LawFont.com

The New York Times carried a story about a lawsuit filed by restaurant owner Rebecca Charles, proprietor of the Pearl Oyster Bar in New York’s West Village. The article mentions that she has sued Ed McFarland, owner of Ed’s Oyster Bar, she considers to be a “knockoff” of her own. McFarland was her former sous chef for six years. [And yes, apologies for the pun in the title.] (more…)

You’ve probably never heard of Fyodor, or insecure.org. I expect you will over the next few days as the mainstream media begins to pick up on a Harry Potter story. Fyodor is a very gifted programmer who created an extremely valuable security analysis program called nmap over 10 years ago, and has been maintaining and improving it ever since. nmap is one of the most widely-used vulnerability scanners, and was even featured in the second Matrix movie (pictures are at the bottom of the insecure.org home page. Geek trivia: the versions of nmap, the target computer system, and the actual vulnerability are historically accurate.)

What does this have to do with Harry Potter? Well, Fyodor also hosts a number of extremely useful computer security discussion lists on his site. And on one of those, a day ago, someone posting as “Gabriel” posted a message entitled “Harry Potter 0day”. (”0day” is jargon for “zero day”, and is used to denote a file — originally software, but more commonly now films or music — that is released onto the underground scene on the day of its public release. This kind of piracy gives bragging rights to the crackers.) In the post, Gabriel claims to give spoilers as to the ending of the upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book. (more…)

It suddenly occurred to me that there might be a better way of verifying my impression that afr.com would have lost readers as a result of its move from an html-based subscription model to the awful Flash-based one I wrote about recently. (Others seem to have similar opinions - see eg this well-written post at ExplodedLibrary bunker.)

Enter Alexa, a site for measuring web traffic. Now it’s not perfect, but any systematic under/over counts or reporting biases should remain relatively constant over time — meaning that somewhat meaningful comparisons can be drawn against its own figures from different time periods, even if they cannot necessarily be drawn against data from other statistics sites.

Without further ado, here is the 5 year graph of traffic to afr.com as measured by Alexa. That crater in mid-2006 corresponds, unsurprisingly enough, with the introduction of AFR Access.

(permanent link)

A comparison against other Australian and international news sites is also instructive. (more…)

Judge Posner posted a very insightful entry on the Becker-Posner blog concerning family control of voting stock in media companies, a topical subject given Rupert Murdoch’s overtures to the Bancroft family regarding the Wall Street Journal.

Of interest is this quote, which shows how well he “gets” the internet: (more…)

Those of you who have tried to post any comments recently may have noticed that I have added an anti-spam “captcha” feature (type into a box the words you see generated onscreen). It’s a shame it’s necessary, but the spammers are getting more sophisticated.

The good part is that the captcha is part of a program currently being used to digitise books from the Internet Archive and make them freely available. Kudos to the authors from Carnegie Mellon University.

Judge Eduardo Robreno of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has handed down a very interesting judgment dismissing two motions by Linden Labs (the makers of Second Life) in a lawsuit brought by lawyer Marc Bragg.

Bragg signed up to Second Life in 2005. He said he was induced into “investing” in virtual land by representations made by Linden and Rosedale in press releases, interviews, and through the Second Life website, and paid real money as “tax” on his virtual land. (more…)

I opened the Fin Review today to see a double page ad spread for the new afr.com. Fantastic, I thought; they’ve ditched the awful experiment that was AFR Access and reverted to an html-based site that I can actually use.

For those who never subscribed, the Fin Review originally had one of the best on-line services (see a sample view), with some stories free to all users, and some only available to subscribers. I used the free service since 1996 or 1997, and then had a subscription via my former employer, which I used daily.

Then for some reason Fairfax decided to switch to a flash-based version in mid 2006, called AFR Access. I tried it a couple of times, and gave up: it was impossibly slow, unwieldy, and offered no benefits at all over the former version — while introducing plenty of needless annoyances and a poor user interface. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was put off, as someone a few months ago mentioned a Crikey story that there were only 2,000 subscribers, about 1/10th of the budgeted amount. (Just found it - here it is.) (more…)

To continue the renewal, we have also updated the site’s look and feel. Not a huge change, but I think it’s cleaner and quicker-loading, and I hope you agree.

