IN THIS ISSUE
Relax, this is not spam - High Court says yes to Freeserve cutting links - Email, email everywhere - French court to review US hare site - Highs & lows in Silicon Valley - LCD has new URL - Online calculator - Probate direct & online - Web redesign for Wedlake Bell - US legal news round-up - Protecting IP rights online - E-District facing claims - Data retention plans slammed - Butterworths in web TV move - US legal technology news - Venables newsletter voted best - Here comes the champ - Next issue - 05.07.2001

EDITORIAL: RELAX - YOU ARE NOT BEING SPAMMED
If you were expecting your copy of Legal Technology News.com today and are puzzled to know why New Media Lawyer has arrived instead, relax. You have not been spammed but are merely the victims of a rebranding exercise here at Legal News Media. The content of the publication remains exactly the same - but we have changed the name to create a clearer distinction between our primarily UK legal IT oriented print newsletter Legal Technology Insider and this ezine which, along with having a more international flavour, also focuses on new media law as well as legal technology. You will also be pleased to know that our next project is a major rewrite of the Legal News Media web site, which in recent month has become a horrible mess of frames. And now back to the news...

HIGH COURT SAYS YES TO FREESERVE CUTTING MOTOR LINKS
The UK web portal Freeserve has won a High Court action to sever links with its joint venture partner Internet Trading Clubs (ITC) in an online B2C car buying service called the FS Motorist Club. Last December Freeserve claimed it was dissatisfied with the "quality of the site" and sought to remove the link to the service from its home page however ITC retaliated by obtaining an injunction requiring Freeserve to keep the site live until the trial. However at the trial in London last week, the court dismissed ITC's claims.

In a statement issued after the case Freeserve said ITC "had completely failed in its contractual obligations to deliver a quality web site dedicated to motoring consistent with the high standards promised from the outset". The FS Motorist Club has now been closed down although Freeserve says it hopes to relaunch the channel with new partners within the coming months.

EMAIL, EMAIL EVERYWHERE
A new survey published in the UK press earlier this week predicts that by next year some business managers will be spending up to four hours a day sorting through their email. The survey also said the average business email user in the UK already spends 49 minutes a day dealing with email - a 35 percent increase on last year.

FRENCH COURT TO CONSIDER APPLICATION TO BAN US HATE SITE
This Friday (29th June) a Paris court will hear an application from J'Accuse, a French anti-racist group, seeking an injunction compelling French internet service providers to block access to Front14.org, a US web portal that includes neo-Nazi and racist statements. J'Accuse was founded by Marc Knobel, a member of French anti-racism group LICRA who last year helped orchestrate the French lawsuit against Yahoo!

HIGHS AND LOWS IN SILICON VALLEY
One of Silicon Valley's best known law firms Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati has just launched its Document Access & Subscription System for inhouse staff and clients. The system - what would be called a virtual dealroom in the UK - allows users access to documents in a case in a secure, online collaborative environment. Elsewhere the news is not looking so good with Gunderson Dettmer in Palo Alto recently announcing that it would no longer guarantee bonuses to associates. At the height of the dotcom boom in 1999, the firm was one of the first to offer high salaries - a base salary for first year associates of $125,000 (about 30 percent above the going rate) and a guaranteed $20,000 annual bonus - to attract staff.

LCD GETS A NEW URL
The ULK's Lord Chancellor's Department has changed its main web site address. It can now be found at www.lcd.gov.uk rather than at its previous less than obvious www.open.gov.uk/lcd location.

JUDGMENT CALCULATOR ON THE WEB
The Judgment Calc software package, which allows lawyers to perform complex pre and post judgment interest bearing calculations, including preparing the figures for statements of claim, garnishee notices and directions to enforce writs of seizure and sale, is now available in a web based version. www.judgmentcalc.com

GRANT OF REPRESENTATION SERVICE GOES ONLINE
Yorkshire law firm The Lister Croft Partnership has launched Probates Direct, a new online service to help members of the public to apply for grants of representation - these give the person administering the deceased's affairs permission to pay any bills and deal with the estate. The site is the brainchild of Alan Benstock, a member of the English Law Society's Probate Section and a partner with The Lister Croft Partnership. People accessing the site can complete a simple six step form authorising ProbatesDirect staff to process applications. The site also provides a free advice centre with expert guidance on bereavement and legal issues. www.probatesdirect.co.uk

MAJOR REDESIGN FOR WEDLAKE BELL
New media agency Hyperlink Interactive, part of the Cable & Wireless group, has completed a major redevelopment of London law firm Wedlake Bell's web site. Hyperlink redesigned the site to provide faster navigation to more information, displayed in a more user-friendly format, with an emphasis upon making the site suitable for use as a research tool, a contacts directory and a source of information for potential clients. www.wedlakebell.com

US LEGAL NEWS IN BRIEF
FREELANCE RIGHTS - The US Supreme Court this week extended an author's copyright protection to the internet and digital media technologies. The 7-2 decision in the widely awaited Tasini case means that publishers will now violate the copyrights of freelance writers if they re-publish articles online without consent. Full story in the next issue.

