Information Law Possum

Interesting post on the Wired Blog Network about the website www.drabandabic.com. Some interesting aspects of that story:

a) It’s astonishing how quickly users create content (in casu: hoaxes) and how fast this gets noticed by large mainstream media (search for dragan dabic website on Google News). Karadzic was arrested no more than 40 hours ago.

b) Hoaxes can be uncovered very quickly by other users.

c) The use of the Whois Privacy Protection Service by the domain name registrant was useless: First, the whois entry still shows the date of the last update — July 22nd; second, the fact that the registrant used that service kind of reverses the burden of proof that the website isn’t a hoax.

d) It might have been profitable for the hoaxer to add Google ads to the website.

Today I saw that our Public TV network has been posting videos on its own YouTube channel for 10 months. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/user/SchweizerFer….

(They’ve been publishing content over their own website for a while now.)

Given the fact that Swiss TV viewers (including me) pay a mandatory fee of 400 dollars a year, I can only welcome this added service.

Returning from a vacation I saw today that Professor Solove posted a new paper to SSRN on July 12, the very day I went on holiday. I returned on July 21, the day the last tome of the Harry Potter saga went on sale–the lines at the bookstores’ cashiers at Dublin airport were almost as long as the ones at the security check.
Now legal scholarship appears to have its new J.K. Rowling: Professor Solove’s paper was downloaded 39′000 times within thirteen days (it’s now 4th on the all-time ranking), and there are 30,000 Google hits for the terms “daniel solove” “nothing to hide”. This is absolutely fascinating and — from this side of the atlantic — hard to explain, given that Professor Solove’s other SSRN papers are popular, too, but not on this scale.
One reason for the paper’s popularity could be that it is based on and a reaction to a discussion on the author’s blog, but I’m not sure whether this is the only reason for the paper’s success.

Mr Güggi, the managing director of the Swiss online law review Jusletter, today wrote me that he shares my wish and announced that they aim to set up an “reply” feature by Summer 2007.

Looking forward to Jusletter 2.0!