Slashdot Mirror

A public policy, existing through the years, and derived from a profound knowledge of human characteristics and motives, has established a rule that demands of a corporate officer or director, peremptorily and inexorably, the most scrupulous observance of his duty, not only affirmatively to protect the interest of the corporation committed to his charge, but also to refrain from doing anything that would work injury to the corporation, or to deprive it of profit or advantage which his skill and ability might properly bring to it, or to enable it to make in the reasonable and lawful exercise of its powers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guth_v._Loft_Inc.

There's also Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, but Many say that it's not useful law anymore, but I think that's because the primacy of shareholder wealth maximization has been internalized into corporate law and culture. Shareholders sue corporations all the time for not maximizing shareholder value. There seem to be no doubts about the primacy of this practice in the journals:

This essay, "In Defense of the Shareholder Wealth Maximization Norm, appeared in the Symposium on New Directions in Corporate Law published in volume 50 of the Washington & Lee Law Review. This essay was written as a reply to an article in the same symposium by Professor Ronald M. Green - "Shareholders as Stakeholders: Changing Metaphors of Corporate Governance," 50 Wash. & Lee. L. Rev. 1409 (1993) - in which Professor Green criticized the dominant view of corporate governance, according to which directors have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder wealth. In sharp contrast, this essay argues that the principle of shareholder wealth maximization is both a valid positive account of corporate law and also a legitimate normative proposition.

link

Alas, I have no LexisNexis account.

Toyota shareholders sue over fallen stock price
Shareholders Sue the Pants Off Yahoo

Directors and officers are obligated to maximize shareholder value. Shareholder value is largely perceived as the current stock price. Current stock price is largely based on the latest quarterly profit report. I think arguments to the contrary are rather naive.

Well, one company is clearly setting themselves up for some big lawsuits in the event of a Google-Toyota merger.

TorrentFreak reports that Toyota's lawyers have recently contacted computer wallpaper site Desktop Nexus in a blatant example of DMCA abuse. Toyota issued a blanket request to demand the immediate removal of all member-uploaded wallpapers featuring a Toyota, Lexus, or Scion vehicle

Desktop Nexus... Toyota, Lexus, or Scion

...Nexus Lexus...

Lexis Nexis

God damn lawyers.

At the (UK) university where I work we subscribe to Lexis Nexis (http://www.lexisnexis.com/). This gives full text from loads of newspapers around the world - there are no images (i think) and you can't see the contemporary ephemera such as adverts, but it's great for stories.

A search for '9/11' (as an example of a massively covered event worlwide) gives thousands of results and with the first thousand English language hits there are newspapers such as: Cobourg Daily Star (Ontario); The Independent (London); The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); The Scotsman & Scotland on Sunday; Seattle Post-Intelligencer; South Bend Tribune; New Straits Times (Malaysia); The Japan Times.

Unless google is planning on doing like-for-like digitisations and/or giving free access to everyone I don't see that they are offering anything that doesn't already exist (admittedly as a [probably] expensive research tool).

Don't most companies assert ownership of copyrights/patents/anything created by its employees (by forcing employees to sign contracts giving them this ownership of course)? We should be forcing the legislative bodies (who are our employees) to sign similar contracts.

Buy hey, the party doesn't stop at the state level... check out the ordinance code for my local county. I obtained this link from the official county website: http://municipalcodes.lexisnexis.com/codes/fresno/

There it is, in black and white: "No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher."

So according to a private company, I'm not allowed to posses a copy of the ordinance code which governs my life and my rights. Fantastic!

What a world...

They could probably only win a trespassing case if the private road was fenced or gated off and the Google driver opened the gate to get in without permission. Simply sticking up a Private Property sign is not enough. I'm not saying Google was right in driving on their road but there's no way they could be charged with trespassing in this case.

