iPad for law school? Forum

[T14_Scholly]

As an IT consultant myself, I am most definitely going to take full advantage of all the technology at my disposal to achieve maximum efficiency in note-taking and outline creation.

You, an IT consultant?

[kswiss]

Or my reading device for that matter. It is just nice to have as an extra piece of cutting edge technology.

TITCR. At this point its not much more than a toy, since it doesn't do anything that you can't already do with the cheapest netbook available (in fact it does far less.)

Do I want one? Yes. I'm like a raccoon and I love shiny things. If it had a front facing camera and support for video conferencing I'd probably buy one just for that; it'd be a cool coffee table video conferencing appliance. As it is, I can't find a way to convince myself to actually spend the $$, because it will not add anything in the way of productivity or ability to my life.

I agree with other posters....wait until 2.0 at least. There are going to be a bunch of competing products released in the next year that will do a lot more, at which point Apple will incorporate some real features with some downward price pressure. Best of both worlds: Apple's gloss, but with some legit features.

[of Benito Cereno]

As a grad student in the social sciences I certainly could have made great use of the ipad, it would have been fantastic to just slip that in my bag have all the research articles in my library available wherever I am. I also am constantly reading articles from all sorts of online journals, blogs, and newspapers on my laptop (there are 35 half-finished ones open right now on safari) I really would love to be able to leave the macbook at home and just have that little ipad with me wherever i go to read articles from signandsight or aldaily like a magazine. I'll be going to law school in a major city and will likely be out and about pretty much the whole day so I think it would be a pretty ideal device to have during law school. I don't plan on using a computer in the classroom anyways (ruins concentration).

[T14_Scholly]

Or my reading device for that matter. It is just nice to have as an extra piece of cutting edge technology.

In what way is the iPad cutting edge technology?

[vanwinkle]

TITCR. At this point its not much more than a toy, since it doesn't do anything that you can't already do with the cheapest netbook available (in fact it does far less.)

I don't understand why people keep saying this. It doesn't do quite the same things as the cheapest netbooks, but it certainly doesn't do less.

I think the biggest thing would be the video playback, which is amazing on the iPad (I played with one yesterday). Many netbooks stutter when trying to play 720p, but the iPad can do it smoothly. The netbooks that can handle 720p well typically have Nvidia ION graphics that suck battery life a lot faster, and the iPad reviews out now show it really does go 10 hours on a charge even while watching videos.

Besides that, the iPad has a huge convenience factor most netbooks don't. It's in a form factor that's easier to hold and use, and personally I find the virtual keyboard easier to use than the tiny-form-factor keyboards on many netbooks. The iPad is something you can just pull out and use for a minute, a lot easier than you can just pull out and use a netbook.

Then there are the apps that do things you can't easily do on a netbook. The Weather Underground app for the iPad is amazing, for example. You can easily zoom in and out all over the country with the touch of a finger to look at the weather map anywhere, scroll through video camera feeds in different areas, pull up long-term forecasts, and it's incredibly easy to use. To get at all that information on a netbook you've gotta do a lot of scrolling and clicking, and I find just touching the thing you want to look at on the iPad a lot more intuitive than having to scroll a cursor around on a tiny touchpad on a netbook.

There are quite a few apps already for the iPad that work that painlessly and beautifully, and I'd expect that to continue. As it does, the iPad starts to do more and more that cheap netbooks can't. And it already can do some things they can't, at least not well.

I am eagerly awaiting the day e-textbooks are readily available. We're not there yet, but with the iPad shipping now and motivating a new push toward digital content, it might help it happen.

[TheBigMediocre]

I'm just waiting for the iPad to drive the price of the Amazon Kindle down so I can purchase one of those.

[wreckem]

I had plenty of professors in undergrad who did this (or something very similar).

Not being law professors, I wouldn't expect them quite so much to appreciate the illegality of their actions.

Under US copyright law, you can reproduce a limited amount/a portion of, of copyrighted material for academic use without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.

[quickquestionthanks]

TITCR. At this point its not much more than a toy, since it doesn't do anything that you can't already do with the cheapest netbook available (in fact it does far less.)

I don't understand why people keep saying this. It doesn't do quite the same things as the cheapest netbooks, but it certainly doesn't do less.

Exactly.

ITT: Apple envy.

