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Dilbert 2014-08-27

About a month ago I wrote about James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of the Center of the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School releasing a free download of an Intellectual Property Statutory Supplement (which normally big publishers try to sell for around $50). As noted, this was a kickoff for an even bigger project, an open coursebook in intellectual property. That Open Intellectual Property Casebook is now available. You can download the whole thing for free. If you want a nice printed copy, it’ll currently run about $24 on Amazon — which is about $135 less than other IP case books. The entire book weighs in at nearly 800 pages, so there’s a lot in there if you felt like delving into a variety of topics around copyright, trademark and patent law — including specific efforts by Congress around those laws and the way that the courts have interpreted them.

As mentioned in our last post, Boyle and Jenkins are doing this, in part, because they recognize the insane prices that academic publishers have been getting away with charging for their books:

Partly, we do it because we think the price of legal casebooks and materials is obscene. Law students, who are already facing large debt burdens, are required to buy casebooks that cost $150–$200, and “statutory supplements” that consist mainly of unedited, public domain, Federal statutes for $40 or $50. The total textbook bill for a year can be over $1500. This is not a criticism of casebook authors, but rather of the casebook publishing system. We know well that putting together a casebook is a lot of work and can represent considerable scholarship and pedagogic innovation. We just put together this one and we are proud of it. But we think that the cost is disproportionate and that the benefit flows disproportionately to conventional legal publishers. Some of those costs might have been more justifiable when we did not have mechanisms for free worldwide and almost costless distribution. Some might have been justifiable when we did not have fast, cheap and accurate print on demand services. Now we have both. Legal education is already expensive; we want to play a small part in diminishing the costs of the materials involved.

However, they also note that it’s not just about making the books cheaper, but better and more useful:

Our point is not only that the current casebook is vastly too expensive, it is also awkward, inflexible, lacking visual stimulus, incapable of customization and hard to preview and search on the open web. Casebooks do not respond well to the different needs of different professors. Students cannot easily be given free, searchable digital access to all the materials, on all their devices, anywhere, access that does not go away when the course—or the publisher—ends. We can do that.

There are also lots of people outside of law school, or outside this country, who would like to know more about American law—just as there are people outside of computer science who want to know about artificial intelligence. Free is a good price-point for them. Customizable is a good form. This book is merely a beta-test version, but it is an example of what can be done.

In case you’re wondering, while the statutory supplement was available on a CC: BY license (requires just attribution), this casebook is under a CC: BY-NC-SA license. The key differences: the former can be resold commercially while the latter has a block on commercial uses. It also has a "share alike" requirement. While I’m a huge fan of Creative Commons, I’ve been critical of its licenses that include the non-commercial restriction and believe there are strong reasons to remove them, in part because of a perception and branding problem that people have, which potentially do more harm than good to the Creative Commons brand. Many people believe that all CC licenses are "non-commercial" which has actually limited those who wish to use them to encourage commercial use. Separately, the definition of "non-commercial" can be pretty vague (though, to its credit, Creative Commons has worked hard to clarify).

While Boyle and Jenkins are using an NC license with the casebook, I’m happy that they at least put in a note defining their interpretation of commercial use:

Editor’s note: we interpret this to mean “providing the material above cost.” Digital cost is zero. You are free to reproduce the material in paper form and charge a fee to cover copying costs, but nothing more. This applies both to commercial and non commercial entities.

I still think it would have been fine if they’d skipped the "NC" altogether, but it does not appear to be a huge issue here. On the whole this is great news for folks who want to learn more about copyright, patents and trademark law — whether you’re a law student or just an interested bystander…

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Intellectual Property Casebook Now Available As A Free Download

An anonymous reader writes Duke Law School’s James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins just published a CC licensed, freely downloadable textbook called "Intellectual Property Law and the Information Society." (Which includes a discussion of whether and when the term "intellectual property" is a dangerous misnomer). The book is apparently part of an attempt to lower what the authors describe as the "obscene cost" of legal textbooks. "This is the first in a series of free digital/low cost print legal educational materials to be published by Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain—starting with statutory supplements aimed at the basic classes. The goal of this project… is to improve the pricing and access norms of the world of legal textbook publishing, while offering the flexibility and possibility for customization that unfettered digital access provides. We hope it will provide a pleasant, restorative, competitive pressure on the commercial publishers to lower their prices and improve their digital access norms." The book’s "problems range from a video of the Napster oral argument to counseling clients about search engines and trademarks, applying the First Amendment to digital rights management and copyright or commenting on the Supreme Court’s new rulings on gene patents.. [The book] includes discussions of such issues as the Redskins trademark cancelations, the Google Books case and the America Invents Act."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Free Law Casebook Project Starts With IP Coursebook

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Homemade semi-automatic pistols illegally produced in China

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Dilbert 2014-08-24

Sometimes there is need to use conditional expression inside stored procedure to control the flow of execution.We can use IF or CASE statements for this.Below is a stored procedure to check the performance of a student based on its score.Store the below stored procedure in a file called get_performance.sqlDELIMITER $$DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS get_performance$$CREATE PROCEDURE get_performance    (score NUMERIC(8, 2),    OUT result VARCHAR(11))BEGIN    IF (score >= 90) THEN        SET result = ‘OUTSTANDING’;    ELSEIF (score >= 70 AND score < 90) THEN        SET result = ‘AWESOME’;    ELSEIF (score >= 60 AND score < 70) THEN        SET result = ‘GOOD’;    ELSEIF (score >= 40 AND score < 60) THEN    SET result = ‘OK’;    ELSE    SET result = ‘FAIL’;    END IF;END$$DELIMITER ;Execute the procedure:mysql> SOURCE get_performance.sql;Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)Execute the call:mysql> CALL get_performance(67, @result);Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)mysql> SELECT @result;+———+| @result |+———+| GOOD    |+———+1 row in set (0.00 sec)Basically IF, ELSEIF check for conditions, ELSE matches any condition which has not been matched by any preceding condition and finally THEN executes the set of statements for the satisfied condition and breaks out of the conditional expression. Similarly, we can use CASE for switching to statement sections based on equality comparison with a set of unique values.
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Using conditional expressions inside MySQL Stored Procedure

Loops -> Repetitive tasks3 types of loops in MySQL stored program: – Simple loop using LOOP and END LOOP clauses- WHILE and END WHILE clauses that runs while a condition is true- REPEAT  and UNTIL clauses that runs until a condition is trueTermination of loop -> LEAVE statement.I will demonstrate the use of loops the simple loop way.Simple counter from 1 to 10:Store below stored procedure in a file named my_loop.sqlDELIMITER $$DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS my_loop$$CREATE PROCEDURE my_loop()BEGIN    DECLARE counter INT DEFAULT 0;    my_loop: LOOP        SET counter = counter + 1;        IF counter = 10 THEN            LEAVE my_loop;        END IF;    END LOOP my_loop;    SELECT CONCAT(‘Done counting up to ‘, counter) AS result;END$$DELIMITER ;Execute the stored procedure:mysql> SOURCE my_loop.sqlQuery OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)mysql> CALL my_loop();+————————+| result                 |+————————+| Done counting up to 10 |+————————+1 row in set (0.00 sec)Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)Explaining simply, we are defining a counter that starts with 0 and a LOOP labelled my_loop that increments from 0 onward and a condition inside to check for counter value of 10, when the loop terminates through the use of LEAVE clause. You can give a try to the other loop clauses 🙂
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Use of loops in MySQL stored procedures