Probably depends on what state they're in. I'm not a lawyer, but if I understand English, in Maryland they definitely could be charged with trespassing, and sticking up signs in fact is enough. And so you know I'm not just making stuff up, here's the link to the law, as well as the text:

(a) Prohibited.- A person may not enter or trespass on property that is posted conspicuously against trespass by: (1) signs placed where they reasonably may be seen; or (2) paint marks...

(b) Penalty.- A person who violates this section is guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction is subject to imprisonment not exceeding 90 days or a fine not exceeding $500 or both.

I found this here:

Connector Order and Priority

Connectors operate in the following order of priority:

1. OR
2. /n, +n, NOT /n
3. /s
4. /p
5. /seg
6. NOT /seg
7. AND
8. AND NOT

If you use two or more of the same connector, they operate left to right. If the "n" (number) connectors have different numbers, the smallest number is operated on first. You cannot use the /p and /s connectors with a proximity connector (e.g., /n).

Example: bankrupt! /25 discharg! AND student OR college OR education /5 loan is operated on in the following manner:

* Because OR has the highest priority, it operates first and creates a unit of student OR college OR education!.
* /5, the smaller of the /n connectors, ties together the term loan and the previously formed unit of student OR college OR education!.
* /25 operates next and creates a unit of bankrupt! /25 discharg!.
* AND, with the lowest priority, operates last and links the units formed in the second and third bullets above.

Yes, it's a press release, but there is a real case and real filings. Before all you guys dismiss this case just because you heard it from a news wire, you ought check and see the court filings. Filed in Cook County Illinois, June 23, 2008, case number 2008-L-006828.

2008-L-006828 LIMITNONE LLC GOOGLE INC 06/23/2008
https://w3.courtlink.lexisnexis.com/cookcounty/Finddock.asp?DocketKey=CAAI0L0AAGICI0LD

This is just off the top of my head..

Interwoven
Hummingbird DM system (Document management)
Casemap http://www.casesoft.com/
iPro http://www.iprocorp.com/
Concordance http://law.lexisnexis.com/concordance
LiveNote http://www.livenote.com/

These applications (or similar competing products) are used in every single law firm with more than 40 or so lawyers. A lot of them integrate with each other and with many other custom applications depending on the size of the law firm. An example is Hummingbird integrates directly into Outlook, Citrix, and Windows explorer, Many firms have custom front ends for iPro and Concordance for case management across different firms. A lot of archiving solutions work directly with these apps as well. Third party companies that process and manage case materials for submission to courts use this exact software. Imagine trying to manage, review and maintain search able databases of 3 or 4 GB of data across multiple law firms and have a third party companies process, scan, and package data with some off the wall application that no one supports? It would not work. None support Mac at all or not to the level that is useful, hell, some of them don't even support Vista yet. People like to throw MS office out there and claim, see, you can switch to a different office package or run Office on a MAC but MS Office is such a small part of the whole thing. Most businesses are far more than a bunch of individuals sitting at a desk creating word processing documents and running one or two web based applications.

paid services like LexusNexis

it's actually LexisNexis.

I am in the wrong business.

I don't think Timeline made any money. In this it indicates that Timeline (and MS) paid $2.5m jury costs, so it looks like MS coughed up $5mill to feed the lawyers and pay Timelines expenses.

If you look here and research the case a bit, you'll find that a Maryland company may have actually been more responsible for ATT's abilities than ATT would like to admit. That company is now defunct, unfortunately, and so it's now safe for ATT to pretend that they've done work in the area without answering to more law suits.

It was a very technically challenging job. We helped to index records for these guys until mid-2005. We did it in effectively O(n) time - the cool factor was higher than the say-nothing factor.

And yes - I know that academia will claim that it's not possible, that data correlation must be O(n^2). For the decade that we did it, we were sure glad that academia held to that position.

