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Prosper were just sent a cease and decist by the SEC for offering investments without registration. Prosper is/was one of a small handful of P2P lending markets offering an innovative approach to lending, allowing normal people to lend money to each other. Not that I am a lawyer, but from reading the ruling, it appears …
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I am glad to hear that Douglas Jackson and associates manage to avoid jail and get probation, community service and a fine instead. I still think it’s extremely unfair that a service as innovative as e-gold were punished like this. Apparently so does the US District Judge Rosemary Collyer: According to cnet: U.S. …
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AmLaw Daily has a great interview with Richard Susskind about his new book The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. It is essentially about the fundamental changes that are coming in the business models of lawyers due to changes in technology in general and the economy as a whole. The book points …
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There have been two related blog posts in the last couple of days :The Cure to Our Economic Problems by Mark Cuban and Amen Brother Cuban by Matt Maroon that I can absolutely sympathise with. True entrepreneurs are so focused on their idea that they will find a way. Mark says: The impact of tax rates on productivity …
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We’ve already seen what happens when you leave drafting your agreements entirely to an uninterested legal team. Yet people still have their lawyers draft up an agreement, which more than likely for most contracts really is a paralegal filling out a word template. There are lots of myths surrounding agreements that I …
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Kim Jong-Il the glorious leader of North Korea has long been the laughing stock of most of the world except of course the poor millions of North Koreans who happen to be stuck under his rule. So why is it that most medium to large companies blindly follow his doctrine? Why are so many startups sliding down the path of …
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By now you have no doubt heard about the issue with Google’s Chrome End User License Agreement (or EULA). The original clause of concern was: 1.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying …
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update Several people have mistakenly thought my slightly tongue in cheek title to mean that I’m one of the part of the fringe paranoia groups here. While the USDOJ did bring down e-gold. The term “The Man” as well as the use of references to Black Helicopters were an attempt to caricaturize those paranoia groups. Now …
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By now many people have heard of Nassim Taleb’s amazing book Black Swan. This book has completely changed the way I think about the world as a whole and startups in particular. I really recommend you read the book as I can’t possibly do it justice myself. However I will give a brief overview here. Hopefully in later …
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I’m sitting at the OAuth Summit held at Yahoo in Santa Clara. We’ve had a brief discussion about the IPR policy negotiation process that has been going on in the background between a few core OAuth people and legal departments in various large companies (most notably Yahoo, Google and Microsoft). Briefly the IPR policy …
