explodedlibrary.info

my return to law library land

A lot has happened in the last couple of months. My normal inclination is to write one humungous post where I try to make sense of everything, but I don’t think that such a post will ever be finished - at least not before my life has moved on and I’m thinking about other things.

So here’s one part of it. My new job.

For some reason this job seems totally different, even if it’s not. After all, I’ve worked as a law librarian before - that’s what I did when I first started blogging. Being a law librarian was my initial goal when I decided to become a librarian.

The difference is that my previous law library position was in an academic law library. The majority of my career has been in academic libraries, but this new job is with a big law firm.

In Australia, law firm blogging doesn’t seem to have taken off in the same way that it has in the US. For the time being, I’d rather not mention the particular firm where I work. It’s no dark secret (actually I am really glad to be working for this particular firm), but once I mention that word here, my name and my employers become inextricably linked through Google and other search engines. Later on I may change my mind and provide those details. That’s fine and I’d rather err by being over-cautious in the beginning. After all, if I say everything now, I can’t unsay that later on.

My initial impression is that being a law firm librarian is very different from being an academic law librarian and it’s also different from non-legal special library positions I’ve had.

One big difference from being an academic law librarian, is that in the law firms, information is not meant to be free. It is expensive and it is power and there are some boundaries which it is not permitted to cross.

The most obvious boundary is attorney-client privilege.

Another way that information is constrained are by Chinese Walls, to use the un-PC Australian colloquial term. Other words include firewalls and cones of silence. Whatever you call them, these are used when one firm represents different parties with different interests about something. It would not be a good idea to have information flowing freely between the lawyers representing these different interests.

I’ve noticed another aspect of this information exchange issue. When I receive a research request, I don’t usually receive a whole lot of background or contextual information. It was very different in academic libraries, where I saw reference interviews which resembled interrogations. It is true that more contextual information usually helped the research process.

The more I’ve started to think about this, I wonder if maybe this lack of context is a mercy. After all, it would be quite disturbing for me to to hear detailed information about how my work was facilitating behaviour by individuals or companies which were at odds with my own personal values.

This leads to the next big issue on my mind, which will be the topic of my next post. It is important for me to go to work knowing that I am doing good of some sort in the world. At the very least, I don’t want to be causing harm.

How are these concerns resolved in the law firm environment?

sample lease and other tenancy documents

Something I've been looking for lately has been a sample Australian residential tenancy lease. Sadly not being in a law library with easy access to formbooks and form databases, this has been more of a challenge. Particularly because I have been looking for a sample lease that was free, authoritative and not obviously biased in favour of landlords or tenants. I did find something, and that's why I'm blogging about it - to make it easier for other people to find such documents.

This sample lease was created by the South Australian Office of Consumer and Business Affairs. There are only a few things which seem specific to that jurisdiction. Because I was able to convert the pdf to Word, it's easy enough to remove those.

There are other free tenancy documents on this page - such as an inspection sheet.

revisiting linking rights

I have discovered a little contradiction within myself. On the one hand, I am a zealous believer in the right to link. Links have been and remain the lifeblood of the web. The anti-linking policies which seemed fashionable a few years ago were invariably flouted and led to the wide-spread ridicule of the things which they were meant to be “protecting.”

That’s only one aspect of the right to link. In 2005, the issue of the linker’s liability for linking to copyright infringing material hosted by third parties has received some judicial attention in Australia. But I would argue that even the Universal Music Australia v. Cooper case doesn’t yet endanger the right to create a bare link to infringing materials, provided there’s no question of “authorizing” copyright infringement.

A bare link does not provide any endorsement, agreement or authorization of the material being linked to. A bare link to a web site is just a statement of a fact - that at a certain place on the web this information exists. While there is any strength left in the ideas and expression of ideas dichotomy, US National Public Radio (a past offender) can't prevent a blogger from linking to them, no more than it can copyright any other fact, such as 2+2=4. For NPR to prevent anybody linking to them is like claiming copyright in their own physical address.

To use a different analogy, anti-linking policies make as much sense as an author claiming that merely being cited in a journal article infringes on her/his copyright.

It might be different if there’s more than a bare link happening. For example, if I linked directly to a certain image on the illegal-art website and wrote, “Check out this hilarious parody of the Starbucks logo!” That might get me into trouble, so I’m not going to do that.

