Legal Docs LibraryKnow Your Rights

The Boston Globe ran a piece today about the new Apple iPad’s insistence on its own platform that will not be compatible with other electronic readers. The Associate Press article by Peter Svensson is a nice analysis of the problem that is cropping up, with Amazon’s Kindle, and now the Apple iPad insisting on their own independent systems that will not allow users who buy an e-book for one reader to import that book to another reader. I am not clear whether the Sony Reader, the other major e-reader on the market also has their own platform that is incompatible. Rather than developing a uniform platform that would help build a market for e-readers, these marketers are more fixed on cornering their markets and driving competition to the wall. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s Boston Globe includes a provocative article entitled, “Justice, medieval style.” As history, it is extremely interesting; as public policy, it is questionable. During the medieval era, “Europe’s legal systems decided difficult criminal cases in a most peculiar way. When judges were uncertain about an accused criminal’s guilt, they ordered a cauldron of water to be boiled, a ring to be thrown in, and the defendant to plunge in his naked hand and pluck the object out. The defendant’s hand was wrapped in bandages and revisited three days later. If it survived the bubbling cauldon unharmed, the defendant was declared innocent. If it didn’t, he was convicted.

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