Enough reminiscing.

to all the above:

listening to tech geeks talk about law is nearly as informative as listening to law geeks talk about tech. ;-)

criminal liability in court generally requires a showing of the existence of both a mens rea (criminal intent / guilty mind) and an actus reus (an illegal act proscribed by law). certain crimes which are considered especially injurious to our social fabric, such as statutory rape, or which constitute "simple" administrative violations, such as speeding, are subject to "strict liability", which means the act itself regardless of the intent is sufficient to establish the accused's guilt and to subject him/her to criminal liability. these crimes are--and need be under western principles of criminality--generally well-defined, however. don't worry: leeching a decoy mpaa torrent is not likely to be one of them.

a common concern expressed in the numerous posts above suggests a shared belief here at slashdot that the downloading of a non-existent copyrighted file cannot constitute a "crime" because no copyrighted file was downloaded. readers may be surprised to learn that while certain jurisdictions allow "legal impossibility" (eg. shooting, with the intent to kill, a dead person; pickpocketing an undercover cop, etc.) as a defense to liability for criminal attempt, others do not. (see http://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool/study/outlines /html/crim/crim20.htm for a primer.)

civil liability is another matter entirely: the standard of proof is less favorable to the "accused" in civil court than in criminal court... ... ...there is not likely to be a jury... ... ...OJ was found liable in a civil court (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.J._Simpson#Civil_t rial)... ... ...etc.

ianal.

This article refers to changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and as such would applicable to all companies involved in federal litigation. Note that IANAL. You can find a number of articles providing more detail than this one, including:

http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/Reports/ST09-2005.pd f
http://www.lexisnexis.com/applieddiscovery/lawlibr ary/whitePapers/ADI_FS_Top10TipsforFRCP.pdf
http://infogovernance.blogspot.com/2006/08/federal -rules-of-civil-procedure.html

http://informata.blogspot.com/

Google is starting to infringe on a couple of companies that already do this kind of thing but they charge for the service. This is exactly what companies like Lexis-Nexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com/?a=g and ProQuest, http://proquest.com/ do as their significant business model. Add to the "search all the old news" the ability to email you a daily report of keyword searches anywhere in your choice of selectable data sources and you have put them out of business. The significant difference is ProQuest built their business on all of the archived dissertations and Thesis of American colleges and Lexis-Nexis built their business on archiving legal andrnment proceedings but both have expanded into newpapers, magazines and TV broadcasts.

...I wait for Slashdot to report the news again! *ducks*

In all seriousness, it's always a good idea to have this information all in one place so you don't have to look for a million results. One thing I liked about my university's library is that they had a portal where you could search all their article databases from one point: You'd get back Lexis-Nexis results, web searches, etc. If Google can do this and tie together trade and scientific journals (say, the APA and thousands of others), then we'll be on our way. Right now one of the other option I can think of is LookSmart's FindArticles, although it seems small at only 10 million articles.

What the hell is Nexis-Lexis? Maybe the submitter meant LexisNexis and maybe the so-called editors should have caught this?

Before and during WWII all mail crossing an international border in or out of the US was steamed open and read. This included all mail, all packages, all telegrams, and all telephone calls. In addition to all mail being steamed open and read, it was censored if the Army deemed it to be necessary to support the goals of the Army. Letters would arrive with portions cut out by scissors. They also censored all international media -- radio, newspapers, and magazines both incoming and outgoing.

It's quite easy to imagine as it's already been done.

Did anyone read this link from the summary?

The folks get to ride a bus for 3 hours each day to/from work. Their shift is really a 12-hour shift because of this, since they get it at 15:00 and get home around 03:00. The day shifters get 9.50$ US/Hour, and night people get 50 cents more (a whole 4$ more/day; 1,040$ more/year).

Given 52 weeks with 5 business days, 8 hours/day, gives a salary of $19,760 before taxes for the day shifters. Is that above the US poverty line? In Saskatchewan (where most of basic healthcare is taken care of, and things like food are a bit cheaper), our poverty line is around $16,000/year. Any medical problem in the US is going to cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars -- I've seen what your drugs cost at the corner store. If you adjust it, I'd say they're probably pretty close to the poverty line.

