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CHICAGO, Feb. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Winston & Strawn LLP announced today that nationally recognized criminal defense attorney Daniel D. Rubinstein, as well as noted technology, media and intellectual property litigator Paul D. McGrady, Jr., have joined its litigation practice in Chicago as partners.  Rubinstein is a decorated former Assistant U.S. Attorney for both Los Angeles and Chicago, having been awarded the Department of Justice's prestigious Director's Award for Superior Performance and twice having received the Chicago Crime Commission's "Stars of Distinction" award.  McGrady is a recognized authority on the law governing the intersection of information technology and intellectual property, having authored McGrady on Domain Names, the three-volume definitive treatise on domain name law, and McGrady on Social Media, both of which are published by Lexis Nexis.  The World Trademark Review describes McGrady as having "established himself as "a leading expert" in the area of domain names.  WTR ranks McGrady in both contentious and non-contentious work.

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Although concentrating their diverse practices on apparently different areas of the law, Rubinstein and McGrady have a number of high profile clients in common and have collaborated in litigation for their shared clients with excellent results.  They join Winston from Greenberg Traurig.

Rubinstein's practice involves defending companies and executives and other regulatory enforcement matters, as well as handling government and corporate internal investigations, including several large private or publicly traded corporations and investment funds.    He has also successfully negotiated, and often tried as lead counsel, numerous criminal cases and has litigated many complex civil matters in various federal courts and before the SEC and the NYSE.  Rubinstein is also a lecturer-in-law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he has taught Federal Criminal Practice since 2007.

McGrady, who will be joining the firm's highly-ranked Advertising, Marketing & Entertainment law practice, is a recognized legal authority on branding issues, especially as they relate to both domain names and social media.  He is a veteran of more than 300 proceedings under the Uniform Domain Dispute Resolution Procedure, in which the Panel ordered transfer of a domain name to his client, as well as many cases brought under the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and under foreign domain name dispute policies.  McGrady represents a wide array of large brand owners, some of whom have chosen to apply for and operate a new top-level domain.  He previously served as in-house for a Fortune 500 retailer focusing in trademarks, franchising, advertising and shareholder/member relations.  McGrady also serves as an adjunct professor of law at DePaul University College of Law, teaching Cyberlaw.

"Dan and Paul bring to the firm truly exceptional experience from their challenging work on behalf of executives and large companies," said firm chairman Dan K. Webb. "Their common work on cutting edge domain name and other technology litigation is particularly a perfect complement to Winston's highly-regarded global litigation team."

"Dan's involvement in complex commercial litigation and corporate governance issues, as well as his well-known ability to defend securities and other criminal allegations and regulatory enforcement actions will greatly increase the depth of our global litigation services and will indeed be welcomed by our clients world-wide."

"I'm excited to join Winston's preeminent global litigation team," Rubinstein said. "Winston is well known for its experienced trial lawyers, international platform, and demonstrated excellence on behalf of clients when the stakes are at their highest."

"I was likewise attracted to Winston because of its acclaimed media, IP and technology litigators and look forward to contributing my experience with matters at the junction of IP, IT and social/mobile media to the team offerings," said McGrady.

Rubinstein earned his J.D. cum laude from Boston University School of Law. He previously served as a law clerk for the Honorable Ernest C. Torres, U. S. District Court, and District of Rhode Island.  McGrady earned his J.D. from DePaul University College of Law.

Winston & Strawn LLP is an international commercial law firm with 15 offices in North America, Asia, and Europe. More information about the firm is available at http://www.winston.com.

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Prominent White-Collar Criminal Defense Litigator Daniel Rubinstein, and Intellectual Property Authority, Paul McGrady ...

Twitter has responded to criticisms that it censored users parodying the French president Nicolas Sarkozy when he opened an account on the social network on 15 February.

Twitter has responded to accusations of censorship in France after it reportedly took down four user accounts for impersonating French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Image credit: Downing Street/Flickr

Digital rights group Internet Without Borders (Internet Sans Frontieres) said on Sunday that the accounts were taken down in response to a real Sarkozy account being opened. It added that they were all clear parody accounts and not an attempt to impersonate the French president.

