Rensselaer Train Station

Several years ago a new train station was built for Amtrak in Rensselaer. I don't remember all the details, but it cost a huge amount of money. $55 million sticks in my head, but maybe that was before the cost overruns.I'm sitting now in the station waiting for a train. On the drive up I noticed that the old station buildings are still there, and they don't look so good. Seems like there was no

What do lawyers do? Diversifying the revenue stream

An interesting issue has come up in our office recently. How much should a small law firm like ours do to diversify our revenue stream? Other businesses have this kind of issue, but in some ways this is special to lawyers.Our law firm in Albany has a strong main practice handling traffic cases in upstate New York. We get roughly ten new traffic cases a week. One nice thing about this is that it's

Vermont Traffic Courts

I got motivated and entered all the traffic courts in Vermont in the past week or so. Not too many of them. Vermont has fourteen counties. Each county has two courts -- District Court and Superior Court. As one might think, District Court handles lesser offenses while Superior Court handles the more serious ones. But in an interesting twist, Vermont Superior Court does the small claims.There is

More Traffic Court News

Our Traffic Court website has shot up in the world a bit. According to Alexa, the site is now among the top 350,000 websites in the world. That's a big jump, but not really because of an increase in the importance of our site.Alexa changed the way it measures websites. They had been criticized for some time for relying too much on their own "toolbar". It's unclear exactly how they've changed

More Disputes Going Before China's Courts

China News recently reported on new systems put in place by the Chinese courts to increase public awareness of complicated court proceedings and to expedite the resolution of disputes through the courts.

The article also reports some encouraging statistics that reflect on the rule of law in China. It cites a March 2008 State Supreme Court work report that China's courts handled almost 32 million cases from 2003 through 2007. That's up 1.6% over the previous four-year period (1998-2002).

The Shanghai courts saw a much larger increase in their case loads, however, which were up 10% during the same time period. This finding about the Shanghai courts is consistent with observations by my colleagues in the Licensing Executives Society and the American Bar Association's China Committee that courts in certain Chinese cities, Shanghai among them, are becoming more educated as to intellectual property rights and more reliable as fora for the resolution of intellectual property disputes.

To read the China News article, click here. For an excellent list of China resources compiled by the ABA's China Committee, click here.

For more information about doing business in China and with Chinese companies, please contact us at +1.208.939.4472 or info@technologylawgroup.com.

Doing Business in China? Check Out This Recommended Reading!

Recently, the American Bar Association's China Committee discussed books on China that have been useful to our members and to our respective clients doing business in that country or planning to do so.

With more than 500 attorney members around the world, the China Committee is a joint body of the ABA's International Law, Intellectual Property Law, and Science and Technology practice sections.

The China Committee's recommended reading includes books covering topics ranging from China's place in the global economy to the consumer products market there to histories that elucidate Chinese cultural and business philosophies.

I have gathered these titles together for you here in the new Resources link. You'll find the link on the right side of this page above the blog archive listing. Click here and you'll go to our Amazon store to see all the China titles.

You will also see a collection of the TLG team's favorite resources on entrepreneurship, intellectual property strategy, women in science and technology, and more. Because we support Science Olympiad and other programs to foster children's creativity and natural interest in science and technology, we've even put together a set of excellent chemistry sets, books, and other great products to help Kids Create!

To discuss more about your business activities and plans in China, please contact us at +1.208.939.4472 or info@technologylawgroup.com.

San Diego Criminal Court - The Marine Widow Case

We finished the San Diego Superior Courts, and I came across a great story in the process. It's apparently called the Marine Widow case, and that link is to a story about it. Heard in San Diego Criminal Court.Short version: Marine dies. Wife responds by getting a boob job with the life insurance money, joining wet t-shirt contests, and shagging other soldiers. Also buys herself out of substantial

Chinese Intellectual Property Cases Online

To improve the rule of law in China and the transparency and availability of court decisions there, the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Division of the Supreme People's Court offers an online resource for obtaining published decisions in intellectual property cases in China.

The Web site is principally in Chinese language. The search engine operates in English and Chinese. One may search by litigant name, court, filing date, case number, and cause of action.

Just enter search terms in English, and the site returns a list of search results in Chinese, but with some English labeling. The decisions are in Chinese, but no worries! We have Chinese linguistics on our team.

The Web site's navigation bar to the left also has English labels for types of actions: trademarks, copyright and related rights, patents, unfair competition, plant varieties, technology contracts, and others.

Among the Others category are cases involving integrated circuit ("IC") design and cases involving discovery and innovation. (RESOURCE NOTE: For a detailed, albeit 2003, analysis of China's IC design protection law, click here.)

