Printing from WestlawNext Enabled

This is not an April Fool's Day joke--I tried to print this morning from WestlawNext to our standalone printers, and it worked. Hallelujah! I can't wait to let our students know. I had heard through the grapevine that April 1 was to be the big day, but didn't believe it until I tried it myself. I still don't understand why it took until so late in the academic year to get the printing going, but I'm grateful all the same. My school was an early adopter of WestlawNext. We taught it to our first-year students last fall, and haven't regretted our choice at all. Students have taken to it very well, but were put off by the inability to print to the standalone printers. We publicized workarounds, but it was annoying all the same. With more content migrated to WestlawNext, having the standalone printing in place will be all the more valuable.

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New App for Shelfreading

Shelfreading is like dusting--no one wants to do it, but it has to be done. Now, however, a new Android app may make shelfreading a breeze. The brainchild of the Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group, the app "'reads' a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced. It will also point to the correct place on the bookshelf so the book can easily be re-shelved correctly." This description comes from Audrey Watters' post on the ReadWriteWeb blog. The post includes a video of Professor William "Bo" Brinkman demonstrating how shelfreading would work using the app. Professor Brinkman makes the point that the app won't work well for thin books as they would be difficult to tag. In addition, at the moment the "prototype only uses 16 bits on the tag, but Brinkman says the group is working on a version that would allow them to put around 72 bits on a tag, allowing the system to scale up to work with any library collection." Professor Brinkman says the app would also facilitate doing inventories of library collections. The app will be demonstrated at the ACRL conference on Saturday, April 2.

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The Criminal Justice System Gone Awry

Professor Brandon L. Garrett's sobering article, "Getting guilty right," published in the Boston Globe on March 28, presents the results of his study of 250 erroneous convictions using court records and archives housed at the Innocence Project. Garrett's book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, will be published in April, and expands on the conclusions he reaches in his Globe article.

Garrett uses the example of Neil Miller, wrongly convicted of a 1989 rape, to draw attention to the shortcomings of the criminal-justice system. By the time a new DNA test was performed thanks to the work of attorneys from the Innocence Project, Miller had served almost ten years in prison for a crime he did not commit. What went wrong in Miller's case? The DNA evidence in his case was not conclusive, and the "photo arrays" shown to the victim were handled in a "suggestive way." The victim did not positively identify Miller as her attacker until she saw him in the courtroom where it "was obvious that he was the suspect in her case." What did the jury see? "A victim pointing confidently to Neil Miller in the courtroom and declaring that he had attacked her." Conviction was a foregone conclusion.

Garrett discusses the methodology of his study:

In each case, the trial record can be read like a kind of airline accident report, a set of clues that points to what sent an innocent person to jail and let the real culprit go free. To amass the first systematic record of how these false guilty verdicts were reached, I located more than 200 trial transcripts, together with plea hearings, police reports, and judicial decisions in the cases of the first 250 convicts freed by DNA tests from 1989 through early 2010. With the help of law student research assistants, I then combed through the voluminous records. The results suggest real cause for concern about the accuracy of types of evidence that our courts routinely rely upon. Time and again, certain things went wrong, starting in the early stages of a case and later shaping what happened in the courtroom: the way eyewitness testimony was elicited, the reliability of forensic evidence, the handling of interrogations, and the way the investigations themselves were conducted.

He urges the American law-enforcement system to "learn from its mistakes ... to make things better." Garrett makes specific suggestions on how police can ensure the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and avoid false confessions, some of which come after the individual endured "high-pressure interrogation tactics over many hours." Garrett urges police to record entire interrogations and cautions against reliance on forensic evidence that may "sound scientific but actually depend on subjective judgment." Until the science has been improved, "judges need to carefully scrutinize forensics in their courtrooms." He ends on a hopeful note:

The costs of these wrongful convictions are now clear, as are the benefits of adopting reforms. A decade ago, only a handful of states had relaxed the strict rules that limited convicts’ ability to reopen their cases for new DNA testing, and now all but two states have done so. A decade ago, few police departments videotaped interrogations, and now over 750 do so. It took years to exonerate these innocent people and to understand what these cases can teach us about how to make our criminal justice system more accurate. Slowly but surely in reaction to these troubling cases, we are beginning to see the stirrings of a criminal procedure revolution.