Adjusting the 8/hour wages for the true 12/hour day with commute, the poor folks are actually earning $6.34 an hour, which is a lot closer to minimum wage. You can argue that the time on the bus isn't lost to them, but I don't see them being able to pursue most hobbies, clean their houses, or be there for their children in that time.

So, in fact, tech is not saving small town America. These folks are just as poor and not well off as any inner-city folks who have to bus for hours to work for almost nothing, while their children are home alone. They live in poverty, and they have no time to themselves for self development.

Like FDR did when in WWII ALL outgoing and incoming mail and telegrams were intercepted and censored if the government deemed it to be necessary?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt establishes the Office of Censorship in 1941 to censor communications between the United States and foreign countries and to prevent news organizations from publishing information the enemy might be interested in. Roosevelt appoints Byron Price, a respected journalist, to run the office. Price accepts the post on the condition that the media can voluntarily agree to self-censorship. The office employs 14,462 civilians to monitor cable, mail, and radio communications between the United States and other nations....

From December 19, 1941, until August 15, 1945, the Office of Censorship had the power to censor international communications at its "absolute discretion." With a staff of more than 10,000 censors, the office routinely examined mail, cables, newspapers, magazines, films, and radio broadcasts. Its operations constituted the most extensive government censorship of the media in U. S. history ...

The Lexis/Nexis database, a ubiquitous research tool by the late '80s.

Should have researched it more before posting, the name of the company was Matthew Bender and it looks like they got bought by LexisNexis. I had thought Penguin had bought them as there is now a Penguin Publishing sign and logo on the outside of the building where he worked.

So I'm guessing you aren't familiar with Shepard's, which basically solves this? Always shepardize your citations, my man.

The legal Citation tool? I didn't until you mentioned it. A quick google search found This. Is that what you meant? Another "service" provided by lawyers to make themselves money untangling the mess they made.

Perhaps. The point is that they exist, and influence what happens. You can't ignore reality. Additionally, while it's not justice, political concerns are important; laws should strive to serve both justice and the people.


In that order of precedence. Which is not the case. The current status quo has it the other way around. Right and wrong be damned, reelection is paramount!


Just because it hasn't been repealed doesn't mean it's still the law. Courts can't change what's in the statute books, but they can still overturn.

Unless I'm mistaken, it can't be overturned unless its challenged. And it can't be challenged unless someone is charged under it. Which means *gasp* paying a lawyer. Seems to be a recurring theme here...

This is why it's important for laws to generally reflect social norms.

Which ours tend to not do, especially lately. Instead, they represent the "right to profit" of the top income people at the *expense* of the people they're supposed to be "representing the will" of.

However, most laws are irrelevant to most people. The Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure is a big book.

Two words: Tax Law. Those effect EVERYONE. But only a SELECT few actually understand what the hell is going on there.

This is the case with most laws: they exist to do their jobs, not to be clear to random people that, while they are bound by them, never actually even approach the cases in which they matter.

This seems to be the point where we split, because their "job," in my view, is PREVENTATIVE. Whereas you seem to think they are PUNITIVE. If someone is dragged off before a judge, it should be because they KNEW the law and willfully broke it. That's a warning sign of a sociopath who might need to be removed from society.

Instead, we have hundreds if not thousands of seemingly inoccuous actions that may or may not be illegal because some politician somewhere got his panties in a bunch over something that pissed him, or a vocal minority of his constituency, off.

Is there anyone who knows everything there is to know about their profession? Probably only people in the most simplistic of fields. You don't see me claiming that we ought to rip out all plumbing and start over fresh just because plumbers that repair household leaks aren't knowledgable enough to single-handedly design a water and sewage system for a major metropolis that incorporates all knowledge of their field.

LAW should be one of those fields. If they are expected to be followed by the most simplistic of people, then they should be understood by them. The current law system is apparently modelled after the medieval Church: lawyers are the new priests, the middlemen making the word of on high knowable to the unwashed masses, for a not-so-modest fee, of course.

Bad plumbing does not cost one the supposedly greatest virtue of American society: freedom. Broken law systems like ours do.

