A girl “works” a bar (exam) pole has a writeup on this. You will remember the PMBR folks losing $12 mil. for copying questions a few years back. The MBE portion of the bar exam consists of 200 multiple choice questions (10 of which are only test questions and do not figure into the score) and the National Conference of Bar Examiners often reuses questions for years, which is why they were very aggressive going after PMBR.
Now, they are chasing an individual who posted 41 questions after the Feb. exam in the comments section of a blog (they have long been deleted, so there is no reason to provide a link). The questions were posted by Anonymous, and the poster indicated that they simply rattled off as many as they could remember immediately after the exam in the car on the way to the airport (many of us take a vacation immediately after the bar, I took a week and begin work tomorrow), and that the posters girlfreind wrote them down. Why they later typed them up and put them on the internet is anyones guess. The bottom line is that those 41 questions have been retired and they have tracked the poster to an IP address owned by Earthlink, who refuses to disclose the identity of the poster. Lets face it, NCBE should easily win any case against someone who published nearly 1/4 of the MBE on the net.
The pending case for the identity of the poster is Fulbright & Jaworski v. EarthLink Legal Dept. No. 1:07-MI-0097 (N.D.) and the lawyers from the Washington office of Fulbright & Jaworski obtained a subpoena in U.S. District Court in Atlanta commanding EarthLink to surrender the identity of the person who posted the questions. The blog was at Blogger, owed by Google, who previously gave up the IP address of the poster.
This is the first time that the NCBE has pursued an anonymous Internet poster for publishing exam questions online.
Filed under: 2007 Copyright Cases, Copyright, Infringment Cases
