Lex Ferenda

Note to my dearest Lexferendans:

My host tells me that this site seems to have been the subject of two DDOS attacks over the last 24 hours. I’m travelling at the moment so don’t panic if you are (temporarily) locked out - we will get things up and running again. Funny, this never happened when I posted about coffee and cheap travel … the world is full of surprises, it seems.

…is an anagram, says Twenty Major (over here), of Ace Internet Marketing. I couldn’t possibly comment.

I’m sorry for the delay in approving some of your comments. See, some clever kid has decided to to flood Lex Ferenda (and in particular the thread about Ace) with spam. After some response to a post of mine, they proceeded to attack the post and the site as a whole. As I hold all first-time comments for moderation, marking them for deletion took some time, and I’m very sorry if I deleted any *real* comments in the meantime.

In the meantime, I’ve received another love letter from Ace. Now, as you recall, someone purporting to speak for them (although later claiming not to be a principal) has threatened to sue me about this post. The recent missive contains a bizarre and probably unenforceable beefed-up disclaimer. In particular, I am asked not to “peruse, use, disseminate, distribute or copy” the message. (How am I supposed to read it then???)

I do not have a contract with the sender, of course, and it is a virtually worthless disclaimer. I see no grounds for an expectation of confidentiality in its contents, and indeed this is an unsolicited message with someone I have no business or private relationship with. However, recognising that this mail (as distinct from previous ones) does contain a statement that “this email is private” I will simply summarise its contents here.

A further request is made for removal of the original post (I will not comply with this request and I have responded accordingly). It is suggested that it is time to “nip this in the bud” as I have not taken their warnings. (An unusual statement that Ace Internet Marketing is not a company is also included, which would seem to be confusing).

The email also includes a question as to my motives here. I have none. I write about Internet law. Damien’s blog highlighted an interesting question of apparent disregard for IP laws. While not agreeing with all IP law (of course), I wrote about the apparent violation of copyright law. Of course, the original post has now disappeared. Admission of wrongdoing perhaps?

The footer, containing the supposed disclaimer (it has changed in every mail!), says that if I receive the message in error, I should contact legal@techstore.ie. I wonder if techstore.ie are aware of the threats.

Thanks to all the people who added comments to the original post about the libel threat and in particular those who made fun of the unusually badly spelled and punctuated threat of legal action. You may also enjoy an exchange in the comments on Damien’s blog - an anonymous person of dubious origin is criticising Damien’s reaction to the unauthorised copying of his content. I wonder who it is….

I’m hosting the Blawg Review this week, and a roundup of the week in legal blogging will hit the Web (which is now available in book form!) next Monday.

To submit a post of your own, or an interesting post that you’ve seen, please follow the submission guidelines here.

Inspired by Peter Black post (itself inspired by this news), here’s a quick look at the browser stats for Lex Ferenda:

Unknown 32.3 %
MS Internet Explorer 32.2 %
Safari 12.4 %
Firefox 9.8 %
Opera 4.1 %
NewsGator (RSS Reader) 2.5 %
Mozilla 2.3 %
AppleSyndication (RSS Reader) 1.1 %
NetNewsWire (RSS Reader) 0.7 %
RssReader (RSS Reader) 0.5 %
Others 1.4 %

Last month it was:

Unknown 14946 33 %
MS Internet Explorer 14733 32.5 %
Firefox 6014 13.2 %
Safari 3736 8.2 %
Opera 1437 3.1 %
Mozilla 1058 2.3 %
NewsGator (RSS Reader) 981 2.1 %
AppleSyndication (RSS Reader) 698 1.5 %
NetNewsWire (RSS Reader) 539 1.1 %
RssReader (RSS Reader) 247 0.5 %
Others 901 1.9 %

and a year ago it was

Unknown 3294 46.6 %
MS Internet Explorer 1973 27.9 %
Safari 838 11.8 %
Firefox 705 9.9 %
Mozilla 107 1.5 %
Netscape 88 1.2 %
Opera 22 0.3 %
Camino 15 0.2 %
Links 13 0.1 %
Konqueror 8 0.1 %
Others 0 %

Is this thing on?

My stats show an interesting pattern - on the day I closed the shutters, I got more hits than ever before. This wasn’t due to a celebration of my absence, but a nice mention on the Berkman Buzz newsletter. I’ve also received some incoming traffic via Doc Searls and (weirdly) a comment to a Guardian blog piece on low-cost travel.

Anyway, if you’re here through any of the above, or came for the Summer Doctoral Programme traffic in general, you’re very welcome. I’m back in Dublin and will be here for what’s left of the wet summer, with a couple of occasional excursions for conferences etc.

Speaking of conferences…Ethan Zuckerman published a comprehensive post on live blogging on his blog last month, and highlighted a lot of good ideas about conference blogging. My efforts at the SDP (from the now-immortalised square metre (or meter), were somewhat more amateur, but very useful from my point of view, in terms of keeping focused, taking notes, sharing information and more . Indeed, I did test Ethan’s theory about the links between live blogging and baseball scorekeeping by giving the latter a shot at the weekend - I can see how the obsessive mind can be put to good use in both ‘arts’, and it’s a good comparison to make as in both cases, there is often an ‘official’ record, but there is still a difference between it and the self-blogged/self-scored version! (If you’ve never seen a scorecard, by the way, here’s an example (taken from the useful baseballscorecard.com site)).

