This week, Judge Lasnik of the Western District of Washington ruled in favor of Avvo’s online rankings in a 10-page order upholding the right of attorneys and consumers to both create and contribute to user-generated attorney ratings.

“To the extent that their lawsuit has focused a spotlight on how ludicrous the rating of attorneys (and judges) has become, more power to them. To the extent that they seek to prevent the dissemination of opinions regarding attorneys and judges, however, the First Amendment precludes their cause of action,” Lasnik wrote.

Avvo provides a system where every lawyer is ranked according to information provided by the lawyer, public records (such as disciplinary actions), endorsements from colleagues, and feedback from current and past clients. Avvo then ranks each lawyer from 1 to 10 using a proprietary system that applies different weights to these data.

For example, I am rated “Good” with a score of 6.5, while Seattle Trademark Lawyer, David Atkins (one of my favorite bloggers) scores a “superb” rating of 9.6. I’ve got some catching up to do.

While this case is more about free expression than copyright, it does highlight some of the trickier concepts in the evolving area of user-generated content. Avvo–while actively soliciting content from its users–claims copyright in all materials on its site. Arguably, there are multiple authors, each having some interest in the content to which they contributed. Also, to the extent that Avvo is reposting public records, it cannot claim copyright in these materials.

Unfortunately, none of these important issues were evaluated by the Cour. The case focused on consumer protection and whether Avvo had the right to make such user-generated content available in the first place. The plaintiffs may still appeal the decision, but here’s hoping they’ll leave the court to resolving more important disputes.

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The Department of Justice is not happy with the PRO IP Act introduced by Judiciary Chairman John Conyers last week. His comments (reposted below) on the pending bill do little to rebut criticism that the bill would increase litigation by large entertainment companies without protecting the rights of small authors.

“We’re always watching lawyers that are hustling, so that goes with the turf.”

Ok.

In other news, Howard Berman (D-CA) (”Congressman Hollywood“), suggests mandatory filtering technology should be evaluated and that the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions might need to be eliminated. Filtering technology already threatens the fair use of content on the Internet and the DMCA is abused by Studio’s like 20th Century Fox. Strengthening the DMCA and making filtering technology mandatory may further shift rights away from the public.

Maybe Congressman Hollywood’s time would be better spent working out a solution to the writer’s strike.

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There are a number of arguments to be made that copyright infringement penalties are too harsh. Some members of congress, however, feel they need to be stiffened up. The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (”PRO IP“) Act of 2007 (H.R. 4279) would significantly harshen penalties for would-be intellectual property infringers, create a new Intellectual Property Enforcement Division in the Department of Justice, and create the new ambassador level post of the White House Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (”WHIPER“.)

The increased penalties will do little to nothing to reduce infringing activities. Despite the Recording Industry Association of America’s aggressive, high-profile approach to litigation and the huge awards extracted from people of little means, file sharing appears to be here to stay. (This week RIAA threatened 22 Universities with legal action.) Ignoring for the moment whether we as a society should be encouraging for-profit industries to siphon money from educational institutions, unregistered copyrights (the vast majority) would not benefit from these increased penalties and will continue to be essentially unprotected by U.S. law. Unlike the vast majority of countries in the world, we’ll continue to have a two-tiered system favoring large content holders. Not so PRO-IP.

However, the bill is not uniformly bad. The WHIPER is a great idea that should yield real benefits to the U.S. economy. The IP Enforcement Representative would coordinate U.S. IP enforcement policy by chairing an interagency advisory committee composed of senior representatives from the Department of Justice, Patent and Trademark Office, Office of the United States Trade Representative, and the United States Copyright Office. The IP Representative also would create a joint strategic plan to eliminate counterfeit and pirated goods from the international supply chain and to establish international standards and policies for the effective protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Perhaps the IP Representative will notice the U.S. is one of the few countries where copyright registration is required in order to enforce your rights. A requirement that few small authors understand or know about. Eliminating this requirement would be the biggest step that Congress could take to strengthen and inject uniform fairness into our copyright system.

Maybe that’ll show up in the markup.

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