TYPOSQUATTING - The US 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that registering internet domain names that are intentional misspellings of famous domain names is a violation of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. The federal court affirmed a US district court judge's earlier injunction against a man who had registered several misspelled versions of the popular web site joecartoon.com.

CYBERSQUATTING - Joe Cartoon clearly fared better than Michael Bloomberg, of eponymous Bloomberg online information service fame and now a contender for the New York mayoral elections - who failed to win ownership of the MichaelBloombergSucks.com domain name before a US dispute resolution panel. Apparently the site was registered by a free speech organisation and Bloomberg was unable to show that the name was being used in bad faith.

NAPSTER - Although Napster is now moving closer to becoming a legitimate music download service - earlier this week it signed a commercial deal with 150 European independent record labels via AIM (Association of Independent Music) and IMPALA (Independent Music Companies Association) - it is still being dogged by legal disputes in the United States. In the latest round of proceedings, a federal appeals court ruled that Napster must continue to block the swapping of copyrighted music.

In a two page order released last Friday, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals denied two separate requests from Napster. In one, a three judge panel said it would not rehear issues it ruled on last February. Responding to another petition, a larger group of judges also declined to review the matter in a so-called en banc appeal. Industry figures indicate the extent of the court's rulings on Napster. In early February, pre the court injunction, 2.8 billion files were being swapped each month via Napster but by May this figure had fallen to 360 million.

QUACK MEDICINE - The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) have begun a campaign to cut down the amount of quack medicine and bogus claims about alternative health products being promoted over the internet. As part of a project called Operation Cure.All, public enemy number one is a liquid called colloidal silver. According to some web sites, colloidal silver can cure acne, herpes, cancer, leprosy, bubonic plague and even the ebola flesh eating virus, as well as perk up your sex life. Sadly the only documented effect of taking colloidal silver - which involves ingesting silver - is that your skin eventually turns a blue-grey colour.

The FTC says that internet retailers engaging in "fraudulent marketing of supplements and other health products" face fines, the seizure of their products and proceedings to close down their sites. To-date the FDA has sent out over 100 notices requiring web site operators to revise their sites but so far only about 20% have complied - and at least one has relocated to Western Samoa to escape US jurisdiction.

CONGRESS TO INVESTIGATE NET FRAUD - The chairman and one of the members of the US House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee this week sent a letter to the chief executives of eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon.com asking them to answer questions about the prevalence of fraud, and specifically about shill bidding, in the online auction business.

PROTECTING IP RIGHTS ONLINE - NEWS IN BRIEF
DOMAIN NAMES - Apparently there are now over 29.5 million top level generic domain names (gTLDs) registered in the world - including over 22 million for .com - with 35,000 new names being registered every day. Despite the fact we have .info, .pro and .biz coming online during the course of this year - info is expected to go live on 19th September - this week also saw the launch of a new online naming company Register.ad (01273 233344) offering a new service which it claims "not only offers a distinctive alternative to the heavily subscribed generic domains but also enables businesses to protect their hard earned brand identity online" by only registering names that are already protected by a trademark. The way the scheme works is that although the .ad suffixes can be registered for 10 years for just £349, every two years the domain name owner must reaffirm that they are the legitimate owner of the trademark with the Andorran trademark body. Yahoo! and the French dairy products company Danone have already registered .ad addresses. www.register.ad

IMAGE FILES - This week has seen the launch of a new file format for digital images. Called VFZ (vector format for zooming) its developers say that along with various technical benefits - images can be resized from 5% to 1200% without loss of quality and are fully reversible to and from popular file formats such as JPEG and BMP - the format also supports digital rights management. The DRM element includes a file access facility restricting the use and manipulation of VFZ images, as well as tracking their movement for royalty purposes. The VFZ format was developed by VFZomm.com Ltd, a joint venture between Sumitomo and Digital Publishing Japan. www.vfzoom.com

DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT - RealNetworks, with the support of IBM, Sun, Sony, AOL Time Warner, MGM, Bertelsmann and others has announced plans for a new software standard that will allow music, movies and other forms of digital entertainment material to be distributed over the internet while still preserving the owners' copyright. Called XMCL (extensible media commerce language), the proposed new standard would introduce technical specifications that will work with digital rights management software to protect digital content from piracy. Interestingly the XMCL initiative is in direct competition to a similar standard for copyright protection - XRML (extensible rights markup language) - which is being backed by Microsoft.

