Intellectual Property Law
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Post Frequency: 2.2/day Last Entry: November 21, 2009 at 00:09:45 Recent Entries: 642
By Michael Madison, Brett Frischmann, Frank Pasquale, Alfred Chueh-Chih Yen, and Deven Desai
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Cyberlaw Without PowerPoint
Posted on November 21, 2009Today, I participated in a terrific symposium at the Denver University School of Law based on Danielle Citron’s work on Cyber Civil Rights. Two aspects of this symposium are particularly noteworthy, outside of the extremely interesting substance and the great group of speakers collected together by Danielle and the editors of the Denver University Law [...
Doing right and wrong by college sports recruits
Posted on November 19, 2009Today’s Charlotte Observer reports the story of Clair Watkins, a senior basketball player who got one of those coveted “early commitments” from basketball powerhouse Duke. According to the story, Duke offered Ms. Watkins a promise of admission to Duke and a full basketball scholarship, a scholarship that Duke planned to honor for 4 years...
Assessing Algorithmic Authority
Posted on November 18, 2009Clay Shirky characterizes “algorithmic authority” as “the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying ‘Trust this because you trust me...
Legal and Algorithmic Authority
Posted on November 18, 2009Clay Shirky has recently written “A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority,” based on a talk at Yale’s recent conference on Journalism & The New Media Ecology. Shirky noted that “people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia (in its ?breaking news? mode),” and calls “this [...
Ozymandias Lessons for Copyright
Posted on November 18, 2009Ann Bartow’s post about Paul Zukofsky, son of Louis and Celia Zukofsky, and his attempt to exert extreme control over his parents’ work reveals that heirs are problem for copyright. Mr. Zukofsky asserts some untenable points about his power over the material and the need for academics to seek his approval...
Celebs Fight Back ?
Posted on November 18, 2009Given that the Twilight sequel, New Moon, opens this week, I just have to blog about something Twilight-related. I’ve been writing lately about celebrity privacy rights, and the right of publicity – and considering the extent to which celebrities should be legally protected against paparazzi intrusions...
Google does case law
Posted on November 17, 2009Our Rutgers-Camden librarian, John P. Joergensen, tipped me off to this. Paul Caron has some details. Here’s what comes up for Kremen v. Cohen. More open access to law is always a good thing, imho. No Tags
Who gets whacked? Politico and Copyright
Posted on November 17, 2009This morning’s Politico.com features a story entitled “Who Gets Whacked?” – a guide to Sarah Palin’s recent “Going Rogue” memoir summarizing how Palin treats various Washington players. The story features fairly extensive quotation from the book, which the authors of the story got in advance of today’s release...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Advisory Board is currently comprised of 19 men and 2 women. And 8 out of 10 members of EFF?s Board of Directors are also male.
Posted on November 16, 2009Details here. No Tags
On Quoting the Works of Louis and Celia Zukofsky
Posted on November 16, 2009Biographical information about Louis and Celia Zukofsky is available here. Paul is their son, and he posted the following at this site: from Paul Zukofsky TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN Far too many people, especially perhaps-innocent grad. students, have been misled into thinking that, in terms of quoting LZ or CZ, they may do what they want, and [...
Cultural Evolution?
Posted on November 16, 2009You be the judge. 1976 Pastime Paradise – Stevie Wonder 1995 Gangstas Paradise – Coolio 1996 By the way, I suggest that anyone wanting a great album acquire Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. No Tags
The 2000 Year Old Man Does Copyright Law
Posted on November 15, 2009The standard copyright rap holds that creators need to bottle their work in objects in order to make money from it, but distributing the objects creates the risk that pirates will take the objects and copy them without compensating the creators. Copyright in the creative “work” allows the creators to stop the pirates and capture [...
A Little Song, a Little Dance ?
Posted on November 13, 2009… a little seltzer down your pants. Are you old enough or enough of a pop culture geek to remember that line? If so, enjoy your own private Mary Tyler Moore moment, laughing and crying at all the right and wrong times, as you remember the life and times of David Lloyd, who wrote the [...
Wikipedia & the Epistemology of Convenience
Posted on November 12, 2009A recent article in the Boston Review by Evgeny Morozov laments the influence of Wikipedia. I found this passage a particularly interesting take on the epistemology (and ecology) of the web: Wikipedians . . . are obsessed with popular culture and less equipped to document the high-brow...
Glenn Beck Loses Domain Name Dispute
Posted on November 12, 2009In case anyone missed it, Glenn Beck unsurprisingly was unsuccessful in a WIPO arbitration proceeding seeking transfer of the domain name: “http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/” An amusing account of the decision and the aftermath is available here...
Somehow I missed this when the story initially broke; I?m posting it in case anyone else did.
Posted on November 11, 2009From the SF Chron: Did Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office use a coded veto message to send the f-bomb to Tom Ammiano, soon after the San Francisco assemblyman made news by telling the governor to “kiss my gay ass”? Schwarzenegger’s people say no...
Facebook Status Update Creates Alibi
Posted on November 11, 2009From the NYT: Where?s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford?s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father?s apartment in Harlem. At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update ? words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides [...
Crossroads of Social Capital
Posted on November 07, 2009The New York Times reported on virtual economies yesterday, noting how the U.S. economy for virtual goods is estimated to be around $1 billion this year, with a $5 billion economy worldwide. Here’s a quote: ?It?s not about the good itself, it?s about the underlying human emotion or desire,? said Moshe Koyfman, a principal at Spark [...
I want my video on demand?.
Posted on November 06, 2009Yesterday, while sitting in Toronto airport I had an hour or so to kill so I thought I’d take advantage of my new ear buds (Ann, they’re pink!) and plug into my netbook to watch some video on demand. To my surprise – although I shouldn’t have been surprised being an IP prof – I [...
Free Credit Report (dot) TM?
Posted on November 04, 2009With thanks to my colleague Cassandra Robertson for bring this article in yesterday’s NY Times to my attention. The article describes ongoing battles between the FTC and Experian to have Experian stop using the “freecreditreport.com” domain name for credit monitoring services that are not, in fact, free...
What Happens to the Losing Team?s Championship Shirts?
Posted on November 04, 2009Blogger Matt Soniak answers: The international Christian humanitarian aid group works with Major League Baseball, the NFL, and the NBA to collect misprinted merchandise and distribute it to people living in impoverished nations. (MLB used to require the destruction of shirts and hats proclaiming the wrong champions, but two years ago they began donating their postseason [...
Faust on Leadership
Posted on November 03, 2009One of my favorite things in the Sunday New York Times these days is the Corner Office column, which reports a bit of an interview each week on “leadership” from the perspective of a CEO. Usually, these interviews consist not of tips from would-be management gurus, but instead anecdotes about the interviewees’ own experiences...
Jotwell Under Way
Posted on November 02, 2009Jotwell, the “Journal of Things We Like (Lots),” has been incubating for a long time, and at last it’s alive, thanks to the persistence of Michael Froomkin and lots of support from the University of Miami, including students there. Jotwell is an effort to look at the mass of new legal scholarship and highlight books and [...
Trade Secrecy in Willy Wonka?s Chocolate Factory
Posted on October 30, 2009Cross posted from The Faculty Lounge. I had been meaning to post about this for a while but life got on top of me. Jeanne Fromer at Fordham has written a great essay on trade secret law with reference to the confectionery industry and with specific reference to Roald Dahl’s creation of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory...
Signifiers in Cyberspace ? at Case
Posted on October 30, 2009In case anyone is going to be in or around Cleveland on November 12-13 (and needs a break after the hiring conference!), we are hosting a symposium on trademark and domain name issues in cyberspace with a terrific group of speakers. Keynotes to be provided by Daniel Gervais (Vanderbilt) who will be speaking on geographic [...
Twelve years after suing Aqua over the song ?Barbie Girl,? Mattel is adapting it for Barbie advertising.
Posted on October 29, 2009From the NYT: …Twelve years after the hit pop tune ?Barbie Girl? raised the hackles of the toymaker that sells Barbie, Mattel, the song is being adapted for Barbie advertising. Mattel has uploaded to YouTube a video clip of a dance called the Barbie, which is danced to a rerecorded version of ?Barbie Girl...
Digital Labor at the New School
Posted on October 27, 2009Trebor Scholz and the New School for Social Research are sponsoring a conference in a few weeks on the political economy of Web 2.0 called “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” Participants have been having a fascinating discussion on the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity...
Letter in support of FCC NPRM
Posted on October 22, 2009October 22, 2009 The Honorable Julius Genachowski Chairman, Federal Communications Commission 445 12th Street, SW Washington, DC 20554 Dear Chairman Genachowski: The undersigned are a diverse group of academic researchers who study Internet policy. We applaud the Federal Communications Commission for launching the Open Internet proceeding...
FCC issued its NPRM: ?Preserving the Open Internet?
Posted on October 22, 2009Along with other academic researchers who study Internet Policy, I am going to file a letter supporting the NPRM. I’ll post the letter tomorrow. I will also post some additional thoughts over the next week or so. Here are various public docs: NPRM: http://hraunfoss...
Another Way to Understand Twilight and Authors
Posted on October 22, 2009Apparently Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, started writing a version of the series from a different character’s (Edward’s) point of view and the early, incomplete draft was leaked onto the Internet. Jacqui Lipton’s post about Stephenie Meyer’s “reaction to the unauthorized release” of her partial draft reveals another way to think about [...
Knives and Things
Posted on October 21, 2009Mike Dorf posted a rules v. standards meditation on the recent kerfuffle over whether a six-year-old child should be disciplined for violating a school rule that prohibits bringing knives to school, when the object in question was a folding knife/fork/spoon in common use among campers, including young ones...
Plagiarism Software Used to Bolster Claim That Shakespeare Authored a Play
Posted on October 20, 2009From Yahoo News: … Plagiarism-detection software was created with lazy, sneaky college students in mind – not the likes of William Shakespeare. Yet the software may have settled a centuries-old mystery over the authorship of an unattributed play from the late 1500s called The Reign of Edward III...
Debate exhaustion and exhilaration
Posted on October 19, 2009I recently listened to the Federalist Society?s ScotusCast debate among Mark Lemley, Richard Epstein, Fred Von Lohmann, and Scott Kieff (in order of presentation), moderated by Adam Mossoff, on the issue of patent exhaustion after the Supreme Court’s Quanta v...
Digital Copyright Law: What Authors Want?.
Posted on October 19, 2009With the second movie in the Twilight series (New Moon) imminently about to appear on the big screen, I found myself getting interested in this pop culture phenomenon, particularly as I strolled around a bookstore this afternoon and found just about every magazine cover devoted to the exploits of the teenage vampires and werewolves in [...
When is a Cell Phone Not a Cell Phone?
Posted on October 19, 2009As I have noted often in the past, IP law sometimes echoes Dr. Seuss. Do we have One Thing or Two Things? Things matter, again. I’m catching up with a district court case from earlier this month, in which the court wrestled with the following argument: A cell phone is sold to a [...
A Little Los Lobos and Early Halloween
Posted on October 18, 2009One of my best friends gave me the album Kiko by Los Lobos as a college graduation gift. I love the album to this day. The title track, Kiko and the Lavender Moon, is great. It always reminds me of old spooky cartoons from the Bugs Bunny era with the sheet-like ghosts drifting, floating, bobbing [...
Smart or Not So Smart Money; The Limits on Derivatives and Regulating Them
Posted on October 18, 2009The New York Times op-ed by Calvin Trillin, Wall Street Smarts, has a parable-like quality with the two characters meeting and exchanging wisdom. The lesson offered by the wiseman: ?The financial system nearly collapsed,? he said, ?because smart guys had started working on Wall Street...
The Obama ?Hope? Poster Case ? Whoa!
Posted on October 17, 2009(This is the 8th in a series of posts on Fairey v. Associated Press. See below for other posts in the series.) I’ve been too busy to blog recently about the Hope poster case, but aside from the AP’s answer to Garcia’s claims of ownership, not much has happened...
Finland Makes Broadband Access A Legal Right
Posted on October 16, 2009From here: Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right, YLE, the country’s national broadcasting company, reported on Wednesday. According to the report, every person in Finland (a little over 5 million people, according to a 2009 estimate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broadband connection starting [...
Dreyfuss at American ? Oct. 20, 2009
Posted on October 16, 2009What the Federal Circuit Can Learn from the Supreme Court — and Vice Versa Professor Rochelle C. Dreyfuss, the Pauline Newman Professor of Law at New York University Law School, will deliver the Fifth Annual Finnegan Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Property on October 20, 2009 at 6:00 p...
?Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world,? produced for the FCC by the Berkman Center.
Posted on October 16, 2009An incredible report with important data and comparative analysis of broadband policies across different countries. Remarkably, the report indicates that the U.S. might have prematurely given up on open access / functional separation. I need to read it carefully and digest, and should anyone interested in broadband policy...
DIY Book Scanner
Posted on October 15, 2009I’m glad to see all the Google focus here! (And I’m sorry to have been away for so long–a number of writing projects came home to roost, demanding edits, this fall. I’m now finishing number 4 of 5.) As for GBS: I’m pretty defeatist on the Google Book Search settlement, especially if our enervated antitrust [...
Samuelson v. Sergei
Posted on October 15, 2009Smackdown! Pam Samuelson has a new op-ed up at the Huffington Post that disassembles Sergei Brin’s recent New York Times defense of Google Book Search as a 21st century “library.” Here’s a link to the piece, which has the hallmarks of what WWE fans would call a “finishing move...
Because Sometimes You Need a Little Mental Vacation
Posted on October 13, 2009As a way to get ready for the Brazil Olympics and as a little throw back for hipsters and neo-hipsters, enjoy: The Girl From Ipanema – Stan Getz I urge folks to discover or re-discover, Jobim, Getz, and Gilberto. Great stuff to get into another world of jazz and far away lands while staying right where you [...
New Blog About Innovation?
Posted on September 30, 2009It’s called “There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges and Jury Rigs” No Tags
?Forrest Gump in One Minute, in One Take?
Posted on September 29, 2009See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. No Tags
?Ignoring RIAA lawsuits cheaper than going to trial?
Posted on September 29, 2009From Ars Technica: … Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum captured the nation’s attention when they were defendants in the RIAA’s first two trials against accused online infringers. But here’s the mind-warping reality: both defendants would have been far better off monetarily if they had simply ignored the complaint altogether and failed to show up in court...
More on Facebook and the Perils of User Generated Content
Posted on September 28, 2009Cross posted from Faculty Lounge: According to CNN, the U.S. Secret Service asked Facebook to suspend the use of an application that allows users to create online polls when someone created a poll asking whether the president should be killed. The possible answers were “yes”, “no”, “maybe”, and “if he cuts my healthcare”...
Fun with Movie Reviews
Posted on September 25, 2009A couple of weeks ago I noticed in an advertisement for the movie “Love Happens” a tag line that read: “Jennifer Aniston at her most engaging.” Of course, having read the review from which it was taken, I realized that the full quote in context said something like: “Even Jennifer Aniston at her most engaging [...
Missing a Netflix DVD?
Posted on September 22, 2009Massachusetts postal worker admits to stealing 30,000 DVDs. A former postal service employee has pleaded guilty to stealing more than 30,000 DVDs that moved through a western Massachusetts post office. Myles Weathers, formerly of Springfield, took DVDs that were mailed by Netflix to customers for a year [...
Google Gains Ground on Adwords in EU
Posted on September 22, 2009I don’t know how many people saw this, and I haven’t read the full opinion yet, but yesterday an Advocate-General advising a French court opined that Google’s adwords program didn’t violate trademark law in the E.U. There is a media story here (thanks to Roberto Colon for passing this on to me)...
A Termination Notice Is Not A Lawsuit, But At Least One Journalist Is Really Confused
Posted on September 22, 2009From here, an article entitled: Kirby Estate Sues Marvel - Notices of copyright termination sent to film studios. The estate of comic book icon Jack Kirby has filed a copyright lawsuit against Marvel Entertainment, challenging the company’s — and its new potential corporate parent, Disney’s — long-term rights to certain characters...
Using data from the social network Facebook, MIT students find that just by looking at a person?s online friends, they could predict whether someone is homosexual.