Well, Wikipedia says they have the 5th largest defense budget in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Self-Defense_Fo rces

And a Japanse professor

http://www.lexisnexis.com/academic/2upa/Ias/Occupa tionJapanRearmament.asp

The amendment seems to have been simply within the scope of reaffirming habeas corpus despite possible confusion that the Patriot Act might infringe it. I can't find the killed amendment online (yet), but it passed unanimously in committee, before being killed by Republicans on the floor in a purely partisan vote:
Rep. LOFGREN: Well, as you know, we completed action last night, and on a party-line vote, the bill was passed. ...
You know, when the assistant attorney general came to testify before the committee on the act, I asked him whether he thought it might not be a good idea to reaffirm that the Congress of the United States has not acted to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. I offered that amendment last night, yesterday evening, and it was unanimously adopted. And then after much flurrying around with kind of Justice Department dweebs, there was a party-line vote to revote that amendment, and the Republicans voted against the proposition that we have not suspended the write of habeas corpus, so that's kind of chilling news for the country and an additional reason to be concerned.

I doubt the committee passed some kind of pork sandwich wrapped in habeas corpus. Especially since at least one Republican would have voted for it. If someone can show me the amendment, and it's really just pork or some other exploding cargo, I'll believe your theory. Until then, I'll accept the completely plausible assertion of Rep. Lofgren. And refuse to accept the Act, which now obviously targets the destruction of habeas corpus (unless, perhaps, you're a Congressmember, or used to run Enron/HealthSouth/ArthurAnderson).

... it shows me what a void there is still to fill!

ISI has had a fantastic run providing bibliometric research tools for nearly 30 years, but only to deep-pocket libraries. WebOfScience finally brought the ISI analysis of academic pubs into 21st century, and so it is no surprise that they quickly bumped into Google, who brought fundamentally the same insight (citation impact/in-degree is a great clue) to the Web. If GoogleScholar has simply nudged Thomson (who bought ISI in 1992) to broaden the market for this tool, that's already progress in my book.

For now, the interesting part to me is a compare/contrast of just what each brings to the party. While this review by Péter Jacsó' (his earlier review is also helpful) is part of Thomson/Gale's site, I think it's unfair to see it simply as a vendor whitepaper; he identifies serious flaws in GoogleScholar. But even with the price differential aside, it must be clear to all that WoS has some serious issues, too! (Some of you might be interested in an author-focused comparison I did recently between GS and WoS: Scientific impact quantity and quality: Analysis of two sources of bibliographic data , arXiv.org preprint arXiv:cs.IR/0504046, 11 Apr 05). Do they really want to hold up the interface to WoS as a virtue?! Checkout the touchgraph browser for CiteSeer as an example of what we can hope for. And while there isn't yet an API to GoogleScholar, screen-scraping at least lets us do some experiments over this corpus; WoS does not seem willing to provide similar access (I've tried:).

These aren't the only two vendors, of course: GoogleScholar was certainly inspired by the CiteSeer (originally at NEC, now at UPenn) project; it continues to be an innovative force. Our local, generally well-stocked library doesn't carry Scopus (too expensive?), but I hear good things about it. Entrez/PubMed has been mentioned and (while it is great in many other dimensions!) I don't see it is as especially relevant until the citation linkages it is beginning to build via PubMedCentral come online. And when the NIH's "Open Access" policy (cf. [Science 11 February 2005; 307: 825 DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5711.825], but not without a subscription:) starts to kick in, and as changing standards regarding exchange of ``open citation'' information (e.g, CrossRef) propagate, the pace of change is bound to accelerate.

Looking a bit farther afield for suggestions of what might be coming, some of you lawyer-types may appreciate what Shepards does for case law searching. They orignally started doing simply the manual "inversion" of citation links that ISI does, but grew into an entirely new source of independent analysis of the arguments connecting the two documents. Imagine how helpful it could be if scientific and web citations carried as much third-party (ie, from neither the cited or citing authors) metadata!

