Bryan Strawser

Harvard Law School is planning to put more than a million documents from the Nuremberg trials on the Internet, allowing ready access to records of the historic proceedings that probed the war crimes of Hitler’s Third Reich.

More than 6,700 pages of material from one of the trials, known as the ”Medical Case” or the ”Doctors’ Trial,” which involved 23 defendants accused of doing harmful or fatal medical experiments on humans, have already been posted, Martin said. [Boston.com]

The Smoking Gun has named their 2003 Legal Document of the Year already. A hilarious reading of a public defender’s challenge to a criminal charge on behalf of a high school student who used the word “Fuck” numerous times in a confrontation with his principal.

One of the best legal documents I’ve ever read. Hands down!

I wish I had been intelligent enough to register this domain in 1994. Grrr. What dreams may come.

The owner of the porn site Sex.com is legally entitled to seek damages from the company that runs the dot-com registry for improperly transferring his website to a con man, a federal appeals court ruled. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News]

Good God. Shut Charles Rangel up. Please.

Or beat him in the next election. Any takers?

WERE THE HUSSEIN BROTHERS’ DEATHS AN ILLEGAL ASSASSINATION? Rep. Charles Rangel suggests so, but this seems to me to be an example of (still more) hysterical overreaching by critics of the Administration, for reasons made clear in this post by Eugene Volokh…. [Instapundit.com]

I am glad that this fellow is in jail. Good case, great article.

The hunt for an eBay scammer. Jay Nelson ripped off buyers on eBay and Yahoo until the Feds put him behind bars. We catch up with him in prison, where he’ll be until 2007. [Fast Company]

I used to think it was wildly funny and somewhat entertaining when some enterprising company ran out, purchased a patent or a portfolio full of patents from some smaller firm (or an individual), and then proceeded to sue a bunch of people over using that patent.

As I remember from my classes on US History - the patent system was intended to protect the inventor of a unique product from having that product copied - thus infringing the patent. I’m fairly confident that it was never intended to be used to patent things like HTML Navigation, One-Click Shopping, the transmission of data over the internet, and so on, and so on.

A group of my friends, who operate a variety of websites and a part of a large online community, are being pressured by Acacia Media Technologies Corporation to hand over large portions of their earnings for having streaming audio and/or video content on their sites.

I’m certain that there is prior art that makes this patent invalid - but who has the time and the funding to challenge this. These folks are all running small businesses and don’t have the time, the expertise, or the money to fight this out in court. So they’ll do what almost every other business that Acacia is going after will do…

Pay.