Posted on September 21, 2009From the NYT: … The idea behind the MIT work, done in 2007, is as old as the adage that birds of a feather flock together. For years, sociologists have known of the ?homophily principle? - the tendency for similar people to group together. People of one race tend to have spouses, confidants, and friends of [...
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski?s Speech
Posted on September 21, 2009FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s recent remarks at the Brookings Institution — ?Preserving a Free and Open Internet: A Platform for Innovation, Opportunity, and Prosperity? — call for the FCC to adopt network neutrality rules. It is a good speech — the webcast is here...
Measuring the DoJ Response to the GBS Settlement
Posted on September 21, 2009Pam Samuelson’s latest HuffPo column measures the Department of Justice response to the proposed Google Book Search settlement. All commentators, including Pam and Randy Picker (in his post below) note that the settlement is being revised (James Grimmelmann speculates that the negotiations are “frantic”)...
DOJ Filing in Google Book Search
Posted on September 19, 2009Let me start by saying thanks to Mike for the invitation to blog here. I will probably cross-post some posts here and at the Chicago Faculty blog. This is a longish post and runs the risk of violating some filter Mike has undoubtedly set about the number of self-cites permitted in a post...
A Seller of Online Adult Novelties Brought Federal Copyright and Trademark Infringement Claims Alleging: ?Linden looks the other way, while virtual residents rip off the SexGen product line, which includes specially programmed beds, rugs, sofas and even a coffin that enable consenting avatars to engage in virtual sex acts.?
Posted on September 18, 2009Story here. Sample SexGen commodified virtual monster genitalia below. Might not be safe for work, apologies if this post got you fired. No Tags
Alum Suing NYU for Stealing Her Bobcat Drawing
Posted on September 18, 2009From the NY Daily News: A freelance artist is suing New York University, saying her alma mater’s famous bobcat mascot is really just a copycat. Ariel Fleurimond says the mascot NYU unveiled in 2008 and began plastering on apparel, memorabilia, posters, its Web site and even the gymnasium floor is a design she created at the request [...
Facebook Effrontery
Posted on September 18, 2009Did anyone see this report from CNET News about a guy who apparently, while robbing a house, logged in to the homeowner’s computer to check his Facebook page? It links to another story about a guy who targets people checking their Facebook pages in Starbucks as a good place to steal laptops...
Transformative Works and Cultures Vol 3 (2009)
Posted on September 15, 2009Table of Contents Editorial Extending transformation HTML TWC Editor Theory The labor of creativity: Women’s work, quilting, and the uncommodified life Abstract HTML Debora J Halbert Sex detectives: “Law & Order: SVU”’s fans, critics, and characters investigate lesbian desire Abstract HTML Julie Levin Russo On productivity and game fandom Abstract HTML Hanna Wirman Praxis Sites of participation: Wiki fandom and the case of Lostpedia Abstract HTML Jason Mittell Identity and authenticity in the filk [...
Judging, On and Off the Court
Posted on September 14, 2009Tennis fans are still buzzing about the unbelievable scene that unfolded late last night at the US Open tournament. Kim Clijsters faced Serena Williams in one of the semi-final matches. Clijsters was dominating Williams, to the latter’s enormous and obvious frustration...
People Who Died Now Includes Jim Carroll
Posted on September 14, 2009NYT obit here. below is an excerpt: In 1973 Mr. Carroll left New York to escape drugs. He settled in Bolinas, an artistic community north of San Francisco, where met and married Rosemary Klemfuss in 1978. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by a brother, Tom...
Another Win for Veoh
Posted on September 14, 2009So, first of all, thanks to Mike et al. for inviting me to join the blog. Alas, my time for blogging right now is limited, but I did want to point out that the district court in UMG v. Veoh granted summary judgement to Veoh on Friday. Decision here, courtesy of Copyrights & Campaigns...
Housing Crisis in ?Toon Town
Posted on September 13, 2009As a parent of youngsters, I spend a lot of my time being brainwashed by exposed to cartoons on Nick, Noggin etc. It dawns on me that no one has yet noticed the apparent severity of the housing crisis in the world of cartoons. For example, Wubbzy lives in a tree and SpongeBob lives in [...
IP, India, and Cultural Anthropology
Posted on September 12, 2009Before anything, I want to thank Michael and the others contributors for inviting me join in this creative collaboration. For my first post to Madisonian.net, I’m focused on culture and norms and how they affect intellectual property policy. No doubt, this is prompted by being in Kolkata, India, where I was invited by a good friend, [...
Making Silly Putty
Posted on September 11, 2009As a mom, I just love this recipe for (and history of) silly putty - from WikiHow. (And just to be IP relevant, Crayola apparently owns the trademark…) No Tags
History, Literature, and ? Patents
Posted on September 10, 2009First, let me thank Mike and his crew for having me here. I’ve often read Madisonian and am honored to be among the new participants. I thought I’d start off talking about my increasingly inaccurately referenced “summer reading list”...
More Madisonian Expansion
Posted on September 10, 2009The roster of contributors to Madisonian.net is expanding again by three. Please welcome the following three law professors to the team, all of whom have overlapping interests in intellectual property law, technology law, and other things: Jacqui Lipton, at Case Western Reserve, who also blogs at The Faculty Lounge, Bruce Boyden, at Marquette, who also blogs [...
CBS claims copyright in open mike tape of Assemblyman Duvall
Posted on September 10, 2009In a story entitled “Recorded Sex Comments Cost Calif. Lawmaker His Job,” the Associated Press reports that California Assemblyman Mike Duvall resigned after his boasts about extramarital affairs were recorded by an open mike. The story mentioned that the tape had been posted to YouTube, and - like all dedicated academics with inquiring minds [...
Teaching and Learning in Law and Life
Posted on September 09, 2009As expected, last weekend’s NYT op-eds with advice to college students attracted commentary that points out how legal education is like, and unlike, college education. Paul Horwitz at Prawfsblawg offers characteristically thoughtful analysis; Danielle Citron at Concurring Opinions is pithier but no less on point...
More Python, Fair Use, and Attribution
Posted on September 09, 2009So I had my iTunes open and on shuffle yesterday when Monty Python’s “Finland” came on. That was what prompted me to check YouTube for Python offerings. Now the Python chaps have offered their own channel. This video has the usual Python cheek as they talk about YouTube, being ripped off, and the open plea [...
Connectivity Panics: In the Cloud and on the Ground
Posted on September 08, 2009The news media seem to be frothing at the news that the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, the single most vital ground transportation link in the Bay Area and a LANDMARK bridge, will be closed today. (There is a major crack in the bridge, requiring an immediate repair; the bridge was closed over the holiday [...
Smart Choices
Posted on September 08, 2009From the NYT: A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation?s largest food manufacturers, is ?designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices.? The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including ? to the surprise of many [...
On Fidelity
Posted on September 05, 2009(Lots of interesting details are omitted from the anecdote below; in time, as circumstances permit, I may flesh them out!) Ah, the perils of teaching timely topics. Among the scenarios that I ran by my Trademark Law students at the beginning of this semester is a pending Intent to Use application to register a trademark...
The NY Daily News Needs A Factchecker
Posted on September 04, 2009Because it turns out that this is a tall tale. No Tags
Some Weekend Music
Posted on September 04, 2009I fully laud Dave Hoffman’s encouraging folks to listen to Nina Simone’s Sinnerman. As the long weekend is upon us, I offer another tune to help get you pumped up, the B-52s’ Private Idaho (Rock Lobster may have been a great fit for beach goers but I could not find a good stream)...
Copyright Irony, Of Royalty Boards and Google Book Deals
Posted on September 04, 2009Earlier this week Live365 filed a law suit arguing that the Copyright Royalty Board is unconstitutional. Today is the deadline for authors to opt-out of the class in the Google Book Settlement. The idea that this Settlement ought to approved is more than suspect...
Thought Police at the RIAA?
Posted on September 04, 2009The Recording Industry Association of American thumped music downloader Joel Tenenbaum at trial, and now the RIAA wants him to act the repentant sinner? Michael Vick volunteered to do penance by helping with the anti-dogfighting campaign of The Humane Society of the United States, but if he hadn’t done so, would he have been back [...
Tiny (Or Rather Shiny?) Bubbles: Apple Trademarks Dialogue Bubbles?
Posted on September 03, 2009As Don Ho (and others) have sung: Tiny bubbles In the wine Make me feel happy Ah, they make me feel fine Those tiny bubbles Make me warm all over With a feeling that I’m gonna Love you till the end of time The little charming talk bubbles all over the Internet communications have a similar warm effect...
Thoughts on Beatles Rock Band and the Economics of IP
Posted on September 02, 2009“The Beatles: Rock Band” is due for release a week from today, together with a newly remastered set of CDs of the Beatles’ albums. That’s news to just about no one in the entertainment field, whether on the consumer side, the producer side, or the observer side...
?A new study conducted by Wikimedia Foundation suggests that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women.?
Posted on September 02, 2009This won’t surprise anybody who actually pays attention to the climate of the editing discussions on many wikipedia pages. This blog post notes: According to the The Wall Street Journal, the survey took place in November of last year, with results being presented last week at a conference in Buenos Aires...
Twits, As In The NFL Management Folks and Twitter
Posted on September 01, 2009Although I despise those who twitter as a general matter (and will thus likely embrace the odd medium any day now), it has moments where it is useful. Short bursts of information updates for natural disasters, airport shut downs, and possible revolutionary mayhem come to mind...
Madisonian Expands
Posted on September 01, 2009Our list of contributors (column at left) has recently expanded by three colleagues who write and blog about IP and technology law. From time to time you will see posts from the following: Mike Carroll, now on the faculty at American University Washington College of Law, who also blogs on his own at Carrollogos...
The Google Book Search Settlement Goes Meta
Posted on August 31, 2009Geoff Nunberg at Language Log has a great and passionate post about flaws in the Google Book Search program that aren’t usually part of the IP/privacy debate. Nunberg’s basic points are that (i) there is basically one chance to do this book scanning thing right; (ii) Google is screwing it up; and (iii) one major way [...
A Terrible Towel Trademark Tale?
Posted on August 30, 2009As the NFL season gets underway and the Pittsburgh Steelers set off in pursuit of a seventh Super Bowl title (Pittsburghers used to say “One for the thumb” and now, fans call the city “Sixburgh”; what slogan comes next?), the local press is searching for feel-good fan stories...
The Google Book Search Settlement and its Implications
Posted on August 28, 2009My attention wandered for a moment and I failed to post a link to the second of Pam Samuelson’s excellent Huffington Post analyses of the Google Book Search settlement: “Why is the Antitrust Division Investigating the Google Book Search Settlement?” This also seems an apt moment to observe that the real import of the GBS settlement [...
Classes Begin: Tips for Newbies
Posted on August 28, 2009So there you sit in the first year class. You have tracked down the assignment and read it in a vacuum. You thought you understood it. The professor seems to drone and then surprises the class with a question. Hands fly up. Bodies sink into seats. Anxiety sits next you...
Sears Not Really Selling BBQ Grill to Cook Babies
Posted on August 28, 2009This was apparently some kind of hack: And Sears doesn’t think it was funny: No Tags
Odd All Monkey Movie from the 1940s Uses Trademarks For Humor
Posted on August 28, 2009Probably without authorization from the mark holders! No Tags
Seeing With Your Tongue: No Really
Posted on August 28, 2009Not much law here, yet. Researchers have taken theoretical work begun decades ago and developed a “brain port,” a device that uses technology to allow people to reorganize how they process sensory data. In the example below, blind people are able to see images...
I See Code: Plain View and Computer Searches
Posted on August 27, 2009The Ninth Circuit has taken a swat computer searches and the plain view doctrine (pdf). I have not yet read the entire opinion but Orin Kerr has a series of posts about the decision here. And Shaun Martin for whom I have a ton of respect as well, covers the case here...
Lizzie Borden?s Hometown Museum Apparently Settles TM Suit, But the Boston Globe Report is Very Confusing
Posted on August 26, 2009In which I take a few whacks at lousy IP law reporting: Here’s an excerpt from the article: Mandy Webster had come all the way from Pennsylvania to visit the house where Lizzie Borden once lived, and she was not about to go home empty-handed. After touring the three-story clapboard house, the site of one of [...
July 16, 1925. Washington, D.C. ?U.S. Patent Office.? Information storage and retrieval in the analog age.
Posted on August 25, 2009Via. No Tags
The Scary Spectre of Professional Identity Theft
Posted on August 25, 2009From Inside Higher Ed: One deleted e-mail marked the beginning of my ordeal. It was finals week, just before Christmas break, when I received a strange message asking me to comment on some kind of online political essay that I had supposedly written. Since I?m not a blogger and make it a point to avoid the [...
Wikipedia becomes more ?top down.?
Posted on August 25, 2009Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people. From the NYT: … Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon...
Google, Glenn Beck, and AP: Are Results Being Squashed?
Posted on August 24, 2009So some of you may have heard that Glenn Beck has managed to upset advertisers by calling President Obama a racist. I don’t have much to say about Beck. I was more interested in the advertiser reaction. I saw the article on Yahoo! but wanted a more stable URL...
Saved By A Music Contract? Artist Invokes Clause and Gets Her PhD
Posted on August 23, 2009As anyone who follows the music industry should know, the history of record labels, artists, and exploitation is long and a bit dirty. K.J. Greene has argued that the problems of race and music business practices should be part of the reparations debate...
Weekend Song and Get Ready for Classes to Begin
Posted on August 21, 2009So the weekend is upon us. For many of our readers law school and a fresh fall semester looms. What is one to do? Scurry to find the initial assignments for your class? Well, yes. But as a last, lingering gasp of summer I offer Blitzen Trapper and their song Furr...
Gaming, Depression, and the CDC: Thanks Ars Technica
Posted on August 21, 2009Several news outlets are covering the hyped notion that gamers tend to be overweight, 35, and depressed. The first thing that crossed my mind was this fact: it was conducted in the the Seattle-Tacoma area. Wow, people in MSville which is known for no sunlight, coffe-compensation techniques, and a great era of rather depressing music [...
Mentoring Tip: Do not teach in these pants.
Posted on August 21, 2009Here they are in “pat. pending” action: No Tags
The Federal Ciruit affirmed a finding that title to a patent can be ?properly transferred by operation of state foreclosure law? even without an affirmative assignment of rights.
Posted on August 21, 2009Dennis Crouch explains here. No Tags
Lessig is Hibernating His Blog
Posted on August 20, 2009He explains why here. This particular section caught my attention: Some very good friends — Theo Armour and M. David Peterson — have been volunteering time to do the mechanics of site maintenance. That has gotten overwhelming. Theo estimates that 1/3 of the 30,000 comments that were posted to the blog over these 7 years [...
RECAP Already Proving Its Power?
Posted on August 19, 2009A couple days ago I blogged about RECAP, a system that aims to enhance government transparency by increasing access to court documents. RECAP does this by making it easy for people to share PACER documents after they have paid for them. Today I read that a judge has vacated “legally significant” opinions in a tort [...
Resources for Legal Scholars
Posted on August 19, 2009As the academic year gears up, here’s a reminder that folks at Pitt Law offer the following resources to law professors: The Legal Scholarship Blog, co-produced with the University of Washington School of Law, keeps up with law-related calls for papers, conferences, and workshops across all disciplines...
Bill Patry?s New Copyright Book
Posted on August 18, 2009The newest addition to my reading list is Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, a brand new book by Bill Patry, coming imminently from Oxford. (September 3 is the official publication date, but the Oxford site reports that the book is in stock. Here’s the Oxford link...
IP in and on the Air
Posted on August 18, 2009Two of the hottest cases in American IP law are the subjects of recent podcasts: SCOTUScast presents a dialogue on the Bilski case now before the Supreme Court, primarily between Michael Risch of West Virginia University and Josh Sarnoff of American University Washington College of Law...
All I wanted was to hear the Green Acres theme song in Hungarian but what I got instead was Google Chrome.
Posted on August 13, 2009I think what happened is that I failed to uncheck all the boxes reflecting my “agreement” to accept a bunch of gratuitous crap Real Audio was trying to foist on me as a condition of a software upgrade. Why the Google Chrome browser was one of the presumptive downloads I have no idea...
