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This is the debut of Securities Docket Radio on the Legal Talk Network with host Bruce Carton, columnist at Compliance Week. Bruce welcomes Sanjay Wadhwa, Deputy Chief of the new Market Abuse Unit in the Division of Enforcement at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, to discuss the new unit and investigations involving insider trading, specialist misconduct, offering fraud, and improper activities at hedge funds. Bruce and Sanjay also discuss the significant reorganization of the Division of Enforcement, and look inside the recent insider trading action brought against hedge fund giant Galleon, and the successful Reebok insider trading investigation.

In the second part of Lawyer2Lawyer on the Google Books Settlement, attorneys and co-hosts J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi welcome Attorney Jonathan Band and Attorney Cindy Cohn, Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation , to take a closer look at the complex Google Books Settlement. They explore the deeper legal issues like privacy, copyright and antitrust issues, who this settlement could ultimately benefit or hurt and whether consumers are better off with or without a settlement.

The Boston Globe’s Andrew Ryan reports on a passionate and raucous meeting at the central Boston Public Library. Nearly 400 people packed a lecture hall in the beautiful Copley branch. When City Council President Michael Ross stepped to the microphone at one point, the crowd roared, and people shouted: “The public goes first!” and “Let the people speak!” And speak they did! The city council, Mayor Menino and the Trustees of the Public Library got quite an earful from the people of Boston. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Landry, JD ‘07, a Boston-area lawyer practicing in the area of Intellectual Property law, discusses changes affecting patent term adjustment in this installment of our IP podcast series.

Suffolk Law alumnus Paul Cronin, JD ‘98, a Boston-based patent lawyer, discusses changes impacting patent marking requirements in this week’s Intellectual Property podcast.

In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a very provocative article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. While he loves the wonderful access the Internet gives him as a writer to all kinds of information, Carr has noticed that it seems to have changed how he reads the materials he gets online: Read the rest of this entry »

The Globe also reports on Harvard Professor and Guggenheim fellow Jeannie Suk’s argument that fashion designers need a tailored (ahem!) copyright provision covering their designs. Professor Suk’s article, The Law, Culture, and Economics of Fashion, in vol. 61 Stanford Law Review (March, 2009), is summarized in the abstract, in part: Read the rest of this entry »

In criminal cases, there have been challenges on sufficiency grounds and concerns over the use of forensic DNA evidence as the sole or primary proof of guilt. Uncorroborated DNA matching might not be enough to satisfy the burden of establishing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The reliability of forensic DNA testing results might be questioned for any number of reasons, e.g., laboratory error, cross-contamination, interpretive bias or fraud, etc. Ken Strutin’s essay provides an overview of nuclear DNA typing, a sampling of the kinds of discretionary decisions that analysts often confront when interpreting crime scene samples, and concludes with with remarks about current disputes in forensic DNA typing, and how recognition of its inherent subjectivity might inform and illuminate these debates.

It began last October with a ban by the U.S. military on embedded press photographing or filming soldiers killed in action. The story is here at the National Press Photographers Association website in an article by Donald R. Winslow dated October 14, 2009 for the News Photographer magazine. Read the rest of this entry »

In this edition of the Boston University School of Law podcast, host and media veteran, Dan Rea of WBZ-Radio 1030 welcomes Professor Michael Meurer, the Michaels Faculty Research Scholar of Law at BU School of Law, to discuss his new book, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk. Dan and Professor Meurer take a hard look at the American patent system and why many innovators consider this system and the institutions created to protect patents complete failures.