Week 10 BoC: Lawyer Jokes.

-Q: How can you tell the difference between an attorney lying dead in the road and a coyote lying dead in the road? A: With the coyote, you would see skid marks.

http://justjoking.com/jokes/jokes/joke317.html

What's the difference between a hooker and a lawyer?

-A hooker will stop screwing you after you are dead.

http://www.lawlaughs.com/short/thedifference.html

-Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Three. One to climb the ladder. One to shake it. And one to sue the ladder company.

http://www.swapmeetdave.com/Humor/Lawyer.htm

Week 7 EoC: 10 Lawyers, 10 Websites

1. Donald L. Prunty
http://www.gtlaw.com/

2. Susan M. Pitz
http://www.nutilepitz.com/

3. Ira W. David
http://www.morishitalawfirm.com/

4. Tiffany Swanis
http://www.jonesvargas.com/

5. Neil J. Beller
http://www.neiljbeller.com/Firm%20Info/Lawyers/1066956.aspx

6. Victor Hairapetian
http://www.facebook.com/people/Victor-Hairapetian/1084736615#!/profile.php?id=1084736615

7. Ikenna K. Odunze
http://www.manta.com/c/mth51lw/ikenna-k-odunze-attorney

8. John Lund Krieger
http://www.lrlaw.com/professionals/xprProfessionalDetailsLR.aspx?xpST=ProfessionalDetail&professional=197

9. Steven Pacitti
http://www.colo-lawyers.com/bio/StevenPacitti.asp

10. Gregory R. Gemignani
http://www.lionelsawyer.com/index.cfm?page_id=5&page=attorney_profile&atid=22

Week 7 EoC: Intellectual Property Questions

1. How do I best protect myself from someone else stealing my artwork/design?
2. What’s the first step to take if someone does steal my design?
3. Do you recommend I personally contact a company that I suspect has stolen my idea?
4. How different (percentage wise) does my design have to be than a similar one?
5. What common issues do designers usually overlook in protecting themselves?
6. Do you recommend a lawyer review my contracts before signatures are put on them by the parties involved?
7. Where do you recommend a designer look for a contract template?
8. Is it better to use a template or have a lawyer draft an original contract for my design?
9. If I die and have a patent pending, does it become public domain?
10. When is it necessary to trademark intellectual property?

Week 6 EoC: Illicit

It’s very difficult for a country like ours, the USA to deal with criminal activities within our borders alone, and this is considering we are a first world nation. When you start thinking about the difficulty that governments have in second or third world nations, you can imagine just how difficult fighting this all really is. Now add the fact taht in our modern times how small the world has become through the internet, you can now imagine how difficult the act of controlling criminal acts like counterfeiting and illicit has become. Controlling your own borders is one thing, but considering how interconnected criminal organizations have become, I really think it’s become just about a losing war.
Truth is, nations will probably never get a hold on every crime ever committed, but what we have here is a free for all where criminals majority of the time are getting away with, and that’s what’s really important. Not only are criminals winning, they’re dominating.
Now when it comes to my personal opinion about all this, well, I have the same issue most governments have to deal with. We won’t exceed the borders of their own country. Honestly, I’m no government or international official whose job it is to deal with this growing issue. So another words, as long as it has no direct effect to my life and the people I know, I really don’t care.
To be honest, I have a bit of contempt for capitalism, and I care less if multimillion dollar organizations and companies around the world are getting ripped off because of this issue. I care about the fake pharmaceuticals because in a cases like those people’s lives are endangered over bogus medications. But either than that and cases similar, I really don’t care to be frank. Now you can hold be contempt for my rash opinions and my favoring to stay ignorant. But the fact is the world is a very ugly place, and it’s only in fat countries like ours where you have people sitting on top wondering why the rest of the world cries for bread when they could be eating cake.

Week 5 EoC: Lawyers looking for Fame

As with every generation, what can be expected by ethics and common practices might as well go out the window. As with then generations in the past 30 years, the so and so called “Me” generation, the questions has been asked if people as a whole are getting greedier, selfish, and more self centered than they use to be. With the generation that is now graduated from the colleges and heading out into the work force, the term “Trophy Kids” has been coined to refer to them.