I believe in the right to link and that if somebody chooses to make their website or blog available to the world, anybody has the right to link to it. On the other hand, in my own personal conduct I had decided that I would prefer being courteous over exercising this right. For example, with the list of Australian librarian blogs on my sidebar, I have often requested permission before adding blogs to this list.

Courtesy is very good and nice, but I have now decided that it is too much of a good thing if it gets in the way of adding new blogs to this list. It has even caused me to temporarily lose some of the blogs which I intended to add. I know, losing a blog is a very embarrassing and silly thing to do.

From now on, I’ll just add the blogs as I find them. If anybody has a problem with being added, they are welcome to email me about it and we can talk about it.

unsmiling passport photos, returning resident alien

How quickly one year passes! It's almost time for me to make my obligatory annual visit to the US to re-establish my US permanent residency status. Or as it's worded in officialese:

A permanent resident alien returning to the United States from a visit abroad of less than a year may apply for readmission  by presenting an Alien Registration Receipt Card ("green card") to the immigration authorities at a port of entry.
[Returning Resident Alien Leaflet, U.S. Department of State]

Even more scary is how quickly the past ten years have gone by. My Australian passport has expired after ten years and it's time for me to renew it. I have discovered that by law, my new passport photo must be unsmiling. I gather that smiles cause problems with new face scanning technologies, where scanners in the airport try to match the faces with the passport photos. Maybe unsmiling passport photos are also a lot more realistic, especially considering how most people feel at the end of a long-haul flight.

So, I'm going to be visiting Hawaii between the 9th and 15th of September. Hawaii doesn't have the reputation of being a cheap destination, but it's the cheapest US destination for me to reach from Australia. It's weird to think that for the time being, I have to go Hawaii once a year, but I'm also looking forward to having a little break.

I like living in Australia and think it was the right decision for me to return. I have no plans to move back to the US, but I also want to keep my options open. At least for the time being.

i <3 atomized texts

Time to put into practice what I was writing about a couple of posts ago.

Michael Gorman has just annoyed me again (via Librarian in Black), but I’m not going to write about him. Instead I want to write about why I think that atomized information is mostly a good thing.

As a blogger, I am used to having my writing atomized. Blogs are designed to be atomized. Some posts are more popular than others. Some sections of posts are more popular and are atomized when quoted in isolation from the rest of the post.

If I cared to study the matter more systematically I could probably see some ideas and themes developing since I started this blog almost 3 years ago. But it’s not really that important. Otherwise, I would demand that all my new readers begin with my very first post and read every one in chronological order before they were ready for the stuff I’m writing now. The very thought is ludicrous.

Of course there is a huge difference between unfinished and unfixed blogs and books that were written as a single unit. It would be an understatement to say that authors go to a great deal of trouble in arranging the content of their books. Atomization – ripping a few relevant paragraphs or sentences or words from these finished edifices – undoes all of that work. It wouldn’t surprise me if some authors aren’t comfortable with this. To that I say, the intentions of the author are irrelevant. I don’t want to go any more post-modern than this, but a text gains its meaning from how it is interpreted and read, not from the intentions of its author.

pondering the rant

My DSL service has finally switched on at my new place! I've been wanting to go on a big rant against my ISP which had been bungling the transfer of my DSL service to my new apartment. It's been particularly annoying because I had a few ideas for posts in this month, and being stuck on dialup - on a fairly busy shared phone line - has made this difficult. I'm postponing my goals for July (testing trackbacks, moderated comments and ads) through to the end of August, because I just haven't been able to do enough blogging in July. I guess that off-line blogging (as discussed in my post here) is possible, but it's not the way that I like to blog. It creates a disconnect between reading and writing. Maybe this could lead to more considered posts, but it also diminishes the spontaneity which is one of the possibilities of blogging. Even worse is that it separates the research from the writing - I now realise that I research as I write, or more accurately, that the processes for these two things are so deeply intertwined now that it's difficult when I try to do these things separately.

