Silent J

'...not so you could throw light switch raves!!!'

While preparing to film a movie entitled A Night in Casablanca, the Marx brothers received a letter from Warner Bros. threatening legal action if they did not change the film’s title. Warner Bros. deemed the film’s title too similar to their own Casablanca, released almost five years earlier in 1942, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. In response Groucho Marx dispatched the following letter to the studio’s legal department.

Dear Warner Brothers,

Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.

It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.

I just don’t understand your attitude. Even if you plan or releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

Groucho Marx to Warner Bros

A New Kind of Science describes a radical vision of the future of science, based on Wolfram's long love affair with computers. The book's publisher, Wolfram Media, announces "a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe" and "a series of dramatic discoveries never before made public." Wolfram claims to offer a revolution in the nature of science, again and again distancing his work from what he calls traditional science, with remarks like "If traditional science was our only guide, then at this point we would probably be quite stuck." He stakes his claim in the first few lines of the book: "Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation...."

The New York Review of Books: Is the Universe a Computer?

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics.

Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.

Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity.

The website offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.

In addition, we want your help. We are gathering a searchable database of Cease and Desist notices sent to Internet users like you. We invite you to input Cease and Desist letters that you've received into our database. We will respond by linking the legalese in the letters to FAQs that explain the allegations in plain English.

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse

Copyfight!

Here we'll explore the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill policy- making, technical standards development and technological innovation that creates-- and will recreate--the networked world as we know it. Translating legalese and technical language into plain English, we'll keep you updated on battles and decisions likely to impact the technology industry, talking to key players to help us understand not only the underlying forces shaping these decisions but also what they actually mean. Among the topics we'll touch on: intellectual property conflicts, technical architecture and innovation, the evolution of copyright, private vs. public interests in Net policy- making, lobbying and the law, and more.

Copyfight: the Politics of IP. Corante.

Paul Sanchez, the public drunk who had been picked up a dizzying 124 times in San Francisco the last time we counted, is back in jail again -- having clocked up another four arrests for some form of public drunkenness.

Sanchez now resides in the medical wing of the County Jail, doing a 130- day stretch for resisting arrest after throwing an empty vodka bottle at a cop. The cop had revived him while Sanchez lay passed out in a doorway near Castro and Market.

Sanchez is a legend among the city's beat cops and paramedics -- and he's become Exhibit A for the growing problems caused by the city's street people.

128th time: Angry drunk in tank, again / Chronic drinker soaks up police, hospital resources

Slashdot style blog for Law-related Memes. Seems to be mostly coverage of Tech law, including copyright stuff, etc. Very good stuff!

LawMeme: Legal Bricolage for a Technological Age

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it...He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should be spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature ... Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
--Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson on 'Intellectual Property'

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E-text of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"

Critique of Pure Reason