"Speaking publicly of individual, specific cases of suspension is a breach of confidentiality and security. That said, we would like to provide this context for the recent suspensions," Twitter said in a post on its French blog.

"Parody is tolerated and encouraged on Twitter, so long as it respects not merely some, but all, of the conditions stated publicly in our parody policy. An impersonating account is suspended when it a) violates our parody policy and b) is reported by the person being impersonated," the company added.

Additionally, Twitter said it only resorts to automated suspension s for accounts which violate the spam section of the Twitter rules, and that even in this case, suspended users are "often granted" a second chance to comply with the rules.

The role of social networks, such as Twitter, for organisational and coordination purposes has been witnessed in recent world events such as the Arab Spring uprisings and London riots in 2011.

"Twitter plays an integral role in political discourse all over the world. We understand and support the critical need for citizens and politicians to engage in real-time conversations about important issues — and we would never stand in the way of that," the company said. "However, we will also protect the user experience on Twitter, which includes ensuring our policies are followed."

When ZDNet UK checked Twitter, a number of Sarkozy parody accounts were still active at the time of writing.

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Twitter explains Sarkozy 'censorship'

The country's decision to block the Uzbek-language wiki may be more about showmanship and nationalism than controlling information.

Wikipedia.org

Uzbekistan's ban on Wikipedia is censorship as performance art. The ban, enacted late last month, blocks all articles written in Uzbek while leaving articles in other languages accessible. Unlike earlier acts of online censorship, the ban on Uzbek Wikipedia articles does not prevent citizens from accessing political information. On the contrary, it blocks a prime venue of innocuous diversion: the thousands of articles about pop stars, national heroes, and sports figures that comprise the Uzbek-language Wikipedia. Uzbeks unable to access the Uzbek-language Wikipedia may now turn instead to the Russian-language Wikipedia, a virtual treasure trove of Uzbekistan's state-suppressed memories that could not possibly merit official approval. So why block the Uzbek version? What does it accomplish?

Like its English-language counterpart, the Uzbek Wikipedia is an idiosyncratic collection that represents the diverse interests of its users. The best entries, as rated by moderators, are Cristiano Ronaldo, the Republic of Korea, Philosophy, and Alisher Navoi (a 15th century Uzbek poet). Other user favorites include Kelly Clarkson, Nirvana (the band), Internet Explorer, and a Finnish symphonic metal group called Nightwish. Pop culture entries tend to skew toward foreign tastes: the recently updated Uitni Hyuston entry, for example, is longer than that of popular Uzbek singer Yulduz Usmonova. Though the Uzbek government can be capricious in its censorship, the Uzbek Wikipedia is assiduously unprovocative - indeed, Uzbeks writing about national hero Navoi is exactly the sort of thing that the state encourages. Skimming the list of 7,890 entries, I found more of the same apolitical fare: an epic piece on FIFA; a treatise on plov.

What is missing from the Uzbek Wikipedia? Information on contemporary political life. President Karimov has a short, perfunctory entry, and all opposition figures and parties are absent. The chronology of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, a source of domestic tension for decades, terminates in 1991. The Uzbek entry for Andijon, the site of the brutal state crackdown on civilian protest in 2005, contains two lines detailing its geographic location and its founding as a city in 1297. Contrast this with the entry on Andijon in the Russian Wikipedia - not banned in Uzbekistan -  a long, contentious account that notes the deaths of innocent citizens and their subsequent labeling as "criminals" by the Karimov regime.

I have a suspicion that what prompted the Wikipedia ban at the end of the January was the addition, on January 24, of the following entries: "seks", "penis", "gey", and "jinsiy aloqa" (sexual relations), which come complete with helpful illustrations. This would be in keeping with the government's aversion to overt sexual content, which they believe threatens national values. (Note that this is simply a theory - I have no inside knowledge as to the reason for the ban, nor has the Uzbek government addressed it. ) But that still leaves the question of why the Russian or English Wikipedias remain open to the public when they contain even more sexual imagery and political content.