Under Article 134 of China's Civil Procedural Law, "The people's court shall publicly pronounce its judgment in all cases, whether publicly tried or not." (RESOURCE NOTE: For the text of this law, click here.) Further, Article 8 of the 1993 Supreme Court's Rules in Court of the People's Court states that "citizens may audit the court session of cases which are publicly tried according to law."

That said, the courts appear to have some discretion regarding publication, having, for example, no time frame within which they must publish their decisions and no requirements as to the methods of such required publication.

For more information, please reach us at +1.208.939.4472 or info@technologylawgroup.com.

Los Angeles Traffic Courts

We made some progress on our directory project, adding all the superior courts in Los Angeles County. Superior Court in California seems to handle just about everything, from simple traffic tickets up to murder cases and civil cases too.A couple of the more "happening" traffic courts there include Beverly Hills Superior Court and Malibu Superior Court, which have had quite a few celebrity cases.

Lawyer websites and font size

I just visited a website for another law firm in the Albany area. The font size was extremely small. Below is an image showing it next to our website, and you can see that our fonts are significantly larger. If you go to the effort to create a website, you should go further and make sure it is user friendly and readable. It is an attractive website and the firm has a good reputation (I took the

Is Tibet A Country?

Those of us serving on the ABA's China Committee are now discussing the question of Tibet's legal status, particularly whether Tibet is independent or part of China.

For those of you who have been following the compelling stories of political unrest in Tibet and China's intervention there, this post will be particularly interesting.

The term "suzertainty" refers to a principle first seen in feudal law and later used in more modern (late 1800s) positive law in which one country is a vassal state to other. Parts of the Ottoman Empire, e.g., Egypt, Bulgaria, Romania, and others, were organized this way.

The vassal is described as an independent state that gives up some, but not all, of its autonomy to the suzerain state in exchange for certain obligations flowing back to the vassal state.

(RESOURCE NOTE: For an excellent summary of the history of the term "suzertainty" with references, click here.)

Unraveling the legal status of Tibet takes one through the period of British colonialism in the region and later through one or more treaties between Britain and imperial Russian, later cancelled by the Communist government, and through the 1950 invasion by China of Tibet to the present day. A partial timeline of the historical development of Tibet's legal status follows.

One discussion, attributed to Sir Algemon Rumbold, President of the Tibet Society of the United Kingdom from 1977-1988, says that Britain treated Tibet as an independent state from 1910, but stated in 1912 and again 1943 that it acknowledged the suzertainty of China in Tibet, but on the condition that Tibet's autonomy was respected. The latter is cited Memorandum from Sir Anthony Eden to the Chinese Foreign Minister, T.V. Soong, FO371/93001 (May 8, 1943).

Some say that Tibet initially declared independence in 1912, a position apparently agreed by the British government, which treated Tibet as independent from 1910 or from 1912, depending on the commentator. Others say that that 1912 and two subsequent declarations, at least through 1965 or so, did not amount to declarations. See Alfred P. Rubin, Tibet's Declarations of Independence, 60 AM. J. INT'L L. 812-14 (1966).

The 1914 Simla Convention between Great Britain and Tibet established or purported to establish internationally-recognized boundaries, the McMahon Line, for an independent Tibet. China refused that Convention, and Sir Rumbold writes that it was a that point that Tibet repudiated China's suzertainty.

On September 19, 2006, the Declaration of Independence of the Nations of High Asia: Tibet, East Turkistan and Inner Mongolia was made in Washington, D.C. at the Capitol Building.

Although not a thorough analysis of the question of Tibet's legal status, the foregoing indicates that Tibet is indeed a separate country.

For more information on international law, please contact us at +1.208.939.4472 or info@technologylawgroup.com.

Albany Public Relations

My buddy Mark Grimm is also my fellow town board member. Mark really led the campaign and I think his skills in public relations really helped. He has a website for his business: Albany Public Relations. A couple years ago when we sued the Rensselaer DA, Mark set up our press conference and it went very well.I've learned a lot from Mark, and from my own experiences with the media. One big thing

Schenectady DWI

We handle DWI in the Schenectady area. It seems like most of the cases we see occur in the towns, like Rotterdam, Duanesburg and Glenville. Of course there are some in the City of Schenectady as well. We certainly see more DWI and DWAI cases in Albany County. And we see more Saratoga DWI cases too. For Albany it seems obvious why -- bigger area, and maybe we have a closer connection to Albany.

Gmail April Fools Joke Got Me

So there I am peacefully using my Gmail when I notice a link at the top for a new feature -- Gmail custom time. Check out Google's Gmail April Fools Joke.I actually fell for it for a couple minutes. Started composing a message to see how it worked, but the feature was missing. Went back to read the instructions again. Google got me!