But back to the ranting, I was tempted to castigate this company. From time to time, I've had a mind to vent my spleen at a few other companies, banks, retailers etc., but generally I've decided not to. For one thing, there are legal issues. I am concerned about the impact of defamation on freedom of speech, particularly now that I'm living in Australia again. I don't agree with our defamation laws and think that truth alone should always be a defence and that breaches of privacy should be dealt with separately, but that's what the law is right now in NSW - and the law should generally be respected and obeyed even when it is being an Ass.* [I'm resisting the urge to digress into jurisprudence and discuss the limits, if there should be any, of our obedience to unjust and immoral laws]

But matters of law aside, I just don't want to be wasting my energy on these negative issues any more than I need to. If bloggers gradually accumulate positive credibility, I think that every negative post about a company or person has a chance of backfiring, and damaging the blogger as much as her/his target. Maybe it's possible to get away with a few attacks, but after a while, people might start to think, "He's just another ranter/hater/troll" - and the credibility plummets. (Unless of course, one's credibility is based on negativity, in which case the opposite would apply.) This all sounds terribly amoral - of course there are moral arguments that are relevant, but that's opening another can of worms.

Of course I'll still be negative sometimes, especially towards ideas and generalities which I disagree with. I just hope that on this blog at least, I'll make myself pause and take a deep breath before ranting at specific targets.

taking a nuanced view of the Federal Court of Australia's anti-linking decision

[20/12/06 update: The decision in this case has recently been upheld by the Full Federal Court of Australia. For information about how this case was treated on appeal, see this commentary by Kim Weatherall]

In no shape or form do I approve or agree with the "anti-linking decision" recently handed down by the Federal Court of Australia in the Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Cooper [2005] FCA 972 (14 July 2005). Having read the decision for myself, I do think that there is some hyperbole in some of the criticisms of this case. People were all too happy to take a nuanced reading of the Grokster decision. My argument is that the Cooper case deserves a similar nuanced reading. The respondent Cooper lost one key point, but the applicants – Universal Music Australia and the other members of Australia’s Content Cartel – didn’t get everything which they wanted either.

Most importantly, Tamberlin J rejected the applicant’s contention that merely linking to copyrighted material on the web infringes copyright.

The Federal Court held against Cooper for a different reason, that his website was designed to facilitate and enable its users to infringe copyright. The site, mp3s4free.net, fell afoul of the rule prohibiting authorization of copyright infringement which exists in Australian copyright law. The fact that mp3s4free.net had many deep direct links to infringing copies of sound files on third party sites hurt their case. Who knows that would have happened if mp3s4free.net’s links had been to htm or similar regular web pages, and not directly to the sound files.

The Content Cartel wanted to make it illegal for anybody to provide links to infringing material. That argument failed. Instead the Court has held against the practice of linking to files in such a way that facilitates and encourages other people to infringe. One of the cited High Court authorities states that authorization “connotes a mental element.” (see para. 79 of the decision)

I don’t like this decision, I think it has some disturbing implications and hope it is appealed and overturned by the High Court of Australia. But hysteria and hyperbole aren’t helpful responses to it.

Excerpts from Tamberlin J's opinion:

57 The applicants allege that Cooper has directly infringed the applicants’ copyright in the music sound recordings by communicating these recordings to the public. …

but please, no minimum billable hours for law firm librarians

This article - Heather Smith, Don't count out law librarians, American Lawyer (July 14, 2005) - provides some good examples of librarians meeting the challenges (and opportunities) presented by our current times. Here's one brief quote:

Schnader Harrison partner Donaldson says she's heard no negative feedback from clients when presenting them with bills for librarians' work. "They've been pleased with what [librarians have] been able to ferret out," she says. And since LexisNexis and Westlaw searches are billed as separate line items, cost-conscious clients have begun demanding that lawyers improve their efficiency by using librarians who are more skilled searchers.

Thanks to Library Stuff for the link.

embarrassed and ashamed by the Australian government’s continuing contempt for its human rights obligations

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a while, but the topic has proven quite overwhelming. Where to begin? Mandatory detention of refugees (including children) in detention centres which are effectively legal blackholes, Australia’s homegrown version of Guantanamo Bay. The threat to free speech and legitimate protest embodied in the Gunns 20 lawsuit against the Wilderness Society and other environmental activists. Australia’s ongoing disgraceful treatment of its indigenous population, including abolishing ATSIC and the NSW government’s urban renewal plans for Redfern, urban renewal being code for squeezing out the Aborigines.

Australia’s human rights record has once again been condemned by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (link to pdf of the Committee’s March 2005 report, CERD/C/AUS/CO/14).

