West announced yesterday that 29 of its most popular law book titles are now available for the Kindle eBook reader. Titles include Guerilla Tactics for Getting the Legal Job of Your Dreams, Contracts in a Nutshell, and Justice Scalia's Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges. A complete list is available from their press release.

In a proposed settlement for a class action suit, Facebook has agreed to shut down its Beacon marketing system. The agreement is before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California: Lane v. Facebook Inc., N.D. Cal., No. 5:08-cv-3845, 9/18/09).

Beacon is a controversial Facebook system that monitors a users purchases on certain online venders and then publishes that information on the user's news feeds, read by the user's Facebook friends.

Facebook aslo proposes creating a $9.5 million settlement fund, partially to pay damages. Part of the of the fund would launch a privacy foundation to fund and sponsor programs designed to educate users, regulators, and enterprises regarding critical issues relating to protection of identity and personal information online through user control, and to protect users from online threats.

Read more about the case through the library's subscription to BNA Privacy Law Watch.

Full text of the Motion for Preliminary Approval of Class Action Settlement Agreement is available at http://0-op.bna.com.gull.georgetown.edu/pl.nsf/r?Open=dapn-7w6jg2.

Full text of the proposed Stipulation and Agreement is available at http://0-op.bna.com.gull.georgetown.edu/pl.nsf/r?Open=dapn-7w6jjb.

IMS ExpertServices posted an online list of 10 mistakes that lawyers and judges made while using online social networks.

Highlights of the list include a lawyer who asked for a continuance because of a death in the family but had posted Facebook status updates about going partying.

Another highlight was from a judge who friended a lawyer trying a case in his court. The lawyer posted a status during the litigation that "I have a wise judge."  Opposing counsel moved for a new trial and the judge removed himself from the case and granted the new trial. The state's Judicial Standards Commission issued a public reprimand for violating the prohibition against a judge engaging in ex parte communications.

This week the Sacramento Bee reported that a California judge ruled that a litigant may learn the identity of a person who posts an anonymous comment on a blog.

In the case Calvin Chang, a police officer for the University of California in Davis filed suit against UC, claiming discrimination and breach of a settlement agreement in a prior lawsuit. David Greenwald, who operates a blog called The People's Vanguard of Davis, wrote about the suit and people commented. Chang believes that one anonymous comment was written by a 'managing agents' of the university and contained information that would violate the agreement of the prior settlement agreement.

The California judge ruled that Chang can hire a third-party to investigate whether the author of the comment was a manging agent. If it was the court would allow Chang to request that Google, the Vanguard's former host, provide him with the anonymous poster's e-mail addresses and log-in information.

The Sacramento Bee also reported that the judge ruled that the First Amendment generally protects anonymous speech, but online anonymity may be breached. "When vigorous criticism descends into defamation, constitutional protection is no longer available."

Read more about the case in the Chronicle of Higher Education, provide through the library's subscription.

Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain also spoke this spring at Yale's Library 2.0 conference; this past Sunday, July 19th, his opinion piece  "Lost in the Cloud" appeared, with a run-down on the up-and down-sides of cloud computing, both practical and legal. He proposes some possible improvements: requiring social networking and other cloud-inhabiting companies to 1) give your data back to you if you ask, 2) use better security, and 3) improve privacy protection. But he also raises the interesting questions of innovation, competition and control. Stay tuned!

Jureeka is a useful tool that works with the Firefox Web browser. It recognizes legal citations and automatically searches the Web for a free version of the cited document. By using Jureeka, you don't have to search several legal sites (Findlaw, Justia, etc.) to find a particular document. Jureeka searches all of them at once.

Remember that while free legal information sites can be quite helpful in your research, they do have significant limitations. For more information, see the Law Library's Free & Low Cost Legal Research Guide.

Amazon just announced a large-format version of their electronic book reader, called the Kindle DX, which you can see in action at engadget. The product doesn't launch until this summer, but it could be in the hands of many university students for a pilot coming to five schools this fall. Library Journal reports that these schools are: Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  As of yet, there are no law schools who will try this out.  Because Kindle books are typically locked into a single device, this could mean the disappearance of a used book market.  That said, it means fewer dead trees and possibly more publishing options for content producers.  In law schools, where much of the raw source material is in the public domain, casebooks and case compilations could be done very economically, if not for free.

An interesting feature of the new device is that it supports native PDF documents, instead of forcing people to pay to convert them to a proprietary Kindle format. This means you could get class notes or reading materials in PDF format and read them directly.  It's not clear if this would support image-based formats like scanned law reviews from Hein Online or published reporter cases from Westlaw.  If so, this could be a boon for students willing to pay almost $500 for the device.

In the past, there has been some debate over whether libraries can lend Kindle readers to their users. One problem with having a Kindle in a library is that book purchasing is tied directly to the account on the device.  A library owning one to lend would have to disable purchasing options. Books purchased for the Kindle cannot be transferred to another device.

In advance of the latest Kindle announcement, the New York Times ran a story about large format e-book readers, exploring questions of whether these could save daily newspapers.  Media conglomerate Hearst Corporation is rumored to be launching a wireless e-book reader. They publish everything from Harper's Bazaar to Good Housekeeping to Popular Mechanics.  It will be exciting to see how electronic books develop over time.  They look like a possible life preserver for print media. Perhaps this Fall we'll see how they fare in the education sector.

Update: Additional coverage, including law school topics, is found here:

• Who will get the first e-book into the law school classroom?
• Case Western Reserve University students will use textbooks on Kindle electronic reader

Judges are realizing that jury instructions & court rules may have to be amended to take the most recent technological craze into consideration. The New York Times and the Associated Press published interesting articles yesterday on this phenomenon, commenting on the number of mistrials resulting from juror's use of Twitter and Facebook.  

For more information on Jury Instructions and Court Rules, check out our Research Guides on both topics.

In a new article on LLRX.com entitled "Collaboration through Wikis at Hicks Morley," author Heather Colman discusses how her law firm started using wikis to collaborate and share their work product.  The article includes an overview of the decisions made by the firm throughout the process of development as well as a series of recommendations for the successful implementation of wikis.  Also, it is worth noting that one need not be a company to find wikis useful.  Even small groups who are trying to collaborate on one or more projects can use wikis to better centralize their work product.  Click here to see the full text of the article.

LexisNexis has introduced Lexis Web, a free way (at least as long as the search engine is in beta format) to search the web for legal authority and content.  Lexis Web is a legal-specific search engine that provides access to free web content.  According to the company, all results come from legal sites vetted by LexisNexis attorney editors.  Some example types of sites included in the search results include legal blogs, news, advocacy organizations, think tanks, court websites and government websites.

The search engine also allows users to filter and navigate their results using a left navigation frame and limit results by such factors as geography, company or individual name, or citations to specific cases.  Results can also be augmented by subscribed content available on Lexis (for users who have subscriptions to Lexis).

A free Reference Guide to using Lexis Web is available as a pdf file.  Try it out when searching the free web for legal information and post comments here about what you think.