Weird Law Day: Big Time Jewel Heists and MS Word Enjoined
Posted on August 12, 2009Yesterday I saw an article about a jewelry heist in London where two men in nice suits got away with $65 million of merchandise. The weird part to me was that the store had a similar event in 2003 where 23 million pounds worth of jewels were taken, and more recently in 2007 a branch [...
Some Thoughts About Meteors and the Hugos
Posted on August 11, 2009For time to time, I like to remind folks that they should look up from work and take note of the world around them. Today, or rather tonight, is just such a time to do that. Yes, it is Perseid meteor shower time! I remember a particularly spectacular one around when Star Wars or Empire [...
Taking the Google Book Search Settlement to Another Level
Posted on August 10, 2009Academic angst about the Google Book Search settlement is well on its way to reaching a fever pitch, with fora and conference galore scheduled between now and the October hearing on confirmation of the deal. But if the stakes for books and knowledge are greater than that, then ways need to be found to bring the [...
More on Trademarks, Ambush Marketing, and International Soccer
Posted on August 07, 2009As Ann reports below, Mark Lemley and Mark McKenna are sharing a new paper on the overbreadth of “likelihood of confusion” analysis in contemporary trademark law. These thesis of the paper seems incontrovertible to me, but the paper frames its argument with an initial anecdote that bears a little exploration...
A Trademark/Antitrust Intersection
Posted on August 07, 2009Major League Baseball has signed a deal with Topps, the baseball card company now controlled by Michael Eisner, that will give Topps exclusive rights to produce trading cards using images of major league ballplayers and marks of MLB teams. The deal may be questionable under antitrust law...
IPSC 2009
Posted on August 07, 2009It’s Day Two of IPSC, an annual work in progress conference for Intellectual Property Law scholars. It’s great to see so many friends in one place, and to learn about all of the interesting research going on. I sat in on Copyright sessions yesterday, but am starting off today in a Trademark track, which [...
Pittsburgh Reels as Women Suffer
Posted on August 06, 2009The Pittsburgh region is reeling this week after three women were murdered and nine others wounded in a mass shooting at a suburban LA Fitness facility by a man who is being described by local media as someone whose self-professed hatred of women resulted from isolation that can be traced to … wait for it [...
ESPN, Google, and Me
Posted on August 05, 2009Like Deven, I’ve been mostly AWOL on the blog for much of the last several weeks (it’s been an unusually busy travel summer for me), and easing back into the swing of blogging things after a hiatus always requires some delicacy. There’s a lot going on in the IP and Internet law and policy world; [...
Where Is Deven?
Posted on August 03, 2009I know I have not posted in a little bit. Some explanation is in order. As previous posts noted, through the good graces of Peter Yu, the University of Hong Kong, and the South China University of Technology, Intellectual Property School & Law School, Guangzhou, I was in Hong Kong and China until mid-June...
Valuation and Virtue in the New Economy
Posted on July 18, 2009Tyler Cowen’s “Good and Plenty” promotes the use of market mechanisms to fund culture. He’s recently turned his attention to valuation problems raised by time spent on the web: Much of the Web’s value is experienced at the personal level and does not show up in productivity numbers...
Michael Jackson Tribute
Posted on July 14, 2009I’d resolved to ease up on the YouTube clips but I couldn’t let this one pass unblogged: No Tags
Mannie Garcia enters the Hope Fray
Posted on July 13, 2009Personally, I’m pleased about this, though I suppose some people might find it odd to be pleased about adding new parties to litigation. Still, if this turns out to be a significant opinion on fair use, which it will probably be, I really think that the artist should be heard...
Judge rules that a burrito is not a sandwich.
Posted on July 10, 2009From here: … [The] Panera [Bread Co. bakery-and-cafe chain] has a clause in its lease that prevents the White City Shopping Center in Shrewsbury from renting to another sandwich shop. Panera tried to invoke that clause to stop the opening of an Qdoba Mexican Grill...
?United [Airlines] Breaks Guitars?
Posted on July 08, 2009The company pummels the crud out of suitcases, too. Via. No Tags
Our future as ?parasitic aggregators? is in jeopardy!
Posted on July 08, 2009This article, which I couldn’t resist reposting in its entirety, is from Daily Finance: A push to tweak existing copyright laws to help newspapers profit from the content they produce has attracted some very vocal opposition in a short span of time, but the idea continues to gain currency nevertheless...
Stunning Ignorance
Posted on July 07, 2009Slate Pundit and law school graduate Mickey Kaus has just discovered Section 230 but he doesn’t think it “will hold up.” No Tags
Irony (Updated)
Posted on July 07, 2009Wired editor Chris Anderson, in a book entitled Free, in passages defining “free lunch” and the “TANSTAAFL” acronym, decides to get his authorial words for free from Wikipedia and to include them in Free without attribution. Guess what? Turns out that when it comes to lifting other people’s writing, there’s no such thing [...
Patented Humor
Posted on July 06, 2009From here: I went to the Patent Office trying to register some of my inventions. I went to the main desk to sign in and the lady at the desk had a form that had to be filled out. She wrote down my personal info and then asked me what I had invented. I said, “A folding [...
?One Sentence?
Posted on July 05, 2009Stories told in a single sentence. From here: When I was 5 or so my mom would tell me to lie down before she tied my tie and I just now realized at the age of 19 that she did this because she’s a funeral director. As you were breaking up with me, all I could think [...
Salinger Takes Another Round
Posted on July 02, 2009Prequel: A Sequel in the Rye J.D. Salinger has persuaded a district court judge to elevate a temporary restraining order to a preliminary injunction in his effort to prevent American audiences from reading 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which uses an aged Holden Caulfield in a narrative sequel to - or parody of — [...
A Machine Would Never Be Bitter
Posted on July 01, 2009I sometimes wonder if the flipside of the AI campaign to make machines more humanlike is a pharmacological campaign to make humans as quiescent as machines. As global competition increases the value of productivity, an underground world of neuro-enhancing drugs is a growing part of campus life...
Copyright and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Posted on June 30, 2009Matthew B. Crawford’s new book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” gives IP lawyers quite a lot to think about. (An excerpt appeared recently in the New York Times magazine, and the book as a whole originated as an essay at The New Atlantis...
A copyright radio ad
Posted on June 30, 2009I never thought this would happen, but today I heard my first radio ad directed specifically towards copyright. The ad, airing here in Boston, criticized attempts in Congress to add a performance right for recording artists, and it encouraged listeners to fight the “tax” on radio stations...
IP and Children, in the Wilderness
Posted on June 30, 2009Michael Chabon has an elegiac essay in the New York Review of Books (”Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood”) on what is denied to our children: This is the kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived to provide for our children...
Vuvuzelas
Posted on June 29, 2009The gang at Language Log provides a thorough overview of the meaning and function of the vuvuzela, the device that provided the soundtrack to the just-concluded Confederations Cup soccer tournament in South Africa (the result in yesterday’s final: Brazil 3 - USA 2, more or less as I predicted last week)...
Netflix Prize Won?
Posted on June 29, 2009It appears that the Netflix Prize has been won. Thet Netflix Prize is a $1 million prize being offered by Netflix for development of a “movie recommendation system” that is 10% better than Netflix’s own Cinematch system as predicting the movie preferences of Netflix subscribers...
Irony
Posted on June 28, 2009Wired editor Chris Anderson, in a book entitled Free, in passages defining “free lunch” and the “TANSTAAFL” acronym, decides to get his authorial words for free from Wikipedia and to include them in Free without attribution. Guess what? Turn out that when it comes to lifting other people’s writing, there’s no such thing [...
Sorry Paul, They Took Your Kodachrome Away
Posted on June 26, 2009The technology turn and churn has claimed another piece of history. Kodak is ceasing to make its Kodachrome film. I don’t think that one should be upset about this change but some nostalgia seems proper. Here are some pictures in tribute to the film...
Michael Jackson, IP, and Culture
Posted on June 26, 2009So first I must admit I am not a huge fan of Michael Jackson. What? Yes. No! I’m afraid so. That being said, for all the oddity that occurred in the later part of his life the man and his work highlight some interesting points in IP and culture...
Noveck?s Proposals for Open Government
Posted on June 23, 2009Here is a very nice NYT profile of Beth Noveck’s work at the White House to use technology to enhance democracy: The White House made its first major entree into government by the people last month when it set up an online forum to ask ordinary people for their ideas on how to carry out [...
A Note on the World Copyright Summit
Posted on June 23, 2009The recent “World Copyright Summit,” sponsored by CISAC (the “International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers”) only came to my attention after the fact. Glancing through the program materials, I came across a framing editorial for the conference that begins this way: Faced with an era of digital disruption, what would Michelangelo think of the [...
Responsibility and Duty Meet Social Networking
Posted on June 22, 2009In light of the events in Iran, many may laud the power of tools such as Twitter and Facebook as they allow information to reach the world. Here in the United States, however, a few stories highlight how social networking tools and blogs run into ideas of fairness, honesty, and even justice...
A Sequel in the Rye?
Posted on June 21, 2009For the moment, J.D. Salinger has in hand an order prohibiting the distribution in the U.S. of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which is either an unauthorized sequel to (i.e., derivative work, based on) and an invasion of the privacy of the author of The Catcher in the Rye, more or less akin [...
Pen and Parchment at the Metropolitan Museum
Posted on June 21, 2009I’ve had the pleasure of wandering through the Metropolitan Museum in New York many times over the years, but for the first time, perhaps, yesterday I was fortunate to see an exhibition that really changed the way I (and perhaps others) think about the world of art...
Cyber-Socialism?
Posted on June 21, 2009Wired “senior maverick” Kevin Kelly has called a wide variety of P2P collaborations a new form of socialism. For example, he points to Craigslist as a collective where the principle “from each according to abilities, to each according to his needs” may well be functioning: How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society [...
A New Low
Posted on June 18, 2009The recording industry’s inquisitorial pursuit of downloaders has reached new heights - or depths. Map Boon onto the interests represented by the RIAA and Katy onto the interests represented by the accused in this sequence from Animal House: Boon: Unbelievable...
Property, Identity, and Giuseppe Rossi
Posted on June 17, 2009Finally, the United States bred a world class soccer talent. But Giuseppe Rossi was born in New Jersey to Italian parents and dreamed of playing for Italy, as the rules of international soccer allow. Now he is not only playing for Italy - but he’s scoring the goals that beat the United States...
The Values of the Bat Signal
Posted on June 16, 2009I drove to Boulder and back earlier this month, which is nothing of consequence except for the fact that I live in Pittsburgh and, with an excursion to Minnesota on the return, I put 3,400 miles on our vehicle. Picture me in a large blue pickup under the blue Nebraska sky, cruising comfortably in a [...
The Age of Digital Convergence in Hong Kong
Posted on June 13, 2009Just a quick note. I am fortunate to be in Hong Kong at The Age of Digital Convergence, An East-West Dialogue Law, Media, Technology. The Journalism and Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong and Intellectual Property Law Center at Drake University Law School organized the event and the Faculty of Law at [...
Googlebombing Pittsburgh?
Posted on June 10, 2009Here in Pittsburgh, civic enthusiasts are so giddy over the prospect of the G-20 summit coming to town next Fall that that they just can’t help themselves. A local marketing firm has announced that it is launching a campaign to create a network of links that would cause the Google search engine to reply “Pittsburgh” [...
Who Are You? Some Thoughts on Public/Private Information and Who?s Who
Posted on June 02, 2009I received an email from Who?s Who today. Apparently I have been included on their list of Who’s Who in Law Higher Education. I did not ask to be included and I am not sure that I want to be on this list. So I poked around. Mark Lemley is in their database, and my [...
Too Scandalous To Be A Registered Trademark: ?Pussy Natural Energy?
Posted on June 02, 2009At least according to the TTAB which said: In this case, it is the term PUSSY which is the focus of the refusal and our analysis. The term PUSSY is the most significant element in the mark. Accordingly, when we discuss the term PUSSY alone, we are mindful that the entire mark is the mark shown [...
The Pirate Party Expands by Another Country
Posted on June 01, 2009The Pirate Party has planted another official flag: Finland, where its 5,000 signatures made it an officially recognized party. [H/T: Orgtheory.net] About the Pirate Party, from Wikipedia: The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) is a political party in Sweden...
Literalized Song Video: Bonnie Tyler - Total Eclipse of the Heart
Posted on June 01, 2009The original: The adapted, “literal video” version: ETA: Live rowdy awesome eff bomb dropping feminist rockstar version of this doofy song here. No Tags
When Paintings Perform
Posted on June 01, 2009Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker reported on the copyright story behind Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, which I haven’t seen. Among the pieces in the museum that come alive as part of the film, paintings literally leap off the walls: There is an animated (and occasionally talkative) Degas ballerina, a Jackson Pollock [...
The Issue is, What is a Potato Crisp?
Posted on June 01, 2009Because I’m not a tax lawyer, I didn’t see Paul Caron’s coverage of the Court of Appeal judgment in the Pringles case, but I did see the New York Times opinion piece this morning. It’s interesting to watch an obscure little case generate so many different interpretations...
Up ? and Back
Posted on May 30, 2009[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions] I just came back from seeing the new Pixar animated film Up . It?s a charracteristically charming Pixar effort; all thumbs up! Plus, I got these neat-o 3D glasses. There?s a little IP angle to the film, though, and I want to use that to anchor this last of my guest posts...
Maps and Legends
Posted on May 29, 2009Space the final frontier. These are the voyages of ? ah, you know the rest. Exploration and the idea of frontiers seem to capture an important part of the human experience. The possibility of finding something new, of entering uncharted territories excites people...
What Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Hath Wrought
Posted on May 29, 2009Yet another reason to simply laugh at the claims that porn is “under attack” in this country; it could hardly be more mainstream. No Tags
SchoolHouse Rock - Walkin? On Wall Street
Posted on May 26, 2009Not exactly sure what the takeaway is supposed to be… No Tags
?Blogola: The FTC Takes On Paid Posts - The Federal Trade Commission wants bloggers to disclose when they?ve been wooed with cash or freebies from companies they cover?
Posted on May 23, 2009From Business Week: This summer, the government agency is expected to issue new advertising guidelines that will require bloggers to disclose when they’re writing about a sponsor’s product and voicing opinions that aren’t their own. The new FTC guidelines say that blog authors should disclose when they’re being compensated by an advertiser to discuss a product...
The Watchmakers? Court and Related Curiosities
Posted on May 22, 2009[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions] This recent New Yorker piece about ?Baselworld,? the annual watchmakers? confab in Switzerland (Patricia Marx, ?Face Value,? May 25, 2009) included a throwaway line that I found fascinating. Baselworld is so large that it has its own police force and ?a judiciary to settle trademark disputes...
A Rumble in the Wiki/Licensing World: Wikimedia Foundation Moves from GNU to Creative Commons
Posted on May 21, 2009Slashdot reports that “The Wikimedia Foundation has resolved to migrate the copyright licensing of all of its wiki projects, including Wikipedia, from the GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License...
Where Trademarked ?Eagles? Dare
Posted on May 21, 2009[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions] The world is again safe for trademark law, now that the National Rifle Association has put an end to efforts at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse to name the university?s eagle mascot ?Eddie.? For 20 years, the eagle has been the mascot of athletic teams at UW-L...
Creative Logos Deconstructed
Posted on May 20, 2009From here: The Big Ten collegiate conference has eleven schools but they didn?t want to change their name. However, they used their logo to hide the numerical ?11? in the name. Many more at the source site. No Tags
More on Comic Norms, and Virtual Symposia
Posted on May 20, 2009[Cross-posted in part from Concurring Opinions] I posted earlier about the Virginia Law Review In Brief responses to Dotan Oliar’s and Chris Sprigman’s UVa Law Review article, There?s No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy, 94 Va...
Best Practices in Fair Use
Posted on May 19, 2009Following up on Ann’s post yesterday, and cross-posted from Concurring Opinions: Yesterday, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University?s Washington College of Law and the Center for Social Media at AU?s School of Communication released ?Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend,? a video that accompanies and explains the Code of Best [...