To quote a portion of an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald about this (David Marr, “Geneva v. Canberra,” Sydney Morning Herald, Mar. 28, 2005, at 13):

Canberra has learnt one lesson superbly. Instead of raging and complaining about Geneva's intrusion into Australia's domestic affairs, it's much better to shut up. The effort ministers put into denigrating the committee system the last time round only gave the issue more oxygen. After the latest verdict a little more than a fortnight ago, there was no thunder from Howard, Downer or Ruddock. Not even a press release. Silence effectively killed the story.

The Howard government is masterful in its ability to manipulate Australian public opinion and deflect all forms of criticism. But I really hope that they don’t get off the hook quite so easily on this one. To be fair to them, the Howard government isn't  causing the Gunns 20 lawsuit or the racist Redfern redevelopment plans, but they are still answerable to the international community for all human rights abuses which occur in Australia, whether committed by state governments or corporations.

By the way, I'm partially retracting some of the opinions I stated in a previous post which discussed the merits of written versus unwritten constitutions. No system is perfect, and every system can be manipulated by those in power. That said, if Australia had a written constitution with prohibitions against discrimination and guarantees of due process and freedom of speech, it is quite unlikely that these abuses would be happening in Australia today.

a new job!

Yes, I’ve got a full-time permanent librarian job again! This job is going to be in Sydney, in a special library. There’s so much that I could write about the whole job seeking process, but for now I just want to share this news. The next two weeks are going to be a very busy time as I prepare to move from Tasmania, take the boat to Sydney and find a place over there.

open source legal research

I was going to write about the recent Salon article about Groklaw and open source legal research on the SCO case, but Copyfight's Jason Schultz has already written about it, so I'm just going to link to that and post a brief excerpt from the Salon article.

[Pamela] Jones [of Groklaw] has been praised by just about everyone in the open-source world for her efforts to undermine SCO. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has said that Groklaw shows "how the open-source ideals end up working in the legal arena, too, and I think that has been very useful and made a few people sit up and notice." Bruce Perens calls Jones "paralegal to the world." Clay Shirky, the influential tech pundit, points out that "Groklaw may also be affecting the case in the courts, by helping IBM with a distributed discovery effort that they, IBM, could never accomplish on their own, no matter how many lawyers they throw at it." [hypertext from original not included]

please sign this petition against the IP provisions of the Australia-US free trade agreement

Kim Weatherall has written about how the FTA will affect Australia's intellectual property laws. To summarize, if Australia signs onto this, we're going to be stuck with - copyright term extension a la Sonny Bono & Mickey Mouse, strengthening our anti-circumvention laws, weakening exemptions including ones granted to libraries, and the creation of some sort of ISP take-down rule.

It is a horrifying prospect to be saddled with the worst of US intellectual property law. But the most pathetic thing is the way that it's been imposed on Australia. The DMCA is an awful law for the US, but at least it was a genuine product of the American legislative process. At least it went through the various committees and was debated, and voted on as to whether that particular law was good for the country or not. It is pathetic that Australia is poised to rubber stamp elements of this law at the behest of another country.

These are significant changes to our intellectual property laws. Whether you support them or oppose them, these changes should be fully debated by the Australian people.

But there is not going to be a debate about the proposed changes to intellectual property laws in isolation. The negotiation is finished and now the only choices are to ratify or reject the FTA. Now we have the situation where our government is forced to consider all of these disparate issues which have bundled together. How can one weigh the restrictions on Australian creativity and freedom that will be caused by these IP laws, against protecting Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme which gives us affordable medicines, against the livelihoods of Australian sugar cane farmers, against the benefits which we would gain from otherwise free trade with the US?

Enough ranting for now. The Age has reported that Australian open source advocates are sponsoring an online petition against the IP provisions of the FTA. Please sign it - especially if you are Australian or American (if you dislike US intellectual property laws and would hate to see them exported and imposed on other people).

relearning Australian legal research

One of the reasons why I decided to become a law librarian rather than practice law was because I knew I would be moving to the US and did not want to bother with taking additional law classes in the US or sitting for New York's or any other state's bar exam. It's so much easier to work in a different country as a law librarian than as a lawyer. That's not to say that a law librarian can change countries at a drop of a hat and instantly be at home in her/his new place. The basic techniques of the law librarian remain the same, but there are different resources (online and print) to use, and different terminology to remember.

I've be reacquainting myself with some of these things lately. So let me remember to never say shepardizing unless I'm doing American legal research. From now, using a citator is called noting up. When citing cases that are published in law reports (never the American "law reporters"), I mustn't put the year at the end of the citation. And for statutes, I'll try not to pine too much for a government published codification!

