharing this follow-up: “Clark’s article has produced an extensive discussion and Comments, including the NARA Response by Gary M. Stern on July 24, 2008. Kate at ArchivesNext has posted a thoughtful response after talking off the record to archives staff: Access to records of the National Archives, July 24th, 2008.”
Hat tip to the great folks at FreeGovInfo for this posting:
Get to the bottom of SIC codes and other international trade information and statistics with this handy-dandy guide on International Trade (by Ed Herman, University of Buffalo, 2007) CC
The guide covers many topics, including background information on foreign trade, classification schemes, statistics, and what we love best of all, a section on trade laws, treaties and regulations.
Yesterday’s earthquake in Los Angeles happened on the first day of the state bar exam. According to a National Law Journal story, “Earthquake doesn’t faze law firms, or first day of bar exam,” by Amanda Bronstad:
. . .
“Any interruption weighs heavily upon the takers,” [ Robert Hawley, deputy executive director of the State Bar of California] said. As a result, the State Bar is gathering data on the disruption that, along with reports from experts in psychometrics, will be presented to the committee of bar examiners in order to measure the earthquake’s possible impact on test scores.
. . .
Hat tip to Law Librarian Blog today for posting, among other things, notice of two forthcoming (next month) state-related legal research titles from the Carolina Academic Press Legal Research Series:
Carolina Academic Press lists the following additional state-related legal research titles as also forthcoming:
In conjunction with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual meeting on July 12-15, 2008, Thomson/West presented a white paper Partnership and Solutions for Preparing Job-Ready Attorneys that follows on its 2007 white paper Research Skills for Lawyers and Law Students.
More from the National Law Journal on this program:
Patent Office launches clinical certification program with six law schools
Lynne Marek / Staff reporter
July 29, 2008The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has launched a two-year law school clinical certification program that will give students from six selected U.S. law schools experience in practicing intellectual property law before the agency.
The six schools selected to participate in the pilot program that will begin this fall are American University, William Mitchell College of Law, Washington College of Law, University of Connecticut School of Law, the John Marshall Law School, the University of Maine School of Law and Vanderbilt Law School, the office said in a press release. Law school clinical faculty will serve as supervisors.
“We look forward to providing a real-world experience for the students so they will be well prepared to tackle the complexities of intellectual property law that are so important in today’s economy,” said Jon Dudas, the U.S. Commerce Department under secretary for intellectual property.
