The important thing to remember is that BAILII, just like Wikipedia, is a charity and relies on donations to continue to provide its crucial service. It’s certainly the most useful thing I can think of that’s been done to promote open access to court decisions, including recent ones, and well worth a donation.

This is not here for its musical chops

The competition for supermarkets in Britain is pretty limited and customers have a particular disadvantage here.

The only solution to this is to sit down and try to address the information disadvantage. There’s various ways of doing this and one way is to do primary research. Unfortunately, canvassing all products in all supermarkets in a reasonable amount of time is a massive task and, being give-up-your-day-job labour intensive, it won’t save you much money. It has only just become practical to do it this way because the internet, of course, has made it practical to crowdsource supermarket comparison shopping. Suddenly everyone can share small samples of prices that they found while going about their lives and combine them together into a database.

Supermarkets, as rational actors, do not like this. So much so that they have taken some big steps to stomping it out. People writing in notepads or taking pictures of shelves have been asked to leave stores because it’s against the law.

The Guardian comments come to our aid here:

Just for the avoidance of doubt, in legal terms this is what is technically known as ABSOLUTE BALLS.

The interesting thing is the Tesco staff quoted in the article’s approach to this. They explicitly say that you are allowed to track the prices of things you buy but not things still in the store. This is naturally a fantastic option for Tesco.

H/T: The Guardian

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Soulver is basically a notepad application that lets you write out what calculations you’re doing and then does the computation next to it. I like it because my fundamental failing in maths is keeping track of what I’ve done, what I’m doing now and where I go from there. Soulver lets you type out a document, with variables and dependent answers if you want, that neatly sets out your working. It means that you don’t feed numbers into a calculator and, on going back, wonder “where did that 50p come from?”. It’s also great used as a more regular text editor to take notes where numbers are involved.

For example, the above is a question I worked out in a tax tutorial (by the way, if you rely on my figures here to calculate the dividend in your own company you’re literally crazy). I typed out the numbers again but I could also have dragged and dropped from the right hand side into the text window on the left. That has the advantage of putting in pointers which can change as the calculations they rely on change, just like a spreadsheet formula.

Soulver costs $24.95 (about £15) and, as standard for a piece of software in this is price range, tries to back away from as much liability as possible. I think this is only sensible — I found Soulver as a Mac Switcher through a recommendation from David Sparks (MacSparky), a California trial attorney who, as far as I understand, uses it at work. The Terms of Use put a $2 limit on total company liability.

Two provisions from the Terms of Use say:

The developer makes no claims for Soulver’s accuracy, reliability or correctness. You should always check the accuracy of the results, and not rely on them being correct.

Soulver should not be used in cases where errors or inaccuracies in a result would lead to death, personal injury, financial and economic losses, losses, damage to property, or any other form of damage.

I suspect that whoever wrote that had the Mars Climate Orbiter in mind when doing so. The MCO crashed because of a communication error between multiple teams — one team did their work in metric units, another team used imperial ones. The resulting disparity meant that the spacecraft crashed. Similarly, my own example of using Soulver to calculate company tax creates opportunities for some crazy liabilities. Soulver’s killer feature here, every calculation is neatly written down and stored line by line, means that there is a paper trial built up for exactly where the error happened; that’s not the same as blaming Casio when your tax return gets audited.

I think this makes a dramatic contrast to the “use at your own risk” EULA found by Michael @ Law Actually.

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I suspect most people have heard about Catgate by now — one of Theresa May’s researchers has found a immigration case in which a cat was mentioned and has either cynically misrepresented it or catastrophically misunderstood it to the extent it was headlined in a Party conference speech as an outrageous “yuman rites” story.

Ken Clarke, echoing many of us in all walks of life who are a bit sick of our area of expertise being done very badly in public, pulled a face when May said that the central legal issue in the case was immigrants having a cat. That sounds like a ridiculous reason to let someone stay in Britain, right?

Spoiler: it totally is.

Outrageousness

The notable thing about outrageous stories is that they’re unexpected — that makes it stand out. You see it regularly in health reporting to the extent that if a new study reveals unexpected results it’s probably wrong. There’s a lot science doesn’t know yet but it wasn’t born yesterday either.

Your gut has a reasonable sense of how the world should (and nearly always does) work. If you see a car rolling uphill that stands out as not expected. This is why gravity hills are interesting:

If you gut says “that doesn’t sound right” it’s worth checking if it is. That’s what Ken Clarke did with Catgate, and it so happens that he was perfectly right. It turned out that the cat was mentioned in passing by a witness as an example of how he had cemented a family relationship with other humans.

Unexpected anecdotes are also an extremely poor way to make policy. We should not abolish the Human Rights Act because an aide at the Home Office found a story about a cat.

Frankly, it’s outrageous to think otherwise.