Well actually, I never used the USC if the USCA or USCS was available - unless I was helping a student with a legal research exercise. But still, the annotated codes are based on the official code. If that hadn't been around, the two commercial codes would probably be arranged totally differently from each other. I haven't been shy of criticizing the US at times, but I think it's high time that Australian statutes were republished in an American-style code. If the state of Minnesota can arrange a very nice codification of its laws, surely the Australian federal government could do likewise. I think that a reform like this would make it a lot easier for the average citizen to find a statute, whether they're looking online or in print.

where do library issues end and personal values begin?

Richard Poynder, "Fiddling while Rome burns?", InformationToday (Jan. 2004).

I drafted most of these comments in January, after reading this article in the printed version of InformationToday. I didn’t post it then mainly because there was no link to the full-text of the article. I thought that maybe in a month, InformationToday would publish the full-text. But they haven’t, even though they’ve put other articles from that issue on the web. I decided to finish this response to it anyway. Most librarians will access to a print copy of InformationToday or can easily get it via Interlibrary Loan.

First, a minor quibble about how this piece was presented. I think that this is more of an opinion piece than an investigative report. Yes, Mr Poynder has research behind his opinions, but the thrust of the article is very opinionated. The premise is that librarians have lost the plot and need to mend their ways. According to Richard Poynder, we need to cease fighting windmills like the USAPATRIOT Act and CIPA, and save our strength for true fight.

Mr Poynder does make some valid points. I agree with one of his major arguments that in practical terms, media consolidation and expanding and oppressive copyright laws are a greater threat to what libraries are about. I also agree that the way that the ALA has handled Cuba has been a complete debacle.

I disagree with the way that Mr Poynder belittles the role of librarians as protectors of intellectual freedom. I disagree with the logic which says that because a few librarians have been hypocritical about this issue, that we have all failed and must give it up.

I wonder if Mr Poynder would have written anything different had he wrote his article after the "almanac scare". He uses John Ashcroft's and the FBI's words that the FBI has no interest in tracking the reading habits of ordinary Americans. Then we learn that something as innocent and neutral as an almanac is viewed with suspicion by law enforcement.

My strongest criticism of his article is when he mentions that the word "library" does not appear once in the USAPATRIOT Act. This comes right out of the FBI's talking points. It doesn't matter if libraries, or booksellers or whatever is actually specified in the language of the Act. The wording is broad enough that it will apply to libraries and a lot of other organizations. Maybe the drafters of the legislation preferred the broad language so libraries could be the concealed target, allowing apologists like Poynder to play down its effect on libraries. Maybe the drafters wanted to be able to use the USAPATRIOT Act against anyone with any personal information that might be useful. Neither explanation is reassuring.

Mr Poynder says that librarians have been politicized to the extent that they are unable to differentiate between library issues and civil rights issues. I agree that not every library issue is a civil rights issue, and not every civil rights issue is a library issue. As a reference law librarian, I often had to help people who were fighting "on the wrong side" of a civil rights issue. I appreciate that sometimes professional ethics as a librarian will diverge from my own personal values. But Mr Poynder seems to be suggesting that there should be a dichotomy between the two.

I certainly don’t agree with the way that this article seems to deride librarians for conveniently and hypocritically latching onto the cause of intellectual freedom. This an insult to those of us who do view librarianship as more than just a comparatively low-paid job with low-prestige, but almost as a calling.

I view the current threats to libraries and open access to information as two-fold in nature. The threat of media consolidation and expanded copyright is like a physical threat. If we lose this fight, it will become more and more difficult to do our jobs and our patrons will eventually go elsewhere - if they can afford to. The USAPATRIOT Act is a different kind of threat. If we lose the fight for intellectual freedom, libraries will continue to function but they will have been corrupted. I say that we can't afford to lose either struggle.

has the intellectual property world gone mad?

I don't really have anything to add to this - I'm speechless.

There is something very wrong with the copyright industry when we have this discussion [about English postal workers humming/whistling tunes] as part of the question of what needs licensing. Displacement of Concepts has an analysis of this post by Cory Doctorow who saw this article from last February ("We Can Work It Out" - Kim Howells Invites Musicians To Work With Government On Delivery Of The Licensing Bill), which Cory describes as: A new business-licensing scheme in the UK will allow... [bIPlog]

does the marketing by Lexis and Westlaw have an effect on librarians?

