A reminder for folks that tomorrow, Wednesday May 26th, at 9am PT/noon ET, we'll be holding the next webinar in our IT Innovation series, What IT Needs To Know About The Law. I've been working on the content for this webinar with Dave Navetta and Larry Downes, and it's shaping up great, covering many of the issues we talk about here on a regular basis. In fact, there's so much good stuff, that we're down to figure out what we're leaving out -- perhaps to revisit at a future date. Either way, it should be chock full of good info that will be useful for any IT person, so don't miss it. Sign up now, and stop by tomorrow with questions ready. As with our past webinars, this one will be interactive. We'll be taking questions from attendees throughout the webinar. Please join us.

Erik Heels, an intellectual property lawyer and a regular Techdirt reader, has put up a nice blog post, explaining why patents rarely make sense for startups (especially if the patents are for software). He notes that, in most cases, filing for a patent is "a waste of time and energy," not to mention money -- not that "your money and time would be better spent hiring programmers, marketers, and a sales force." Indeed. Unfortunately, lots of startups think they need patents -- often erroneously claiming that VCs won't invest without patents. But as many smart VCs point out, having patents for a startup is usually pretty useless. Startups live or die in the marketplace with a product -- and that product is rarely going to wait around for a patent. Focus on building a business, not wasting time and energy on useless patents.

One of the more recent "moral panics" that we've seen is around this concept of "sexting," where people (often youngsters who might not fully recognize the consequences of what they're doing) send either naked or at least revealing images of themselves to others. In the last year or so the press has written about it quite a bit, and while it seems like it's really just a situation that requires more education for kids to recognize what a bad idea this is, once you get a moral panic going, it's never long before politicians feel the need to "help deal with" the issue, "for the children," of course. Mark sends in the news that some politicians in Indiana have decided to tackle the issue with new legislation, though it's not at all clear that the state Senators debating the subject even understand what sexting means:

"Until some terrible tragedy happens where a child or teenager commits suicide because they have been bullied by e-mail, texting or sexting," said Rep. Sandra Blanton.

Bullied by sexting will lead to suicide? How? And how do you create a law to prevent that? Then there's the politician who wants to ban mobile phones in schools to deal with this issue:

"Keep them in lockers and not allow them in the classroom or on school property to do the sexting," Rep. Blanton said.

Really? The sexting happens on school property? If that's the case, then wouldn't the issue be public nudity -- for which I would imagine there are already laws -- rather than "sexting"? If he just means that the sending of these photos continues on school property, I'm not really sure how keeping the phones in lockers fixes anything. It just means those messages will be sent after school when there's even less supervision of what the kids are doing. I guess that's the head-in-the-sand approach to dealing with things, but I'm not sure how it helps any.

Certainly the issue of sexting is one worth educating kids about, so they recognize the dangers of passing on such photos which can quickly multiply and be spread further in amazingly embarrassing ways. But I don't see how any law helps the issue at all -- but plenty of ways laws can make things worse -- especially when the politicians writing and voting on the laws don't even seem to understand what the issue is beyond "sexting = bad!"

Michael Scott points us to an interesting discussion among some lawyers trying to grapple with the implications of a rise in "cloud computing." For example, they note that courts usually don't take kindly to excuses such as "the hard drive ate my documents" when certain documents are unable to be found during the discovery process. But, if people are using a cloud computing solution such as Google Docs, this could actually be an issue. Google's terms of service allows it to cancel accounts and delete documents -- and someone who relies on a system like that only to find out later that he or she needs to hand over documents as a part of a court case may be in trouble. Of course, I don't see how this should be any different than any other "out of my hands" issue. What if a fire destroys paper documents? Or should the problem be that the user didn't make backup copies? The problem here isn't necessarily cloud computing itself, but the way the law views the discovery process.

The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) -- which is basically just a front for the RIAA -- has been pushing hard for increasingly strict copyright laws in Canada, for no good reason (or, rather, entirely made up reasons). To date, the group has had trouble getting the laws passed, as the public has been quick to speak up in defense of user rights -- something that few politicians seem interested in protecting. However, Michael Geist points out that the CRIA isn't stopping, and has put out a copyright reform FAQ. However, what's amazing is that almost every "answer" in the FAQ appears to be wrong. In talking about what copyright is, it only talks about the rights of the content creator, and not the user, nor the fact that copyright law has always been designed to "balance" both sets of rights. It also claims (incorrectly again) that "piracy" (loaded word) is no different than shoplifting, despite the fact that any ounce of logic would tell you the two are quite different -- even if both may break the law.

But, perhaps the most stunning claim is the one where the CRIA actually claims that it's "piracy" that has caused record stores to shut down, rather than the shift to buying (legally) things online:

Q: Does copyright piracy put your job at risk? A: Yes. Canadians who work in the copyright-related industries have seen numerous job losses - from the artists who create music to truck drivers who deliver CDs and DVDs to retailers. Since the advent of widespread P2P file sharing 10 years ago, retail sales of music have declined by more than half; this has forced ongoing job reductions and slashed funds available for Canadian artist development.

Does the CRIA actually think anyone believes that P2P file sharing is the reason for this? I don't do any file sharing at all, but haven't set foot in a physical "record store" in years -- because I buy all my CDs online (and, yes, I still buy CDs). To claim that the end of physical retailing can be blamed on file sharing is simply ridiculous.

You can read through the link above to see the other "questions and answers" including, Geist's refuting nearly every single one. What's sad, though, is that some in the press, and many politicians, will start using these as talking points as if they're factual.

Well here's a story about copyright that's so bizarre it makes you think that there must be a mistake somewhere -- but it seems to be completely true. Apparently, Oregon is complaining to sites like Justia (which publish public domain legal documents) that they are violating copyright by republishing some of Oregon's laws. The state admits that the text of the laws are not covered by copyright, but that everything else about the way the law is presented is covered by copyright (such as the numbering, the notes and annotations). This is an accurate portrayal of copyright law, which does allow such things to be covered by copyright (though, the "numbering" part seems questionable), but it's difficult to see how the state could possibly get upset that someone is trying to better publicize Oregon's laws. The state does make one good point: Justia adds its own copyright notice to the text, which is bad form, but was probably just a template issue. Either way, it's difficult to see what Oregon could possibly gain in trying to force copies of its laws off of public resource legal sites.

One of the key themes around here for a while has been that technology has a way of making certain laws either obsolete or antithetical to their intended purposes. Often, however, lawyers, judges and politicians have a difficult time recognizing this. That's why it's at least somewhat encouraging to see Australian High Court Judge Justice Kirby publicly recognizing that computer code tends to make laws obsolete or meaningless. "It was a good moral and ethical principle to keep people's control over the usage that was made of the information... And then along came Google and Yahoo. And when the new technology came, there was a massive capacity to range through vast amounts of information. The notion that you could control this was a conundrum." However, while he does realize that technology can make laws obsolete, his solution is still to push for more laws: "To do nothing is to make a decision to let others go and take technology where they will. There are even more acute questions arising in biotechnology and informatics, such as the hybridization of the human species and other species. Points of no return can be reached." It's an interesting point -- though, he doesn't exactly explain what those points of no return are (at least not in the article that quotes him), and why the law would do a better job preventing those points from being reached than technology itself. In some ways, this is merely echoing Larry Lessig's concept that "code is law," though Lessig better recognized that trying to regulate technology with regulations was likely to be a lot less effective than regulating technology with technology.