On Being an Ambassador for Pittsburgh
Posted on May 18, 2009[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions] By popular request, I?m posting this link to my brief appearance in this morning?s New York Times. (Well, the link is popular in certain quarters, and I did receive a request to post it!) The story has to do with tomorrow?s mayoral primary, in which Pittsburgh?s young mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, front man for [...
?Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend? is a collaborative project of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property?a program of AU?s Washington College of Law?and the Center for Social Media?a center of AU?s School of Communication?along with Stanford Law School?s Fair Use Project. It was funded by Google.
Posted on May 18, 2009From Stacey Jackson-Roberts at American University Washington College of Law: American University Washington College of Law?s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and AU’s Center for Social Media, in collaboration with Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project, are launching a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common [...
From the Department of Odd Products
Posted on May 18, 2009This. I’m guessing the product name is “merely descriptive” but will not be doing any empirical research on the question. No Tags
Google Respects Colonel Sanders? Kentucky Fried Privacy
Posted on May 15, 2009The people walking by, not so much. Via. No Tags
On Showing Up
Posted on May 15, 2009[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions] My post on the challenges facing the law school Research Dean contained an implicit and unexamined assumption regarding a gap between the interest of the individual faculty member in producing and distributing research and scholarship, on the one hand, and the interest of that faculty member?s law school in the research and [...
Patent Law and Women?s Health
Posted on May 13, 2009The ACLU has helped organize a lawsuit challenging a decision by the Patent & Trademark Office granting Myriad Genetic patent rights to two genes that are closely associated with increased risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and on the testing that measures that risk for individual women...
Copyright Debate at The Economist
Posted on May 12, 2009The Economist is hosting an online debate on copyright law and policy. The proposition at issue is this: ”This house believes that existing copyright laws do more harm than good.” Defending the motion is William (Terry) Fisher of Harvard; opposing the motion is Justin Hughes of Cardozo...
A Right to be Punished?
Posted on May 12, 2009[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions] From the Department of Paradoxes in Sporting Jurisprudence: Last Saturday night, at the end of the NBA playoff basketball game between the Dallas Mavericks and the Denver Nuggets, Antoine Wright of the Mavericks broke the rules...
?Irish student hoaxes world?s media with fake quote?
Posted on May 12, 2009From Yahoo News: When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news...
The Law School Faculty as a Commons
Posted on May 11, 2009[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions] What?s the connection between law professors and stand-up comics? My last post pointed to a recent short piece on comics and the relationship between ?anti-plagiarism? social norms that encourage comic creativity and the emergence of those norms in the context of commodified comedy...
At Co-Op This Month
Posted on May 11, 2009I’m guest-blogging at Concurring Opinions this month and will cross-post here when it seems appropriate. Here is my first (guest) post. No Tags
?This case stems from a dangerous, cruel, and highly indecent use of the internet for the apparent purpose of revenge.?
Posted on May 07, 2009A unanimous three-judge panel in the Ninth Circuit held in Barnes v. Yahoo!, Inc. that a claim for promissory estoppel by an Internet harassment victim was not necessarily precluded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The plaintiff’s lawsuit alleged that her former boyfriend created a Yahoo account through which the plaintiff herself [...
Robin Malloy on Entrepreneurship, Property, and Markets
Posted on May 06, 2009I recently wrote about the Creativity, Law and Entrepreneurship Workshop at the University of Wisconsin in which I participated. One of the speakers, Robin Malloy who is the E.I. Chair and Distinguished Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law, emailed me and about the ideas he presented...
Pharmaceutical company Merck paid an undisclosed sum to academic publisher Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles?most of which presented data favorable to Merck products?that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship.
Posted on May 06, 2009From Bioethics.net: The Scientist has reported that, yes, it’s true, Merck cooked up a phony, but real sounding, peer reviewed journal and published favorably looking data for its products in them. Merck paid Elsevier to publish such a tome, which neither appears in MEDLINE or has a website, according to The Scientist...
Facebook CPO for CA AG 2.0?
Posted on May 03, 2009The post title isn’t a cryptic Star Wars reference. Instead, what do we think of the following? Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly is thinking of running for Attorney General of California in 2010, when Jerry Brown’s term expires...
Pac Man Redux
Posted on May 01, 2009Via Bill McGeveran, secret law prof superhero (whoops). No Tags
Me, Myself, and the Public Domain
Posted on May 01, 2009On the one hand, fantasy sports leagues are slowly confirming their legal right to use names and statistics of professional athletes as part of their businesses, without compensating the players, their teams, or the leagues. Bloomberg reports that CBS Interactive has prevailed on this point over the NFL Players Assocation...
Scalia?s Views of Privacy Apparently Change When His Personal Information is at Stake
Posted on April 30, 2009From the ABA Journal: Last year, when law professor Joel Reidenberg wanted to show his Fordham University class how readily private information is available on the Internet, he assigned a group project. It was collecting personal information from the Web about himself...
?U.S. Targets Canada Over Copyright in Special 301 Report?
Posted on April 30, 2009That’s the title of a new post by notorious international copyright subversive Michael Geist, which reports: The U.S. Trade Representative released its Special 301 report today, in which it casts judgement on the intellectual property laws of dozens of countries around the world...
Sewing Machine Commons
Posted on April 30, 2009Check out Adam Mossoff’s post at Volokh (and the comments), discussing his recent paper, A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket. The paper is a terrific example of a case study of the emergence of a commons (in this case, a patent pool) as a resolution to a packet [...
Music Via the Internets
Posted on April 30, 2009Playing For Change | Song Around The World “Stand By Me” from Concord Music Group on Vimeo. No Tags
Comedy is a Serious Business
Posted on April 30, 2009Late last year the Virginia Law Review published a provocative and entertaining article by Dotan Oliar and Christopher Sprigman on copyright law and the social norms of stand-up comics. There’s No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy, 94 Va...
MARBLECAKE ALSO THE GAME
Posted on April 29, 2009Time Magazine’s “World’s Most Influential Person” poll got hacked. Detailed account of same here. No Tags
Posner on the obviousness of a generally lubricous glass-based material containing an appreciable amount of an oxide of boron.
Posted on April 27, 2009Check out “Judge Posner at the Federal Circuit: Patent on Sex Aid is Obvious” at Patently-O if you want to read about Posner’s take on the patentability of adapting easy-slide thermometer materials for use on sex toys. Here’s the abstract of what was formerly an enforceable patent: A sexual aid comprising a cylindrical rod is disclosed...
More Thoughts About On Demand Printing
Posted on April 27, 2009Ann Bartow’s post about the Espresso on demand printing press highlights that change takes time. Ann’s post notes a Guardian article touting the machine as revolutionary and that a publisher in the U.K. launched a service based on the machine in the past few days...
David Post on his new book: ?In Search of Jefferson?s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace?
Posted on April 27, 2009No Tags
Creativity, Law and Entrepreneurship Workshop at Wisconsin
Posted on April 27, 2009On Friday I was in lovely Madison, Wisconsin for the Creativity, Law and Entrepreneurship Workshop which Shubha Ghosh put together and was sponsored by UW Law School, the Institute for Legal Studies, the Initiative for Studies in Technology Entrepreneurship (INSITE), and the Global Legal Studies Center...
?Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London?
Posted on April 27, 2009The machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait. From The Guardian: It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy ? it looks like a large photocopier ? but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than [...
Newman! World Digital Library Misses Legal Opportunity
Posted on April 23, 2009So when I first encountered the WDL, I was excited. I did, however, have a lingering question about the intellectual property laws involved. I scanned the page and found the infamous Legal link at the bottom of the page. I clicked. And then the moment of “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” vanished...
Small Businesses in the Offline World
Posted on April 22, 2009I recently wrote about online regulations and small business. Today, I have another example of small business struggling to meet its legal obligations. It is a local outdoor movie theater here is San Diego. It is called Tops Presents. With zero-gravity recliners, great movies, a good screen, excellent sound, and the warm San Diego sky [...
INTERNET-AGE WRITING SYLLABUS AND COURSE OVERVIEW.
Posted on April 22, 2009ENG 371WR: Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.?12:15 p.m. Instructor: Robert Lanham Course Description As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the [...
?The Backlash Tracker: Build ?Em Up, Knock ?Em Down, NEXT!?
Posted on April 22, 2009Here. Embarrassed to say I was unaware of Cat Calendar Tolerance Level theory until reading the linked post. No Tags
One Snarky Book Review
Posted on April 22, 2009Very mean but also funny, especially if you are familiar with the Picoult oeuvre. No Tags
Take That, Google! Well, Not Really: World Digital Library Now Online Near You
Posted on April 21, 2009Here’s a little public service message about the World Digital Library (seems to detect or default to English, but you can change the language). The WDL is free, offered in multilingual format, and offers these principal objectives: [T]o: * Promote international and intercultural understanding; * Expand the volume and variety [...
?He?s not only been used by politicians like the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, to promote their own agendas, but he?s also been employed by merchants to sell air fresheners in Peru, snowboards in Switzerland and wine in Italy.?
Posted on April 20, 2009He is Che Guevera, and this NYT book review further notes: …The supermodel Gisele Bündchen pranced [ed: "Pranced?" Blarg...] down a runway in a Che bikini. A men?s wear company brought out a Che action figure, complete with fatigues, a beret, a gun and a cigar...
A Note on Leadership
Posted on April 20, 2009Occasionally I come across a quotation that just resonates. Here’s an example, from the Department of “I’ll Have What He’s Having.” Q. What is the most important lesson you?ve learned about leadership through the years? A...
Disturbing Strokes
Posted on April 19, 2009A creepy remix of the opening sequence of a sitcom from years gone by. Feel free to integrate the totemic phrase “What chu talkin’ ’bout Willis?” into any reactions this provokes in you. No Tags
It?s A Funeral; Time To Sing
Posted on April 19, 2009Although much has been written about the importance of sharing culture and the way information flow helps connect people, concrete examples aid in illustrating the point. Infamous stories about ?Happy Birthday? serve that role well but now we have a possible new arena from which to ask ?Did they really need to go after that [...
Useful Models
Posted on April 18, 2009From the Lone Gunman, quoting The Truth About Markets/Culture and Prosperity (UK/US title respectively), a”two-paragraph excerpt from a section discussing ‘large models purportedly descriptive of entire economic systems’ (pp. 193-194)”: The error of principle?the reason these models will never be useful?is best exposed by Jorge Luis Borges? story of mapmakers who competed to build the best possible [...
A Small Piece of Land, Surrounded by Legislation
Posted on April 17, 2009The post title is an oft-quoted phrase describing a croft, which I encountered for the first time in David Owen’s piece on a remote and ancient golf course in Scotland, “The Ghost Course,” which appears in this week’s The New Yorker...
How to Stop Piracy
Posted on April 17, 2009Much as Anderson Cooper once quipped that the surest way to find Osama Bin Laden would be put the Yale alumni association on his tail (”If Osama bin Laden was a Yale graduate they would know what cave he was in, exactly.”), surely the most effective way to put an end to piracy on the [...
10 Things Some Blogger Hates About NPR
Posted on April 17, 2009Curmudgeonly but funny and kinda true. No Tags
Doppelgängers
Posted on April 17, 2009My name is just common enough that I hear about “me” doing some really interesting things, like singing with Derek Trucks (well, he spells his name differently, but it sounds the same). Today, however, was a first. The mail brought me reprints sent by a scholar at a different law school, acknowledging that my work has [...
Down with Strunk & White
Posted on April 14, 2009Geoff Pullum, linguist and (among other things) contributor to the magnificent Language Log, has a sharp critique of Strunk & White at the Chronicle of Higher Education, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the publication of their little book: It’s sad...
Has It Come to This?
Posted on April 13, 2009Today’s sign that the Internet apocalypse is upon us: The New York Times crossword puzzle includes the phrase “Rickrolling” as the answer to a clue (37 Across: “Widespread Internet prank involving a bait-and-switch link to a music video”)...
In the words of Monty Python, ?I want to sing!?
Posted on April 12, 2009This one just made me smile (and maybe sing). It is fun, and although I associate the music with Christmas, it works for Easter too. Now you may notice that it is staged. Which I suppose means that the media company behind the event has taken its cue from flashmobs...
The Revenge of the Romantic Author
Posted on April 09, 2009Critics of the “romantic author” critique of copyright law are back. As the Dan Hicks song goes, how can I miss the romantic author if she won’t go away? Three new IP papers on “originality” in copyright law have been posted recently on SSRN, two of which emphasize the idea that copyright law should do more [...
UGC 3.0 at Columbia
Posted on April 09, 2009I’ll be talking next Friday at a conference at Columbia on the effects of User-Generated Content. Here’s the overview: The rapid increase of user-generated content on the Internet is a source of concern for traditional media firms. Will the YouTubes, Facebooks, Flickrs, Second Lifes and the HuffPos take away significant audience segments on a sustaining basis? [...
Bill Patry Has A New Book Coming Out: ?Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars?
Posted on April 08, 2009From the publisher’s website: Metaphors, moral panics, folk devils, Jack Valenti, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Kenyes, predictable irrationality, and free market fundamentalism are a few of the topics covered in this lively, unflinching examination of the Copyright Wars: the pitched battles over new technology, business models, and most of all, consumers...
?Downturn Puts New Stresses on Libraries?
Posted on April 07, 2009That’s the title of this NYT article, which reports in part: These days, however, community need reaches far beyond reference help ? and in many libraries, it is turning a normally tranquil place into an emotional and stressful hotbed. As the national economic crisis has deepened and social services have become casualties of budget cuts, libraries have [...
Works in Progress Conferences for IP Scholars
Posted on April 07, 2009Two leading “works in progress” conferences for IP scholarship have posted calls for papers. The Intellectual Property Scholars Conference (IPSC) moves back to Cardozo Law School this year. The conference is scheduled for August 6 and 7...
We Know Where Waldo Is!
Posted on April 06, 2009[O]n April 2nd, 2009, the Rutgers University Programming Association (RUPA) and Rutgers Student Life broke the Guinness World Record for The World?s Largest Gathering of People Dressed as Waldo from the iconic picture book series, Where?s Waldo?. 1,052 Rutgers students, staff and community members were spotted ?showing their stripes? at the historic State Theatre located [...
Recruiting Violations and the Integrity of March Madness
Posted on April 06, 2009The University of Connecticut men?s basketball team will not be playing in the championship game tonight, but recent turmoil surrounding the program raises important questions about the direction and credibility of college sports. One need not be a cynic to wonder, indeed suspect, that serious cheating has become the norm in big-money college sports...
Paid Placement = Trademark Use
Posted on April 03, 2009So the Rescuecom.com case was just decided. I will have to parse it carefully, but my initial impression is that it brings the Second Circuit into harmony with the other federal circuits. As I argued in my Google’s Law article, I think this is the right result on the doctrinal issue of trademark use (I [...
Julia Angwin on Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America
Posted on April 02, 2009This makes the Dark Side looks kind of fun.
Posted on April 02, 2009(Fast forward about 40 second if you want to skip the legalese.) No Tags
Star Trek Character or Erectile Dysfunction Pill?
Posted on April 02, 2009Take the quiz here. No Tags
New Paper on SSRN on Law and Knowledge
Posted on April 02, 2009I’ve posted a new paper to SSRN titled “Notes on a Geography of Knowledge.” (Download it here.) The paper is part of a forthcoming symposium being published by the Fordham Law Review, organized by Kathy Strandburg, Jay Kesan, and Brett Frischmann and titled, “When Worlds Collide: Intellectual Property at the Interface Between Systems of Knowledge [...
William Zinsser, Writing Well, and Fair Use
Posted on April 02, 2009Virtually every law professor who works with student law review editors has horror stories about students’ mindless affection for the Bluebook, for alleged “rules” of grammar, syntax, and writing style, and (my own favorite) for the journal’s “policy” regarding something or other...
WIPIP 2009 Scheduled
Posted on April 02, 2009The following arrived in my In box yesterday: Seton Hall University School of Law and the Gibbons Institute of Law, Science and Technology at the Law School are pleased to host the 7th Annual Works in Progress Intellectual Property (WIPIP) conference on Friday and Saturday, October 2-3, 2009...
