Musings on law, tech, chess & other topics by a geek

I am back at patronizing Cherry Street Cafe again, and happy to be here. Last November I had a bad experience at Cherry street Cafe, after blogging about it the owner contacted me and invited me back.  Over the last few months I have returned for both business meetings and social events and the experiences have been good.  I am happy to add Cherry Street Cafe Back to my recommended list of Seattle Coffee Houses.

This is the first positive experience that I have had with a business that really cared about their image AND was willing to reaching out through social media to make things right.  I applaud Cherry Street Cafe.

The presentation was very practical in nature, Mike is a former Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & rosati attorney and current iPhone game designer spoke today at 4Culture.

Practical Advice from Mike:

• Smaller game developers should consider S-Corp status – S Corps allow for easy transition to C-Corp later and allow you to write off losses on your income taxes.
• LLC is another option but LLC’s are less favored by investors and are tougher to convert to C-Corps
• w/ Contractors & Employees you must assign the works to the corporation or you have legal ambiguity in the rights. (I agree that you need agreements I would favor using a CC license over a blanket assingment )
• Avoid Viral Licenses,  (Note Rowe: I disagree here but I am likely to market the game as OS)1. “the gpl is the most notorious” 2.under the GPL if you add GPL code to an executable the requirements
• MIT or BSD license are great to use because they are attribution only, but you may need to do due diligence.
• MYTH: I can use it, it is fair use it is only a defense to copyright infringement. (I agree here fair use )
• fighting piracy is not productive even if you are legal right, spend your time making new games instead of

The main case on Open Source code is

Q: can you check the validity of OS code?

A: No

My answer: kind of there are projects like Fossology that will help you determine the history of code in projects.

Mike wrote a book The Business of iPhone app Development he is also on Twitter: @hivebrain

I will be offline, on vacation, the next two weeks.

I had a great meeting yesterday with Disability Rights Washington over social media strategy which has prompted me to update my list of recommend resources for NPO’s thinking about getting into Social Media. Here is the new list:

Best Blogs:
BoingBoing – Great short form blog, Cory Doctorow is my favorite writer on the blog he cover everything from Do It Yourself Culture to user rights technology issues.
Freedom to Tinker: Group blog hosted by hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Very strong policy posts with a diverse set of views.
EFF Deep Links – EFF’s blog is a decent example of a nonprofit blog for an npo that also does litigation.
Blogging Best Practices Post w/ a video from Cory Doctorow
Posner and Becker’s Blog – Law and Economics, this a long form blog that covers current issues in a back and forth debate between Posner a very out spoken judge & Becker an Econ professor at Chicago U.  The post are a little long for my taste but a lot of people really like them, I would not publish post longer then this.

Online video:
RSS in Plain English by Common Craft.  Common Craft is a great local start up that does amazing short informational videos.
5 mins with Harold Feld - FCC/ Copyright public interest lawyer at Public Knowledge that is great at translating Law into plain English.
New in IP – a weekly video cast I do on Copyright & Patent issue, very low production cost focusing on recent news and commentary.

Flickr photo pools for NPO:
Sierra Club’s Daily Ray of Hope – Amazing User Generated photo pool.
Tech Soup’s Article on How NPO’s can get the most out of Flickr

Free copyright licensing designed to enable sharing:
Creative Commons
Blog posts From Beth Kanter on How NPO’s can utilize CC

Hehe, great video. Several people I know from the UW’s iSchool are in it including my information systems professor Bob Boiko:

I just can’t pass up a road trip to Portland. I will be joining Rachel Bridgewater, an Academic Librarian from Reed College, on a panel about the Google Book Settlement at the 2010 Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference to be held September 16-17 at the PCC Sylvania campus in Portland Oregon.

PS I heart Reed, between my AA and my BS/BA, while I was working for Wizards, I audited a few classes at Reed including intro to psychology and a history of Buddhism class (maybe i ghosted one of those…).  At the time Reed had a great policy where members of the community could join 2 classes a year for $100 each as long as the instructor was cool with it.  The class sizes were very small and they always had great conversation both during and after the classes, the students were very friendly and outgoing.  I learned more useful information from the psychology class then in many of my law school classes!

Update: Reed Still has the policy in place:

people may audit no more than two courses in one year, with written permission of the instructor. The auditor’s fee is $100 per course, per semester, plus any additional course fees.

I will be speaking at this years ATJ Conference in Wenatchee on June 5th. Here is the panel I am on : Technology Power Tools for Justice

Development and advances in technology have provided the justice system with transformative tools that can effectively, efficiently and economically make available both information and services to vast numbers of people almost anywhere in minutes. These tools can serve and empower people who have been powerless, excluded, underserved – and do so in practical ways with concrete effects. These tools can also enable and make real diversity in the people we serve, inclusiveness in the justice system and those who govern and work in it, and enable intergenerational communication and cooperation and leadership development at all levels. Focused on understanding how to use technology to serve our fundamental values and deliver meaningful justice in the daily lives of all people, we will demonstrate important tools and opportunities available now, and some exciting future directions.

We are likely to cover a lot of accessibility tools along with some other cutting edge projects. My hope is to include CC, twitter, mobile access, social media and Diaspora in the conversation.

Logging in to online banking never fails to irk me somehow.  I have a bills account that run a balance of about 2k that is waiting for the money to be pulled out for various expenses like car payment, insurance, ect.  The account even has a special name that makes me feel appreciated “First Choice Gold” at least I feel that way until I see how well I am appreciated.  Here is the interest on the account:

Really 1 cent interest on 2k… If I owed them 2k on a credit card I am sure they would not be charging me 1 cent.