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Bentham Project Revisited

In a blog post last December, I discussed the University College London's Transcribe Bentham Project, an experiment in crowdsourcing whose goal was transcription of the unpublished manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham. All the work was going to be done by volunteers, with their submissions being vetted by paid research associates. Now it looks as if the future of the project is in doubt. According to a post in the Wired Campus blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, lack of funding is going to cause "scholars to scale back [the] groundbreaking project ..." The government grant that paid for computer programmers, photography, and research associates is coming to an end, and private money needs to be found to keep the project going. The research associates were a vital link between the project and the volunteers, and once they are gone, the links will begin to break down. The director of the project, Philip Schofield, acknowledged that relying on volunteers was risky; some were put off by the difficulty of the undertaking, and bailed out after transcribing one or two documents. Mr. Schofield thinks that "one way to overcome that problem might be to use the crowdsourcing model in an entity like a museum ... which would already have an established community interested in its work."

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Darnton on Digital Libraries

The New York Times Opinion pages of March 23, 2011 carried an essay from Robert Darnton, the Harvard Librarian, "A Digital Library Better Than Google's." In response to Judge Denny Chin's rejection of the Google Book Settlement, Darnton revisits the dream of Google Books - a vast digital library, which makes available freely to anyone with a computer and internet connection, the literature of the world.

Darnton gives a nice precis of the action up til now: The Authors' Guild, representing a mere 8,000 members, proposed to sue Google for infringement of copyright. Google, which could have defended its actions as fair use, elected instead to negotiate a settlement agreement. This was what eventually went before Judge Chin, in a much-amended version, which...

divided up the pie. Google would sell access to its digitized database, and it would share the profits with the plaintiffs, who would now become its partners. The company would take 37 percent; the authors would get 63 percent. That solution amounted to changing copyright by means of a private lawsuit, and it gave Google legal protection that would be denied to its competitors. This was what Judge Chin found most objectionable.

Other objections were that other authors (and illustrators as well), who were not represented by the Author's Guild, did not like the agreement's terms, and wished to negotiate their own terms. But the Agreement covered everybody, unless they specifically contacted Google to opt out. Instead of correcting past problems, the Agreement set into stone the development of digital books in the future, according to many critics. For example,

the question of orphan books — that is, copyrighted books whose rightsholders have not been identified. The settlement gives Google the exclusive right to digitize and sell access to those books without being subject to suits for infringement of copyright. According to Judge Chin, that provision would give Google “a de facto monopoly over unclaimed works,” raising serious antitrust concerns.

Judge Chin invited the parties to rewrite the Settlement Agreement. Darnton, at Harvard, is part of a group that is thinking of ways to create a noncommercial alternative to the Google commercial model that is currently proposed. How to fund such a thing is a puzzle, but Darnton suggests, for example, a coalition of foundations working with a coalition of research libraries. He hopes that Congress would pass a bill exempting orphan works from copyrights for noncommercial purposes in a truly public library.

As examples of public digitization efforts that have succeeded, Darnton offers the Knowledge Commons and the Internet Archive which between them have digitized several million books. He also cites efforts in several countries to digitize completely the national library. This includes France, the Netherlands, Australia, Finland and Norway. He hopes that Google itself might donate its digitized trove to such an effort. It cannot hurt to ask, and the idea is an exciting one. While the current management at Google is good-hearted and public-spirited, there is certainly no guarantee that this will always be the case.

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Who Owns Sunlight?

I had never thought about who owns sunlight until I read an interview with Professor Stuart Banner of UCLA Law School. Professor Banner has recently published a book, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own, which, according to the publisher's blurb, is the "first comprehensive history of property in the United States." Banner's central thesis is that the nature of property has changed over time, and was once linked to ownership of tangible things. This is not so today, when ownership of intangibles such as ideas, HTML code, genetic material, artistic styles, and methods of making traditional medicinal remedies is accepted. Banner asserts that notions about what is property have been changing for centuries.

The nature of property, he argues, has been shifting for centuries, as society and technology change. Some types of property have vanished, like commons laws that stretch back to the first North American Colonies, while new ones have emerged, like ownership of the airwaves.

Banner is careful to point out that, through all those shifts, the real constant hasn't been what property is or how you can prove ownership, but what our property does for us. Our modern social definition of property ... took shape around the turn of the 20th century as a "bundle of rights." It has since evolved into a "set of relationships" among people, businesses, the state, and the land.

Banner uses sunlight to illustrate the notion of property as a bundle of rights. Elevated train lines that were built in some cities blocked the sun from buildings that abutted the lines. The buildings' "owners ... stated that it was an infringement of their property rights" to have the sunlight taken away, and they sued, in many cases successfully. The idea that the owners had a property interest in the right to receive sunlight would have been unthinkable a generation earlier.

Asked about the "burgeoning issues in property law," Banner pointed to the "use of aspects of traditional culture, art forms, medicine." Specifically, "Australian Aboriginal art with the lines and dots" is "traditional artistic style that groups came up with over long periods of time, so now groups are litigating for that style to be property of that people."

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