Google to Take Over Federal Court System?
Posted on April 01, 2009A friend of mine at Google passed along a copy of an internal email today. My friend asked me to keep it confidential, but the news is too unnerving — and huge — to keep quiet. Here’s the relevant text: To: [names redacted] From: [names redacted] Re: Google Law Project Date: April 1, 2009 I’d like the working group to [...
TOTM Blog Symposium on Mike Carrier?s book, Innovation for the 21st Century
Posted on April 01, 2009Check out the blog symposium at Truth on the Market on Professor Michael Carrier?s (Rutgers) forthcoming book: Innovation for the 21st Century: Harnessing the Power of Intellectual Property and Antitrust Law. Comments welcome! I’ll link to the posts below the fold: Here are the posts so far: Dan Crane Phil Weiser Geoff Manne Josh Wright Dennis [...
That Was Irving R. Levine
Posted on March 28, 2009I arrived at college the same year that ABC launched Nightline (originally: the late, great Frank Reynolds hosting “America Held Hostage”), and Ted Koppel’s face graced my dorm room almost every night for four years. I learned to love TV news in high school, however, and that’s because I was a huge fan of Irving [...
??DNA bungle? haunts German police?
Posted on March 27, 2009Six murders were linked by DNA that probably had nothing to do with the killer(s). From the BBC: Police in Germany have admitted that a woman they have been hunting for more than 15 years may never have existed. Dubbed the “phantom of Heilbronn”, the woman was described by police as the country’s most dangerous woman...
The History of Newspapers and Copyright Standards
Posted on March 26, 2009In an earlier post I suggested that the contemporary intersections of newspapers and technology could be contrasted in interesting ways with the last ten years’ worth of intersections of recording companies, motion picture studios, and software companies and technology...
Schlag and Me
Posted on March 25, 2009About three years ago, I wrote a short essay on law reviews and open access publishing that characterized legal scholarship in student-edited journals in glib and uncharitable terms: “The theory of the economy of prestige holds that we see a grumpily mutually-reinforcing symbolic economy of law professors, lawyers, law students, law schools and their universities [...
Life Imitating Art, I
Posted on March 25, 2009“Here, there be dragons” has long served as a metaphor for the unknown. An unfortunate Indonesian fisherman recently discovered that sometimes, there really are dragons. Slaying Komodo dragons may be a bad idea, but slaying their metaphorical brethren is a different matter...
Technology and Business Models
Posted on March 24, 2009Here some thoughts prompted by the Q&A for Panel 1 at Southwestern?s Copyright Reform Conference. One idea that came up was the way in which law and technology intersect. Nimmer claimed that the 1976 Act would have addressed DeCSS. Fred von Lohmann said no, Betamax and other cases would have said non-infringing uses mean DeCSS [...
To Rent or Own? SpiralFrog Closes; Customers Lose Access to Music
Posted on March 23, 2009CNET reports that SpiralFrog, a company that was, yes was, in the online music game is closing its doors. If one was a customer, music covered by SprialFrog’s DRM software will be unusable 60 days from the closing date which seems to have been on March 20, 2009...
Late Recap of the Southwestern Conference About Copyright Reform, Panel 1
Posted on March 23, 2009A few weeks back, I wrote a post about my views on a big issue in copyright reform and my paper, Copyright?s Hidden Assumption: A Critical Analysis of the Foundations of Descendible Copyright, which addresses what I think will yet again be a major theme in copyright reform: term extension justified as way to [...
More on Publishing News from the University
Posted on March 23, 2009News that the University of Michigan Press will publish primarily electronically, rather than in print form, is not particularly interesting in the “book v. e-book” sense. The print monograph is cooked, just like printed daily journalism is cooked...
?The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital.?
Posted on March 23, 2009Story at Inside Higher Ed. One blogging historian express doubts about this here. I have mixed feelings. I like reading actual books better then staring at a computer monitor, but for research and reference purposes the electronic format sure is handy...
Incenting and Incentivizing
Posted on March 22, 2009From this post at Language Log: Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994) says of incentivize that “This is perhaps the most recent of the infamous verbs that end in -ize”, noting that the members of a usage panel in 1985 “rejected it almost unanimously with varying degrees of disgust and horror”...
From the ?Choice of Law? paragraph of the Uniblue Registry Booster 2009 License Agreement: ?This Licensing Agreement Will Be Governed By The Laws of Malta, Europe Excluding Any Conflict Of Rules Of Law?
Posted on March 22, 2009That’s paragraph 11. The preamble to the Licensing Agreement says “it is advisable that You print or save a soft copy of this Licensing Agreement for record purposes.” Which I might have done if I could figure out how - I couldn’t even make my Firefox browser super copy the Licensing Agreement, no less print [...
Odd Extended Muppets Pitch for La Choy Chow Mein, With Background Info, Circa 1966
Posted on March 20, 2009No Tags
BlogRolling.com is Evil
Posted on March 20, 2009It’s causing me to see pop up like advertisements at the top of almost every blog I visit, including my own. How do I make it go away? The solution the company suggests doesn’t work - the ad goes away briefly but another one appears if you refresh...
Can Pittsburgh Save Detroit?
Posted on March 19, 2009The post title is the premise of the CNN piece that was supposed to air last night on Anderson Cooper 360 but that got preempted by Natasha Richardson and AIG (not that those two things have anything to do with each other). I was interviewed on camera for the story, so there goes my [...
Seven Reasons to Doubt Competition in the General Search Engine Market
Posted on March 18, 2009New books on Google by Randall Stross, Alexander Halavais, and Jeff Jarvis have been getting a good deal of media attention lately. I highly recommend the Stross and Halavais volumes because they recognize that the unique power of Google is likely to be lasting...
Shameless Self-CNN-Plug
Posted on March 17, 2009CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 is doing a series this week on how different cities across America are faring during the economic crisis. I was interviewed by the program (the reporter was Randi Kaye) about how Pittsburgh is doing (reasonably well, all things considered)...
Amazon.com, the Kindle 2, and the Visually Impaired: Not a love story.
Posted on March 16, 2009In previous episodes: I offered some tepid, conditional support for the Authors Guild’s position that if the Kindle 2’s “read aloud” function was shown to shrink the revenue streams for audio books, a court might conclude there was reproduction rights based copyright infringement...
Newspapers and IP Business Models
Posted on March 16, 2009A hypothesis: The dynamics of social and institutional change are affected the presence of intellectual property rights and, importantly, by the rhetoric of intellectual property rights. It is instructive to compare the firestorm that is currently engulfing the newspapers that house some of this country’s most respected journalism – the Rocky Mountain News (gone), the San Francisco [...
At Least One Year Of Law School Now Mandatory For Nation?s 25-Year-Olds
Posted on March 14, 2009According to this report, anyway. No Tags
Peter Jaszi at Collectanea
Posted on March 13, 2009Professor Peter Jaszi, copyright scholar extraordinaire and sometime fair use activist at American University’s Washington College of Law, has begun blogging at Collectanea, in his role as Virtual Scholar at the University of Maryland’s Center for Intellectual Property...
Following Zinsser: Writing Well
Posted on March 13, 2009Nonfiction writing guru William Zinsser has a reflection on teaching and learning how to write nonfiction in the current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine. I arrived at Yale too late to take one of his seminars, but I’ve been a fan of his work since I first read On Writing Well as an undergraduate...
?One Letter Off? - Not quite the movies you know.
Posted on March 12, 2009The rules of this Worth1000.com photoshop contest were: take a popular movie and swap one and only one letter of its title OR add or subtract one and only one letter of its title. Here are a few of the submissions: Many more here! No Tags
Two Birds One Stone: Thoughts on Theory and Law Practice
Posted on March 11, 2009As Lawrence Cunnigham?s post explains, the patterns regarding law firms and law as a business are not new. Still, the comments have asked properly why partners don?t move away from high per partner profits and try and keep associates. The answer to that is complicated to say the least...
Worth Reading 2: Economics v. Culture in IP, at Chicago
Posted on March 10, 2009The Faculty Blog at the University of Chicago Law School is hosting another in its occasional series of online roundtables (a/k/a mobblogs), this one titled “Beyond Economic Analysis of Intellectual Property: The Need For Social and Cultural Theory?” and framed by the work of Madhavi Sunder, currently visiting at Chicago...
Worth Reading 1: NIH?s Open Access Policy Under Attack
Posted on March 10, 2009As open access advocates are well aware, there is a bill pending in Congress that would undo the NIH open access mandate for publications based on NIH-funded research. At the Huffington Post, there is a terrific back and forth between Larry Lessig and Michael Eisen (defending the NIH policy) and Rep...
Law Review Submission Stories
Posted on March 09, 2009Dave Hoffman at CoOp has opened the bidding on law review spring submission stories. Here is a slightly different perspective. Last year I became one of our (Pittsburgh’s) advisors to the law review. One of the things that I noticed at the time was the difference between Pitt’s US News ranking (a not entirely meaningless number, [...
Towers of Babel and What?s a Cubit?
Posted on March 09, 2009Burj Dubai is close to being complete. It will be the world’s tallest building (although some debate how to evaluate that title). So is it a Tower of Babel? Depends on who you ask? As a matter of hubris or monument’s to humanity’s glory, maybe so...
The Vader Project
Posted on March 08, 2009There is a new exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh titled The Vader Project, and I’d love to know whether any of it was cleared through George Lucas and Lucasfilm. From the exhibition website: 100 Reimagined Darth Vader helmets complete THE VADER PROJECT Premiering at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Show runs February 13 ? [...
Kindle 2 Update: Amazon has decided to give rights holders the choice to disable the text-to-speech function on a work by work basis.
Posted on March 02, 2009Mark Lemley cited more often than Louis Brandeis; God doesn?t even make the Top 50
Posted on March 01, 2009?Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.?
Posted on February 25, 2009The post title is taken from Roy Blount Jr.’s NYT Op-Ed entitled “The Kindle Swindle?” In it he argues, in his capacity as president of the Author’s Guild, that the Kindle 2 will undermine the market for audio books, which provide a decent amount of income to authors...
Backlash Persuades Tropicana To Abandon New Packaging
Posted on February 23, 2009From the NYT: … The PepsiCo Americas Beverages division of PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, executives plan to announce on Monday, and the previous version will be brought back in [...
No More What?s His/Her Face? iPhoto and Face Recognition
Posted on February 20, 2009CNET has a fluff piece about the fun of iPhoto’s new face recognition software. The author shares how the software identified a friend as a lemur and mistakenly identified friends as aged relatives. So here “the goofs are what make it fun...
Commons in the News
Posted on February 19, 2009Five newspapers in the Northeast are going to pool some of their newsgathering to save money, an ad hoc editorial pooling arrangement (commons) that both presages more to come and echoes other larger, more complex commons all around us. Given that commons is one of my main research interests at the moment, one thing I [...
danah boyd?s thesis
Posted on February 19, 2009If you do any significant internet-related research, chances are you know who danah boyd is. If not, there’s a Wikipedia page with a run-down of relevant details and links. What I did not know until just now is that her PhD thesis on teens and social software is posted online...
Scholarship as Storytelling
Posted on February 18, 2009Have you ever noticed that really engaging academic scholarship unfolds like a story? Like the authors had subconscious ideas about main characters and plots and conflict and resolution? Great scholars are often great characters in their own right, or at least they become great characters, in kind of a literary way...
Building Institutions
Posted on February 18, 2009Some time back, I noticed that Rick Garnett at Prawfs was one of the few people to notice a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times on the value of institutions. Here’s a quick hit of Brooks: In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask [...
Assorted Links
Posted on February 18, 2009I’ve been pretty busy lately, but I wanted to link to some recent blog posts of mine that may interest Madisonian readers. On Balkinization, I’ve put up a few posts recently on innovation policy: Beyond Innovation: The Many Goals of Internet Law and Policy Beyond Competition: Preparing for a Google Book Search Monopoly Search [...
Facebook Imbroglio - That Was Fast
Posted on February 18, 2009Before you could say “Facebook is . . . doing an about face,” Facebook did an about face on changes to its Terms of Service. Bill McGeveran at Info/Law has the story and the relevant links, if this mini-maelstrom blew by you too quickly. (In our household, it blew across the screen at CNN yesterday morning [...
New Opening Sequence for The Simpsons
Posted on February 17, 2009Seems even longer! More here. No Tags
Likelihood of Confusion
Posted on February 17, 2009From here: … a friend told us the story of her husband taking their 3 year old kid out to run errands. He decided to grab some lunch for them and pulled into Arby’s. The kid, not being able to read, yelled out “Yay! Arby’s!” The dad was surprised because the kid couldn’t read yet so he [...
Google Books and the Essential Facilities Doctrine
Posted on February 15, 2009Google Books is an amazing service. Many others have raved about it, and many others have analyzed the settlement agreement between Google and the The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. For very insightful analyses, see various posts here (a, b, c, d, e) and here, here, here, and here...
New Sony Product
Posted on February 14, 2009Major cuss word warning! Don’t watch this in South Carolina! See also. No Tags
?Why You Can?t Buy a New Car Online?
Posted on February 14, 2009I’ve wondered about that sometimes. Mother Jones reports: Americans can buy virtually anything over the Internet these days?sex, booze, houses?everything, that is, but a new car. If you want to buy a new Ford Fusion, you have to go down to your local dealership and haggle with the car salesmen, an unpleasant and daunting task...
An Infrastructure Bank / Governance Commission (By Brett Frischmann and Robin Chase)
Posted on February 13, 2009A second draft op ed, below the fold President-elect Obama has expressed a firm commitment to massive federal spending on infrastructure. Beyond the infrastructure investments in the economic stimulus package, he is likely to administer the “single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s...
Infrastructure as destiny (By Brett Frischmann and Robin Chase)
Posted on February 13, 2009A draft op ed, below the fold As Barack Obama and his advisers ponder how to transform campaign promises about road and bridge improvements into reality, they should consider this historical lesson: Large-scale infrastructure investments have ? and will ? chart our national destiny...
Infrastructure op eds
Posted on February 13, 2009So a little over a month ago, Robin Chase and I put together two op eds on infrastructure policy. Neither caught the attention of newspaper editors. Unfortunately, we delayed in posting them; we’ve both had a busy beginning to 2009. Both are relevant to the debates about the stimulus package, but neither [...
What a BigLaw Firm Might Say, but Won?t
Posted on February 12, 2009At the Faculty Lounge, Dan Filler collects links to ATL posts that cover the recent wave of law firm layoffs. The notices are depressingly similar. Work is way off; the firm needs to position itself to remain competitive; etc. etc. etc. As is almost always the case, what the law firms don’t say makes for [...
Lanham Act Defying Tattoos for Law Professors
Posted on February 10, 2009It’s only false advertising if the misleading sobriquet is material. Via. No Tags
John Stewart, Bill O?Reilly and Privacy
Posted on February 10, 2009I am teaching Information Privacy this semester (yes I use Solove/Schwartz for the text), and it is a great class to teach. In addition to the rich material, the class provides a way to show students that the first year, silo approach to law is just the starting point...
Hermione Granger Fan Tributes
Posted on February 08, 2009Watch them while you can: “I Am Woman” “Don’t Mess With Hermione Granger” “One Girl Revolution” “Super Girl” “Miss Independent” “Mood Swings” “A Dangerous Mind” No Tags
?The Complete New Yorker,? only slightly a misnomer (covers February 1925 through April 2008) in the form of 8 DVD-ROMS & a book, costs an astoundingly low $19.99!
Posted on February 07, 2009Cripes, that level of affordability is very nice, but also kind of scary. So much so that I’m blogging what is basically a free advert for the magazine because I’d miss it terribly if it went under. Buy it here. In the highly improbable event that this is generating profits, I promise I don’t get [...
?A sculpture of a shoe erected in Iraq to honour a journalist who threw his footwear at George W Bush has been dismantled, reports say.?
Posted on February 06, 2009From the BBC News: Foreign media say the bronze-coloured fibre-glass shoe was removed from its site in the city of Tikrit on the orders of the local authorities. It had been erected in the grounds of an orphanage. The monument was reportedly taken down just a day after being unveiled in the late Saddam Hussein’s home town...
