ABA

From the ABA TECHSHOW Blog (reposted with permission): 

Nominations are being accepted for the James I. Keane Memorial Award For Excellence in eLawyering.  The awardee will receive a free registration to ABA TECHSHOW 2008 and be recognized at a special luncheon. If you or anyone you know is involved in innovative delivery of legal services over the Web, please consider a nomination. Submissions are due by December 31, 2007. 

One of the web?s greatest strengths as a communication tool is the ease with which one can add content: click a few options in a WYSIWYG site editor, drag a file through an FTP program, and moments later your content is accessible to millions of people. Unfortunately, this great strength is also a great weakness, as content disappears from the web just as quickly as it is added. Anyone who regularly uses the web for research or as a reference source has no doubt had the experience of finding a useful site, bookmarking it, and coming back a few months later to find that the content you found so useful has been deleted, moved, or hugely modified.

If you find yourself in that position, there?s some hope: The Wayback Machine, run by the Internet Archive, is an archive of more than 85 billion web pages dating back as far as 1996. The pages are gathered by automated computer programs that wander around the web and preserve ?snapshots? of sites on the Internet Archive?s servers (albeit imperfectly ? images are often missing and not everything is saved). Whether you?re trying to find an old page you had bookmarked, a snapshot of a news site from a particular day in the past, or if you?re just curious to see what Yahoo looked like in 1996, there?s a good chance The Wayback Machine has saved it.

If the concept of The Wayback Machine has you thinking about evidentiary rules and intellectual property, you aren?t alone: The Wayback Machine has been involved in a few legal scuffles, mostly settled out of court, but makes a policy of removing content from their archives and allowing web site developers to protect their content against archiving. It remains unclear whether their archived web sites are admissible as evidence in court.

Earlier this week, the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling in United States v. Arnold that the Fourth Amendment?s ?reasonable suspicion? requirement does not apply to the search of a laptop during an international border crossing. The court rejected Arnold?s argument that a laptop should be treated similarly to a home or office for privacy purposes, holding instead that a laptop was akin to a traveler?s luggage. George Washington University Law School Professor Orin Kerr discusses the holding in more detail at the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

Arnold presents an interesting challenge for attorneys who travel internationally: how do you safeguard the sensitive client and firm data on your laptop when a security person, sans any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, can investigate your files? The easiest and best solution is simply to avoid placing sensitive or confidential information on your laptop. Such information can be stored on secure servers at an attorney?s main office and accessed remotely via VPN, or encrypted and stored remotely with an online backup vendor. If internet access will be unavailable on your trip or you otherwise require local copies of your sensitive information, consider encrypting the data and perhaps also relocating it to a storage device such as a USB thumb drive or CD-R. While such methods won?t guarantee you privacy, they may reduce the likelihood that your client?s confidential information will be revealed in a casual search of your laptop.

It may not have quite the media cachet of the Oscars or Emmys, but the annual Webby Awards are no less prestigious for those who create or follow Internet-based technology. Now in their 12th year, the Webby Awards recognize excellence in websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobility. The awards are judged by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body that includes a range of leading Web experts, business figures, and celebrities from David Bowie to Anil Dash to Matt Groening. In addition, a People?s Voice Award is also determined for each category based on a public vote via the web.

Nominees are broken down into nearly 70 categories with websites representing the majority of nominees. Some of this year?s nominees include Eyes on Darfur (Activism Category), HowStuffWorks (Best Copy/Writing), Apple (Best Use of Video or Moving Image), Yahoo! Sports (Sports Category), and the ABA Journal website (Law Category).

The Webby Awards? website offers a full list of nominees (as well as nominees and winners from the past 11 years). As a research and reference tool, the list of former winners and nominees offers a great directory of high quality websites by category. If you?d like to vote for your favorite Webby Award nominee, you can visit the public voting page now.