[UTaylor526]

There is a school-specific thread that is having this same debate and the general consensus there is it is better to save the money and get a notebook than a Kindle, IPAD, or ereader. There was more talk of putting reference materials (Black's Law, etc.) on the kindle/IPAD than actual casebooks but it wasn't anything you couldn't do on a notebook.

So the question boils down to this: Why get a Kindle/IPAD and not just spend the money getting a nicer notebook?

[UTaylor526]

I had plenty of professors in undergrad who did this (or something very similar).

Not being law professors, I wouldn't expect them quite so much to appreciate the illegality of their actions.

Under US copyright law, you can reproduce a limited amount/a portion of, of copyrighted material for academic use without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.

Regardless of the professor doing this -couldn't you do it yourself? Take your casebooks (or borrow from a friend), scan them, and use them on your notebook/IPAD/Kindle using Adobe products? As long as you are not distributing the materials, are you breaking copyright laws?

[vanwinkle]

I had plenty of professors in undergrad who did this (or something very similar).

Not being law professors, I wouldn't expect them quite so much to appreciate the illegality of their actions.

Under US copyright law, you can reproduce a limited amount/a portion of, of copyrighted material for academic use without obtaining permission from the copyright owner.

The OP I was responding to made it sound like the professor decided to do this for the entire class/semester. In that case she'd be borrowing so much to distribute in PDF that the students wouldn't need to buy the books anymore even though they're relying on the casebook material for the entire semester, and I'm pretty sure the publisher could easily argue that goes well beyond "fair use".

[vanwinkle]

Regardless of the professor doing this -couldn't you do it yourself? Take your casebooks (or borrow from a friend), scan them, and use them on your notebook/IPAD/Kindle using Adobe products? As long as you are not distributing the materials, are you breaking copyright laws?

This is a lot easier to argue as falling under fair use, since you're only making a copy of a work you've already bought a right to (by buying the textbook for yourself) and you're not distributing it to others. The professor would be going well beyond that by distributing all the relevant parts of the casebook to her students, undermining the sales of that many copies of the casebook by students who would've otherwise had to buy it.

Part of the problem with this is that copyright law interpretation is changing and evolving right now to try to keep up with the digital age, and there's a huge pushback against the fair use doctrine in general, making it hard to say how far you can go with fair use exactly. However, this case sounds a lot more like fair use than what the professor is supposedly doing.

[T14_Scholly]

Then there are the apps that do things you can't easily do on a netbook. The Weather Underground app for the iPad is amazing, for example. You can easily zoom in and out all over the country with the touch of a finger to look at the weather map anywhere, scroll through video camera feeds in different areas, pull up long-term forecasts, and it's incredibly easy to use. To get at all that information on a netbook you've gotta do a lot of scrolling and clicking, and I find just touching the thing you want to look at on the iPad a lot more intuitive than having to scroll a cursor around on a tiny touchpad on a netbook.

Too bad those apps, just like viewing nationwide weather forecasts, are probably not going to be used much and exist mainly for the "wow" effect.

[CMDantes]

The ipad is going to be such a useless device it's ridiculous, and you really will look like an apple fanboy tool-lord using it to take notes.

Do yourself a favor and just get a laptop.

[Lawl Shcool]

Re: turning casebooks into PDF files

I don't understand why professors don't just assign the cases from the book via westlaw (which every student gets for free) and accompany them with their own thought questions (like the notes after the cases). It would save so much student $ and actually have better in class results because the prof can pose their own questions geared towards the class discussion.

I understand that the casebook cases are edited down, but that shouldn't be a big barrier to overcome. It would just take the prof reading the full case and then next to the assignment limiting which pages were relevant.

[vanwinkle]

Also: I can do all of those things on a netbook; they might not look as cool, but they are pretty easy to anyone with internet access and [strike]Topeka[/strike] Google.

It's not just "not look as cool" but "aren't as easy to use through the available interface". The iPad isn't really about what you can do but how you can do it easily. The Reuters and NYT apps, for example, make browsing and reading the news so simple and easy, and I'd expect that to expand as more news outlets develop similar ads or iPad-optimized websites.

Plus, you can't easily hold a netbook in one hand and do all the input necessary to browse or read or access that data with the other. It's designed to be set down and typed on.