One of the things about my job that I'll sometimes miss is being courted by the two mega legal publishers, Westlaw and Lexis. Law librarians get presents from them all the time. During the two and half years in my job in an academic law library, I've received numerous travelling cups, t-shirts, fancy pens, a flashlight, a clock, and several other things which I'm forgetting. I've only been to one AALL conference in that time - but librarians going to those can pick up even more goodies. I got a toy moose which my niece loved when I gave it to her. Then there's all the free food - from the pastries when our Westlaw or Lexis rep visit, to the huge box of chocolates we received in December.

As an academic law librarian I am of two minds about legal publishers, especially the Big Two.

more about the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004

Wired News has another article about the stealth passage of elements of the Patriot Act II.

$15 for the Fifteen

Jason Lefkowitz has also been following the story about how the Bush administration outmaneuvered opponents of the Patriot Act II by incorporating some of its elements into Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 2004 and so avoid public debate about its controversial changes. Jason hasn't just got angry about it - he's set up a fund to reward the 15 House Republicans who crossed the floor and voted against this legislation. He is using PayDemocracy host the $15 for Fifteen campaign.

With Republicans in control of the Presidency, Congress and Supreme Court (most of the time), it is important to realize that they are not a monolithic group and that not all Republican members of Congress are like Tom DeLay.

how I changed my iBook's DVD player into a region-free player

I decided to do a little more research into how I might be able to turn my iBook’s DVD player into a region free DVD player. Then on an impulse, I implemented what I learned – and it worked!

So in case I forget what I did, I’m going to write down the steps involved in this.

updated version of Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom

From the Free Expression Policy Project, an updated version of Marjorie Heins's policy report, "'The Progress of Science and Useful Arts': Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom." It's worth a read. Also available in PDF format. [commons-blog]

One quote from the cited source: "Like copyright term extension, the DMCA has been defended as necessary to harmonize U.S. with international law. Two treaties crafted by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) oblige member countries to "provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies" against circumvention of electronic locks on copyrighted works. ... But the head of the Patent and Trademark Office acknowledged that the treaties do not require the DMCA's "device-oriented" approach – as opposed to the more traditional "conduct-oriented" approach that targets copyright infringers and not the researchers who create new technologies."

results of a Daypop search about the stealth passage of Patriot II elements

Daypop is one of my favourite tools for finding information on really current topics. Because it crawls a smaller number of websites (just blogs and news sources), it can be more responsive than Google.

Anyway, I did a quick & dirty search on Daypop concerning the topic which I wrote about yesterday. Here's a digested version of my results, listed in loosely chronological order.

Wired News - November 28
Slashdot - November 28
Michigan IMC - December 16, contains URLs to the White House statement about the Act, legislator's comments and an AP report
The Daily Harrumph - permalinks don't seem to be working, but it's the third from the top posting of December 16
Seeing the Forest - December 26
Daily Rotten - I can't find a permalink, but scroll down to December 26
Queixa - December 28
Ron's Log - December 28
peerfear.org - December 28
Reason - Hit & Run - December 29
The Monster Limo Weblog - December 29
Easter Lemming - Liberal News - December 29
sf.indymedia.org - December 29

It's amazing that this story was first broken (and then slashdotted) on November 28. Well I guess that was around Thanksgiving and many people's attention must have been elsewhere.

while you were distracted, the Patriot Act II was reincarnated and signed into law

This is truly frightening. The Red Pencil Diaries has reported, linking to a San Antonio Current article, that much of the dreaded Patriot Act II has been stealthily reconstituted into the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 2004, which was signed into law on the day that Saddam Hussein was captured.

"...it appeared that the Bush Administration was waiting for the start of the Iraq war to introduce Patriot Act II, and then exploit the crisis to ram it through Congress with little public debate.

The leak and ensuing public backlash frustrated the Bush administration's strategy, so Ashcroft and Co. disassembled Patriot Act II, then reassembled its parts into other legislation. By attaching the redefinition of "financial institution" to an Intelligence Authorization Act, the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies avoided public hearings and floor debates for the expansion of the Patriot Act. [David Martin, "With a whisper, not a bang: Bush signs parts of Patriot Act II into law — stealthily", San Antonio Current (Dec. 24, 2003)]

This is so outrageous that I've tried to confirm it from other sources.
Here is a press release from Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) mentioning that he voted against the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 2004, H.R. 2417. His main reason: "However, under this provision the FBI no longer needs a court order to serve a subpoena on a new and lengthy list of ‘financial institutions.’ With this legislation we eliminate the judicial oversight that was built into our system for a reason - to make sure that our precious liberties are protected."