?The True Colors of Trademark Law: Greenlighting a Red Tide of Anti Competition Blues?
Posted on February 05, 2009Yes, it’s self-promotion Thursday here at Madisonian.net, Bartow edition. Here’s the abstract for my newly published article: Abstract: The elevation of color to stand-alone trademark status illustrates the unbounded nature of trademarks within the judicial consciousness...
Possible History/Economics Lesson from Japan in the 1990s
Posted on February 02, 2009Professor Diego Comin of Harvard Business School has a working paper called An Exploration of the Japanese Slowdown during the 1990s. Here is the blurb from HBS: Why was the 1990s a lost decade for Japan? HBS professor Diego Comin argues that it was the combination of some shocks that lasted for about three years and [...
http://feministlawprofessors.com/
Posted on February 01, 2009That’s where you will find Feminist Law Professors now! http://feministlawprofessors.com/ No Tags
Terroir in Iowa
Posted on February 01, 2009When I graduated from college in 1983 and moved to Sioux City, my friends kidded me about moving from the state with the fewest pigs-per-capita (Connecticut) to the state with the most (Iowa). At long last I have a measure of revenge: Today’s NYT reports on La Quercia, an Iowa prosciutto producer that is earning raves...
Did You Clean Out Your Locker?: Yahoo Shuts Its Online Storage Service
Posted on January 31, 2009Yahoo! is closing its online storage service Briefcase. According to CNET the service started about ten years ago. Now Yahoo! is telling customers that they have until March 30 to “to retrieve or delete their documents.” As some of you know, I have been writing about who owns material stored online...
KISS This
Posted on January 31, 2009In right of publicity news, Gene Simmons objects to his likeness appearing on skis without his permission, which seems neither surprising nor controversial. The fact that Gene Simmons has an image worth protecting is noteworthy, however. Count KISS among those 70s acts (along with the Village People, Gloria Gaynor, and John Travolta) whose cultural impact has [...
Rules and Personal Justice; Or Not
Posted on January 31, 2009Apparently Shawn Crawford who won the silver medal in the 200 meter race has given his medal to Churandy Martina. Martina finished second to Crawford but was disqualified for running out his lane. Crawford explained “[I]f a guy is 10 meters in front of me, I don’t care if he stayed in the middle of [...
Someone hacked into the computer that controls the digital road signs in Austin, Texas
Posted on January 30, 2009Story here. No Tags
Death, Grief, and the Internets
Posted on January 30, 2009ABC News recently reported about the practice of some funeral homes to webcast funerals, in a story with the somewhat awkward title: “Funeral Webcasts Gain in Popularity.” Less popular by far was the decision by a newspaper to have one of its reporters live blog the funeral of a 3-year-old boy killed in a tragic [...
The Terrible IP Towel
Posted on January 30, 2009It’s Super Bowl week here in Pittsburgh, and under the local bloggers’ code all posts must have something to do with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Fortunately, there is no shortage of IP-related blog fodder when it comes to Steelers-mania, and today’s Times brings the best of all possible examples, a story that recounts the true meaning of [...
Noted
Posted on January 30, 2009Bruce Sterling, at Seed magazine, on panics for 2009: I’m always impressed by people’s behavior during massive panics. They rarely believe or admit that they are panicked. Instead they assure one another that at last the wool has been lifted from their eyes...
Google killed Bambi!
Posted on January 29, 2009The Google Maps car took out a baby deer, and it recorded the entire process for all Google Maps users to see. Found this sad story here. This site reports: “Google, citing ?high demand,? has blocked out the image. Whether this is temporary or they?re scrambling to replace the original shot is to be seen...
After more than a hundred years of featuring a gherkin pickle on its ketchup labels, H.J. Heinz replaced it with a tomato.
Posted on January 28, 2009Some people in Pittsburgh are bumming. I am too a little bit. I liked that pickle. No Tags
Listen Closely: 1979-1980 Catches Up to Us
Posted on January 27, 2009The film Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten was on cable recently, and I was lucky enough to catch it. First, I love the Clash and Strummer’s work in general. The film traces his history, and the story about how he and his views evolved is rather interesting...
Obama Mask Factory
Posted on January 25, 2009Whatever else is going on with photos and posters, it sure seems like there is a lot of “fair use” of Obama’s face! No Tags
Fair Use? Pop Rocks the Steelers
Posted on January 23, 2009The Pittsburgh Steelers are on their way to a seventh Super Bowl appearance, and their international fan base is well on its way to raising its intensity level from the baseline (absolutely manic) to 11. The Steelers songbook is filled almost to the brim by virtue of earlier trips to the big game and the local [...
Oscars and IP?s Romantic Collaborative
Posted on January 23, 2009A pair of comments via the New York Times — David Carr, in the paper, and Michael Cieply, in the Carpetbagger blog – make two related claims. One is that Academy Award nominations (including those released yesterday) betray a distinct tilt away from bigger, commercial, Hollywood films and toward more independent, auteur-ish films...
New Int?l Society for IP Theory
Posted on January 23, 2009International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property CALL FOR PAPERS First Annual ISHTIP Workshop The Construction of Immateriality Practices of Appropriation and the Genealogy of Intellectual Property Bocconi University, Milan Italy 26-27 June 2009 This workshop will explore the making of “intellectual property”, understood broadly as the myriad legal and non-legal processes by which individuals and groups are credited [...
Sweet or Creepy?
Posted on January 22, 2009From the AP and the Chicago Tribune: Beanie Babies maker Ty Inc. sells Sasha, Malia dolls but denies Obama girls are inspiration CHICAGO (AP) ? The company that makes the popular Beanie Babies is hoping for two more big winners with dolls named “Sweet Sasha” and “Marvelous Malia...
Chia Obama Handmade Decorative Planter?
Posted on January 22, 2009Hard to believe that this is for real but apparently it is. No Tags
The White House Commons
Posted on January 22, 2009The Copyright Notice at Whitehouse.gov says: Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise...
?The Future of News, Part One ? The Problem?
Posted on January 21, 2009A long post by Ed Baker outlining the challenges faced by contemporary journalism is up at Balkinization. He will describe some possible solutions in a second post tomorrow, unless the blog is severly under-capitalized and this requires Jack Balkin to lay him off, as seems to be happening to so many talented reporters these days...
Will the Obama Adminstration Be More Open to Allowing Search Engines to Index Government Web Sites?
Posted on January 21, 2009From Kottke.org: The country’s new robots.txt file Here’s a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here’s the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday: User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /search Disallow: /query...
Copyright and Digital Tech Updates
Posted on January 21, 2009The news rushes past with not enough time for comment. Items that caught my eye in the last week include: The owners of a multiplex in Colorado claim that they foreclosed on the copyrights to Ingmar Bergman’s films in order to satisfy an unpaid judgment in their favor...
Fairey, Obama, and Fair Use
Posted on January 21, 2009Now that the source material for the iconic Barack Obama campaign image, produced by Shepard Fairey, has been identified, the fair use fun can begin. The photographer says that he doesn’t want to make trouble. But some in the art world have been gunning for Fairey, arguing that he’s not just a bad artist, but [...
The Crucible
Posted on January 19, 2009Much has been written about the role that Harvard Law School played in the development of President-Elect Obama’s personality, temperament, management style, world view, and probably (though I haven’t seen this - yet) crossover dribble. Much of it, like this current piece in The New Republic, isn’t about Obama at all; Obama is a hook [...
martinlutherking.org is a hate site.
Posted on January 19, 2009Not going to link to it. If you want to read about King or hear his voice, go here. No Tags
Spirit Airlines Tries To Charge Cancellation Fees On Passengers It Put On Flight 1549 (yes, the one that landed in the Hudson River).
Posted on January 19, 2009From here: Rob and Jeff Kolodjay were scheduled to fly on Spirit Airlines to a golf vacation with four other friends on Thursday out of LaGuardia in New York City. Their flight got cancelled, and they rebooked their flight to US Airways flight 1549. While the Kolodjay?s have good things to say about US Airways, they are [...
?The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy? by Jerry Bowyer
Posted on January 18, 2009This book, published in 2003, is apparently NOT SATIRICAL! Over at Amazon.com, the customer reviews are illuminating. Below I’ve re-published a couple: This book has a very interesting premise, which is that common sense and experienced reality are both false...
The Picture and the Paint
Posted on January 18, 2009Over the past few days I’ve been dipping into Cory Doctorow’s Content, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, and Larry Lessig’s Remix. I like them all for different reasons; Doctorow is an irrepressible enthusiast for online openness, Weinberger connects that openness to older patterns of information storage and retrieval, and Lessig sings of the creativity [...
There are some product names and trademarks a company comes to seriously regret later.
Posted on January 18, 2009No Tags
Jacobsen v. Katzer Continues
Posted on January 13, 2009Last August the Federal Circuit held in Jacobsen v. Katzer that the Artistic License, a type of open source license, could be enforced via injunction, as a form of copyright license. Free and open source advocates mostly cheered; the holding is consistent with the idea that open source licenses should be enforceable via injunction so [...
Some recent CFAA cases
Posted on January 13, 2009Evan Brown has a recap of some recent CFAA cases here. I’ve been following CFAA litigation for awhile and it seems that (putting to one side the Lori Drew conviction) courts may now be getting a better handle on how to interpret a badly drafted statute...
Colbert for Law Professors
Posted on January 12, 2009By my count, we’ve now seen three law professors “do” The Colbert Report: Neal Katyal (Georgetown), Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard), and most recently Lawrence Lessig (Stanford, but signed, sealed, and all but delivered to Harvard). Here are the clips, in that order: For years, law professors have wondered whether blogging is a good idea in light of [...
Michael Moore v. Sanjay Gupta
Posted on January 11, 2009On CNN: On Larry King Live: On Michael Moore’s website, here. No Tags
Search Engine Competition in China
Posted on January 05, 2009Chi-Chu Tschang’s article on Baidu illuminates how an unscrupulous search engine can exert a great deal of power once it attains dominance. Baidu has over 60% of the market in China, and can make or break an online business: Salespeople working for Baidu drop sites from results to bully companies into buying sponsored links, [...
How to Scholar
Posted on January 05, 2009As thousands of law professors prepare to descend on San Diego this coming weekend for the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), the lawprof blogosphere is again gurgling with advice for junior scholars. Gordon Smith framed the conversation with a great post about scholarship from the point of view of someone [...
The Great Grimmelmann Rants About Copyright Formalities
Posted on January 04, 2009Here. Technically it is an “informal” rant to feel free to make yourself comfy before you read it. No Tags
Towards Responsible Use of Cognition-Dulling Drugs
Posted on January 04, 2009In a recent editorial in Nature entitled Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy, distinguished contributors have endorsed a “presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs...
New Paper on User-Created Content and Virtual Worlds
Posted on January 04, 2009Mira Burri-Nenova has just posted a working paper on SSRN: “User Created Content in Virtual Worlds and Cultural Diversity ” User created content (UCC) has often been celebrated as a grassroots cultural revolution that as a genuine expression of creativity, localism and non-commercialism can arguably also cater for a sustainable culturally diverse environment...
Controversy over possible trademark registration for the phrase ?Freedom Tower: Make Love Not War? to market condoms.
Posted on January 02, 2009The New York post has a short account of a burgeoning dispute about this entitled: September 11 Condom-Nation. Like most mass media stories about intellectual property, a lot of relevant detail is missing. Here is the entire article: A German entrepreneur has taken bad taste to new heights - applying for a federal trademark to use [...
Candidate 7: When asked about his most current writings, said, ?I have an idea for a new sort of short fiction, but I?m waiting to find out about patenting the forms before sharing it with anyone.?
Posted on January 01, 2009Context here. No Tags
There is Art, and Then There is Art
Posted on December 31, 2008Last Sunday’s New York Times juxtaposed two interesting and seemingly contradictory pieces on art, money, and modern culture. The apparently decline of music for music’s sake is lamented, but few stand in the way of the evolution. The loss of art for art’s sake is more stridently resisted...
Israel is Broadcasting Its Attacks On Hamas Via YouTube
Posted on December 31, 2008Here is one example entitled “Israeli Air Force Strikes Terror Targets in Gaza 29 Dec. 2008″: The YouTube channel maintained by the Israel Defense Force Spokesperson’s Unit is here. Text there explains: The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit is the Israel Defense Forces’ professional body responsible for media and public relations in Israel and around the world...
Hamster Power
Posted on December 30, 2008No, not this kind! Instead: Hamster Paper Shredder ?An energetic hamster is powering an environmentally-friendly paper shredder by running on his wheel. And he?s certainly got his work cut out for him - as he has to run flat out for 45 minutes to shred one sheet of A4 paper...
John Cage Lives
Posted on December 30, 2008If you like aleatory music, you’ll love the new iPhone app RjDj: The application includes a set of entrancing songs that go on forever, using the iPhone?s internal microphone to ?listen? to the noises and voices heard in your proximity to dynamically create music...
Telcos Want Broadband Stimulus? Show Us the Texting Data
Posted on December 30, 2008As the $700 billion bailout for banks falters, the US needs to be very careful about future investment programs. Though I’ve endorsed a broadband stimulus proposed by Yochai Benkler, there should be at least some window of opportunity for consumer groups and others to make demands of telcos in exchange for the money...
A Story of Fan Fiction Via Twitter: ?i am @bettydraper?
Posted on December 30, 2008At Ad Broad. Here’s an excerpt: My life as a Mad Man began as a lark. On August 26, just after AMC lawyers changed their minds about closing down Mad Men twitter accounts (persuaded in part by bloggers and journalists who couldn’t believe AMC would toss away a brilliant promotional idea that did not cost them [...
Farewell, Polaroid; Good Riddance, VHS
Posted on December 29, 2008Format wars buried two victims this year: instant photographs, and VHS videotape. Curiously, the demise of Polaroid and instant photography is accompanied by poignant farewells in The New York Times, for example, while in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, for example, just about no one is shedding tears over videotape...
Animal House and Cultural Remixing
Posted on December 29, 2008Yesterday’s NFL game between the Pittsburgh Steelers (31) and the Cleveland Browns (0) prompted one of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s sportswriters to note that the Browns’ quarterback narrowly missed a Blutarsky. The QB, one Bruce Gradkowski, achieved a passer rating — a measure of the player’s efficiency — of 2...
Marley, Happy Birthday, and Me
Posted on December 28, 2008This year, part of our family’s annual orgy of holiday film-going included Marley & Me. I usually make a point of sitting all the way through the closing credits, and that’s a good thing, too, because it took me almost two hours to notice something worth blogging about the movie...
Literalism
Posted on December 26, 2008Via Andrew Sullivan, the the long-awaited explanation of that classic A-ha video: See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. Which reminds me of Howard Jones’s Everlasting Love, the most visually literal video I can remember…...
Who Owns Your Fat?
Posted on December 26, 2008Forbes reports that a Beverly Hills physician who removes human fat by liposuction uses the fat as fuel for two biodiesel SUVs (his Ford model and his girlfriend?s Navigator). Apparently, ?A gallon of grease will get you about a gallon of fuel, and drivers can get about the same amount of mileage from fat [...
Lessig on Fresh Air
Posted on December 23, 2008Larry Lessig was on Fresh Air yesterday talking about his new book and the Stanford -> Harvard switch. For diehard Lessig fans and followers (like me) there wasn’t much you haven’t already heard, but then again, it’s always interesting to listen to attempts to educate the public (well, the NPR listenership at least) in the [...
?Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes? by Elizabeth Losh
Posted on December 22, 2008From the MIT Press page: Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government?even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and [...
How to Be a Useless Company: ATT and iPhones (with irony and a request)
Posted on December 22, 2008I don?t buy Apple products. I was just starting to change my mind but Apple has managed to annoy me yet again. I wanted an iPhone. My brother noted that and thought he was getting me a gift card for the iPhone. But wait, I am an ATT customer for ten, yes ten, years...
Holy Crap: Catholic Google
Posted on December 22, 2008Catholic search engine powered by Google striving to provide an easy to use resource to anyone wanting to learn more about Catholicism and provide a safer way for good Catholics to surf the web. CatholicGoogle is powered by Google using “safe search” technology, it produces results from all over the internet with more weighting to given to [...