From http://privacyfacts.lexisnexis.com/consumerswlette r/index.html : The letter includes instructions on how you can sign up for this help and a promotional code that eliminates the need to use a credit card to access the services, so you do not have to pay for the service. It sounds like you do not need to pay for the service. That said, it sounds like LexisNexis really needs to watch their collective asses.

Go here http://www.lexisnexis.com/terms/privacy/data/remov al.asp to get the form you can print out and FAX to LexisNexis to opt out of their database.

You're distracted by the movies, which have nothing to do with the science of global climate change. It's like sending a guy to Washington because he played a killer robot from the future convincingly. The chaos starting to become evident in our atmosphere is the subject of lots of increasingly alarming science from not only reputable scientists, but from the overwhelming consensus of their community. As well as the head of oil giant Shell. And the head of insurance giant Lloyd's. Some serious predictions show the Antarctic is melting at a rate now that will raise the seas 15' in the next 100 years. That means a 50% chance the Gulf Stream change, dropping temperature by 5'C - which itself means a 70% chance that the Gulf Stream will stop completely by 2200. Those probabilities are very high - well beyond the threats we otherwise take deadly seriously. Denying it as some kind of Hollywood stunt wouldn't even rate a grade B movie plot.

...done that...

Talk to the hand.
You go girl.

My first thought when I read this was that Google could easily challenge Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw for their hold on the law school community in the US. While my wife was in law school I routinely helped her research cases using both of these services, and quite frankly their interface sucks. It took forever to find just about anything, and they had to continually pelt the students with free gifts just to keep them coming back. Google could potentially do very well in this area and I think there is certainly room for another competitor; especially one with Google's name recognition.

The Government and the DHS already uses a system like this. It was developed by a former client of mine Lexis Nexis called Risk Management Solutions.

This is used by various employers and government agencies (local, state and federal). This knowledge system could pull up reports indicating various aspects of your life including where you have lived, who your neighbors are/were, driving record, criminal records, Judgements/Liens/Bankruptcies, property ownership and much much more.

The system is limited in its search capability based on who the customer is (i.e. employers or potential employers) cannot access criminal records, driving records and such.

Additionally Lexis Nexis recently purchased a company called Seisint that gives them an even bigger stake in the profiling and data mining business as it relates to Risk Management.

You notice that there's no "opt out" anywhere on the locateplus.com website.


At least some other database companies, such as lexis-nexis.com will let you at least opt out.

I wonder how long before these private databases are mandated to respond to "opt out" requests.

There was a US tort case involving some rather painful defenses along the lines of the parent post. In that case, I believe that the holding was regardless of how much warning you give a person, there is a point at which you're using unnecessary force and you're liable for injuries. See, for example, the Restatements of Tort Law here. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. Check the case law in your jurisdiction for what your liability would be.

Says the parent:

The police are here to protect me.

Well, yeah, in an ideal and probably ordinary world that's so. But, according to a lexisnexis.com bit:

because any duty owed is limited to the public at large rather than to any specific individual.

I can speak to the medical privacy issue from personal experience. I was a less qualified person on a fire department type basic life support team. We see people in some of their most vulnerable times and take measures to protect their privacy. It's to everyone's benefit because we often need quick answers to do our job right, quickly, and get back to the house. It's law & policy too.

Offtopic, but don't depend on being able to tell the medics that you're allergic to anything. For the slashdot demographic, if you really, really need the medics, you'll probably be half conscious, naked (God help my mind's eye) and otherwise not up to answering questions. Get a bracelet, make sure your roomies know or whatever. And for pity's sake, don't worry about embarassing yourself or the medics. Anybody that cares will have long since left after they've seen their first old lady-cpr case. No one cares, but I digress.

Anyway, they probably will help, but they don't owe you or me anything, US maybe. That's how I read the law anyway.

Damn!

I did not realize that LexisNexis did more than the case law searches...

The one that seems particularly interesting is the "Instant ID" product (details)...

