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Not only is Jurist one of the Ancient Wise Oracles of the online legal world, it is a moment-to-moment legal media center.  Just to give two examples of particular concern to me:

As I wrote yesterday, Google seemed on the verge of settling the long-running and profound disputes concerning its Google Library Project.  Jurist now reports the settlement is final:

Internet search company Google, Inc. [corporate website] agreed Tuesday to settle [Google press release] two copyright infringement lawsuits stemming from its book-scanning initiative [Google Book Search website]. The two lawsuits were brought against Google by The Authors Guild [advocacy website; press release, PDF], an advocacy group seeking to preserve copyright protection for authors, and by other plaintiffs including the Association of American Publishers (AAP) [organization website; AAP press release], The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., Penguin Group (USA), Inc., and Simon & Schuster, Inc. [corporate websites]. Under the terms of the settlement agreement [text, PDF], which is subject to approval by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York [court website], Google will pay $125 million to authors and publishers of copyrighted works. In return, Google will be allowed to display online up to 20% of the total pages of a copyrighted book, and will offer users an opportunity to purchase the remainder of any viewed book. The New York Times has more. The Washington Post has additional coverage.The two lawsuits settled Tuesday were originally brought against Google in 2005. In September 2005, The Authors Guild alleged [JURIST report] “massive copyright infringement at the expense of the rights of individual writers.” The lawsuit accused Google of engaging in unauthorized scanning and copying of books through its Google Print Library Project [Google backgrounder; advocacy copyright analysis, PDF]. The AAP lawsuit, filed in October 2005 [JURIST report], alleged that Google infringed copyrights held by a number of publishing companies when it scanned the entire book collections of several universities to make them searchable online.

With respect to another profound concern of mine, military torture, Jurist reports that a federal judge has ruled that evidence obtained by torture cannot be admitted in the trial of a Guantanamo detainee:

A US military judge ruled Tuesday that a confession given by Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainee Mohammed Jawad [DOD materials; JURIST news archive] to Afghan officials following his capture in 2002 was obtained using torture and is therefore inadmissible at his upcoming military commission [JURIST news archive] trial. Army Col. Stephen Henley found that Afghan officials threatened to kill Jawad and his family unless he admitted to throwing a grenade that injured three US soldiers in Kabul in 2002. Henley ruled that obtaining a confession using threat of death amounted to torture, and that under Guantanamo trial rules his confession is therefore inadmissible. Reuters has more.

Jawad, who was transferred into US custody after the confession to the Afghanistan government, was designated an “enemy combatant” in 2004. He was later charged [charge sheet, PDF; JURIST report] with attempted murder and intentionally causing serious bodily injury for his role in the attack, which injured two US soldiers and an Afghan translator. The case against him faces growing problems. Last month, former military commissions chief prosecutor Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld resigned [JURIST report], citing “ethical qualms” with the military commissions’ defense counsel discovery procedures. In May, Jawad moved [JURIST report] to have all charges against him dismissed, alleging that he has been tortured in US custody and subjected to the so-called “frequent-flier program,” in which certain inmates are moved between cells at two to four hour intervals in an attempt to cause physical stress through sleep deprivation. Jawad, the fourth Guantanamo detainee to be formally charged with war crimes under the 2006 Military Commissions Act [text, PDF], is set to face military commission on January 5, 2009.