law

Newsom: 'Green' tech promises not good enough

San Francisco may have shaken some flowers from its hair since hosting the first Earth Day 38 years ago, but the city continues to be named one of America's greenest. Satirists mock its politically correct "smug cloud" of eco-hipness, but many other regions tend to follow the city's environmental lead. For instance, more than a handful of U.S. cities are now mulling a ban on plastic grocery bags, first passed in San Francisco last March.

Fresh into his second term, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson in January set goals for the city to become carbon-neutral … Read more

Geekiness at issue in Hans Reiser trial

OAKLAND, Calif.--There are stereotypical nerds...and then there is Hans Reiser. He's in a class all by himself, or at least that's how he was being portrayed here Monday in his first day on the stand in his own murder trial.

Between getting him to talk about the game he created at age 17 to compete with Dungeons and Dragons, to highlighting his interest in Russian mail-order brides, to having him explain a Linux kernel to a jury of laypeople, Reiser's attorney is laying his client's geekiness on thick.

Reiser, 44, the founder of the ReiserFS file system software … Read more

Murder suspect Reiser takes the stand

OAKLAND, Calif.--When he was just 14 years old, Hans Reiser entered the admissions office at University of California at Berkeley, and eventually persuaded officials to enroll him without a high school diploma on the basis of his college entrance exams.

Thirty years later, the computer programmer finds himself again arguing his case, but this time it's before a crowded courtroom where he is facing charges he murdered his estranged wife, whose body has never been found.

The now graying 44-year-old Reiser, donning a blue sportcoat and an occasional smile, took the stand Monday morning at Alameda County Superior … Read more

Trial coverage in the live-blog era: No more crosswords

The courthouse has long been one of the last bastions of gadget-free life. Cell phones, PDAs, and laptops are often banned in courtrooms, and based on first-hand observation, I can warn that you never, ever want to be caught there with a ringing device.

That means when you're covering a trial, you leave your multitasking life behind. Even during the most mind-numbing of testimony, you have to sit tight, a particularly challenging task for San Francisco Chronicle crime reporter Henry Lee, who is known for toting around a folder of crossword and sudoku puzzles to help get him through … Read more

Where we let the chatroom pick the show name, and this was the best they did

EPISODE 40

The three guys today talk about Street Fighter being the best game ever...We wax reminiscent over old video games. Plus, Stanford drops tuition, XNA gets more open, Gears of War 2, and three actors replace Heath Ledger.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

AT&T, Microsoft win as ID theft bill eviscerated

Update: This blog post has been modified since it was first published. Click here for more details, or scroll to the bottom to see the original text.

A pro-consumer, bipartisan data-breach bill was stripped of most its provisions before its feeble remains were finally passed by an Indiana Senate committee on Tuesday.

This came after two weeks of intensive lobbying by AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, and LexisNexis, all of which wanted to kill the bill. For the most part, they were successful.

In a blog post last week, I explained how I had worked with my state Rep. Matt Pierce (D-Bloomington) … Read more

Fair use? Are you sure?

On Sunday, the Washington Post published a story which suggested the RIAA is expanding its copyright-infringement lawsuits against end-users to encompass files ripped from an audio CD to a user's hard drive. In other words, most of the files on the 100+million iPods sold, not to mention the countless files on computer hard drives and other devices. A lot of readers took the story at face value, and expressed dismay that the RIAA would target such copying for personal use. Isn't that fair use?

Turns out that the story's wrong: as the Patry Copyright Blog (and … Read more

Mixing legal strategy with business strategy: Mark Radcliffe's OSBC session

This is why I think so highly of Mark Radcliffe. He just sent me his title/abstract for the upcoming Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) (March 25-26 in San Francisco), and it reveals an attorney who understands the force the law can play in advancing business strategy, not restraining it.

Implementing Your Open Source Business Strategy through Your Legal Strategy

Open source companies are adopting a variety of business strategies from dual licensing to hybrid proprietary/open source distributions and need to ensure that their legal strategy is aligned with their business strategy. This presentation will discuss the elements of … Read more

Open source and the law: 2007 in review

Few can compete with Mark Radcliffe for the distinction of savviest, canniest open-source legal mind. He advises half the known open-source business landscape and sits at the crossroads of copyright and copyleft. Very, very smart and a great asset to anyone fortunate enough to retain him.

It's therefore highly worthwhile to read through Mark's survey of the top ten open-source legal issues in 2007. Here's one, in particular, that caught my eye:

First Patent Infringement Lawsuit by Patent Trolls against FOSS [free and open source] Vendors. IP Innovation LLC (and Technology Licensing Corporation) filed suit against Red … Read more