I then looked up the Bill in Thomas.

I have not had time to thoroughly dissect the Bill, but sections 361 and 374, buried in "Subtitle E - Other Matters" look pretty suspicious.

Amazed at the geekiness of today's law students

Don't get me wrong - this is a good thing. Unless you're a Tolkien fan or have studied Contract law, you probably won't find this link to be funny. I'm both and even found the voluminous comments worth a read.

region free DVD viewing

As I mentioned earlier, I'm returning to Australia on February 1. I have my tickets, I'm now in the process of working out what things I should take with me, and which things I should sell, give away or throw out. I was thinking that I might as well give away my small DVD collection, because it was going to be too difficult for me to view them in Australia, thanks to DVD region encoding (the link is a good summary - albeit slightly biased in favour of regioning). It is so frustrating that a technological solution is deliberately blocked like this.

I've decided that I will bring US DVDs with me in the hope that I'll eventually get a Region-free DVD player in Australia, or I'll find region-switching software for my iBooks's DVD player that will work, that will at least set my iBook's region-switching-counter back to zero.

even if it's not used right now, it still has a chilling effect

Gary Price reports about an Illinois survey about FBI visits to libraries under section 215 of the USAPATRIOT Act

Here are my thoughts about this:
- these are the results for only 1 state
- there could be under-reporting of FBI visits because of section 215's gag-order
- even if John Ashcroft is not lying (and here's an interesting Salon article about the acceptance of lying in public life), and section 215 has not yet been used against librarians, this law is still a concern -

- it is based on a flawed & dangerous premise, that there is a connection between reading about certain things and acting on them
- even if the law is never used, while it's on the books, it has a chilling effect on how people use libraries - or purchase books

will brute political power subvert the US constitution?

[update on 28 March 2005: This article has been followed-up on and partially retracted here]

Among constitutional scholars there was a big divide between those who think that the best safeguard of democracy and human rights is to have a strong written constitution - and those who prefer an unwritten constitution.

I tend to think that when things are going well, a good written constitution will almost always be better. It can help provide a good check on goverment by those without power. But any written constitution is only as strong as a nation's citzenry, courts, law makers, and law enforcement willingness to be bound by it, even when it goes against their immediate wishes. It is so easy for a written constitution to be misinterpreted and marginalized and ultimately ignored. There are numerous examples where a country's constitution's is not so much of a fundamental binding legal document, but a wish list. For example, look at Part II chapter one of the Sudanese constitition. Such a huge gap between the words and the reality! I worry that the US has started to head in this direction.

I could name countless examples , but I'll limit myself to three, concerning each of the branches of goverment. ...

reminiscing about competitive intelligence

This morning I had a reference question about finding financial and other information about a small privately held company. This brought back memories because I did a lot of this sort of research in my previous job, which was primarily doing competitive intelligence for a medium-sized privately held company.

I'm a little rusty at this, and I don't have access to all the tools that I used to have. I did find some information on Westlaw in Dun's Market Identifiers database (the more powerful & expensive databases aren't included in my law school subscription).

Then I wondered, how accurate was the information in this database? ...

finding information about the Moussaoui case

A student doing cite-checking for a law review needed to find some materials about the Moussaoui case. I found that there's a wealth of material at FindLaw. Note that it's in reverse chronological order - and that some of the documents have very unusual names (e.g. "Motion by Defendant to Force [illegible] Liar Aschroft to Disclose and Unredact his Delerious New 5th Plane Pilot ").

Jessamyn West's presentation on the USAPATRIOT Act and CIPA

This is a very helpful summary about the various issues associated with these two oppressive laws - and a guide to how librarians might respond to them.

randomly found blawg: What Blogs can do for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers

TypePad has an interesting feature which allows me to shows links to 5 or so recently updated TypePad blogs on my blog. It's the "Recently Updated Weblogs" section and it's totally random - I have no control over what appears there. For all I know, I could have links to the most hateful right-wing blogs imaginable, but only for a short time, because these links change all the time. Because sometimes randomness is my answer to information overload, I glance at it from time to time and look at one of the blogs whose name catches my attention. Just now I saw this one. I don't know how long this blog will exist for, as it was made for a presentation, but it makes some very salient points and is well worth a look.

