litsupport summary for the week ending on 07/05/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. TextPipe is a text transformation, conversion, cleansing and extraction tool. Are there any other applications like it?

A.

• General areas of open-source software are Perl, Sprog, Jitterbit;
• Learn about ETL and Munging;
• Linux utilities include grep, awk, gawk, sed;
• For Microsoft Windows, there are both free, open source versions (Cygwin) and commercial versions (MKS Toolkit).

Q. An Acrobat plug-in for applying a trial exhibit sticker to the first page of various documents in PDF format? More specifically, a stamp that is a replica of a "tabbie sticker" that can be edited with multiple lines of text? An example would be a stamp that contained something like the following:

Plaintiff's Trial Exhibit

PTX 0001

C.A. No. 00-000 (ABC)

A.

• Scan a sheet of blank Tabbies & then opened the file & select one sticker with the border. You can then copy that image to use as a stamp. Place the "stamp" on the page of the exhibit & resize. You can use the typewriter function to enter whatever text you want;
• Use Visionary, which is free. You can change the colors of the label - yellow for plaintiffs, and blue for defendants. There are 3 lines for the case number, exhibit number and title. The stamp can be moved on the page. You can then print the page with the color exhibit stamp;
• IntelliBates (Acrobat plug-in) is fine but time-consuming (and there is no option for a border of an exhibit sticker).

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 06/28/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 06/21/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

Court orders Jammie Thomas to pay RIAA $1.92 million

In a surprise decision, the jury imposed damages against Thomas-Rasset, who was originally accused of sharing more than 1,700 songs, at a whopping $80,000 for each of the 24 songs she was ultimately found guilty of illegally sharing. One can find an account on CNET news here. There is also a lively tail of comments, discussing whether this is right or wrong and whether Jammie deserved it.

I am not going to talk about the legal merits of the case, but rather venture my understanding of the situation and its possible future consequences.

I don’t think that Jammie’s defense team expected a win. The retrial went through the same arguments as before. If anything, Jammie performed worse than at the first trial, was caught in multiple contradictions, and the defense team did not succeed in their arguments, such as “fair use” theory.

Yet I would say that the defense team may still have walked away a winner. The award sum of 1.92 million is just as uncollectable from Thomas-Rasset as the first verdict of $222,000. And, as comments discuss, it is not even a deterrent, since new potential awards will just go to the end of the queue. Rather, the disproportion and grotesque of the situation became even more obvious than it was before. If the RIAA lawyers realized what public face they are presenting, they should have lost the case.

It would make sense for them to loose, and would create an even better deterrent: for who wants to go through what Thomas-Rasset went through, and a regular letter from RIAA demanding a settlement of around $4,500 is bad enough. Then the public opinion might even conceivably move their way. Had they been even smarter to give her amnesty, they would have won for sure.

However, this requires a free and unorthodox thinking, and in a large bureaucratic hierarchy it is rarely found. The future logic of events will play out without brilliant moves that could potentially slow down or even temporarily reverse the progress of technology.

Enough has been said about the need for the music industry to find a business model which would not put them at odds with their customers. Technology empowerment should not be denied or fought – but understood and harnessed. If you can’t beat them (but hopefully can understand them) – then join them.

Could it be that the defense team who no doubt had Professor Charlie Nesson as a consultant has actually planned it as a strategic move for the next battle?

litsupport summary for the week ending on 06/14/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 06/07/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

litsupport summary for the week ending on 05/31/09

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. Nothing of permanent technological value?

A. None.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.