technology law
WITH MILLIONS OF DOLLARS INVESTED in proprietary content as well as software and code,
guarding copyrights and patents for Internet companies has become a necessary and important
step to making money in the information age. With the free flow of information on the web and
the debate over who owns it, best exemplified by Napster’s recent front page battle with the
music industry, tech-sawy lawyers have a unique
opportunity to help decipher the laws for a new frontier.
Jonathan Zittrain, faculty codirector of the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School,
says there’s a booming demand for “cyberlawyers” who
understand and enjoy the technology they’re dealing
with. “It used to be law school graduates had to wait
years before becoming a corporate counselor. Now,
tech-smart graduates leave school and get hired as cor
porate counsel by a dot-com (with little money, but
plenty of stock options)
where they do everything
from contracts to acquir
ing copyrights and writ
ing cease-and-desist
letters,” says Zittrain.
This opportunity also
extends to tech-sawy lawyers will
ing to stick to the more traditional
law firms. For Robert Morishita, a
26-year-old lawyer in Las Vegas,
the appeal of Internet law and
his decision to help create the
rules for a new digital world
have paid off with a partner
ship in his burgeoning firm,
Anderson & Morishita. Like his counterparts work
ing for tech companies, he has to be ready to do it
all—especially when a small company needs someone
to look over its first contract agreement. But
Morishita relishes the smaller clients. “It’s not the
Microsofts or Ciscos that are making history, it’s the
little guys,” he says.
Zittrain agrees. “You have to be a legal acrobat with
your hands in everything,” he says. Right now, Silicon
Valley is the vanguard of this new type of law. Even if
you don’t land a job as counsel for a tech company, any
local law firm interested in increasing its billable hours
will have a technology issues department. Zittrain also
points out that there’s a tremendous need for cyber
lawyers in the dot-org world of Washington, D.C. “The
same conversations that are going on in California
are occurring in D.C. as well,” he says.
Those interested in cyberlaw
should be techno geeks first
and lawyers second. You
should know the funda
mentals of web design and
coding, and Morishita
recommends boning up
on the industry and fol
lowing daily tech news
columns such as
Reuters. “These compa
nies are extremely clued in to what
everyone else is doing,” he says. “They’ll expect you to
know what other companies are doing as well.”
having 6 million pages based on the
path of each person.”
The technology needed to support
personalized design already exists. And
as Internet access expands into public
and social settings like health clubs and
bars, the practical applications of per
sonalized delivery are limitless. “It goes
beyond cookies,” says Booth. “Cookies
just store the information you’ve given
them in the past. Interactive design
responds to the relationships between
your stored information and lets the
content evolve to follow your tastes.”
best-practice guide
U.S. CITIES GAINED 18 million new resi
dents in the 1990s, and recent UN pro
jections estimate that the world’s urban
population will double in the next 30
years. Explosive growth in cities is noth
ing new though, and neither is urban
sustainability— the concept of encour
aging urban development in ways that
conserve natural resources. What is
new is the emphasis on sharing infor
mation and experience via the web.
According to Sarah Stevenson, 27, a
project director at the San Francisco
based Environmental Policy Center