"They really do seem to want everything, and I can't decide if it's an inability or an unwillingness to make trade-offs," (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455219391652725.html) was said by Derrick Bolton, an assistant dean at Stanford University. As for the case of the fame seeking lawyers, this obviously also applies to them.

As for the case of Fernandez-Vargaz v. Gonzales, the damage that could have been done to nationwide immigration laws because of one of these so called fame seeking lawyers could have been immeasurable.
“Noncitizens with even more compelling cases are still living with the consequences of the Fernandez-Vargas decision,” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/us/10lawyers.html?pagewanted=3) said Trina Realmuto of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.

To be honest, I find this to be a major problem, with today’s generation of thrill seekers more and more people are finding themselves stepping out of place of their skills and experience, and obviously taking very little consideration of what they are doing and what the consequences might end up being outside their own lives.

“College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.” (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/the-culture-of-narcissism/) said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. The fact is, with little sympathy, and hardly any empathy, there cannot be an ethical understanding on behalf of today’s lawyers. Without those ingredients, people today can expect to rely more on themselves and less on the aid of others. I mean lawyers have always just about had the stereotype of being blood sucking vampires, now they’re just going to be upgraded to the next level. Whatever that is, really doesn’t seem all that promising to me. Actually, it’s quite the opposite.

Week 4 EoC: Death Race Jeopardy.

With today’s game, we were separated into teams to play Jeopardy based on the definitions we have been learning in the book for the past four weeks. All of the games were created by us, and right there the biggest problem we were faced with was cohesion. Not all of the games made much sense since some people had put a little less effort in creating a well rounded working game. Some of the questions were confusing to understand, and others were misspelled and grammatically incoherent. But thankfully the majority of the games were understandable enough.
As for the teams, well the member who had obviously studied had a chance to stand out and help their team, and those that hadn’t of course didn’t. As the teams continued to separate, those that had studied began to group together more, leaving out the stragglers to fall into their own teams. Even though this might seem unfair to some, you have to remember those that had studied didn’t have to deal with this problem, for they were doing well no matter what team they were in. So there wasn’t any unfairness amongst the group, and I would say this game was very effective in rewarding those that had studied, and allowing those that hadn’t to learn from the game itself.
As for the words that stuck out the most in my head, electronic filing of patent information comes to mind since I would have an interest in using this service if I ever have to file for a patent. Double patent comes to mind since I was interested in knowing what the legal laws were when two people apply for the same invention at the same time, and finally the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office comes to mind since that administrative branch was mentioned in every answer.

Week 3 EoC: Jeopardy challenges and opportunities

In studies, it tends to get a bit hard remembering every definition, detail, and categorizing everything you’ve learned coherently in your mind. When studying, I think everyone has difficulty understanding everything they read, it also gets pretty hard when you’ll be testing by your knowledge later. Dates, names and definitions always seem to be the hardest ones especially. In order for a person to really absorb everything they have learned, the information acquired sometimes needs to be familiarized with that person by a means only he or she could interpret, or anther words, it’s easy to remember names when faces are involved.

Now when it comes to patent laws and practices, you can’t get any more confusing to a student unless you change the translation into German.  For some people a subject matter like this might as well be in German for they’ll still have as much learning what they’ve read. So the question becomes how does one manage to memorize such a field of study for themselves or anyone to understand?

Well, to tell you what! The answer beats me, I mean since we’re talking about any individual; I guess it would all depend on them figuring all of that out for themselves. But at least for me, and with this assignment of creating a Jeopardy game base on Patent Laws and such, I guess I have kind of hit home since my major just happens to be Game Art Production.  So I’m creating a game here, and I have to learn just how much is needed to create a well rounded game where the questions are categorizes the way they need to be, and how the questions relate to each other. By creating this game I will have to organize all the details to make sense, and not just for me but to anyone that would need to play this game. So in a sense, this just might be the best way to study and remember.