It had the ingredients of a potential snoozer—a nearly 500-page tome that featured a battery of
plaintiff’s attorneys, an arcane epidemiological study, a lengthy tract on
groundwater contamination and an exhaustive, law school-like examination of an
appeals court process. Yet after Jonathan Harr's A
Civil Action appeared in 1995, reviewers saluted it as a “page-turner,”
“gripping,” “riveting” and “hard to put down.” One critic even suggested that the book could
cause sleeping problems. Indeed, Harr’s
book, which tells the story of a wrongful death lawsuit filed by eight families
in Woburn, Mass., is one of the era’s most successful nonfiction books, both critically
and commercially. It won numerous
honors, sold more than two million copies, was bought by Robert Redford for
$1.25 million and turned into a major Hollywood movie starring John Travolta
and Robert Duvall. Like other celebrated
nonfiction books, such as John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Tracy Kidder’s The
Soul of a New Machine and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, A Civil Action
is virtually indistinguishable from the best fiction in its pacing, powerful
scenes and unforgettable cast of characters.
The book’s protagonist, the maverick, Porsche-driving, personal-injury
lawyer Jan Schlichtmann is portrayed as an outsized character imbued with a
novel’s full range of qualities—charm, brains and self-destructive impulses. And the book artfully shifts point of view, as
in classic works of fiction, burrowing into the thoughts and emotions of
Schlichtmann and his opponents. Though
he is best known for A Civil Action, Harr has written for such magazines
as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. He also wrote a second best-seller, The
Lost Painting, which tracks the investigation of a lost Caravaggio that
turns up unexpectedly in a Dublin monastery.
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/080717/harr.shtml
Moorehead Circle was a triple woodhenge constructed about two millennia ago at the Fort Ancient Earthworks in Ohio. The outer circle, discovered in 2005 by
Jarrod Burks, is about 60 meters in diameter. Robert Riordan, Professor of
Archaeology at Wright State University and lead archaeologist investigating the
site, estimates that about two hundred wooden posts were set in the outer
circle. Following the 2009 Field Season
though, this estimate will likely be reevaluated given a huge number of tightly
spaced post-molds found on the geographic south of the feature. Thirty post-molds in all, were found in an
eight meter long area excavated on the border of the circle. "A radiocarbon date on charcoal from a
remnant trace of a post suggests it was built between 40 BC and AD 130. Burned timber fragments from the pit were
dated AD 250 to AD 420." Both dates
fall into the time period of the Hopewell
culture, preceding the Fort Ancient culture occupation that predominates the
site. The use or uses of the circles has
not been determined, although it is likely ceremonial. Dr. Riordan named the circle in honor of Warren K. Moorehead, first curator of archaeology
for the Ohio Historical Society and a leading North American archaeologist
around the turn of the twentieth century, who was largely responsible for
preservation of the Fort Ancient site. Remnants
of a small number of other woodhenges have been found in the central part of
the United States, including at Cahokia in Illinois and the Stubbs Earthwork near Fort
Ancient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorehead_Circle
"There's this beautiful poem that says the year in Denmark has
sixteen months: January, February,
March, April, May, June, July August, September, October, November, November,
November, November, November and December." The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2013, p. 28
Nordic noir, a type of "Scandie lit", refers to the literature
genre of Scandinavian
crime
fiction. Language, heroes and
settings are three commonalities in Nordic crime fiction, which features plain,
direct writing style without metaphor. The novels
are often of the police procedural subgenre, focusing on the
monotonous, day-to-day work of police, though not always involving the
simultaneous investigation of several crimes.
Examples include The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg
Larsson, and Kurt Wallander's detective series on Masterpiece
Mystery!. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_noir
Artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) created the video “Duett” while he was Belgium’s
representative at the 1999 Venice Biennale:
Alÿs and a friend enter Venice by different routes, each carrying separate
halves of a tuba. It took them more than
two days of wandering around the city before they happened to meet each other. At which point, they assembled the tuba and
played a single note. http://www.outset.org.uk/files/2813/1833/6518/Press_Alys_FT.pdf See the 6:48 film at: http://www.francisalys.com/
Owners of e-books are licensees. Unlike
the owners of a physical tome, they won't have the unlimited right to lend an
e-book, give it away, resell it or leave it to their heirs. If it's bought for their iPad, they won't be
able to read it on their Kindle. And if
Amazon or the other sellers don't like what they've done with it, they can take
it back, without warning. All these
restrictions "raise obvious questions about what 'ownership' is,"
observes Dan Gillmor, an expert on
digital media at Arizona State University. "The companies that license stuff
digitally have made it clear that you own nothing." The rules are based, in turn, on the 1998
Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with which Congress hoped to balance the
rights of copyright holders and content users.