Diebold's not the first to invoke copyright to censor important free speech

I get more angry, every time I hear more about the way Diebold is attempting to stifle debate about the insecurity of its touch-screen voting machines. Even if I put aside the red flags about the idea of a company with very partisan leadership getting involved in the voting equipment business, and the fact that Diebold's software has a serious security flaw and does not allow for a paper trail of votes, I am amazed at their response to this criticism - rather than try to improve their software, they try to silence their critics with copyright law! Here's a copy of one Diebold's cease & desist notices, which I found at Chilling Effects. I am glad to see that at least one ISP is standing up to Diebold. I decided to do some research about the intersection between copyright law and freedom of speech - to see if Diebold is the right, and the law is a total ass. ...

presentation at MN IUG; the many galaxies in the legal research universe

I got back over a week ago, but I immediately had I plunge myself into preparing for my presentations at the Minnesota Innovative Users Group Fall Conference. ...

new TypePad blog - PDF for Lawyers

Click here for a glimpse of the new home of PDF for Lawyers site. I plan to make this a multi-author blog and invite my lawyer friends who know a lot about PDF to share their insights here as well. Check it out. [Ernie the Attorney]
Non-lawyers might wonder if there's enough material here to sustain a blog. Who knows, but it's been very interesting so far and I think it will do well. Blogs are certainly becoming specialized. Multiple-blogs by a single author is possibly another trend (faciliated by tools such as TypePad, and indeed Radio - if one can put up with its idiosyncracies).

more doublespeak from Ashcroft

Ashcroft denounces Patriot Act "hysteria"

In a speech Monday to an American Restaurant Association conference, Ashcroft said people are being wrongly led to believe that libraries have been "surrounded by the FBI," with agents "dressed in raincoats, dark suits and sunglasses. They stop everyone and interrogate everyone like Joe Friday.

"Now, you may have thought with all this hysteria and hyperbole, something had to be wrong," Ashcroft said. "Do we at the Justice Department really care what you are reading? No." [AP as reported in Salon]

Basically, this is John Ashcroft saying, "trust us, we're neither able or willing to track what everyone reads." This is meant to be comforting, I suppose. That if you're a normal law-abiding citizen, you don't have anything to worry about. But the devil is in the details. I bet that in Ashcroft's book, Muslims aren't normal Americans, neither are recent immigrants (especially from the Middle East), nor peace activists or other left-wing activists. So already the scope of who may be spied upon is greater than it appeared from Ashcroft's words.

It's true that your average suburban Republican-voting church-attending family of 2.4 probably doesn't have a thing to worry about - yet. Civil liberties are first eroded on the fringes, not in the middle. It's easier that way, because it's someone else's problem. But that doesn't mean that it's going to stop there. What about political opponents?

John Ashcroft, if you really want to reassure people, give us the numbers of how often you use these expanded police powers in libraries. Make it so that there's real judicial oversight based on a standard of at least probable cause. Ensure that there's accountability when these powers are abused. Or if libraries are really so unimportant in the War Against Terror, and these powers so insignificant, then drop them altogether!

ABA chart on the eligibility of foreign law graduates to be admitted to the bar in the US

One of my first ideas for this blog was to discuss some of my reference questions (appropriately sanitized and redacted) and mention what resources I was able to find while answering them. It would be primarily for my own benefit - so that if any similar ever came up, I could refer back to my notes. But I imagine it would also be interesting for other legal researchers.

The trouble has been that I don't like to spend much time on this blog whilst at work - indeed even if I wanted to, it wasn't possible to update this blog from work with Radio - unless I used their scary email to blog feature. This is why I really like TypePad's draft post feature. I can make a quick draft post from any computer. Then later I can polish it up some more and publish it.

So the other day, I had a call from a patron with a law degree from the UK, and LL M from an American law school who was wondering if this would be helpful for him to practise as a lawyer in New England states. This was an interesting question for me, because at one time I had been looking into whether it was feasible for me to practise in Minnesota with my Australian LL B. I found this pdf chart at the ABA's web site which lists the various requirements by all the states on recognizing foreign law degrees and LL Ms. For my part, I wouldn't rely on such a chart without verifying the information about the states which I was interested in. But that chart seemed to be a good starting place for this kind of research.