Here it is useful to look not only at what is being censored, but where - because the question of "where" content exists online is more complex for regimes that derive their power from narrow definitions of nationalism. Uzbekistan's ban on Wikipedia has less to do with blocking access to information than it does with territorializing an ambiguous Uzbek ethnolinguistic virtual space. As I argued in a 2010 article, the Uzbek government views the Internet as a virtual extension of its sovereign dominion, and sees Uzbek-language content as subject to its jurisdiction. Under this logic, state intervention is  more justified when Uzbeks write encyclopedia entries in Uzbek than it is when Uzbeks read encyclopedia entries in Russian, because those entries do not lie on the state's ethnically demarcated virtual "territory". (That said, I see censorship of the Russian version in Uzbekistan's future.)

Censorship in authoritarian states is not purely practical - it is an act of showmanship, and in this case, one-upmanship over a foreign threat. Large, foreign platforms challenge the Karimov regime not only through the interaction they facilitate, but through their ambiguous territorial standing. Last summer, Uzbekistan's state officials responded to Facebook by creating Muloqot, a state-run social media network which only Uzbeks in Uzbekistan can use. By censoring the Uzbek-language Wikipedia, state authorities mark a similarly ambiguous collaborative space as Uzbekistan state territory -- territory subject online, as it is on the ground, to strict government control.

This post originally appeared at Registan.net and is reproduced with permission

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Censorship as Performance Art: Uzbekistan's Bizarre Wikipedia Ban

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President George W. Bush signs the Partial Birth Abortion Bill surrounded by high ranking Republican Congressmen on Nov. 5, 2003 in Washington, DC. The bill banned "partial-birth abortions" except where it is necessary to save a woman's life.

Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

President George W. Bush signs the Partial Birth Abortion Bill surrounded by high ranking Republican Congressmen on Nov. 5, 2003 in Washington, DC. The bill banned "partial-birth abortions" except where it is necessary to save a woman's life.

Jessica Valenti is the founder and editor of Feministing.com

Aspirins and short skirts and contraception, oh my! The last few weeks have seen a slew of Republican gaffes concerning women's sexuality. From Rick Santorum's billionaire supporter Foster Friess's waxing nostalgic about the good old days when women put aspirin "between their knees" in lieu of contraception to an online furor over whether the young conservative women at CPAC dressed too provocatively — the GOP has a major woman problem on their hands. Their fear of sex — of women's sexuality in particular — has become a major media talking point, and a source of outrage among American women. But what I don't understand is why anyone is surprised. Republicans have long based their agenda for women in a deep-rooted disdain for all things female. We've been down this road many, many times before.

When a picture of Congressman Darrell Issa's all-male panel on birth control (the make-up of which prompted several Democratic women to walk out of the hearing) hit the Internet and mainstream media — I couldn't help but be reminded of a similar picture of George W. Bush signing the "partial birth" abortion ban, surrounded by a group of smiling clapping men. All men. (Santorum was one of them.)

Dahlia Lithwick reported last week in Slate on a law that's poised to pass in Virginia that would make it legal to penetrate abortion-seeking women against their wills by requiring a medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound — a procedure that would count as rape under state law. Delegate David Englin told Lithwick that one Republican lawmaker told him that the invasive ultrasound wasn't an issue because women seeking abortions had already made the decision to be "vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant." Apparently once women have been penetrated, all other future penetrations should be no problem, consent notwithstanding.

If this attitude sounds radical, consider that up until 2008, it was the basis for Maryland rape law. If a woman initially agreed to sex, but later withdrew consent, any sex that followed wasn't rape. The justification was based on archaic legislation that said after the initial "de-flowering" of a woman, nothing could be considered rape because "the damage was done," she was no longer a virgin and couldn't be "re-flowered."

The focus on birth control is not new either. Conservatives and Republican appointees successfully held up emergency contraception for over-the-counter status for three years in the FDA, despite a recommendation from an independent joint advisory committee to the agency to make the drug available. Dr. W. David Hager — appointed by then President Bush to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs — told the New York Times about why he voted against the drug's approval, noting, "What we heard today was frequently about individuals who did not want to take responsibility for their actions and wanted a medication to relieve those consequences." (Hager also penned a book in which he argued that prayer could cure PMS — quite the expert on women's health!)

