Over the years as an expert witness I’ve worked with a lot of lawyers. Most are really sharp, some are brilliant, and a few… not so much. Here are some guidelines for treating an expert right.

Wikipedia is great for cocktail party banter, but don’t rely on it for critical facts. The anonymity of its contributors, the poor fact-checking on the early contributions, and the bias of unqualified volunteer editors make it an increasingly inaccurate source that is losing its initial attraction for many.

My book on software intellectual property has just been published by Prentice-Hall.

Peter Huber at the Manhattan Institute argues in the Wall Street Journal that software patents discourage innovation and must be disallowed or restricted. Dr. Huber’s facts are wrong and his conclusion is wrong.

S.A.F.E. has recently announced the release of DocMatch, a new tool for comparing all kinds of documents to find plagiarism.

Antivirus company McAfee and R&D company SAIC recently published a report entitled Underground Economies, a study of corporate IP theft. According to the study, many cyberthieves now see stealing IP as more profitable than credit card theft and identity theft.

In the past few years I’ve been interviewing students for job openings at my companies. Some students came from large, well-known universities while other came from small colleges. Some students had bachelor’s degrees in computer science while others had master’s degrees. One thing that many of these recent graduates had in common was that they couldn’t program competently.

You can now run CodeMeasure for free to graph the growth of your software project development effort over multiple versions of the software. CodeMeasure uses the Changing Lines of Code (CLOC) method to calculate the growth.

The ADFSL 2011 Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law is a small conference that’s focused on practical results as well as academic research. I attended last year, and presented a paper, and found it interesting and informative. I heard from law enforcement officials, the kind of people you don’t often meet at these types of conferences.

Social network games have burst onto the Internet with amazing speed and popularity. There’s a lot of money to be made and a lot of users to capture. There’s also a lot of copying going on. Some of that copying is legitimate and some is infringement. Our Online IP Screening Service found code in common between Zynga’s FarmVille and CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium game. Was is illicit, perfectly allowed, or just coincidence