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"Employee Non-Compete Agreements: Protecting Innovation or Stifling It?" – Harvard's Berkman Center to Debate Economic Implications of Noncompete Agreement

See Xconomy article here for details. Quoting from the article:

Employee Non-Compete Agreements: Protecting Innovation or Stifling It?

Thursday, June 19th, 3:00-7:00 pm

Ames Courtroom, 2nd floor of Austin Hall, Harvard Law School

There will be a panel discussion, followed by a cocktail reception. Anyone is free to attend. You just have to register by June 12 (a week before the event) by emailing your name, title and company to Amar Ashar at the Berkman Center: ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu.

Quick Hits: Supreme Court Arguments, Unpublished Mass Appeals Court Decisions, Trademark Law Decision

The “Oyez” web site now presents oral arguments before the Supreme Court in multimedia: As you listen to the argument you see a synchronized transcript, and a photo of the judge or lawyer speaking appears every time there is a change in speaker. This multimedia presentation makes the experience of listening to these arguments much easier and more pleasant. Link here.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court has made its unpublished decisions available here. This is particularly helpful, since these decisions are difficult to obtain, and on February 25, 2008, the Court issued a ruling permitting unpublished decisions to be cited for their “persuasive value.” This modified a 23 year old court rule that unpublished decisions could not be cited as legal authority.

Massachusetts Federal District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor, IV has issued a written decision in Commerce Bank and Trust Co. v. TD Banknorth, Inc. (see below). Judge Saylor found a likelihood of confusion between “Commerce Bank” and “TD Commerce Bank,” and issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the plaintiff. While this decision is unexceptional, it is a helpful road map to trademark law in this district, and is another example of Judge Saylor’s crisp and comprehensive writing style.

Read this doc on Scribd: Commerce Bank PI Decision

Dummies Guide to Understanding Subprime Mortgages

A lot of people are having a hard time understanding how the country got into the sub-prime mortgage mess, or even exactly what a “sub-prime mortgage” is. How could so many intelligent, responsible people in housing, banking, finance and government have gotten this so wrong? If you’re are one of these people, this skit may aid your understanding.

Judges Who Blog

Very few judges blog, but Massachusetts Federal District District Court Judge Nancy Gertner is one of the first, if not the very first. An article in the May 27, 2008 Boston Globe discusses her blogging for Slate, one of the best online magazines.

If you’re interested in reading Judge Gertner’s blogs, go to “Convictions: Slate’s Blog on Legal Issues” and use the “Search This Blog” field in the upper right corner of the screen to search for “Gertner”.

Judge Gertner’s first blog entry, on March 17, 2008, opens as follows:

I am an unlikely blogger. I am a United States District Court judge for the District of Massachusetts. . . . Although judges are more limited than other public actors in what they can say about a host of things, like cases pending before me or even cases pending before other judges, we are permitted to speak about the administration of justice and other general legal matters. To me, the issue goes beyond what we are “permitted” to comment about and what we are not “permitted” to comment about. I think judges have a responsibility to participate in the public debate and that’s what I hope to do here — all consistent with, indeed enhancing, my “day” job.

Click here for the full post.

The TimesMachine

If you have a home delivery subscription to the New York Times (even only the Sunday Times), check out the TimesMachine — a collection of full-page image scans of the newspaper from 1851-1922. That’s every issue and every page and article, advertisements and all, viewable in their original format.

April 16, 1912

To read how this was done, click here.

“Using Amazon Web Services, Hadoop and our own code, we ingested 405,000 very large TIFF images, 3.3 million articles in SGML and 405,000 xml files mapping articles to rectangular regions in the TIFF’s. This data was converted to a more web-friendly 810,000 PNG images (thumbnails and full images) and 405,000 JavaScript files – all of it ready to be assembled into a TimesMachine. . . . “