E-DISTRICT.NET FACING CLAIMS BY SHAREHOLDERS
A number of shareholders in E-district.net, the UK online entertainment company, are investigating the possibility of suing the company, whose shares last week lost 90 percent of their value within minutes of going back on the London Stock Exchange after being suspended for 16 weeks. E-district.net, which is at the centre of allegations that its former chief executive Steven Laitman "substantially overstated" revenues and web traffic figures, also revealed that its sales for the first six months of last year were now being restated at £33,000 compared with the £1 million originally reported. The company is also suing Laitman for fraudulent misrepresentation, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. In a related development JICNET, the UK industry body established by advertisers and media owners to draw up standards for measuring internet usage and web traffic figures, said it hoped standards could be agreed by "early 2002".

DATA RETENTION PLANS HEAVILY CRITCISED
The UK government's new e-minister Douglas Alexander has come under attack from both the CBI and the ISPA UK (the UK internet service provider's industry body) over proposed changed to the EU data protection directive. What concerns the industry is that proposals would require ISPs to keep extensive records of all their customers' online activities, including which web sites they visit and who are the recipients of their email messages. Such a blanket data retention requirement would not only be costly to implement but, according to the CBI, "would be a retrograde step" that would compromise privacy and damage confidence in e-commerce.

BUTTERWORTHS IN WEB TV MOVE
The UK's largest legal publisher Butterworths Tolley and the producers of the Legal Web TV channel have agreed to a pooling of resources that will in future see Butterworths streaming video news reports broadcast as part of the Legal Web TV service. The Butterworths programmes (which are made by Rollingball Digital Television, the same production company used by Legal Web TV) were previously promoted as the Butterworths CPD Direct Digital Television News Service.

Commenting on the move John Pitman, Publisher, CPD direct, said: "Because delivering legal news in the form of online webcasts is such a new development, we still have to help the market to understand the benefits of this approach and the technology it involves. As this is an issue for both parties we decided to pool our resources so that through the addition of our content Legal Web TV becomes the premier source for quality legal digital TV programmes in the UK."

The Legal Web TV service is a joint venture between Legal News Media, the publishers of New Media Lawyer, and Rollingball Digital Television, the multimedia arm of the Semple Piggot Rochez group that developed the world's first internet law school. There is no charge for viewing Legal Web TV programmes however users do need to have the free utility RealPlayer 8 installed on their computer. Legal Web TV is at www.legalwebtv.com

US LEGAL TECHNOLOGY NEWS
LITIGATION SUPPORT - inData Corporation, the developer of the inData Director Suite of trial presentation software, and Aspen Systems have entered into an exclusive contract covering the remainder of Aspen's participation in the US Department of Justice Mega 1 Automated Litigation Support Services Contract (No.97-C-0025) and Mega 2, currently in the bidding process. The agreement allows for the purchase of inData software and other services by Aspen's government clients

LAWEX - Lawex Corporation, the developer of the TrialWorks case management software, has released its newest version, TrialWorks Version 8.0. TrialWorks continues to be offered in both Microsoft JET and SQL versions so it "can accommodate anyone from a sole practitioner to the firm with 100+ attorneys with multiple locations" but now includes a PC Docs integration facility for firms wanting full featured document management and has added email to its Outlook calendar integration.

QUORUM - Quorum has Robert Seidel Jr as its new national business development consultant. In this newly created management position he will have responsibility for developing customer service through sales training and product development concepts. Before joining Quorum, Seidel served as the president and chief financial officer for Progressive Legal Support, based in Los Angeles,

ASP - Bridgeway Software has launched a web-based ASP and outsourcing service for corporate legal departments in the United States. The two services initially being offered are: eCounsel - a practice management program for corporate legal departments, and Secretariat V.5 - corporate secretary automation system.

VENABLES NEWSLETTER VOTED BEST BY BIALL
At the recent BIALL annual conference (British & Irish Association of Law Librarians) in Cork, Delia Venables' Internet Newsletter for Lawyers was voted the "Legal Serial Publication of the Year" for 2001. Barbara Tearle, president of BIALL and a member of the adjudication panel, said that the newsletter contained articles which "are both focused and topical. They have something for all sectors of the legal profession and for law librarians". She also said that Delia Venables "had filled an emergent niche with a newsletter making an appropriate use (given the subject matter) of the dual media of printed and web with links to the sites". Two other UK titles were highly commended by the judges: the New Law Journal, published by Butterworths and Legal Action published by the Legal Action Group. www.venables.co.uk

HERE COMES THE CHAMP
And, finally, congratulations to Alex Mehta, the London-based dotcom barrister and co-founder of the Freelawyer service, who won his recent boxing match with New York judge Philip Maier in a 'New World v New Economy' bout for the world white-collar light-middleweight title. Billed as Capital Punishment 2, the charity boxing event took place in London to raise funds for a children's hospice and featured a team of white-collar boxers from New York trade blows with a team representing the City of London. Mehta was a knock-out specialist when he was at Oxford University, notching up 19 consecutive first-round wins, national titles and international honours.