award tour

Techcrunch is reporting that Amazon is acquiring AbeBooks. Abe was actually around before the world wide web when it was a tool for used book stores to find used and rare books at stores across the country. It’s current website let’s end users do the exact same search.

What’s very interesting, and not mentioned by techcrunch, is that the company is Canadian and will be keeping their Canadian presence. This is interesting because Amazon doesn’t currently have a Canadian presence because of some legal issues. If they did, then they’d be subject to Canadian content laws regarding the percentage of Canadian book titles they sell on Amazon.ca. I don’t know how they could have structured the deal that the two entities are separate yet not (though I’m not as crafty as corporate lawyers).

Anton just sent me an NPR write-up on yesterday’s Supreme Court oral arguments on the habeas rights of Guantanamo prisoners. In summary, it seems the court is divided 4-4 along party lines with Justice Kennedy, as usual, holding the swing vote. There’s one part from the end of the write-up that I found really interesting and very troubling. It’s a comment from the defense attorney…

To illustrate his point, Waxman pointed to a case in which he said a detainee was finally released after four years in detention because the detainee, a German man, had “what other detainees have not had — a lawyer.” And when the lawyer filed a habeas petition in the federal courts, and the government filed a reply with its evidence, the lawyer saw that the government claimed the detainee had associated with a named terrorist who had blown himself up.

“Within 24 hours, his counsel had affidavits not only from the German prosecuter, but from the supposedly deceased Mr. Bilgen, who is a resident of Dresden, never involved in terrorism, and fully getting on with his life,” Waxman said.