IN THIS ISSUE
Oyez up for sale - More changes at Keystone - Internet proposals causing confusion - Legal news in brief - Microsoft & the DoJ, again - Napster, again - Protection for online designs 10 days away - Dot Biz to get new start - Industry & Professional news in brief - Next issue: 25.10.2001

OYEZ GOES UP FOR SALE
One of the oldest and best known names in the UK legal market - Oyez - is up for sale following the decision by the private equity group Bridgepoint Capital (previously NatWest Ventures) to sell its 75 percent stake in the Oyez Straker legal stationery and office supplies group for between £80-£90 million. Oyez has a projected turnover of £138 million and a projected operating profit of £10 million for the 12 months to August next year.

Along with the stationery operations, which now includes the old Stat Plus business it bought for £17.7 million last year, the company's best known subsidiary is probably the Oyez Legal Technologies litigation support services division. Bridgepoint's deadline for offers is the end of November but the sale is unlikely to be concluded until early next year.

MORE CHANGES AT KEYSTONE
Keystone Solutions director of product development & services Mike Clements is leaving the legal systems company and believed to be going into consultancy. Keystone say they appreciate the work he has done for the company although Legal News Media heard that he was leaving "for philosophical reasons" - whatever that may mean.

Meanwhile Keystone has adopted a new international management model, giving increased autonomy to newly-appointed managing directors in the UK/Europe and Australia/New Zealand so as to move "decision making closer to the customer and the market."

Keystone's former director of marketing and business development, Kaye Sycamore, has been appointed managing director responsible for Keystone's subsidiaries in Australia and New Zealand. Sycamore will also have overall responsibility for product development and delivery from Keystone's application development centre in Auckland, New Zealand. Peter Smales, former international sales director for Keystone, has been appointed managing director responsible for Keystone's operations in UK and Europe. Recruitment is underway for the position of managing director for Keystone's North American operations.

And, one of New Zealand's top five largest law firms, Chapman Tripp, has signed a $NZ 1.3 million contract with Keystone for the implementation of a new IT system..

INTERNET DATA PROPOSALS CAUSING CONFUSION
The UK Government's plans to beef up its post September 11 anti-terrorism laws are causing confusion within the internet community with apparently contradictory statements being made about proposals relating to the storage of data and email files.

At the beginning of the week the Home Office said businesses, including ISPs, would be required to retain records of emails and internet usage for 12 months - currently most ISPs only hold such data for three months. At the time Home Secretary David Blunkett merely said the government would "work with the industry on a code of practice to take (the measures) forward". But he did not say whether this would be a voluntary or mandatory code - and he did not say who would pick up the bill for storing and managing all this extra data, a key factor given that in the UK alone there are over 400 million email messages in circulation every day.

The ISP industry said it hoped it would be a voluntary code but a subsequent statement from the Home Office said it would be a statutory requirement. The government has yet to decide precisely what sort of information it wants storing however it has ruled out requiring ISPs to store the content of emails on the grounds of the expense. And, according to the magazine Computer Weekly, the government has also been talking privately about a compromise solution that would be based on a voluntary code that could be enforced by civil action against companies that refuse to comply.

LEGAL NEWS IN BRIEF
LAW FIRM AGENT SPAMS FOR BUYER - We are used to hearing lawyers warning about the legal perils of spamming but this is the first time we have ever encountered a law firm spamming the legal internet to try to find a buyer for its practice. To be fair, the culprit is actually a UK consultancy called Bottom Line (no jokes about scraping barrels please) acting as agents for a solicitors practice in Kent and we suspect the firm has no idea that its details are being spammed to the world. Bottom Line, incidentally, actually claim that their skills including helping law firms develop their "web site and internet presence". Oh, yeah?

PRIOR REGISTRATION FOILS FSA - The UK's Financial Services Authority has been foiled in its latest attempt to secure the rights to the fsa.co.uk domain name from a small IT company Findlay Steele Associates, which has been using the name since 1997, long before the FSA even came into existence. Last month the UK domain name registrar Nominet ruled in favour of the FSA and suspended Findlay Steele's address. This month Findlay Steele's lawyers had the ruling overturned, leaving the FSA back where it started with, among other things if the report in the Guardian newspaper is anything to go by, confidential emails being sent to the wrong address by magic circle City of London law firms. Apparently the FSA objected to a price of several thousand pounds when they first tried to buy the domain name - Findlay Steele say that as a result of the legal aggravation, that price has now gone up.