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Regular readers will remember that my only complaints about the Kindle were its annotation features (particularly export) and the keyboard. Therefore, I’m quite happy to see what they’ve done now:

Kindle Touch

• faster hardware
• slightly smaller
• lower price
• eInk display
• touch screen
• that awful keyboard is gone

I’m focusing on the eInk device still because I think it suits my purposes better. I just want to read a large number of documents on the bus without having to kill someone’s printer.

The Kindle Touch is not available in the UK yet but it’s surely a matter of time. I think the new touch screen should make the annotation feature more friendly than it used to be. The iPad’s great advantage for marking up documents is that you can swipe your finger across the text you want to highlight. This is a bit of a half way solution as it’s still necessary to get your highlights off the Kindle unless you want to type it out manually and I haven’t heard anything about that. I’m not sure that I’ll ever justify an upgrade to a touch screen device just for easier highlighting.

I also think I’d some how miss having a button to press to change pages when reading. I’m not convinced about swiping between pages.

Kindle Fire

The Kindle Fire seems like an interesting device but it’s very different from the Kindle Touch. It’s an Android based device with an LCD touch display. I suspect it’s going to be fantastic for media use. It’s fundamentally a Kindle with a colour screen but I don’t think it’ll be as good at living in your bag overnight. The Kindle Fire will need charged much more often than an eInk Kindle.

However, if you need more power and any sort of colour graphics in your Kindle this is the only option.

Kindle

My recommendation though, based on what I know of the Kindle 3 and what I don’t like about it, is the Kindle. It’s essentially a slightly smaller, faster, cheaper Wifi Kindle 3 without the rubbish keyboard (it has a probably much, much worse virtual keyboard instead).

The new low end model, the Kindle, is now keyboard-less and operated by a small 5-way control and 4 buttons (I assume Home, Menu, Back, and Text) with a virtual keyboard available. Amazon.co.uk is selling it for £89 and that’s a tempting price. The photocopy metric on that is “only” 1780 pages. I think that’s the the one to go for if you’re buying a new Kindle today.

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It seems reasonable that CAMRA, given its name, shouldn’t have to plug someone’s drink if it’s not ale — you might as well expect them to endorse your brand of orange juice — but they should be proud to see how significant they have become for a group based on reviving a dying type of old-man beer.

I suspect it’s time for a Campaign for Microbreweries to take up the role that the Camden brewer clearly expects CAMRA to perform but there’s a definite irony in expecting CAMRA to change what it does based on what is now fashionable in the British beer scene. This is a group of people trying to sell ale to a nation of lager drinkers, after all.

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“The great irony is we don’t own the surface of the moon, so in a sense we don’t own the footprints” left by Apollo astronauts

In developments rather outside of my jurisdiction, NASA is seeking consensus with private space exploration companies (this alone proves we are in the future) over guidelines to preserve the historical artefacts they put on the moon during the previous century.

Google’s Lunar X prize includes a $20m award for landing a robot that can move 500 metres and send back images from the moon but with a $4m bonus “heritage prize” for landing near one of the Apollo missions. This means that about a dozen teams are actively aiming rockets at some of the most significant, and most fragile, relics of human progress ever.

Interestingly the law here comes from the Outer Space Treaty 1967, which is one of these UN treaties which you notice in footnotes when you’re a student and think is just a cool bit of Cold War trivia. The treaty means means that, because the surface of the moon has no owner, there is no authority which can tell private bodies to leave Apollo 11 alone.

Science mentions the experience of anthropologist Beth O’Leary who approached the US National Park Service trying sort out preservation guidelines and was told that the agency “did not have the jurisdiction to work on such guidelines.”. She provided the quote at the top in 2000. I suspect the change of heart must have something to do with Google putting up the ton of money.

There is likely to be a great deal of money in actual lunar artifacts — I hesitate to imagine how much someone would pay for the Apollo 11 lander module — but they remain extremely important relics for our species.

In the 20 July guidelines, NASA proposes that the Apollo 11 and 17 sites remain off-limits, with ground-travel buffers of 75 meters and 225 meters from each respective lunar lander. Furthermore, NASA simulations and footage from previous lunar missions led Kelso to conclude that 2-kilometer-radius no- fly zones over each site would prevent rocket exhaust from contaminating artifacts. NASA, however, would condone limited activities among the artifacts of other sites, according to the document.

H/T: Science, 2 September 2011, 1207-8

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Greenfield’s primary criticism of the article is fundamentally that it’s a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water and I find him as persuasive as ever on this. The problem is jurors’ imaginations running amok rather than the ability to exclude, for example, torture confessions.

