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Category Archives: law

Updating the MPL

11-Mar-10

Yesterday Mozilla announced that we will be updating the MPL, with the aim of making the license simpler, easier to use, and more robust. Mitchell’s post captures what we want to do in more depth; if you’re interested in the process, you should go read it and our full website at mpl.mozilla.org.
I [...]

looking for locomotives

01-Mar-10

I got some nice birthday gifts (mostly the ability to be around family) but possibly the best gift I got was this Wondermark strip:

I will henceforth refer to reading a contract as ‘looking for locomotives.’
As a bonus, and related to my recent post about plain english in the law, Wondermark is apparently working with the [...]

what writing a contract feels like

23-Feb-10

Alex Macgillivray, late of google and now of twitter, has a good post just now that might help hackers understand what transactional attorneys (aka corporate attorneys, aka ‘the people who write contracts rather than sue over contracts’, aka ‘me right now’) actually do on a day to day basis:
To put it in computer terms, imagine [...]

Telling numbers

04-Feb-10

I’m currently reading a book on modern legal drafting (read: ‘plain english for dummies, I mean, lawyers’). It is very good so far, but I think this is a telling stat about lawyers: 127 pages are devoted to why clear, modern english is a good idea. That is 22 pages more than are devoted to [...]

Credit where credit is due (more Google tea leaves to read)

12-Jan-10

One of the very first things that made me skeptical about Google was their approach to censorship in China, which I thought deeply compromised their supposed ‘don’t be evil’ approach to the world. It struck me that their position- summarized as “the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more [...]

job satisfaction

05-Jan-10

Some of the legal stuff I do at Mozilla1 is fairly dull, painstaking contract work. What makes it worthwhile (besides the paycheck) is seeing that something good came out of it. So it was nice to see this blog post – I only played a small part in getting the new data center up and [...]

starting fresh with mozilla

10-Dec-09

After some bumps in the road which delayed my start by a week, I started today in the legal department at Mozilla. Last night I lost a little sleep worrying if this was the right thing for me, but after a day around the office (during an all-hands meeting, no less) I’m pretty much glowing. [...]

software freedom rainmaking

30-Nov-09

A little over a year ago, I formally introduced John Resig of jquery fame to Brad Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I was therefore very pleased to see today that jquery has joined the Conservancy.

Rain Making on me and Krissa in Tongariro

Sadly no one gives me a partnership cut of this rainmaking but I [...]

“plastic material normally associated with the sport of swimming”

20-Jul-09

Training, by chuck_nc, used under CC-BY-SA

One of the things you can bring into the California bar exam is ‘earplugs or plastic material normally associated with the sport of swimming‘. Two things I really want right now:
1) to walk into the exam with a snorkel.
2) to know why this was put in the list. This must [...]

FLOSS Law Review

14-Jul-09

I thought I was done with law review blogging for a while, but apparently not! The International FLOSS Law Review has just published their first issue, with what looks to be a fair number of interesting articles. I look forward to seeing how it progresses.

This work by Luis Villa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.