Available from tomorrow only for Windows Geeklawyer may fire up a warez copy of Windows XP just to give it a run, but he hopes to cop a good dirty feel-up of Chrome when it eventually comes for Mac OSX.

Google even explain it via a cartoon: an odd lengthy way of explaining things but actually fun and ideal for the 5 second attention span of the Internet kids of today. When we had the Internet back in the 20’s William S. Boroughs could have written an 800 page novel to explain it & everyone would have read it, but not now. Tsssh, Kids.

Thanks to the commenter below for the Google video link explaining it:

Police stated that “while crossing the road to get to his despicable counter-revolutionary news office he was hit and killed by a speeding police bullet on its way to another emergency.

A rigorous independent investigation by local traffic wardens is underway and we have been exhonerated when it is completed in the next 10 minutes or so.“

Frankly Geeklawyer cannot summon words to describe his contempt for this campaign. It is little wonder that photographers everywhere doing what is perfectly lawful are being harassed by the police, ?5/hour rent-a-thug security guards and busybodys when tosh like this is used to engender suspicion and hostility to other citizens. As an aside the police say that terrorists do not photograph targets - it’s a movie plot!

The twaddle is not just about phones it’s about houses:

Phones:

Geeklawyer has not managed to locate the toilet one but imagines that the text would be:

“Terrorists go to the toilet. Terrorists get nervous before an outrage. Excessive use of a toilet may mean an impending atrocity - is someone you know going to the toilet a lot? Call now before they trigger that bomb!!”

Loyal citizen: don’t protect your friends family and coworkers - if in the slightest doubt call the police now!

Our secret colleagues said that the real purpose of the search was not preventing terrorism but an unlawful act of public order control in breach of the anti-terrorist act itself, the police codes of conduct and PACE. We directed them to this nonsensical view to further our wicked aims.

One of our aims is to provoke dissent within society by wearing threatening slogans on clothing that will rile and stir the complacent masses into a fever of discontent and revolt. From there we will coral their energy and anger until we can seize, by violence crime & tyranny, the controls of democracy from the hands of the fair virtuous and pure politicians like Blair/Brown, Bush and other weakling nice-guys.

We will establish a new World Order led by an alliance of Al-Queda, the IRA, the Soviet Union and Walmart.

Today the t-shirt, tomorrow page 8 of the Metro.

Geeklawyer has a lady friend who was fucked up the arse by her divorce lawyer. Astonishing charges, dire service and most of the problems unresolved. One expects this when engaging bottom-end lawyers but she was paying serious dosh. so perhaps John will have some success. One hopes so.

Spiffy: Cuban Taekwondo fighter kicks a referee at Olympics. Great kick, lousy aim. No Cuban cigar for you fella, just Comrade Castros salt mine.

Shocking news: police abuse anti-terror powers to harass photographer who photographed them acting illegally. Who would have thought this could ever happen? Our policemen are the best in the World.

Geeklawyer gets in the Times Best Law Blogs list. The Times reports on limited lawyer blogging in the UK. UK law bloggers respond by ripping The Times a new one & claim lots of bloggers. Geeklawyer partly disagrees with his colleagues because there aren’t that many blogs and many are inactive.

The Olympics are crap. Geeklawyer has unwillingly watched one event only and he wasnt even interested in that.

“Software is commonly distributed without charge under a GNU General Public License. The sufficiency of use should be determined according to the customary practices of a particular industry. . . .That the Software had been distributed pursuant to a GNU General Public License does not defeat trademark ownership, nor does this in any way compel a finding that Darrah abandoned his rights in trademark. Appellants misconstrue the function of a GNU General Public License. Software distributed pursuant to such a license is not necessarily ceded to the public domain and the licensor purports to retain ownership rights, which may or may not include rights to a mark. . . .”

This would be the result expected by GNU licensees and one which most lawyers would predict but which one occasionally hears detractors utter. In the US jurisdiction Planetary Motion would seem to torch any argument along those lines. If the case came to the UK Geeklawyer would be pretty confident that any competent and competent court would hold the same. Apologies for posting about the law again.

Geeklawyer shares the enthusiasm for the idea but considers that rather a lot needs to be done. Not enough statute and statutory judgements are online: OPSI publicises a lot but it is barely in the reusable form needed for this idea. For example, the tellthemwhatyouthink.org site has a vision of publicizing government consultation documents, but it has the devil of a job because the format of the html documents published make data re-use ultra hard. The government are working hard on this.

Geeklawyer says that similar problems confound legislation publication and the limited caselaw that is online, whether published by BAILII or others. Furthermore any wiki would have to permit the re-use of the data within it by the proper use of webbot-scrapeable and reusable documents.

Nick alludes to a more serious problem: contributions. Lawyers are terribly short sighted and the efforts they expend need to yield an immediate and tangible reward before they will invest hours that might otherwise be billable. Geeklawyer remains unconvinced that more than a tiny minority will do so, which in turn leads to issues of momentum and traction. If there is little content then there will be few users and few contributors which becomes a downward spiral.

UK law wikis have not had much success so far. IPKat’s Room 6 IP Law Wiki proposal is nowhere - it doesn’t even have a webpage yet, the Patent Quality Index is blank. The Mental Health Wiki looks active but only has the original author as contributor, ditto Crime Wiki: no other lawyers. Only the UK Patents Wiki looks healthy. This is, in part, the classic problem of social networks. A bazillion of these fail for every Twitter or Facebook.

If Geeklawyer sounds sceptical it’s because he is but not because he don’t support the vision. It could work, it needs to work and it may. But it is a big job.

But. For the second time this week Geeklawyer gets to say IRONIC. It was only a month or so ago that German officials were defending breaking the data protection laws of Lichtenstein to get bank details on suspected tax evaders.