Public Service for Creative Commons
Posted on December 22, 2008Folks, If you don’t know Mike Carroll, fix that. He is currently a visiting professor at American University and an all-around great person. In addition to many accomplishments such as publishing insightful articles and running Carrollogos, Mike is on the board of Creative Commons...
BRIGHT IDEAS SERIES
Posted on December 22, 2008Over at Concurring Opinions I have launched a series called Bright Ideas. My goal is to offer authors a way to share how they came to write a book or other major work. These efforts require huge amounts of time and thought. Often ideas shift and evolve...
Levitt?s Honesty About Economics
Posted on December 21, 2008Should we, or can we, stop pretending we know what lies ahead or should we see what we can do when we know that predictability is an illusion? Steven Levitt of Freakonmics fame did a recent interview on NPR about the current economy that points to this question...
Music, The Internet, Business Models, and Freedom
Posted on December 20, 2008Everything old is new again. Lawsuits regarding music use, confusion over how to make money in the digital age, content and distribution revenue models, all of these issues seem never to go away. They are the chicken or the egg questions for creation and its relationship to making money from creation...
Light Empirical Data On Films and Search
Posted on December 20, 2008IMDb has a feature called MOVIEmeter Top 25 Films of 2008. It claims to be a distillation of the most popular films based on searches. So these rankings are “based not upon critical assessments or box-office performance, but the actual search behavior of over 57 million users of IMDb...
Lighter In A Blender
Posted on December 19, 2008From Geeks Are Sexy, which notes: Warning: Do not attempt to do this at home, or in fact, anywhere, ever No Tags
Music Industry Abandons Suits Against Individual File Sharers
Posted on December 19, 2008Today’s Wall Street Journal online reports that the RIAA will no longer sue individuals it suspects of sharing copyrighted music files online. Instead, the RIAA will notify ISPs on the assumption that ISPs will try to stop their users’ behavior...
Drug Cartels And Propaganda
Posted on December 19, 2008What if major crime groups started to post banners, drop leaflets, use noise campaigns (cars with speakers broadcasting a message), run Internet videos with gruesome scenes, and other propaganda techniques to question the government? What if the messages stated that a public official, a police officer, a special agent, a whole department, and so on [...
Symbolic Control ? Movie Studio Logos Over Time
Posted on December 19, 2008As many of you know I love films and pop culture. They intersect with trademark and copyright all the time. As far as the idea that the symbols are consistent and always or only communicates what the purveyor of the mark wishes, I have doubts. For example, 20th Century Fox has music, “20th Century Fanfare,” [...
The Great Convergence
Posted on December 17, 2008Here’s a nice passage from a piece by Alistair Duff entitled “The Normative Crisis of the Information Society.” The piece looks at problems ranging from copyright to privacy to terror investigations, and considers the convergence of functions on the internet that lead to normative disputes: It has long been evident that cyberspace poses new regulative [...
Get some rock, paper, scissors and tape.
Posted on December 17, 2008Actually jazz would work okay too: No Tags
Again With the Law School Rankings
Posted on December 17, 2008In the National Law Journal, dated December 22, 2008, Peter Kalis, chair and global managing partner of K&L Gates offers a response by BigLaw to the USNews rankings of law schools: The ranking sells magazines. It generates heat, not light. In the legal industry, we’re used to this art form ? a magazine develops a ranking using [...
Cars & Culture
Posted on December 17, 2008Over at his art blog, Gurney Journey, Dan Gurney points to a recent book published by Brian Ladd (University of Chicago Press) called Autophobia. The teaser on the press website asks the following question: Cars are the scourge of civilization, responsible for everything from suburban sprawl and urban decay to environmental devastation and rampant climate change?not [...
Will These Folks Get Sued?
Posted on December 17, 2008They synchronized their holiday lights display to the “Coca Cola Holiday Song”: No Tags
Frontiers of Net Neutrality: Recognizing the Bottlenecks
Posted on December 16, 2008The front-page WSJ article on Google’s alleged backsliding on net neutrality has spawned a lot of controversy on the web. Google has articulately defended the practices at issue in the article. But the piece does focus internet policymakers on some basic truths: there are many potential bottlenecks on the internet, and antitrust law [...
Trademark, Fandom, and Steelers Nation
Posted on December 16, 2008Just a bit too late to work into a hypothetical for my Trademark Law class comes news of a new t-shirt being sold in the Pittsburgh region, featuring the image at left. If you are not a Pittsburgh Steelers or National Football League follower, note that the man pictured is Mike Tomlin, coach of the team [...
MyPods, myPhones, and, of course the myCube: ?fueled by dreams, powered by imagination.?
Posted on December 15, 2008Via. No Tags
Monster Snow Job
Posted on December 15, 2008Monster Cable is trying to stem the tide of public criticism it has received for its aggressive litigation tactics and claims that it owns the word “monster” virtually in gross with this. How many distortions of trademark law can you spot? Just for starters, Monster Cable may “have been awarded 100 registered Monster trademarks in [...
?Obama logo ideas that weren?t chosen?
Posted on December 15, 2008Read about them, with interesting commentary by an Obama strategist, here. I actually sort of like this one: This one, however, reminds me of Oprah’s logo too much. And it also kind of looks like a condom: Check out the wide range of losing contenders here...
Frugality Trumps Trademark Power!
Posted on December 13, 2008Or so this article in the NYT suggests. Entitled “Store Brands Lift Grocers in Troubled Times” it reports in pertinent part: … As the economy plunges into a deep recession, grocery stores are one of the few sectors doing well. That is because cash-short consumers are eating out less and stocking up at the supermarket...
?The 7 Dumbest Things Ever Done by Airport Security?
Posted on December 12, 2008Yep, these sound pretty dumb. We can only hope they don’t get superseded. No Tags
Something to ponder with your students when teaching the ?Harjo? case in Trademark law.
Posted on December 11, 2008A soccer team in Amsterdam has the nickname “the Jews.” As this blogger notes: This would be a great example to use in a discussion of sports mascots, particularly how it compares to American Indian mascots (for examples, see this post) and Notre Dame?s Fighting Irish mascot (see post here)...
?Taylorism ? Ann Taylorism?
Posted on December 11, 2008The last time I bought clothing at a big box store, the cashier wadded it up into a plastic bag, rather than placing a bag over the hangers and tying the bag at the bottom, which had been the previous practice at that retailer, at least in my experience...
Don?t watch this if you have a latex allergy.
Posted on December 09, 2008Don’t think I ever saw this factory tour on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood! No Tags
That?s an Obama speechwriter on the left.
Posted on December 06, 2008Charming, huh? From this WaPo story: Question No. 58 in the transition team vetting document for the Obama White House asks that applicants: “Please provide the URL address of any websites that feature you in either a personal or professional capacity (e...
Joe Satriani and Coldplay, the Chiffons and George Harrison
Posted on December 05, 2008Today, it has been reported that guitarist Joe Satriani has sued Coldplay, alleging that portions of Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” incorporate material from Satriani’s “If I Could Fly.” For those (like me) who didn’t instantly know what the suit is about, Youtube has some interesting videos comparing the relevant portions of the songs - [...
Tesla and the Future of American Automobiles
Posted on December 05, 2008While the Big 3 American automakers ask the federal government for billions of dollars to save them and the economy and workers depending on them, Tesla Motors, producer of an all-electric roadster, has asked for $400 million from the existing federal Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Incentive Program (ATVM), created by Congress in 2007 to support [...
Nuggets, and a Line of the Day
Posted on December 05, 2008Print journalism lends itself to nuggets, bits of writing tucked away at the bottom of the piece to reward those people who read all the way to the end (or who cheat and read the last part first). Links to digital cleverness on the Internet (both hyperlinks and easter eggs) never strike me the same [...
Cyber-Stimulus
Posted on December 04, 2008As I read over some fascinating papers for the Wharton CMCL tomorrow, I’m happy to see that many leading thinkers are addressing the challenge of a New Deal for tech policy. Via TPM, Yochai Benkler pushes for new infrastructure–both physical and cultural: We hear a lot about infrastructure investment today: roads and bridges, mostly...
WKRP is back on the air in Cincinnati, sort of?
Posted on December 03, 2008Via this site, which reports: WKRP is back on the air in Cincinnati — but this time it’s for real. A low-power TV station has changed its call letters to WKRP, the same as the fictional radio station in the 1970s hit series “WKRP in Cincinnati...
The Structural Transformation of the Recursive Public Sphere
Posted on December 02, 2008Christopher Kelty’s book Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software offers an anthropological take on a phenomenon often assimilated to the economic or the technical. One of the key concepts in the book is an idea of the “recursive public:” A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material [...
Warmthvertising
Posted on December 02, 2008Now here is some marketing change I can believe in: In a national advertising first, Stove Top Stuffing is warming up Chicagoans this December by heating 10 bus shelters throughout the Windy City’s high-traffic commuter and shopping areas to help busy consumers keep cozy throughout the hustle and bustle of the holiday season...
Virtue Research
Posted on December 01, 2008Spotted at The University of Chicago’s Science of Virtues project, and with tantalizing possible applications to law and technology questions: In what ways might the humanities and the sciences cooperate to develop richer understandings of virtue for modern societies? The Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago is pleased to announce a new $3 million research program [...
?Evolutionists Flock To Darwin-Shaped Wall Stain?
Posted on November 30, 2008Via this online periodical, which reports in pertinent part: A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin?author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement?made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton...
No cell phone, barely any Internets?
Posted on November 30, 2008So I spent the past few days visiting family in rural parts of the Northeast, and though I visited four fairly widely dispersed residences, not a single one had cell phone access via either Verizon or AT&T. That’s all I could check, but I don’t think any other company facilitated service in any of these [...
Googlement
Posted on November 30, 2008“Googlement,” rather than “government,” seems to be the theme of Jeffrey Rosen’s NYT piece today on how Google decides what stays and what goes on its various platforms. Frank Pasquale offered his own take on the piece here: The ostensibly public-spirited motives of an enormous, for-profit enterprise ought to be examined critically...
Does Google Have a Right to Censor?
Posted on November 29, 2008Jeffrey Rosen had an excellent article on “Google’s Gatekeepers” today, focusing on the company’s legal and policy decisions about what content to index. For example, after a group of videos mocked Turkey’s founder, Google’s deputy general counsel Nicole Wong decided that Google ...
Copyrights in Movie and Painting Styles?
Posted on November 24, 2008Some music videos are really entrancing. Kelly Osbourne’s recent One Word is directly inspired by the great film Alphaville, as Ms. Osbourne happily acknowledges: “I’m going for something like very ‘Alphaville,’ ” Osbourne told MTV News last month when she was dreaming up the concept…...
Kelly on Visual Literacy
Posted on November 24, 2008Last Sunday’s NYTimes allegedy devoted its whole magazine to the notion of “screens” everywhere. I write “allegedly,” because the cover featured an odd photo of Jennifer Aniston, and the accompanying interview seemed to have little to do with the theme...
Exit, Stage Left . . .
Posted on November 24, 2008Left over from the weekend’s reading is this fascinating account of the emerging conflict between playwrights and their not-for-profit producers. Playwrights, like other artists, struggle to find venues to distribute their work. Nonprofit theaters, struggling to find revenue, require that the authors of the plays that they produce commit to pay a continuing royalty based on [...
IP and Camo
Posted on November 24, 2008A reservist friend alerted me to this story, which puts questions of IP rights for fashion design in a different light: One of the stranger questions to emerge after the August conflict between Russia and Georgia: Did Russians go to war in camouflage filched from Finland? Officials were trying to determine whether the Finnish M/05 camouflage, top, [...
The lines between political and commercial speech get a bit murkier.
Posted on November 22, 2008Before the election was even held, Barack Obama was named Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year for 2008, beating out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com and other strong coprorate competitors, as well as John McCain, to be lauded as the nation’s top brand builder...
Is broadband Internet access in the US ?robustly competitive??
Posted on November 21, 2008Rob Frieden has posted an interesting and provocative paper, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics: Developing a Clearer Assessment of Market Penetration and Broadband Competition in the United States. It is well worth a read and is bound to spark a debate...
I Tried the Prius and Didn?t Like It
Posted on November 19, 2008It’s not often that 21st century gets in my face. Computers and computer networks blend seamlessly into work and home and social life; since my first encounters with online games 35 years ago, my reaction has usually been one of degree rather than kind...
Commons in the News
Posted on November 19, 2008Last Sunday’s New York Times included a provocative piece about commons environments that should interest all intellectual property lawyers, scholars, and policymakers. No, I’m not talking about the lengthy and fascinating profile of Lewis Hyde, which intellectual property lawyers, scholars and policymakers should read, too...
Something Completely Different
Posted on November 18, 2008This is technology, law, and society only in the most indirect way, but I can’t resist acknowledging the most recent symposium produced by the Yale Law Journal’s Pocket Part, on Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs). We will all be hearing a lot more about SWFs and their US-based regulatory correspondent, CFIUS (the Committee on Foreign Investment [...
On the Origins of the Norwegian Blue
Posted on November 18, 2008In college I took a course on the ancient origins of modern comedy. Plautus and his antecedents and all that. Comes now news that one of most brilliant and apparently original modern comic bits — Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch — likewise is grounded in the work of the ancients...
Obama?s FCC Transition team
Posted on November 18, 2008Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach will head the Federal Communications Commission transition team. No Tags
Victoria?s Secret Trademark Settlement
Posted on November 14, 2008From New York magazine: Phat Fashions sued Victoria’s Secret in March because the logo for its Pink line closely resembled the Phat Fashions logo, but the case was recently settled. On Wednesday a judge dismissed the suit after both parties reached a mutual agreement...
Does Online Search Behavior Tell Us Anything About Depression?
Posted on November 14, 2008This Time article asserts it does. Below is an excerpt: … In the digital age we’re likely to turn to search engines just as often as we would confide in friends and medical professionals to gauge our psychological state. If we think we’re suffering from a real bout of the blues or a mental crisis, we’re [...
The Merging of Politics and Social Networks
Posted on November 12, 2008To add to Deven’s post below about Obama and technology it was recently reported here that Obama spent $8 million on online advertising: Google remains the clear winner of Obama’s Web spoils, though the search giant’s payments for October have yet to appear in the campaign’s Federal Election Commission filings...
Spam gets 1 response per 12,500,000 emails
Posted on November 12, 2008Tech Radar reports: A new study details how spammers ? the bane of our email inboxes ? still make pots of money, despite only receiving a response to one in every 12,500,000 emails they spam out. The study, by a team of seven computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) infiltrated the [...
Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
Posted on November 11, 2008Another Best Practices in Fair Use report has been released. This time, the focus is media literacy education and educators. The report and recommendations are online at www.centerforsocialmedia.org/medialiteracy. From the introduction: This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use...
Obama and Technology
Posted on November 10, 2008As many of you know, President-elect Obama plans on having a Chief Technology Officer position in his administration. Many moons ago I tried to track down the tech policies of the various candidates. At that time only Ron Paul had one (yes it really was that early in the campaign)...
Ordinary Stick Voted Into Toy Hall of Fame
Posted on November 09, 2008Not a joke. Here is an excerpt from an account by the AP: … The lowly stick, a universal plaything powered by a child’s imagination, landed in the National Toy Hall of Fame on Thursday along with the Baby Doll and the skateboard. The three were chosen to join the Strong National Museum of Play’s lineup of [...
Attorney Tries To Patent Form Of Patent Trolling
Posted on November 09, 2008Via Patently-O: In 2007, Haliburton filed for patent protection ? claiming a method of “patent acquisition and assertion by a (non-inventor) first party against a second party.” It looks like the company wants to be able to sue non-inventing entities who try to patent and assert technology against a company who has been using the technology [...
Money-Laundering Manual
Posted on November 09, 2008From the Memory Hole: The Memory hole has obtained and scanned ?Investigation and Prosecution of Illegal Money Laundering: A Guide to the Bank Secrecy Act.? Originally written and published in 1983 by the Criminal Division of the Justice Department, this is the apparently identical version published by the IRS for its staff...