The problem is sort of a reverse CSI-effect where instead of juries assuming that, if the accused actually did it, there would be DNA and fingerprints; they assume that the accused did do it and there’s something horribly incriminating that their sleazy defence lawyer got buried. The jury then takes it on themselves to imagine what that non-existent evidence is and convicts accordingly. I don’t know how common this is and the rules on jury interviews in the UK makes it tricky to find out but it’s potentially a very serious problem, not least for what it does to the presumption of innocence.

I imagine this comes straight from police dramas where the sleazy defence lawyer is always getting stuff buried. It’s looking increasingly like your odds of conviction in solemn trials depends more than it should on if your jury prefers CSI to Law and Order.

The lesson seems to be that juries sometimes do unpredictable things, whether that’s returning unexpected verdicts, assuming evidence is normally definitive or that it even exists in the first place. We still have to be careful about constitutional safeguards, especially in jurisdictions where the constitution is as flexible as ours.

H/T: Simple Justice

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That was fine when they were a reasonably interesting startup company. They supplied a service which was great, necessary and I can’t think of anything quite like it just now. It’s not all been good though.

They released some new policies following of some fairly terrifying security lapses in which the entire nature of their product had to be re-assessed. Dropbox’s big USP back when I started using it was that everything was encrypted — you could send your files off to some strange company knowing that it was encrypted as it travelled and encrypted as it resided with Dropbox (stored communications are important too). Then it was revealed that, obviously, Dropbox could decrypt your files when they had them and there’s confusion about just how much encryption is really used.

They then had a bizarre security breach where they apparently turned their password system off for a few hours but left the file sharing system up. I didn’t really think that the two were separate.

I have two main thoughts about the new terms of service, one is about the terms themselves and the other is the reaction that the new terms have generated.

The terms

The policies are drafted in a deliberately non-threatening plain-language way, so as to try and fix their image. It’s interesting to see contracts being used as public relations devices but I don’t think it’s really worked; most people didn’t read them (of course) and the people who did are picking at how they’re written.

Plain language drafting is a bit of a holy grail – the idea is to draft clearly and precisely and well duh, because the alternative is stupid. Drafting should be as simple as possible. Fluffy, non threatening drafting isn’t what is required. You can clearly see what Dropbox meant when it wrote the terms but, from my reading, the terms don’t strictly line up with that.

One of the stand out issues for me is the cute “your stuff” that they’ve used: your stuff is defined as your information, files, and folders and your stuff gets to be used however they like, for the purposes of running Dropbox. Although I wouldn’t have lumped my personal information in with my files and folders (I certainly don’t expect Dropbox to process any of my personal information contained in the files I store with them) that’s a mostly stylistic choice but it does mean that every time they say “stuff” later on they’re talking about a huge range of material, some I want distributed to other people, some I want kept limited to my own machines and some I want locked in a safe. I’m not entirely comfortable granting a licence allowing Dropbox to distribute and copy my stuff when, strictly speaking, my stuff includes any payment details I have on record with them. I’m not even sure that the Privacy Policy would definitely overrule me voluntarily granting them a licence.

The main flaw in the agreements is the lack of definition of “the Service”. I can imagine my legislation tutor’s reaction if I handed in a drafting assignment that failed to define “the Service” in a “Terms of Service” agreement. Dropbox can do what they need to do with your stuff to provide you with the service but don’t say what that service consists of. I can assume that the service involves taking a copy of my files and spitting them out over the Internet but anything more detailed is a mystery. If it was easy you’d do it yourself.

The reaction: contracts as PR

One of the main complaints is that the update was the 4th of July weekend so it seemed that they were burying it. I personally don’t see that Internet companies really need to bury changes to their terms and conditions because no one reads them anyway.

The other side is that people who got the announcement (sent by email) despite the holiday weekend promptly got out magnifying glasses and looked to see how Dropbox was trying to screw them. A lot of people don’t trust lawyers and by extension they don’t trust contracts. This is why I think it’s interesting to see contracts being used as PR devices. Users who have pointed out that the terms are pretty broad have been accused of “presuming malice”.

I can’t really believe that Terms of Service agreements will ever be particularly effective as a public relations tool. Almost no one reads them, the people who do don’t trust them (if you trusted it to be acceptable you wouldn’t read it) and your audience may not be able to read them in the first place. The plain language drafting has left it vague enough that, as far as I can see, pretty much everyone blogging about it has made reasonably sensible interpretations of the terms and they’ve all been supported by provisions in the agreements.

However, pretty much no one blogging about this has actually agreed on what the terms say.

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The book emerged from the collected resources and experience of a London law centre and is written from the perspective of pro bono representatives who do it a lot. The advice, from if you should claim to how you should cross examine a witness, works for everyone and it might even be worth having a read just in case if you’re an employee.

What I didn’t realise is that there is a companion site to the book at etclaims.co.uk which has a regularly updated blog on employment tribunal practice. If you’re involved in employment cases I can see this being very useful to check.

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