It also came out that in an internal memo FDA medical official Janet Woodcock argued against making the contraceptive available over the counter for fear that it would cause "extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B." (The same fear-based rhetoric over young women becoming promiscuous was used when conservatives tried to hold up Gardasil, the HPV vaccine that prevents cervical cancer.)

But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that this is just a problem of men attacking women's rights. Conservative women's rights groups, always eager for a patriarchal pat on the head, have long thrown other women under the bus under the guise of protecting them from their own wanton sexuality. The Independent Women's Forum — who oppose the Violence Against Women Act, Title IX and who don't believe pay inequity exists — started a campaign years ago to get the award-winning play The Vagina Monologues banned from college campuses, arguing that it's pornographic and reduces women to their body parts. (Specifically, the one they'd rather not think about.) The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, another right-wing women's organization, launched a campaign and contest in 2008 to "Bringing Back the Dowry and Hope Chest." The winner received a "cedar-lined hope chest filled with $1000 worth of dowry items" as well as $500 toward her future wedding. Retro-chic!

Given this long history of paternalism and efforts to rollback women's rights — I think the calls that the GOP is launching a "war on women" are right on, but years late.

Perhaps today, with the Internet moving information faster than ever before, Republican and conservative sexism doesn't go as easily unnoticed (just ask the folks at Komen). Perhaps the influx of young women and feminists into self-directed and social media activism has changed the course of the national debate. Or maybe women are just fed up with yet another legislator dictating how they should run their lives and use their bodies.

Whatever the reason, we need to ensure that Republicans are held accountable and don't get to brush these comments and actions off as mistakes or misunderstandings. Because they're not simple gaffes, they're a crystal clear window into the future that the GOP wants for women.

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The Nation: Men, All Men. And Birth Control

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Local Corporation (NASDAQ: LOCM - News), a leading online local media company, today announced that its Rovion Ad Management Platform (RAMP) now includes the ability to add real-time polling results to any rich media advertisement, just in time for the 2012 election ad campaign season.

RAMP’s drag and drop functionality allows users to create polls and display results with just a few clicks. The platform’s easy-to-use reporting tool provides immediate results, helping companies and political campaigns quickly decipher polling insights, measure preference ranking and refine messaging.

“The ability to add real-time voting through RAMP’s self service interface eliminates the need for technical personnel and as a result, saves time and reduces cost. Especially with the upcoming 2012 elections, real-time opinion polls in rich media ads that cross mobile and desktop environments can be a powerful tactical advantage for campaigns,” said Michael Sawtell, Local Corporation president and COO.

According to STRATA’s recent survey of advertising agencies, 42 percent say their 2012 political ad spend will be more than 2010.

“We are excited to offer new and compelling features within RAMP, as we continue to integrate the platform and other recent acquisitions into our broader product suite and discover additional opportunities for strategic growth,” said Sawtell.

RAMP by Rovion is the first automated solution that enables agencies, the brands they represent and publishers to create and publish original rich media ads without code or the Adobe® Flash® authoring tool. The custom platform enables the flexible, creation of rich media ads using a single ad tag that can be viewed online or on mobile devices. For more information, please visit: http://www.rovion.com/.

About Local Corporation

Local Corporation (NASDAQ:LOCM - News) is a local media company that specializes in connecting brick-and-mortar businesses with online customers using a variety of innovative digital marketing products including local rich media, local business and product search, mobile, SEO, web hosting, social media and daily deals. The company serves a million consumers a day on the flagship Local.com website, Spreebird.com and a network of more than 1,000 regional media sites. To advertise, or for more information, visit: http://www.local.com/ or http://www.localcorporation.com.

Local Corporation is a registered trade name of Local.com Corporation.

Adobe and Flash are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements that are based upon current expectations and involve certain risks and uncertainties within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words or expressions such as "anticipate," "plan," "will," "intend," "believe" or "expect'" or variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors, some of which are beyond our control and difficult to predict and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or forecasted in the forward-looking statements. Key risks are described in the filings we make with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements in this release speak only as of the date they are made. We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statement for any reason. Unless otherwise stated, all site traffic and usage statistics are from third-party service providers engaged by the company.

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Local Corporation Releases In-Ad Polling Functionality for RAMP Rich Media Ads