E-COMMERCE & CONSUMPTION TAXES - The UK's Institute of Directors has published a discussion paper by Richard Baron looking at the difficulties which tax authorities will face in applying consumption taxes, such as VAT, to sales of digitised products, such as downloadable music and software files. The IoD paper is available for downloading from www.iod.com/policy/papers

NSW LAW SOCIETY ISSUES DISCUSSION PAPER - The Law Society of New South Wales (Australia) has prepared and Issues Paper looking at the 'Security and Authentication Requirements in the Court Process'. It is in two parts: Part 1: Current security practices and requirements - a survey of courts' approaches to online security in Australia and the US. Part 2: Technological solutions for security and authentication in the legal environment The paper is designed to generate discussion. Submissions are invited by Friday 2 November 2001. Word and PDF versions are available at www.lawsocnsw.asn.au/technology/papers/2001_aug/

MICROSOFT RETRACTS NOVELL CLAIM - Microsoft has agreed to halt a promotional campaign which appeared to imply that Novell's NetWare platform had an expiration date. Novell last month launched a lawsuit accusing Microsoft of false advertising and Microsoft has now agreed to sent retraction letters to all the recipients of the original promotional mailshot - a dummy box of breakfast cereal (no, don't ask). However latest reports suggest Novell will still pursue a claim for compensation from Microsoft.

LAW REPORTS WE HAVE LOVED - To celebrate 135 years of law reporting from 1865 to 2000, the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England & Wales has published a special issue of The Law Reports and Weekly Law Reports featuring ten of the most historic cases reported during this period. They include the advertising industry's favourite Carlill -v- Carbolic Smoke Ball, the snail in the ginger beer case Donoghue -v- Stevenson, which almost single-handedly created the negligence litigation industry, and R -v- Dudley & Stephens, which showed the worse things really do happen at sea. For more contemporary law reports visit www.lawreports.co.uk

WALL STREET ASKS JUDGE TO STAND DOWN - Wall Street securities firms, involved in a class action suit brought by investors alleging improper activities in the IPO market during the recent dotcom boom, have asked Manhattan federal court Judge Shira Scheindlin to stand down because she and her family owned shares in some of the companies that are part of the case. The judge is so far refusing to budge, saying she has already disclaimed any interest in benefiting from any possible damages awarded to the plaintiffs, and at least one of the defendant securities firms - Morgan Stanley - has distanced themselves from the move, saying they believe them meritless as "Scheindlin is an excellent and fair judge".

THE COOKIE DOESN'T CRUMBLE ANYMORE - America Online has changed its privacy policy to allow the use of cookies and another controversial tracking device called web bugs, which both help monitor the usage and readership of web content.

MICROSOFT & THE DoJ, PART 99
In the latest installment of the epic struggle between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice over the antitrust lawsuit, the new trial judge - Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly - has appointed Professor Eric Green, of the Boston University law school, to act as a mediator in the case, after the two sides failed to develop a settlement plan by her 12 October deadline. The two sides now have to work to a 2 November settlement deadline or risk the whole case heading back into court for retrial.

In a related development, the US Supreme Court last week refused to review the original ruling that Microsoft held a monopoly in the PC operating systems market and had maintained it illegally. The decision is expected to give the parties - who have been asked by Judge Kollar-Kotelly to negotiate 24 hours a day, seven day a week - an added impetus to settle the dispute.

NAPSTER CASE RUMBLES ON AS INQUIRY BEGINS
And just in case the Microsoft case does ever end, we still have the Napster saga to contend with. In the latest developments on this front, US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel last week rejected a move to bring the case to an end, saying there was not yet enough evidence to support the argument that Napster's service represented wholesale copyright infringement. She then went on to question how the big five record companies could avoid allegations of collusion if they participated in their own online music joint ventures. "Even if it passes antitrust tests, it still looks bad, sounds bad and smells bad".

The smell apparently spreads all the way to Washington DC, which earlier this week saw the Department of Justice announce it was widening its antitrust probe into the online music industry. Civil subpoenas have now been sent to all the key players within the music industry, including the RIAA industry trade body, seeking information on whether copyright rules and licensing practices are being used to control distribution.

PROTECTION FOR ONLINE DESIGNS JUST 10 DAYS AWAY
From Sunday 28 October, computer icons, graphic symbols and other types of design should become eligible for design protection. On this date, the UK Government is expected to bring into force the Registered Designs Regulations 2001, a new law protecting designs.