There is also a “mobile” skin, for those accessing LawFont through a hand-held device, which reduces the amount of data loaded and formats better for a small screen — no need to select it, as it should kick in automatically(”Wordpress mobile” from AlexKing.org).

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on Vista’s EULA. The EULA (available here in PDF format) provides for Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium the following “additional licence term”:

USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.

Leaving aside the issue of whether an EULA actually is a contract (as against an attempt to turn a copyright licence into a contract) a few interesting points emerge. (more…)

Random question for the day: where does the tortured language used in newspapers to describe offences with which people have been charged come from?

For example, in this article on 15 January, the SMH wrote of a man accused of raping a woman after hiding in her car’s boot:

“He was charged with aggravated sexual assault, aggravated detain person for advantage, take and drive conveyance and escape police custody.”

Only the first offence is reported in normal English. The remainder are described curiously ungrammatically. The terminology isn’t based — as one might initially suspect — in the language of the Crimes Act. So why use it? (more…)

Apple has launched iTunes and Online Apple Stores in New Zealand. Interestingly, songs are priced at NZ$1.79, which equates to A$1.56 at today’s rates. This compares with A$1.69 at the Australian iTunes store.

Similarly, music videos are NZ$3.59 (A$3.13) and most albums are NZ$17.99 (A$15.68), compared with A$3.39 and A$16.99 respectively. (Not all albums are as much on the Australian store; for example Boston’s self-titled first album is A$13.52)

Of course, these compare with US$0.99 (A$1.26), US $1.99 (A$2.52) and US$9.99 (A$12.68) respectively at the US store.

Slate has a piece on the use of Google’s Book Seach in detecting plagiarism. It is an interesting area, as it really represents technology removing another barrier to something that was previously relatively hard to do.

Previously, there were a number of barriers to detection of plagiarism. The scope of detection was limited by people’s access to the original books (hence the popularity of plagiarising material published overseas, or which was out of print for some time, or both), their ability to read them (ie to have the time to read it, and to translate the work if necessary), their recollection of what they had read, and the likelihood of finding and reading the infringing work. And in most cases, you would just get a feeling that something was amiss, rather than knowing straight away which portions had been copied and from where.

Now, it is a simple matter of setting a powerful computer loose on a massive database. (more…)

According to the Australia, Sir Cliff Richard is leading a push to have the period of copyright in the UK extended from 50 to 95 years. The reason? Some of his songs, such as “Move It” from 1958, are about to fall out of copyright.

As always, the underlying point not addressed is the rationale underlying copyright laws. Is it to allow perpetual quasi-ownership of something you have created? Is it to allow a reasonable reward by a limited monopoly of exploitation? And if so, for how long? And why should the time–presumably enough when the song was created if you are looking at it from an incentive point of view–be extended any further? The Disney/Sonny Bono Effect hits the UK…

The New York Times is carrying a story about an artist who is being sued by the University of Alabama. His wrongdoing? Selling paintings of football matches that include players wearing the university’s “famous crimson and white color scheme”.

According to the article, the suit is a trade mark action, and it is not someone’s idea of a joke. The artist, Daniel Moore, has been painting football pictures for over 25 years, and says he paints using photographs for reference, but adds his own interpretation and style to them. The accompanying photos suggest that Moore does have an ultra-realistic style. The lawsuit alleges that Moore’s paintings are effectively facsimile images of a football ‘play’ and “adds no message whatever not conveyed by the play itself”. (more…)

Update: The move to a new host is completed, and I think things are working properly now. Please drop me a line at lawfont @ gmail.com if not. Thanks.

Just to let our readers know: I will be moving LawFont to a new webhost over the next few days. There may be periods of downtime, and it is possible that comments on posts might fall into a black hole (but I will try to do my best to prevent this).

Other than this, the changes will be completely behind the scenes, and so the web address (still www.lawfont.com — no need to change your bookmarks), the look and feel, etc, will all be the same.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

You may also have noticed comments are back on after a massive spam blitz over the last couple of weeks. I am still tweaking it, but we’re again down to one or two per day.

And then I have a few further improvements planned for after that.