[italianp88]

There is already an app for the iphone called Fastcase. I don't know much about it but it will work on the ipad. There is also another app called Lawstack. It looks like the development of law materials is already on the way for the iphone and ipad. Those of you haters that are ripping on the ipad must have apple envy or something because it is a great product. Try it out before you rip on it. It is a revolutionary device. In three years I predict a decrease of at least 50% in traditional laptop purchases and people will be buying these types of devices. Maybe not the ipad, but something that was spawned from it.

[Panther7]

Regardless of the professor doing this -couldn't you do it yourself? Take your casebooks (or borrow from a friend), scan them, and use them on your notebook/IPAD/Kindle using Adobe products? As long as you are not distributing the materials, are you breaking copyright laws?

This is a lot easier to argue as falling under fair use, since you're only making a copy of a work you've already bought a right to (by buying the textbook for yourself) and you're not distributing it to others. The professor would be going well beyond that by distributing all the relevant parts of the casebook to her students, undermining the sales of that many copies of the casebook by students who would've otherwise had to buy it.

Part of the problem with this is that copyright law interpretation is changing and evolving right now to try to keep up with the digital age, and there's a huge pushback against the fair use doctrine in general, making it hard to say how far you can go with fair use exactly. However, this case sounds a lot more like fair use than what the professor is supposedly doing.

First of all, I never had to buy a book for one partiuclar class, but the articles for reading came from a different journal every class (actually there isn't even a book for the subject i took). I think that makes a difference.

Also, I don't think there'd be anything wrong with a law professor "requiring" purchase of the physical book, and then distributing copies of it electronically to students in the manner mentioned when the students were told to buy the book.

[kswiss]

TITCR. At this point its not much more than a toy, since it doesn't do anything that you can't already do with the cheapest netbook available (in fact it does far less.)

I don't understand why people keep saying this. It doesn't do quite the same things as the cheapest netbooks, but it certainly doesn't do less.

Exactly.

ITT: Apple envy.

Hah! I'm typing this on a MBP, I have a 2009 iMac, an iPhone and several iPods. If there is something Apple that I like, I usually get it. AppleTV is one relatively useless product, and the iPad is another. I think it has the beginnings of something good, but tons of companies have made tablets, and they struggle to find a market because they just can't do that much.

The things that a netbook does well far outweigh what the iPad does well. Video playback aside, you can actually browse todays web (flash/silverlight/etc), video conference, type a paper, multitask, etc on a netbook, all things that you can't do on an iPad. Plus, if you want to equate them, a $499 netbook will have a 10 hour battery life and play video just fine.

I'm down with the Apple love, but I would rather pay 1,000 for a full featured device than 500 for a coffee table media device. Its just an extra piece to throw in my bag, which seems redundant when my laptop and smart phone go with me everywhere I go.

[pany1985]

You can just buy a regular laptop. It's sorta like having a more-powerful less-expensive iPad with it's own built-in flip-down keyboard for taking notes and holding up the screen so you don't have to do it yourself. Plus, it doesn't have all the idiotic limitations (no multi-tasking? no flash? ).

[quickquestionthanks]

Why do people keep saying "you can just buy a laptop" ?

I already own a laptop! Don't most people own a laptop by the time they get to law school?

Now a netbook is a fair comparison, that I understand, but they don't lend themselves to e-reading and are still much larger. And that touch screen...oooo so nice. That silky smooth UI. Plus we all know it will be able to multitask in T minus 4 months give or take.

[Mattalones]

I would TOTALLY have one IN law school, but I don't think that I would have one exclusively FOR law school. If I were able to take all of my books around on one of them, that would be a totally different story!

I wouldn't care how much of a douche people thought I am for having one. Call me a douche ... I'd be the douche whose books weight less than a pound, while others have to constantly stop by their lockers because of all of the books that are too heavy to cary around.

While I know that it isn't possible yet (not 100% at least), having all of my books on the iPad would also free me up from being in the law school all of the time. I could see myself being tied down there because of the lockers with all of my stuff in them. If it were all with me easily, I would wonder around and get a change of scenery. If/when that happens, I would have an iPad FOR law school, rather than just having one AT law school.

[pany1985]

I guess it doesn't make any sense to me why anyone would need a second computer, particularly a tablet, if they already have a perfectly good laptop... but maybe I'm just out of touch with modern needs or something.

[tikiman6]

You probably can't use the iPad the same way you would use a kindle: the kindle has much softer lighting that is easier on the eyes, if you spent all day reading off the standard iPad lighting, your eyes would bleed out and die.

[chanchito]

yeah, like raisins