Although the practicalities are still to be worked out by the UK Patent Office, computer icons, software fonts and on-screen computer displays may now benefit from registered design protection for the first time, giving potentially significant and highly valuable protection to software and web designers. Registered rights are generally easier to enforce than unregistered ones as there is no need to prove a design has been copied.

"To take best advantage of the new law, software houses and web designers need to consider whether their designs can now be registered, and review the situation on an on-going basis," says Simon Stokes, Head of Intellectual Property at London law firm Tarlo Lyons. "Although these designs may continue to benefit from copyright, unregistered design right, trade mark, patent and 'passing off' protection, applying for a registered design under the new regime can give significant and highly valuable protection."

Up to now, UK designs have been protected by registration under the Registered Designs Act 1949. To get an industrial design registered, it had to be new ('novel'), be applied to a specific 'article' by an industrial process, and be features of shape, configuration, pattern or ornament that have an aesthetic appeal ('eye appeal'). Once registered, a designer would have a right lasting up to 25 years to prevent anyone else from using the design on products for which the design had been registered. A number of these requirements are now swept away or revised, making the revised right relevant to more than just the classic industrial designer. The background to the new law is the 1998 EU Directive on the Legal Protection of Designs. After much debate and lobbying, this Directive finally harmonises how designs can be protected by registration across Europe.

NEW START FOR BIZ NAMES
NeuLevel, the exclusive registry operator for the .BIZ top-level domain, has just announced that the .BIZ Registry will not go live on 23 October 2001, as previously scheduled. The new date is Wednesday 7 November, at 00:00:01 US Eastern Standard Time, at which time new registration requests will be taken on a first-come, first-serve basis.

"NeuLevel is taking extra care to ensure our systems will support the early go-live demand," said Doug Armentrout, CEO of NeuLevel. "Due to the significant market demand for the new TLDs, including .BIZ, we concluded that we needed extra time to test our systems in conjunction with our registrar channel partners. We are determined to launch a live registry service that can accept the market's demand, regardless of the amount of traffic generated."

Although that may be the official party line, it seems a coincidence that only last week a judge in Los Angeles placed 53,000 applications for the new .biz domain names on hold pending a decision on whether NeuLevel ran an illegal lottery when allocating the names. It looks like back to the drawing board for dot biz domain applicants.

INDUSTRY & PROFESSIONAL NEWS IN BRIEF
RUPERT FINDS NEW MENTOR - After 10 years with Equitrac in the UK, Rupert Murray is moving to Perceptive Technology as sales director to focus on the company's flagship Mentor product suite. Commenting on the move Murray said: "it has been an excellent 10 years with Equitrac, but it is now time for a new challenge. Perceptive Technology's growing reputation and excellent suite of products provide me with an exciting opportunity to be at the cutting edge of technology, whilst working with leading professional services firms." Murray's first outing for Perceptive will be at this year's LegalTech exhibition at the end of the month.

INVESTEXT ANALYST REPORTS IN PDF NOW ON WESTLAW.COM - Company research and industry trend analysis reports are now available on Westlaw.com in PDF file format from the US Investext group. The reports, found in the INVSTXT-PDF database on westlaw.com, contain in depth company and market analysis, opinions and forecasts and are displayed in their original format, with images, charts, graphs and tables appearing exactly as they were in the analyst's published document.

CONSULTANT REVAMPS WEB SITE - Lawrence McNulty, the head of the Client Appeal law firm marketing, PR and practice development consultancy in the UK, has just launched a revamped version of his company's web site. Clean look, good navigation and it tells you everything you need to know about the consultancy and its activities. www.clientappeal.co.uk

WEIL GETS BIRD MAN - Weil, Gotshal & Manges has announced the recruitment of partner Graham Defries, former head of the e-commerce practice group at Bird & Bird. Defries specialises in advising clients in the e-commerce, telecommunications and IT sectors on a range of commercial and corporate matters. He has advised several high profile e-commerce start-ups, from inception to IPO, on matters including equity funding, shareholder agreements, branding, software licences, outsourcing agreements and exchange membership agreements. He also advises major IT users and software houses on joint ventures, software purchase/development agreements, technology outsourcing and system procurement agreements.

SPRINGTIME IN PARIS - The Ark Group, the organisers of the recent Legal Solutions Europe event at The Hague, will hold next year's event in Paris. The show will take place at the end of May - exact dates still to be confirmed - at the Sofitel Paris Forum Rive Gauche, the largest convention hotel in Paris.