My podcast interview with Enrico Shaefer about my new venture

I got a call from my friend Enrico Shaefer right after I announced that I was shifting out of the practice of law to do more CLE programs for lawyers who were interested in technology. He practices law and tries to innovate wherever possible to do a better job for clients at a lower cost, so he and I have kept in touch (mostly through social media). He has a weekly podcast where he interviews folks about innovation in the law etc., and so he interviewed me. The interview lasted about 20 minutes as I recall. You can either listen to the podcast, or read the transcript.

A 'Kodak Moment' (upon the eve of its bankruptcy filing)

Moral: Saying you understand the digital revolution (even in a clever way) isn't the same as actually understanding it.

Kodak was once a great company that ruled the photographic industry's roost. Today it's in bankruptcy, while its main competitor in film sales, Fuji, is thriving. Fuji, adapted more quickly to the digital world, and today makes some very popular (and expensive) digital cameras.

In 2006 Kodak's CEO Antonio Perez was invited to the All Things Digital Conference in California — hosted by tech guru Walt Mossberg. This clever video created by Kodak's ad team kicked off Mr. Perez's interview. Then it went viral on YouTube and was shared on over 3,000 technology blogs. The video was also played at internal employee meetings and shareholders and investor events. Like I said, it's a great video.

Perhaps when the bankruptcy is final (after Kodak's desperate flurry of "save the company patent suits" have been put to rest), they'll play the video one more time before they flick off the lights. Too bad they didn't use the imagination it took to create this video to run the company. Using imagination to create a cool video is hard, but it's almost impossible to use it to guide a big company into a new frontier; big companies, like all large groups of humans, always regress towards the mean.

Mentoring new lawyers & providing free CLE

A few weeks ago I announced that I was shifting from the full-time practice of law to full-time work teaching lawyers how to make better use of technology (with the side-benefit of also offering them CLE credit, in Louisiana at least). Today, let me tell you about one important focal point of this move.

I want to do more to help mentor young lawyers.

Law school education has for a long time failed to provide truly practical information to budding lawyers. This is especially true when it comes to information about how to use technology to do a better job in the practice of law. So folks graduate from law school devoid of any sense of how to use technology.

New lawyers are also devoid of money after they pay all their law school bills.

So, here's how DigitalWorkflowCLE plans to help. First, we're going to focus some of our attention on helping new lawyers learn practical skills. And we're going to do it for free. Our first CLE program of the year will be a one hour webinar on Social Networking for Lawyers, and it will only be offered to Louisiana lawyers who've been in practice for three years or less.

The February 3rd webinar is limited to 15 new lawyers. Again, it's completely free and we provide 1 hour of CLE credit (includes Ethics credit). For other lawyers we'll be doing the Social Networking seminar a week later, on February 10, but we'll be charging $30 for the CLE credit (Ethics).

Apple's Siri is both great and annoying, so I'm not using it much

David Sparks of the excellent MacSparky blog recently wrote a post called The Siri Problem, which makes the point that Apple's Siri service s great yet unreliable. I totally agree.

I love Siri and periodically try to use it. If it works it's magic. But just often enough it fails, and it fails just enough that I am giving up on using it. Before Siri I used the voice command feature to dial people's numbers by simply speaking their name. Siri made the success rate of this feature better, but only if the network that powers Siri is available.

The old system didn't require a network connection. So now when Siri isn't working I can't use the voice command at all. Yes, I can go back to the voice command, which doesn't rely on the network, but then I lose Siri functionality (and Siri forgets all your history if you turn it off).

I don't know what the problem is, but I know that if Apple doesn't fix it soon they'll be losing a lot of momentum. When Apple aficianados like David Sparks and me throw up our hands that's a bad sign. Too bad Steve Jobs isn't still around to go kick some ass. There is no excuse for Siri being this unreliable. And don't remind me that Apple says "it's in beta," because they've hyped it extensively in commercials such as this one.

The problem with proposed laws called SOPA and PIPA

A few minutes ago I ran a Google search on an author whose name I wasn't familiar with. Top hit was Wikipedia, so I clicked the link. Then I saw the splash page that informed me today is the day Wikipedia is blacked out because of the proposed legislation known as SOPA (PIPA is the companion legislation in the Senate side). A few minutes after that a local TV news reporter called to ask if I'd be willing to talk about the proposed legislation. I tried to deflect, but she was desperate so I agreed to help.

Since I took the time to figure out how to explain SOPA/PIPA to a TV audience, I figured I'd put it out here for web readers. I'll do it in Q&A format to make it track my TV interview (or at least the way I prepared it).

What would SOPA and PIPA do?

Basically, it would give large media companies greater power to sue people who they believe improperly post copyrighted material online.

What's the problem in a nutshell?

It has a inevitable side-effect of threatening 1st Amendment rights. Why? Well, because it will likely be used unfairly by the powerful media companies. Not always, but often enough to be detrimental to the constitutional rights of many well-meaning citizens who use computers to share information online. When a powerful media company decides to sue it may not always be right, but it almost always has more money and leverage than the average citizen.

In short, SOPA/PIPA increase the odds that people who post content online (or share it, or even link to it) will be wind up getting sued. The only way of decreasing the odds of getting sued is to be ABSOLUTELY SURE. But, "sure of what?" The media companies would say "you must be sure that what you're posting, or linking to, isn't copyrighted material."

Important question: Does your mom, who let's say has a Facebook page, know anything about copyright law? Even the people who run Wikipedia may not know enough about copyright law to avoid getting sued. So the thing you need to be ABSOLUTELY SURE about is this: that media companies won't have a different view of copyright law than you have (assuming you have an informed view). If they have a different view then they'll be motivated to sue, and then it's "game over" for the small website or Facebook user. And it's not just websites and Facebook. It's YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, FourSquare, MySpace (apparently people still use this), and any place that you can post to on the web.

So, large sites like Wikipedia will tend to be overly cautious about what they post and link to. And we'll see less information, even if the information they restrict is actually protected by the First Amendment. This is what First Amendment lawyers call "a chilling effect." I'd tell you to look it up on Wikipedia, but it's down right now for a day of protest. If SOPA/PIPA pass it might be down in worse ways than that.

Update: SOPA/PIPA appear, for now, to have lost critical momentum. On that point, I like Scott Adams' observation about this temporary defeat: "From my perspective, the Internet defended itself from a virus that came out of Congress." And as he points out, after citing Maplight, the virus is powered by money which comes out of Hollywood.