Just the guy to handle your business affairs

A Houston lawyer has taken a home equity loan to repay his law firm for $182,500 lost in a variation of what has become known as the Nigerian e-mail scam.

In the case of lawyer Richard Howell Jr., the scammer claimed to be a Japanese businessman who needed help collecting $3.6 million from four customers in the United States, Texas Lawyer reports. Howell checked and found websites of the collecting company and the four U.S. debtors. His firm Buckley, White, Castaneda & Howell, would get a contingency fee of one-third for any money collected. "To me, it sounded like it could be a potentially lucrative client from Japan," Howell told the legal publication.

The firm received a collections check of $367,500 and, believing the check had cleared, sent $182,500 to the supposed Japanese client in Hong Kong, according to a suit Howell’s firm has filed against Citibank in Houston court. The suit contends the check was labeled "Citibank Official Check" and a Citibank employee verified that the money had been paid, a representation that turned out to be wrong when the check bounced.

Lawyer Says He Is a "Capital-D Dumbass" For Losing $182K in E-mail Scam" (ABA Journal, 26 Jan 2009)

Words fail me.

Hat tip: Carrie, who kindly cc'ed me on this story in an e-mail addressed to every attorney who is a first-degree relative of hers.

Federal court upholds Creative Commons-style licenses

So for non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important. But trust me, this is huge.

[...]

In non-technical terms, the Court [of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over intellectual property law issues - bc] has held that free licenses such as the [Creative Commons] licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Lawrence Lessig - lessig blog - huge and important news

The comments are absolutely worth reading, by the way, or were as of the writing of this post, anyway.  Mr. Lessig has some very smart and interesting readers.

Freedom is a term of art with the specific contextual meaning of "nothing left to lose"

Over at Pencil Roving, Carrie has found a very amusing scholarly article about judges citing popular music lyrics in their opinions.