HUMAN LAW

More on New York advertising rules for lawyers

Kevin O'Keefe (who is frankly my primary source of blog stories) gives us more news about the New York advertisement rules placed on lawyers.

I have previously posted about this issue here in June.

As Kevin writes " The New York Office of Court Administration, the folks who passed the draconian restrictions on lawyer ads that even the FTC said were anti-consumer, concedes the Internet may not have even been considered when passing the restrictions. That's right, restrictions passed in June, 2006, not 1996, perhaps passed without considering the Internet.

This from the spokesman for the state's Office of Court Administration, David Bookstaver in an excellent story in The New York Sun.

The intent of the new rules is to increase professionalism and accountability within the profession. Was the new Internet world considered? Was blogging considered? I don't know.

This is dumbfounding. Actually sickening."

From my perspective, just look at look at the exponential rise of the number of blogs - We are in the midst of a technology revolution and blogging is a very significant part of that.

If the Court Administration did not consider blogging(and it looks that way), I can only say that when it comes to lawyers dealing with innovation, we let ourselves down.    

Join the EU Party

As an article in today's Times highlights, eu web addresses will be launched next week. As they write "New pan-European internet domain names will be up for grabs next week, but only to holders of registered trademarks. The restriction, which will remain in place for four months, is designed to prevent cybersquatters from snapping up popular names and selling them on for a profit."

Google wins domain name case

Recently Google won a victory in a domain name case after the US National Arbitration forum ruled that the registrant, Sergey Gridasov, did not have legitimate interests in names which were confusingly similar to Google's.

Accordingly Google was granted rights to the names googkle.com, ghoogle.com, gfoogle.com and gooigle.com.

For UK users the .uk registry names dispute resolution service is Nominet -  This can be a useful step for clients as it is relatively low cost and they avoid legal expenses. Recently a client of mine set up his business - A competitor took the step of registering a series of domain names containing my client's name. The client was able to go to the nominet dispute service and obtain the relevant domain names in pretty quick time.    

Trading in the EU?

If you trade within in the EU, you may be interested to know that it will soon be possible to obtain the European internet domain name (.eu).

These are going on a first come, first served basis and the procedure is as follows:

Firms with registered trade marks have from 7 December 2005 to 6 February 2006 to register their existing marks as .eu domains.

Those with unregistered marks or registered company names then will have two months to register.

Finally, after 7 April 2006 anyone will be able to request an eu. domain.