A Very Peculiar Scottish Practice & fin de Festival muscellany

Pangloss is in Estonia where she hopes to blog more tomorrow, but in meanwhile, while desperately trying to catch up post far too much Edin Festival indulgence, was delighted to see this tartan trivia below on Lawrence Eastham's excellent blog for the Society for Computers and Law:

"Solicitors on YouTube

Are Scottish solicitors Inksters the first firm to have a dedicated YouTube channel?

The Glasgow-based firm Inksters hope to ‘keep ahead of the legal technology curve with the launch of a YouTube channel’. The channel contains an initial five films which are also available at inksters.com. These include films on The Home Report, one about windfarming on croft land and another on the House of Lords case: Moncrieff v Jamieson (featuring SSCL Chair Iain G Mitchell QC). Brian Inkster said ‘putting these films on YouTube will bring them to a wider audience. It is a natural extension of the Web 2.0 policy we have been pursuing at Inksters. We were the first Scottish law firm to Twitter earlier this year and we are perhaps now the first Scottish law firm with a dedicated YouTube channel’.

The YouTube videos are at www.youtube.com/inksterssolicitors

Not only that but I *think* I've scooped venerable Scots Law News here! Drag your eyes away from Ally Megrahi (that well known footballer), team.. (Opps EDIT: no! See here.)

I've also very belatedly updated my blog roll a little to include a few excellent newer blogs including Datonomy, on personal data with a stellar UK practitioner line up, and Simon Deane-Johns's useful round up of consumer law,Pragmatist, including some very pithy comments on the seemingly endles revision of EC online consumer law.

From Datonomy, I learn that the UK ICO rather quietly commissioned research in August to price a business case for businesses to invest in privacy; effectively aiming to find out how much businesses might save by proactively investing in privacy rather than waiting for the security breach headlines to hit the fan. How interesting, and how topical, but it certainly seems to move us a long way from privacy-as-a-human-right to commodified privacy-as-property doesn't it?

Oddly enough Pangloss will be speaking on this very topic at the upcoming special-value one-time-only credit crunch SCL Policy Forum in September (fee payable with 6 months 0% credit - no not really) , so if anyone else wants to comment or has interesting worked examples (please show figures:-) of the (alleged) value of privacy to either consumers or businesses, please do comment!

So for me upcoming on the intergalactic talk schedule (just call me Cyber Wogan), it's Estonia for cyberwar, Amsterdam for death (2.0 variety), and London for poverty and privacy. The Three Horsemen of the IT Law Apocalypse. What does that leave? Rains of frogs I suppose..