Interesting but perhaps not surprising news that Google will make the VP8 video codec open source. You can read in more detail by following the link but here’s a quick rundown: Many companies have decided to support H.264 for video streaming, including Google, Apple and Microsoft. Others, like Mozilla (the creator of Firefox), have not, as they are concerned about adopting, as a standard, proprietary technology that may one day require payment of royalties. Instead, they have chosen to support Ogg Theora, an open source codec based on a much earlier version of VP8. Making VP8 open source will remove this divide and will likely encourage the adoption of VP8 as a standard in place of either, as VP8 appears to be technically superior to both H.264 and Ogg Theora (which was developed from a much earlier iteration of VP8) and presumably would be free of potential licensing issues (and fees) associated with proprietary solutions such as H.264.
Perhaps not surprising given Google’s approach in mobile (i.e. the Android open source platform). Though it is worth noting that Google isn’t enchanted with all things open source, as evidenced by the hubbub about it and the Affero GPL a few years ago…
Great article by Brad Feld on attempts to draw up standardized seed round funding documents. According to Brad there have now been four different sets of template documents developed in the US for use in seed round financings, each of which is a little bit different. He is now attempting to reach out to some US law firms in an attempt to come up with one single set for the US. Why? To reduce the inevitable haggling and negotiation over terms and reduce legal fees.
If you’re looking for first round financing, worth taking a look at just to get a sense of what sort of terms have achieved some measure of acceptance as being “market” (or at least that some VCs and entrepreneurs can agree on). That being said, if you’re in Canada, some of the things won’t quite work due to differences in the law.
Seems like a great idea. Anyone aware of an initiative like this in Canada?
So spoke Scott McNealy more than a decade ago. At the time he made this statement, he received a fair amount of criticism. Turns out, he might very well have had a point, though perhaps for reasons he might not have foreseen.
A recent paper highlights the issue of the “reidentification” or “deanonymization” of anonymized personal information. However, the issue goes beyond anonymized information to the very heart how one should define personal information that is or should be protected under privacy legislation.
Canadian privacy legislation simply defines personal information as “information about an identifiable individual” (excluding certain information about someone in their capacity as an employee). However, what does “about an identifiable individual” mean? Does it mean that the person collecting the particular nugget of information can associate it with a person’s identity? Or, perhaps more disconcertingly, does it include data that has the potential to be associated with someone by analyzing that particular bit of information, which alone (or even in conjunction with all the other information collected by a given organization) could not be linked with a particular individual, with information available from other sources?
Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the announcement seems to suggest less an emphasis on targeting lawyers as the primary audience, but rather the general public. In fact, in a recent ABA Journal article, Google’s representative even suggested that Google wouldn’t be of much value to lawyers:
Google, meanwhile, is not trying to compete with the likes of West, LexisNexis, Bloomberg, Fastcase or any other commercial legal research company, says lawyer Rick Klau, a project manager at Google who helped build the Scholar database.
“There is no attempt to slay anyone here,” Klau says. “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it useful. This was a collection of content that was not accessible and well-organized.” He says Google Scholar was designed to make the information accessible for ordinary citizens. The company has no current plans to do more with the information than what is already available.
Google’s database allows users to search its content against any words, concepts or citations and will pull up opinions related to the searcher’s query. The results are ranked by relevance. Citations in the opinions are hyperlinked to other opinions. The results also provide links to other Google databases, such as books and law reviews, to help searchers get context.
But Google Scholar does not provide any sort of system to check the validity of the case, nor does it offer any type of taxonomy of the case.
Klau goes so far as to question the value of Google Scholar to practicing lawyers: “The two primary for-pay services provide tremendous value to their users and help you better understand and consume information, like whether an opinion is still valid. Those are things that practitioners rely on and will continue to rely on.”
Despite Klau’s protestations, others in the legal information sector are watching Google. “You are always very conscious of what Google is doing because the company has immense resources available,” says Warwick of Thomson Reuters.
That same article also describes how LexisNexis and Westlaw, the two Microsofts of the legal information industry, will be implementing sweeping changes in their services. I imagine those changes were prompted less by Google’s foray into the legal information industry and more by the entrance of Bloomberg into the market, and the desire to capture a greater share of what seems to be a shrinking market.
In any event, Google isn’t really reinventing anything here but rather making it a bit more convenient to access and use – apparently all of this material had previously been available on various court and other web sites. Google’s value add was to consolidate it all and make it easier to search and use.
Too bad. It would have been interesting to see Google shake things up a bit in the legal information industry (or for that matter the information industry more generally). Then again, you never know…
On that note, apologies to my loyal readers whom I’ve forsaken for quite some time now. I’ve recently transitioned to another firm which always entails a fair bit of work. At least I can rest assured that now can rest assured that no one will sue me for apologizing, as Ontario passed into law last year the Apology Act, 2009.
Laws governing apologies are not the usual subject matter of this blog, but I thought it might be of some interest.
I’ve always inclined to apologize, not with any intent whatsoever of admitting fault, liability or wrongdoing, but rather as a question of polite and well-mannered. However, before the passage of this act, saying your sorry could lead to the very unfortunate result of being construed as the former. Even apart from the legal ramifications, I recall a few years ago some advice one of my colleagues (who I respected very much gave me), which was never to apologize in the course of negotiations, for anything, as it could be interpreted as a sign of weakness.
While I think the introduction of this act is a good thing, it seems to me to be rather unfortunate that the law and society generally have led to a situation where a statute must be enacted so that people can apologize to each other without fear of recrimination. As a lawyer, I understand why professionals should be advised not to apologize, but as a human being, I find it very unfortunate (and non-intuitive) that the law has evolved to equate (or at least run the risk of equating) an expression of sorrow with an admission of liability. If a patient dies on the operating table due to no fault of the doctor performing the surgery, it would nonetheless seem perfectly human to me that the doctor would feel some sense of remorse or sorrow. In fact I’d probably find it somewhat disturbing if he or she didn’t. Expressing that sorrow would, to me, also seem to be a natural extension of that – not because of a desire to admit fault or liability, but because it is a natural extension for those that feel sorrow for the loss of a life and have some reasonable measure of empathy or compassion.
In any event, that’s just my $0.02 on the matter. It’s also perhaps worth mentioning that the Act doesn’t quite give you carte blanche to apologize – there are a number of exceptions, such as traffic violations or testifying at civil proceedings (PDF).