It will be a little quieter now, though, with a couple of posts a day. You can subscribe to the feed or if you want to avoid tangents (like this post), you can take a look at the cyberlaw-only feed.

After the frenzy of the last two weeks, I’m going to have a blogging detox for the next ten days or so, in part due to taking an actual break and in part for the sake of it! Thanks for all your comments and links during the Summer Doctoral Programme. The archive of all SDP posts is here. I may post some more personal reflections in August on the programme - but it was certainly a great experience, and I have renewed energy (which will - hopefully - turn into lots of words).

 
Surf responsibly; don’t break the Internet. Friends, foes etc can still get me by email

What my space looks like (or looked like when this photo was taken last week). The speech bubbles, of course, are not actually there.

Well, you didn’t think that I’d leave out my own presentation, did you?

Here are the slides from my own talk at the Berkman Center today (slightly compressed images, and quite text-light, so I’d be happy to clarify anything in comments). Jonathan Zittrain was the faculty member assigned to the seminar - he made a point of trying to coax a view/argument/narrative out of me, which was helpful. Of anything, I’d take a special pleasure in making my work more argumentative - but the feedback was still very helpful. A pleasant surprise was the attendance of Doc Searls (also of the Berkman Center) who, as well as offering useful comments, wanted to know what I’d do about net neutrality in the US. (Soapboxes are great). The ever-reliable superblogger Ismael has added his impressions/summary in the usual place.

Michael Zimmer has been talking this afternoon about The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine: Values, Technical Design, and the Flow of Personal Information in Spheres of Mobility - otherwise known as his recently completed dissertation. Michael started off with a quick gallop through the theoretical background and the major figures (Williams, Innis, Postman and more, the above being the names that are of particular interest to me), talking about “value-conscious design” and his study of the development of search engines. The perfect solution includes perfect reach (which a lot of people have been working on) and the more difficult perfect recall (contexual). The amusing, on-screen example was knowing whether a search for Paris Hilton was for the hotel or the ‘celebrity’. The dark side, of course, is what Michael refers to as the “Faustian bargain”, not new to search but a very controversial and current one in the context of supersize megoogle etc. The possible solutions/responses include legal regulation of search, internal policy/self-regulation, and value-conscious design; I was struck by the problem of how researchers can engage with techies and designers to encourage such design.

In the last few minutes, we’ve been listening to a helpful exchange over presentation styles and so on, led by Jonathan Zittrain. He has been throwing out various ideas (now and earlier) - a good suggestion is that you should “say enough that someone can disagree with you” (rather than lock it down so tightly and avoid any risk!) Already, this sort of feedback looping and wandering is a theme of the summer programme, and is extremely valuable for me (and hopefully for others). We have two or three presentation sessions a day from students, although usually we’ll have to choose from a menu. So unfortunately, I won’t get to mention all of them, but I’m sure the other bloggers will. On that note, we have a del.icio.us stream going on now - over at del.icio.us/tag/sdp2007, and a GREAT aggregator at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/planet/sdp2007/. Check it out….

Personal, rambling post ahead. Don’t say you weren’t warned. (And the tile means - sort of - an eye on July).

A reader (you know who you are) points out off-blog that I have not posted in ten days. That is true, and a Bad Thing. It has been a busy but fun time, and I’ll try and throw up some of the interesting things I have been reading this month - later this evening, perhaps.

Here in Trinity College, the academic year formally ended today (12th July), so my research assistantship (on the Review of the College Statutes; sorry, non-Trinity readers, this is internal access only) has occupied quite some time (and a lot of goggleeyed computer time at that, meaning that even reading feeds - never mind writing - has stretched my patience at times). I have had the honour to be helping out with a forthcoming Canadian law book (will post about that in the future, not appropriate to do so now), although my (small) contribution is drawing towards a close. And of course, it’s just a few days to the start of the Summer Doctoral Programme that I’ll be attending … the reading list and schedule arrived this week, equal parts exciting and terrifying. I had been doing some work on the promised review of Charles Acland’s collection on residual media, but writing it up has been deferred until after Harvard. And tomorrow, I have my PhD transfer viva (not as scary as it sounds - it’s the formal move from M.Litt to PhD).

It has hardly stopped raining in Ireland this month (and yes, it is indeed July), although I did take a little bit of time to travel down the coast to Wexford by steam train (a rare trip, as you can imagine). Much of the route I know, it being the link between Dublin and my ‘home village’ in Wicklow, and the trip to the south-east still deserves its label of the most scenic railway journey in Ireland (despite the fact that about 3/4 of it is single-track, which means that it’s not the busiest line in the world by any means!). Other than that, it hasn’t really been ’summer’ at all…