"

Damn!

I did not realize that LexisNexis did more than the case law searches...

The one that seems particularly interesting is the "Instant ID" product (details)...

"

Privilege isn't the only issue, unless it is somehow relevant to the case, it's still not something FSF has to give out willingly

(b) Discovery Scope and Limits. Unless otherwise limited by order of the court in accordance with these rules, the scope of discovery is as follows:

(1) In General. Parties may obtain discovery regarding any matter, not privileged, that is relevant to the claim or defense of any party, including the existence, description, nature, custody, condition, and location of any books, documents, or other tangible things and the identity and location of persons having knowledge of any discoverable matter. For good cause, the court may order discovery of any matter relevant to the subject matter involved in the action. Relevant information need not be admissible at the trial if the discovery appears reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. All discovery is subject to the limitations imposed by Rule 26(b)(2)(i), (ii), and (iii).

Rule 401. Definition of "Relevant Evidence"

"Relevant evidence" means evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.

Privilege isn't the only issue, unless it is somehow relevant to the case, it's still not something FSF has to give out willingly

(b) Discovery Scope and Limits. Unless otherwise limited by order of the court in accordance with these rules, the scope of discovery is as follows:

(1) In General. Parties may obtain discovery regarding any matter, not privileged, that is relevant to the claim or defense of any party, including the existence, description, nature, custody, condition, and location of any books, documents, or other tangible things and the identity and location of persons having knowledge of any discoverable matter. For good cause, the court may order discovery of any matter relevant to the subject matter involved in the action. Relevant information need not be admissible at the trial if the discovery appears reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. All discovery is subject to the limitations imposed by Rule 26(b)(2)(i), (ii), and (iii).

Rule 401. Definition of "Relevant Evidence"

"Relevant evidence" means evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.

According to a search on Lexis/Nexis (paid search; subscription required) Claria Corporation donated $10,000 to Mozelle Thompson's campaign and WhenU.com donated $20,000.

This shall not stand. I'm prepared to take action.

I stand corrected. Almost everyone agrees. Or maybe "almost all reasonable people".

Who cares about stealing numbers from the phone book? That would be RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE CO.. At least they cared enough to spend a lot of money on legal fees.

And FYI, there are two BIG web publishers of Legal info: West/Thompson (used to be just West) and LexisNexis and a few smaller ones, like VersusLaw (where I work).

Not a sig, but my fav--
There are 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Nearly all discussion I can find specifically addresses Eminent Domain, where a government takes private property from citizen or citizens and under what circumstances that might happen.

I think we're getting crossways on the difference between 'private property'/'public property' and "public forum". Your constitutional right to free speech is not protected on private property from the owner of that property. If you are the owner, you say what rights of speech someone has there. Here is an article discussing property rights, that should make clear the distinction between a 'public forum' and 'public property' or 'private property'.

• Obviously you have never lived in a country that kills its OWN citizens. For something closer to your home (assuming USA), check out the Waco atrocities committed by the government, as well as Ruby Ridge. Here is some If you are into films, you can also check out the controversial documentary on it.
• Obviously you haven't heard of the totalitarian regimes in Germany, USSR, and USA's close friends Saudi Arabia and Egypt. A couple of stories on the state of Egypt (USA's 2nd large recipient of military aid)
• Obviously you haven't heard of the damage done to civil rights activists in the 60's by the FBI and the CIA. Laws were actually changed to prevent this sort of thing.
• Obviously you have never been targetted by the police. (I have no proof of this but if you let me track you, I can find out :) )
• Obviously you are not a minority man (particularly black) living in some parts of USA. (Don't know this either. But I can easily verify this if you send your driver's license to me)
• Obviously you haven't heard of the infiltration of the FBI by organized criminals (particularly the Italian mafia in the 60's and 70's).
• Obviously you haven't heard of police fabricating information and jailing people.
• Obviously you haven't heard of the government cooking up bogus charges and jailing people. (Refer to the previous link and do your research)
• Obviously McCarthyism is not part of your collective mind.
• Obviously you haven't heard of John Ashcroft's recent decree to spy on antiwar activists.
• Obviously you believe the legal system represent justice. (I can't prove this to anyone. It is something that you will realize as you grow up and leave the cave that you have been living in--if you actually manage to do that!)
• Obviously you underestimate the power of the goverment.

