bq. Professor John R. Kettle, III of the Rutgers School of Law has prepared a great two-page chart summarizing intellectual property law called “What Every Litigator Must Know About Intellectual Property.” The chart comes as a PDF file.
CNN. com reports that Senior Airman Ahmad al Halabi who acted as a ‘translator’ (probably they mean interpreter) at Guantanamo Bay has now been charged with eleven counts, including espionage and aiding the enemy.
He was arrested in July, and about six weeks later, Army Islamic chaplain Capt. James Yee was taken into custody on similar suspicions. (From JURIST).
LATER NOTE: Philip Greenspun points out, quoting a New York Times article (registration required, free of charge), that the airman was also accused of unlawfully delivering baklava to the detainees. Greenspun wonders where al-Halabi found a baklava shop in Cuba.
Language Log is a new linguistics log with at least four authors: Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, Chris Potts, and Geoff Pullum (via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey).
Matt Bulow reports that if you enter the word ‘Englischübersetzer’ in Google, you get 20 hits for a variety of front URLs, behind all of which zappmedia, a big agency, is hiding. He is reporting it so Google can take countermeasures.
Matt Bulow has started a weblog called alt0151 .
Entries are in English so far. (I very rarely give a German version nowadays, but maybe I should return to it, or at least a little summary in the other language à la Walter Simon). After all, unless I do it every time, people won’t expect it at all.
I will take up his first topic in a separate entry.
IPKAT links to an article in English, in The Register, on the new German copyright law. IPKAT also gives a link to the EU Copyright Directive, which the new German Act implements.
Brigitte Zypries, the German Federal Minister of Justice, spoke of a ‘second basket’ of copyright provisions (‘zweiter Korb’), hence IPKAT’s query as to whether this is a basket case. I knew of the grim history of the term basket case, but I thought it was American. The American Heritage Dictionary says it’s British:
bq. In popular usage basket case refers to someone in a hopeless mental condition, but in origin it had a physical meaning. In the grim slang of the British army during World War I, it referred to a quadruple amputee. This is one of several expressions that first became popular in World War I, or that entered American army slang from British English at that time.
The OED says it’s of U.S. origin, and the first example it gives is U.S., 1919. I thought it came from the Civil War, but I don’t know.
And a year ago, Time asked ‘Is Germany Europe’s Basket Case?‘. Here are some other speculations.