Archive for September, 2010

Australian court rules that headlines are not copyright protected

An Australian court has rules that headlines cannot be copyrighted because they are too insubstantial, short and trivial to qualify for copyright protection. Fairfax, publisher of the Australian Financial Review, sued LexisNexis over their ABIX service which provides headlines and short summaries of the day’s news from various sources, including AFR. The Federal Court of [...]

September 20, 2010   Posted in: News  No Comments

Monday morning with Alex Williams’ cartoons, 20th September 2010

This cartoon is by Alex Williams who draws the Queen’s Counsel cartoons for The Times and in numerous books including Lawyers Uncovered. He also does the cartoons for BabyBarista and has had two more excellent books published recently: 101 Ways to Leave the Law and 101 Uses for a Useless Banker. He offers almost all of [...]

September 20, 2010   Posted in: Cartoons  No Comments

Weekend video: Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on Parkinson

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September 18, 2010   Posted in: Video  One Comment

Review of the Copywriting Phrasebook by Amy Harrison

The Copywriting Phrasebook Words. My life is made up of words. I read them, I write them, I speak them and (professionally) I interpret them. As a writer and a lawyer they are the tools of my trade. And yet there are still times when I stop mid way through a blog post halted by [...]

September 18, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Books  No Comments

Police hunt PigSpotter, the Twitter speedcam spy

Police in Johannesburg are investigating a man known as PigSpotter who uses Twitter to warn motorists about speed traps and other police activity. PigSpotter told a talk radio station that his name was meant as a joke and that speed traps were supposed to be visible, so they could not be considered secret. He agreed [...]

September 17, 2010   Posted in: News  No Comments

Skypecast Test

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September 16, 2010   Posted in: News  No Comments

Naturist club objects to erection of five storey tower block

Members of a naturist club in Surrey have reacted furiously to plans to build a tower block which would overlook their grounds. The 70-year-old White House Club, which has 300 members, is objecting to the proposed erection of a block of 167 flats which would overlook its property. They fear the possibility of “undesirable elements” [...]

September 16, 2010   Posted in: News  No Comments

ID fraudsters sell stolen house

Australian police have launched an investigation after Nigerian fraudsters allegedly sold a man’s A$500,000 house using just email, phone and fax messages. ZDNet reports that Roger Mildenhall who lives in South Africa and owns properties in Western Australia only narrowly averted the sale of a second house after he flew thousands of miles to block [...]

September 15, 2010   Posted in: News  No Comments

Burglars used Facebook status updates to find victims

US police think that a gang of burglars used social network status updates to select their victims. The alleged thieves carried out an estimated 50 burglaries in New Hampshire, after gaining intelligence on properties that had been left vacant from status updates on sites such as Facebook. This case validates concerns that users of location-based [...]

September 14, 2010   Posted in: News  No Comments

Raël -v- The Pope: Constructive Genocide and Human Rights Violations

Yesterday the European Raëlian Movement (ERM) issued a press release indicating that they are suing Pope Benedict XVI in the Queen’s Bench Division. They allege as follows: violations of Articles 10 and 22 of the ECHR (freedom of expression, and cultural freedoms); “a campaign of disinformation” orchestrated by the Pope against ERM (presumably amounting to [...]

September 14, 2010   Posted in: News  One Comment