Try this one you republican bi-tatch.

Traditional republican tactics-
1)Lie out the ass.
2)when confronted with a counter argument, imply that the source is unreliable because it is not conservative enough.
3)when confronted with mainstream sources, imply that they do not exist because they're not on your lap in a silver platter.
4)when you're confronted with the raw facts in your lap, wave off the whole discussion as "no longer relevant" or "old news" then make up a new lie.
5)Steal an election, tear up the constitution and wipe your ass on the flag. Then salute the confederate flag and export jobs to the 3rd world.
6)No profit, but you already own everything so who cares as long as you keep your powerbase intact.
7)Kill babies.

As reporters and researchers depend more and more heavily on the Internet as a research tool, manipulation of the net becomes a serious problem

I don't think what Time does on their site has any real bearing on what most reporters and researchers will find. This is because most of them use lexis nexis. It is my understanding that lexis nexis will keep a copy of the article (I'm not sure, it costs money to use). Even if it doesn't, it will keep references to it. It will be shown to exist.

What would cause for concern is lexis nexis removing stuff.

You don't quite have it right about Lexis/Nexis. Lexis is a mind-bogglingly huge research database of many things -- mostly articles from thousands of periodicals of every kind and case opinions from practically every federal and state court that writes opinions -- that's used primarily by scholars, journalists and lawyers for research.

Its people finder function is useful and somewhat scary in its comprehensiveness, but that's certainly not where Lexis derives most of its value, and I'm positive it's not anywhere near the function that's most often used. Lexis' value is in the depth and breadth of the size of its database and its rich search capability. For example, the number of documents (NOT the number of pages!) it has certainly exceeds the number of pages Google indexes -- Lexis has 4.1 billion DOCUMENTS in its database, whereas Google indexes over 3 billion PAGES. And Lexis's searches are robust and very fast.

Lexis is extremely expensive, though. A $300,000 charge isn't that surprising to me, if Lamo used it fairly often and not just to search his name. Repeated searches across the entire news database, I'm sure, is ridiculously expensive, if you don't have a negotiated rate.

But this guy was using a Times account to order outside services from LexisNexis and those guys ain't cheap. I suspect the victims will also be able to quantify how much it took to repair their system. However, I hope they're not counting the cost of closing the security holes since Lamo only exploited the holes -- he didn't make them.

Google indexes and searches a lot of information, almost certainly more than LexisNexis.

According to Google's website, Google searches over 3 billion pages. According to Lexis's website, lexis covers 3.3 billion documents. I suspect that converting web pages into documents, Google would cover somewhat less than 3 billion documents. You should know that! Tsk tsk. Tell us about the lexis network infrastructure -- I've heard it's pretty cool.

Disclaimer: I'm an attorney that greatly prefers lexis.com over westlaw, but the above is entirely factual (at least, according to the respective services).

Academic universe IS avalible to libraries, and not just school libraries.

Before we get all pissy over this, we may wish to read about the services that are avalible from Lexis to libraries. Pricing for a non school library requiers you to contact a lexis rep, but I would guess they price it based on number of terminals that can access it at once, and the products that a library selects.

I do know that very few opt for the entire Academic Universe set, and I would guess that the rep she talked to had never priced it before or didn't know how to price it, so just said it was not avalible. Next time ask to speak with a manager.

Name Removal Forms:
http://www.lexisnexis.com/terms/privacy/data/remov al.asp
http://www.lexisnexis.com/lncc/about/removal_copy( 1).html

Obtain a copy of info:
https://web.lexis.com/consumeraccess2.0/consumerac cess.asp