I think even attorneys can safely agree there are few things as tedious and by the numbers as serving legal papers on someone. In the US notice for legally binding instruments is fundamental, ancient, and sacrosanct. And few things in the law require as much religious devotion in practice. Hence in the US, most states have notice provisions that impose some kind of registered mail requirement. This approach is time honored for a reason.

With American society moving from apple pie to sci-fi, it's not much of a plot twist to hear there is a movement to factor the net into the notice equation. While i am one of the loudest advocates for a techno, forest friendly legal industry, you might be surprised to know that I am not a fan of recent events.

Just a week and a half ago, the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court held that Facebook could be used to serve legally binding documents (a lien notice for a home foreclosure). While some consider this the logical "next step", please allow me to be the closet luddite. While there might be a day not far from now where service by telepathy or flying car, Facebook is very much just the here and now (for now); it's simply just not a proper evolutionary step.

This is because the follow up use of mail service after personal service represents an understanding that postal mail is a transcendent communications technology. The Egyptians used it and George Jetson will likely use it on Alpha Centauri. And so many legal systems have judged mail to be a sufficient last ditch process on the part of a plaintiff.

Email, with its constantly changing free accounts, pointers, forward bots, ISP blackouts, IP blacklists, hard drive failures, blah, blah, and blah cannot be held under the same light as snail nail (slow but true it is...mostly). So how can Facebook be more bedrock than email? Simply, these communications technologies are not so constant that they can be stapled on the legal process (not to non-lawyers at least). If the rules become future driven overseas, there will be greater traction here. So what's the American response, should we allow service through MySpace?

Is Your Credit Card Merchant PCI Compliant?

For the would be ecommerce startup in this next round of net startups, sometimes PayPal isn’t going to cut it for the “look and feel” of a pro. So you may want to take a look at the PCI Compliance Guide. This is a best practices and compliance guide that has been adopted in the US (and founded by the credit card bigwigs) for credit card merchant services. As with most of the major net battle fronts this was motivated by privacy and identity theft concerns. Hence when choosing a credit card merchant, checking their PCI compliance should be part of the process.