Course is nearly over

Thanks to Russell for teaching the class and emparting his wisdom on us. Much appreciated.

IT AND THE COURTS 

Finally an Australian company has been fined for sending spam emails. It is the first time an Australian company has been fined since the introduction of spamming laws in April 2004. Apparently the company, Clarity1 which also trades as Business Seminars Australia and Maverick Partnership, sent approxiamately 75million spam emails in the period from April 2004 to April 2006. Now this begs the question about the effectiveness of legislation based on areas of the Internet. There are so many illegal happenings that Australia simply does not have the resources to effectively control matters such as spam. The Spam Act 2003 is merely “phantom” legislation in my opinion.

On another note, Eric mention on his blog that we play fantasy basketball together. We are actually facing off against each other in Week 1 of the competition which starts on Wednesday and I just wanted to say that I am going destroy him.

Wiki

Wow. I have just been browsing Wikipedia and the site has a comprehensive list of wikis and wiki communities. I had no idea that such a range of different wikis existed on the Web. On another note, I cannot access the aide software. Is there a problem and how will it effect our marks if the system stays down till 4pm Monday (30.10.2006)?

Some Thoughts on the Govt’s New Media Laws

Today was the first time in some weeks that I have browsed the class wiki and it has progressed tremendously. It has been a great effort by the class to create a legal encyclopedia which in my opinion has a better layout than Wikipedia .

DID YOU KNOW that “Wiki Wiki” is a reduplication of “waka waka”, a Hawaiian word for fast.

Now onto the Federal Government’s recently media law reforms which you can find here. What effect will they have on Australian Internet sites. The governments new reforms were introduced in order to increase competition by relaxing cross media ownership and foreign ownership rules amongst other things. This has been quite contentious as the majority of the public view the changes as promoting decreased competition by making it easier for media barons to increase their media market share by allowing them to own companies in different areas of the media. However, we have seen that James Packer and PBL have sold off some of their interests such as ninemsn. In my opinion, competition will increase as media barons will look to take advantage off the laws by selling interests to overseas investors rather than looking to buy into a different form of media. Hence, diversity of views can only be increased with the introduction of foreign investors.

Quick Links

LAWS1032 Homepage

Wiki

26.10.2006

I read a newspaper article today outlining Google’s refusal to remove racist blogs from Blogger (owned by Google). In my opinion such blogs have no place in the community and Google has an ethical duty to removes such blogs. “Patriot Alliance Downunder” and “Red Watch NZ” are such examples of racist blogs promoting hate “against hostile alien elements. I am not going to give a link to these blogs however here is the article.

Interesting Articles

With the increasing size of the World Wide Web comes the inevitable increase in litigation. Here is an interesting article to think about this ever increasing “problem”.

How about the thought of creating custom search engines. You could create custom searches on your very own blog! If you want more information go to http://www.google.com/coop/cse/.

Other Blogs

It is strange to see the high number of blog sites now on the internet. From computer games to personal thoughts, society seems to be creating blogs on basically anything. I do not know if anyone else in the class knows what “fantasy basketball” is but there are some interesting blogs out there on the World Wide Web based on fantasy basketball. They are well laid out and are quite user friendly with my favourites being fantasybasketblog and givemetherock.  Have a look.

Research Essay

I have come to conclusion that the research we just completed was the most involved i have ever been when writing an essay. I chose Question 2 which was ironically a legal research question based on the difficulties of legal research. From my experience it is often easy to fall bored of a research essay based on reading cases and journal articles etc however this research essay actually required you to emerse your self in the topic whether you liked it or not. I am sure everyone who chose Question 2 thoroughly enjoyed this topic.

Assignment

The topic I chose for the essay was about the difficulties of Internet legal research. How about the benefits that the Internet brings? The Internet is ever increasing in size and the number of resources a researcher can choose from is aways increasing as well. Surely, the number of quality catalogues and search engines is increasing as well.

…and…

After 2 classes I have realised that this course is quite practical. The two legal research courses that I have previously completed were rather difficult to understand, considering the time frames in which the courses were completed. The main difference between Computer Applications to Law and the other courses is the broadened spectrum of learning.