In the non-digital world, copyright ends with the first sale of each
copyrighted object. Under the
"first sale" doctrine, once you buy a book, that physical book is
yours to lend, give away, or resell. Copyright is safeguarded by the
limitations of physical transfer — once the book is given or loaned, the
original buyer no longer has access to it. If a library owns five copies of a book, only
five borrowers can read it at the same time. Theoretically a book can be photocopied, but
only at great effort and with a perceptible loss of quality. In digital-dom, however, technology allows
infinite copies to be made, with no loss of quality. Absent the usual restrictions, one could give
away an e-book and still have it to read. Unrestricted transferability becomes a genuine
threat to the livelihood of authors, artists, filmmakers, musicians. In 2009, having learned that it inadvertently
had sold unauthorized e-book versions of George Orwell's "1984" and
"Animal Farm" through its website, the company simply deleted those
e-books from buyers' Kindles stealthily, without warning. An uproar followed, not least because
Amazon's Orwellian behavior involved those Orwellian masterpieces. Amazon settled a subsequent lawsuit by promising never to steal a book back from a
Kindle without the device owner's permission.
But earlier this year, the company was revealed to have unilaterally shut down the access of Linn
Jordet Nygaard, a Norwegian Kindle owner, to her library of 43 e-books, for
reasons it refused to divulge. Another uproar,
and Amazon backed down again, restoring Nygaard's account — again without
explanation. Moreover, notwithstanding
the public impression that digital is forever, nothing is permanent in the
digital world. In fact, digital content
can be less permanent than physical books. In libraries you can find volumes that date
back hundreds of years and can still be read (if carefully); but there are
digital files that date back only a decade yet are completely unintelligible
today. Michael Hiltzik
Jan.
4, 2013 Last
year, an Arizona State University law professor wrote a law review article that delved
into a harassment dispute between an aggrieved vegetarian and his boss at a
financial firm. Now, the professor has
become part of the story himself, facing allegations that his article crossed
the line between scholarship and defamation.
Zachary
Kramer, the author of the article and an associate dean at the school, was
sued last week by Robert Catalanello, a managing director at Credit Agricole,
who was in the news three years ago when he was accused of harassing a former
employee for being a vegetarian. Last
week, Mr. Catalanello sued Mr. Kramer in New Jersey federal district court
demanding $500,000 in damages. Jacob
Gershman http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/01/04/law-review-article-moves-to-center-of-defamation-suit/?mod=djemlawblog_h
Jan. 7, 2013 Last
week, Thomson Reuters had acquired PLC, and then
Lexis
announced they had acquired Knowledge Mosaic, Thomson Reuters rounded out the tri-fecta with
their acquisition of the Continuing Professional Education (CPE/CLE) product of
LearnLive Technologies. Although Thomson Reuters already has a similar
program with West LegalEdcenter, it
seems that LearnLive has been taking some of West LegalEdcenter's marketshare
away, thus Thomson Reuters reached for its checkbook and decided that if you
can't beat 'em… buy 'em. As with both
PLC and Knowledge Mosaic, LearnLive has quite a reputation for customer service
and personal attention given to its customers. Just as with PLC and Knowledge
Mosaic, there is a mild enthusiasm on behalf of the company being acquired that
they will benefit from all the additional resources of the Mega-Company, while
customers are once again left groaning that they will see pricing increases and
service decreases. Time will tell to see
if the acquired company's optimism prevails over the pessimistic customers. I had a conversation with a librarian last
week about all the acquisitions, and during the conversation, he openly
wondered if Thomson Reuters' moves in purchasing some duplicative products
could be to position the Thomson Reuters Legal (aka Westlaw) product to be spun
off from the big TR franchise. That is
an interesting thought. http://www.geeklawblog.com/2013/01/the-shrinkage-tri-fecta-thomson-reuters.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+geeklawblog+%283+Geeks+and+a+Law+Blog%29
Thanks, Julie
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