Hong Kong's first criminal file-sharing conviction

On appeal, the High Court of Hong Kong affirmed the defendant'sconviction on three charges of attempting to distribute an infringingcopy of a copyright work via a peer-to-peer online file-sharingprogram (BitTorrent).     

Should Abused Women's Reports of Partner Substance Abuse Be Accepted as Valid?

Current research suggests that a husband's substance abuse is correlated with severity of physical abuse and the woman's decision to leave a violent situation. Often, only the battered woman's report of abuse is available. This study compares women's reports of their partners' substance use/abuse with their partners' report using a brief measure of polydrug and alcohol abuse, the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory (SASSI) and the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS). Data were analyzed for 25 recovery couples and 25 nonrecovery couples. The correlations for all 50 couples between the male's reported use and the female's report of her partner's use on the SASSI and the CTS were significant on all but one of the CTS scales. They ranged on SASSI from .73 to .33 and from .31 to .06 on the CTS. This suggests that the SASSI and possibly the CTS could be used as valuable tools for assessing women's reports of their partner's substance use/abuse.     

Keeping tabs on the TTAB

TTABlog By John L. Welch Archived back to November 2004, USAhttp://www.thettablog.blogspot.com   John L. Welch, an attorney at Foley Hoag LLP, has an excellentblog focusing on the procedures and decisions of the UnitedStates Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) Trademark Trialand Appeal Board (TTAB, or Board).     

Law representing life — Reflections on Darwinian jurisprudence

A living organism is a model of the world in which it lives ... if you present an animal's body, even a new species previously unknown to science, to a knowledgeable zoologist, she should be able to read its body and tell you what kind of environment it inhabited: desert, rain forest, arctic tundra, temperate woodland or coral reef. She should be able to tell you, by reading its teeth and its guts, what it fed on. Flat, millstone teeth indicate that it was a herbivore; sharp, shearing teeth that it was a carnivore. Long intestines with complicated blind alleys indicate that it was a herbivore; short, simple guts suggest a carnivore. By reading the animal's feet, and its eyes and other sense organs, the zoologist should be able to tell how it found its food. By reading its stripes or flashes, its horns, antlers or crests, she should be able to tell something about its social and sex life.¹ My thanks to Bobbi Low who put me on to the step-parenting material, and Richard Dawkins who put me right on the science.     

Development assistance: Ruined hopes and great expectations in Africa

This paper highlights the difficulties and complexities of development assistance projects through an analysis of 2 Urban Functions in Rural Development projects conducted by the US Agency for International Development (AID) in Upper Volta and northern Cameroon in 1977-82. The general objectives of the Upper Volta project were to carry out urban function studies, develop a plan for strengthening the contributions of urban centers to rural development, develop a list of investment priorities for facilities and services, and increase the capacities of the Ministry in planning processes and methods. The 2-year project was hindered by a 1-year delay in initiating assistance due to difficulties in locating a contractor. In addition, the contractor and other team members felt there was little justification for studies of spatial organization in a country with so much evident need; rather, they focused on a small rural works program and establishment of effective local government, producing an inconsistency between team activities and the original project agreement. A request by the team to extend the project 1 year beyond its official completion date to compensate for early delays was rejected by USAID. Nonetheless, there was agreement that the project had a small positive impact in Upper Volta. Key lessons from Upper Volta were transferred to the Cameroon project. Although this project was judged to have achieved its objective of preparing a regional plan and of identifying programs for facilities, services, and small-scale enterprises, it was beset by problems of inexperience and technical underqualification of team members, poor communication, inconsistency of USAID guidelines, and methodological confusion. It is suggested that a central challenge for such programs is to create a body of qualified Americans who can work with their local counterparts in meeting the challenges of development. A measure of the success or failure of these projects should be the degree to which learning contributes to improved performance.