Reasonably accessible tapes in cartoon and Court of Appeal

I resist passing on all Tom Fishburne’s wonderful Case in Point cartoons which he does for CaseCentral – this is supposed to be a serious place, and I don’t want Fishburne eclipsing my own occasional forays into the lighter side of e-Discovery.

Like all the best cartoons, this week’s is both telling as well as funny:

It is also, as it happens, very timely, coming in the week where the Court of Appeal has actually had to consider a point about reasonable accessibilty of back-up tapes – the case is Fiddes v Channel 4 and I will write about it as soon as I can find a public version of the original judgment. Briefly, the judge decided against ordering the disclosure of some hard-to-access tapes on grounds of proportionality and the Court of Appeal upheld his judgment.

It does not matter what it is which makes people think about the subject – a cartoon and a Court of Appeal judgment have equal weight at that level.

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Using marketing to make people hate you

There is more to marketing than making yourself heard – that is just a process, achieved with money and effort. The objective, however, is to make people buy from you, not hate the sight and sound of your name. Bad marketing taints the water for everyone else.

My post Revolutionary video pillory for PR consultants drew attention to a video on Charles Christian’s Orange Rag which sounded more like a recording than the parody it was meant to be.

He has now put up a sequel The embargo has been broken which, unlike most film sequels, maintains the standard of the first.

Whilst on the subject of PR consultants, can I give a medal to whoever is responsible for the PR for a particular US translations company? I had never heard of them before the recent campaign began and, it is fair to say, I never want to hear of them again. The trick appears to be to place the same article about the company in as many places as possible, regardless of context — I came across one today on what appears to be a site for fatties and food faddists with tags like “burn fat fast” and “psychic powers” and “healthy foods to eat”. They are not, therefore, fussy about the company they keep, merely keen that you should see their bloody press release as often as possible.

Gucci v Curveal: a blow for US interests – whichever way you understand that expression

British 19th Century “gunboat diplomacy” and the song The Wreck of the Old 97 are what came to mind when I read the latest Opinion of a US court about the relative importance of US interests and the laws of other countries restricting the discovery of private information. Carry on like this, USA, and you may well need a gunboat to support document collections.

The article by the respected US e-Discovery commentator Tom O’Connor Why the Rest of the World Thinks we are Crazy concerns an Opinion of the District Court of the Southern District of New York which orders a Malaysian bank, not party to the proceedings, to produce documents despite a Malaysian statute prohibiting them from doing so. I volunteer to speak on the half of “the Rest of the World”