Law Ratchet

Law Ratchet, a new aggregator of legal news and blogs, premiered in late May. Law Ratchet allows you to scan legal news from various sources, i.e. CNN, the ABA Journal, The Wall Street Journal Law Blog, and Thomson Reuters News and Insight, and law blogs ("blawgs") by various subject areas, including "Top 25 Blogs," "Law and Technology," and "Litigation." From Law Ratchet, you link directly to the original post. However, as this post by Robert Ambrogi, a lawyer and media consultant, pointed out, Law Ratchet is not an RSS reader because it does not allow you to add other blogs that you would like to follow.

In another post, Ambrogi brought up the interesting question of whether Law Ratchet's aggregation violates copyright law by republishing the news and blog posts. Ambrogi summarizes the controversy and highlights two possible defenses to Ratchet's copyright infringement: fair use and an implied license to use content when the original site includes an RSS feed. Further, Derek Chau, CEO of Ratchet Technology, in an apology to Simple Justice's Scott Greenfield (see Update #3), stated that Law Ratchet has a new "opt-out" feature for bloggers who do not want their content included in Law Ratchet.

Resources in the McKusick Law Library on the fundamentals of copyright and Internet law may be located through the library catalog on the Law Library's webpage, including Frank Andorka's What is a Copyright? (published by the American Bar Association's Section of Intellectual Property Law), Internet and the Law: Technology, Society, and Compromises by Aaron Schwabach, and Michael L. Rustad's Internet Law in a Nutshell.

More information about the law of copyright can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office website and the University of California's Copyright Ownership webpage.

(This entry was originally written and posted by Marsha Stacey)