The Goodson Blogson

It’s been a wild week for weather around Duke Law. On Tuesday afternoon, the Southeast was rocked by a rare 5.8-magnitude earthquake , which rattled our library windows and library users alike, but caused no lasting problems in this area (although our nation’s capital, closer to the quake’s epicenter in Virginia, sustained some damage to national monuments ). Now, North Carolina’s coast is bracing for a direct hit from Hurricane Irene , which is expected to make landfall on the Outer Banks today before heading toward New York City. Currently, the effects of Irene here in the Research Triangle are expected to be comparatively minimal, although meteorologists predict a soaking rain on Saturday along with some high winds, which could cause flash flooding and power outages in the Durham area. Duke University is monitoring the situation carefully, and the Goodson Law Library will announce any emergency closures this weekend on our website. You can also sign up for Duke Alert emails and ...

Welcome to our new students, and welcome back to our returning students! The Fall 2011 semester is about to begin, and the Goodson Law Library is ready for the typical questions we hear around this time of year: Are you ever open later than 5:00 p.m.? Yes! While the library is always "open" to Duke Law students (who enjoy 24-hour access with their DukeCards), the library service desk will resume evening and weekend hours on Sunday, August 21 . See the Hours & Directions page for information. Staffing hours vary a bit across the three service points (Circulation/Reserve, Reference, and Computing Help), but generally the desk will be staffed until 9 p.m. on weeknights, 5:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 6:00 or 9:00 p.m. on Sundays (depending on the service point). Does the library have copies of my textbooks on Reserve? Maybe! Historically, the library's textbook collection has been the "luck of the draw;" we always buy extra copies of casebooks...

With the explosive growth of reality TV over the last decade, it’s increasingly likely that you already know someone who has participated in one of the many competitions or candid programming out there (in fact, a Duke Law 2L and Simpsons superfan put in a winning appearance on a 2009 Food Network Challenge ). But for the rest of us, we can only speculate about life behind the scenes...that is, until Monday night. That’s when the Village Voice Runnin' Scared blog published a copy of MTV's standard participant contract for its long-running Real World series , and highlighted the blogger's favorite clauses in the 30-page document. Among the explicitly-assumed risks: you might die, and it's not the producers' responsibility. Your new roommates could assault you (sorry, engage in "non-consensual physical contact"), and you have only yourself to blame. And if the show completely misrepresents your life story, unjustly casting you as its major antagonist? Tota...

July was a rough month for Netflix , all things considered. First the film-subscription service announced a radical change to its pricing structure , which by September could hike some subscribers’ monthly payments by nearly 60 percent. The company’s July 12 blog post sparked enough bourgeois Internet outrage that FunnyOrDie.com created a parody “Relief Fund” with celebrity spokesman Jason Alexander . Then came the corporation’s July 25 quarterly letter to its shareholders ( PDF ), which described plans for a “Facebook integration” tool which will soon launch in Canada and Latin America. But what’s the holdup in Netflix’s home country? The shareholder report explains: At this point, we plan to launch this initiative only in Canada and Latin America, as the VPPA (Video Privacy Protection Act) discourages us from launching our Facebook integration domestically . Under the VPPA, it is ambiguous when and how a user can give permission for his or her video viewing data to be shared. A bipar...