Dali, Film, and Exclusivity
Posted on November 07, 2008Apparently there are now three, yes three, Dali biopics in the works. One has Al Pacino which is likely to be ridiculous. But the other has Antonio Banderas which seems just as absurd. These two films are about the end of Dali’s life. The third is about his youth...
HEY! YOU! VOTE!
Posted on November 04, 2008See this image? It is a true screen capture of the page for the United States. Yesterday morning while John Scalzi and I were chatting, a question came up about the United States. He went to Wikipedia and this was the page. By the time I went to it, it had been changed back to [...
Google Book Search and the Future of the Cloud
Posted on November 03, 2008Take a look at this recent post by Nicholas Carr, and then read the first comment (by Tom Lord). They are talking about “network strategies” (cf. “network effects”) and the future of online businesses, with an eye over the shoulder (Nick’s earlier post) on the here-sooner-than-we-realize “cloud” computing platforms from Google, Microsoft, and others...
Kevin Collins on In re Bilski
Posted on November 02, 2008Kevin Collins has a post at Patently-O about the In re Bilski ruling. His thoughts focus on “the criteria that the court offers to draw the line between patentable and unpatentable transformations.” I recommend reading the post but here are some questions he addresses just to entice you: First, the move raises a normative question: Why [...
Deja Vu All Over Again: Detroit Blues
Posted on November 01, 2008As many know Detroit is in the news. A recent L.A. Times story asks ?Are the Big Three worth saving?? Now I hate the Pistons and have never been to Detroit, but that does not mean I think the auto industry should implode. Yet, with $25 billion in loan guarantees in place and new [...
David Foster Wallace On Failure.
Posted on November 01, 2008This clip from an interview in Italy will make you miss him more. No Tags
Today?s Secret Word: Porno
Posted on October 31, 2008Yes the favorite oddity of American culture is back and just in time for Halloween. We don’t mind ultra-violent films but say porno or show some nudity and it’s time to ban a film. First, note that part of the ad campaign for Zack and Miri Make a Porno have dropped the “Make a Porno” [...
Google Book Search Deal: Will the Prices be All Right?
Posted on October 31, 2008Having suggested some conditions for the coming digital library of Alexandria, I should have commented on this Google deal earlier. But I’ve been way too busy to read the details in the proposed settlement. No one can doubt its importance–as Mike has said, we may be “seeing the early stages of the beginning [...
IP Pedagogy
Posted on October 30, 2008Over at Conglomerate, Shubha Ghosh is posting on what he calls IP 3.0, or the turn toward transactional analysis and teaching in intellectual property law. Shubha is right that teaching and studying IP in a transactional context is one of the great unexplored frontiers of IP...
On Google Book Search
Posted on October 30, 2008A blog on intellectual property law carries a burden of commenting on compelling IP policy issues of the day, and the pending settlement of the copyright infringement lawsuit over Google Book Search is about as compelling as it gets. I’ve read only a smattering of blog commentary on the proposal, but Neil Netanel at Balkinization [...
In which I lower the tone of the blog for a cheap, tawdry and only tangentially trademark law related laugh.
Posted on October 30, 2008Auto-tarnishment? Via. No Tags
A Gallery of Harry Potter Related License Plates
Posted on October 30, 2008If J.K. Rowling sues over these, I’m inclined to offer pro bono representation! Many more here. No Tags
Academic Entrepreneurship
Posted on October 29, 2008From different corners comes new of IP law professors as entrepreneurs of different sorts, trying to impact the world of IP, creativity, and innovation in ways that are non-traditional (for law professors, at least): Prof. Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown) is helping to organize the “Organization for Transformative Works...
More on EndNote and Zotero
Posted on October 29, 2008Via the Digital Humanities blog, I learn that George Mason University has released a statement strongly defending the Zotero project, which is under attack by Thomson Reuters, proprietor of EndNote. My earlier post on the EndNote/Zotero lawsuit is here...
From the Department of Nothing New Under the Sun
Posted on October 27, 2008I like this Melissa Etheridge song a lot: But, I can’t help noticing that it owes a little bit of its melody to this song, bizarrely enough. Listen closely to Etheridge’s guitar riff about 1:16 in for the clearest example. No Tags
Computer accessory: Halloween Handrest.
Posted on October 26, 2008From the manufacturer: … we manufactured these disembodied hands from soft foam to look like the real thing. These hands do double-duty as wrist-rests, so they don’t just take up space on your desk, but are actually useful! Features Soft foam wristrest Shaped like a bloody disembodied hand! Perfect for Halloween as a prop, [...
Default to De-friending?
Posted on October 23, 2008Scott Brown has decried friend congestion on Facebook, and proposes a (sun)setting to do something about it: [M]aybe [this is] the answer: A Facebook app we’ll call the Fade Utility. Untended Friends would gradually display a sepia cast on the picture, a blurring of the neglected profile?perhaps a coffee stain might appear on it or [...
?Sarkozy sues over voodoo doll?
Posted on October 23, 2008From here: French President Nicolas Sarkozy is suing a company that sells voodoo dolls in his image along with pins to stick in them and a satirical biography, court officials said Thursday. The same company also sells a similar kit with a doll resembling Socialist standard-bearer Segolene Royal, whom Sarkozy beat in last year’s presidential [...
The End of the Wire Service Commons?
Posted on October 23, 2008For some time, Brett Frischmann, Kathy Strandburg and I have been working on a framework for studying what we call cultural commons: collaborative institutions that structure the production, distribution, and storage of knowledge. (Here is the first paper of what we hope will be a long series...
The Meaning of Lawyering
Posted on October 23, 2008Legal scholars spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to understand the content of the law. They usually spend less time trying to understand the behavior of lawyers in regard to the law. One categorical exception is the group of scholars who think and write about legal ethics...
World?s Most Tattooed Law Student?
Posted on October 22, 2008Eak the Geek a.k.a Eduardo Arrocha is a first year student at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School. Story here. Of course IP oriented legal scholars know that Tattoo Law is a burgeoning field. See also. No Tags
Now That Is Open Source
Posted on October 21, 2008According to AP, some professors are about to post medical records and “the DNA sequence of about one-fifth of their genes on the Web.” The goal is stimulate the ability to have less expensive and easier ways to have personal genome sequencing...
Genius, Not Genius; Right and Wrong
Posted on October 20, 2008Some things that seem to relate to one another, though I haven’t figured out exactly how: Malcolm Gladwell popularizes Daniel Galenson’s research on creativity, ?Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.? Gladwell on Galenson: Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration...
Politics, Science, Vocation, and Purpose
Posted on October 20, 2008There is a fascinating interview with Steven Shapin, author of The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation, at the U. Chicago Press website. Shapin questions the distinctiveness of academic and business modes of inquiry: If we . ...
Who Owns Your Neighborhood?
Posted on October 19, 2008This week’s sign of the IP apocalypse: A mathematician who pioneered a fractal-based urban-mapping technique is embroiled in a copyright battle that raises legal questions about whether a company can claim ownership of the definition of neighborhoods: their specific locations and boundaries...
Siebren Versteeg?s Infinite Touchscreen
Posted on October 18, 2008I had a good afternoon of gallery-hopping today, checking out some of Casey Ruble’s fantastic series “Except in Struggle” and Simon Nicholas’s eerie crowds. For IP and computer experts, Siebren Versteeg’s work raises a number of fascinating questions...
But These Go to 11
Posted on October 17, 2008I will be watching the team at MoneyLaw to see what they make of this story. The high school football coaches at Piedmont High School in Piedmont, California are exploiting what some characterize as a “loophole” in the rules governing the sport...
?Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America?
Posted on October 17, 2008Via Flowing Data. I’m sure any similarity between that map and visual tools developed by the Centers for Disease Control to track lethal epidemics is entirely coincidental. No Tags
Little Trademark Suit On The Prairie
Posted on October 16, 2008The Chicago Tribune reports: There’s a little lawsuit on the West Coast involving the non-profit Little House on the Prairie museum that sits on the Kansas homestead where author Laura Ingalls Wilder briefly lived and now owned by Chicago journalist Bill Kurtis and his sister...
Testicular Cancer Awareness
Posted on October 14, 2008Found the above in the comments thread here. Many feminists, myself included, are pretty fed up with the way companies commodify “breast cancer awareness” by adding pink to their products and radiating a faux spirit of sisterhood to ratchet up their sales...
Perfect Albums
Posted on October 13, 2008Album, the word may evoke a creaky, leather-vinyl, cardboard tome with faded Polaroids, instamatics, and school portraits. It may remind one of a black gold-based vinyl disc spinning at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. It does not always remind one of a smaller, shiny disc full of digits unleashed by a laser...
The Brokers With Hands On Their Faces Blog
Posted on October 13, 2008Here. Free samples below! No Tags
Madisonian Theory Has A Jingle!
Posted on October 13, 2008Here, via the rather annoying Jingle Generator. (If it freezes try this link). No Tags
Christopher Sprigman and Siva Vaidhyanathan, ?Cue ?Barracuda??
Posted on October 13, 2008Chris and Siva’s terrific Op-Ed ran is today’s Washington Post. Here are the opening paragraphs: After vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin finished her big speech at the Republican National Convention, the 1977 song “Barracuda,” by the band Heart, blared out over the roar of the crowd...
Private Governance in Pittsburgh
Posted on October 11, 2008The world of governance is never divided neatly into public and private. This post has nothing to do with technology (though there is a property angle). Instead it illustrates that the perils and pitfalls of uncritically accepting the authority of apparently autonomous self-governing communities — something that science and technology scholars are acutely aware of when it [...
R.I.P., Muxtape: A Tragic Tale of Transaction Costs
Posted on October 09, 2008A few months ago I wrote about the wonderful site Muxtape here. It was not long for this world. I’ll append below a summary of its story from its founder, Justin Ouellette; to whet your interest, here’s an interesting paragraph on fair use indeterminacy: I talked to a lot of very smart lawyers [...
I Found Something Worse Than Jellied Bouillon With Frankfurters.
Posted on October 08, 2008Way worse. Here. But don’t click that link unless you are prepared for the worst prepackaged food idea ever. Someone needs to inform Steve. No Tags
Why This Profession Is Great a.k.a. Thank You Tulane and WIP IP
Posted on October 08, 2008I just returned from the Works In Progress Intellectual Property Conference at Tulane. It was excellent. The IP crowd never fails to satisfy across a range of metrics from panel comments to individual feedback to dinner conversation about scifi, fantasy, film, and more...
A Catch-Up Post: New Models
Posted on October 07, 2008Some things that have caught my eye recently: Ford is introducing technology that allows controls on automobile behavior to be designed into the key. “Ensuring Junior Goes for a Mild Ride” in the NYTimes: Like V-chips that restrict what children can view on television, MyKey allows parents to limit teenage drivers to a top speed of 80 [...
Palin Syrah
Posted on October 07, 2008It’s an organic wine from Chile that liberal winos are avoiding. No Tags
Some Recipes Should Remain Trade Secrets
Posted on October 07, 2008After reading Frank’s post immediately below I began searching the Internets for comparison photos, pitting what’s on the box against what’s in the box. Here’s one example of what I found (here): I also encountered some recipes that should remains trade secrets...
False Advertisements of the Self
Posted on October 06, 2008I just heard about a Jezebel post on Redbook’s photoshopped transformation of Faith Hill. The blogger called the retouching one more example of the “‘cover lie’ of a medium that has made its mark by invalidating women’s strengths, hopes and dreams with an endless parade of stories on how to be thinner, sexier, [and] [...
Tempest Fugit, and it fugits fast.
Posted on October 03, 2008Well over a decade ago this website was extremely popular with the small children in my life. Now it takes mash ups like this to entertain them, and even then they pretend they are watching only to humor me. Happy friday! No Tags
For just $125 this inflatable crime scene can be yours!
Posted on October 01, 2008Here. Suitable for, well, not really anything I can think of, but Walmart is marketing it as a Halloween product. And maybe criminal law clinics could use it for simulations the rest of the year. Potential accessories include “Stabbo the Clown” for $58 perfectly good dollars that you could otherwise use to buy a whole [...
Ann Bartow to Join madisonian.net
Posted on October 01, 2008On behalf of the existing madisonian.net crew, I am delighted to note that Ann Bartow, my longtime friend and IP colleague who teaches at the University of South Carolina School of Law, is bringing her inimitable IP blogging to madisonian.net. As many remember, for a long time Ann blogged on IP and information law at Sivacracy...
EndNote v. Zotero
Posted on September 28, 2008Via Michael Froomkin and James Grimmelmann, I learn of the lawsuit filed by Thomson/Reuters, proprietors of the closed-source EndNote software used by scholars to manage sources, against George Mason University, home of Prof. Dan Cohen, leader of the project to develop Zotero, an open source Firefox plugin that competes against EndNote...
Jammie Thomas Granted New Trial
Posted on September 25, 2008In a recently issued opinion, Judge Davis has granted Jammie Thomas a new trial, overturning an earlier verdict holding her liable in the amount of $222,000 for file sharing music over a peer-to-peer network. The specific legal ground for the ruling was an erroneous jury instruction that merely offering a work on a peer-to-peer [...
McCain Potatoes
Posted on September 24, 2008Take a look at this screenshot from the Campaign HQ for McCain Potatoes: Political parody? No — it’s a real promotional campaign for the french fries and other potato products offered by a real company called McCain, which is trying to capitalize on an unbelievably opportune moment in the company’s history...
Nancy Maynard Hicks
Posted on September 23, 2008The New York Times carried an obituary today for Nancy Maynard Hicks, making clear that she lived an extraordinary life. As the Times wrote, she was the first black woman to be a reporter at The New York Times and with her husband (the late Robert Maynard) bought and published The Oakland Tribune, still the [...
Fruit-Wrap, or Contracts Jump the Shark
Posted on September 18, 2008Via boingboing, grapes with an End User License Agreement: The recipient of the produce contained in this package agrees not to propagate or reproduce any portion of the produce, including (but not limited to) seeds, stems, tissue and fruit. To paraphrase Johnny Mac: They cannot be serious! But I suspect that they are...
New Papers on the Commons
Posted on September 17, 2008I have a hand in two new papers recently posted to SSRN dealing with “cultural commons.” The first is a paper that describes and defends a method for conducting further research, in this case a framework for investigating the mechanics of cultural or knowledge commons via case studies...
Anathem Arrives
Posted on September 17, 2008Neal Stephenson’s newest novel, Anathem, was published the other day. I’m a huge Stephenson fan. I made it all the way through The Baroque Cycle; Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite reads of the last 10 years; Snow Crash and The Diamond Age have long had honored places on my bookshelf; I even cited In [...
Dark Side of the Moon: Richard Wright Died
Posted on September 15, 2008To those who know Pink Floyd’s work the news that Richard Wright died is a bit of a blow. The band is one of my all-time favorites. Dark Side of the Moon is brilliant. Wright composed Us and Them (still pertinent in a world of anger politics) and the Great Gig in the Sky on [...
Student Note Idea: Segways in the Park
Posted on September 12, 2008I find the topic of technology-specific rules fascinating & I have really learned a lot about law and rules from reading Fred Schauer’s work. He has a recent paper on SSRN about the famous example of a rule prohibiting “vehicles in the park...
The Google Imaginary
Posted on September 11, 2008As the DOJ lawyers up for a potential fight with Google (possibly the last entity they consider themselves capable of suing), we’re going to be hearing a lot about “competition on the internet” in coming months. As I’ve said before, I think that’s a will-o-the-wisp, an ignis fatuus that does more to distract us [...
Derivative of a Derivative
Posted on September 10, 2008From this morning’s New York Times: A lawsuit claims that Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures copied a short story that was the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock movie ?Rear Window? when they made the thriller ?Disturbia,? Reuters reported...
KFC, Trade Secrets, and Conspiracy
Posted on September 09, 2008Trade secrets play an important and growing role in American business. Legends about Coca-Cola?s secret formula and the protection of it include the claim that only two people know half of it at one time which Snopes says is false. Instead the two people know the entire formula...
Tim Wu: On the Media
Posted on September 09, 2008In this Slate piece, Tim captures the differences between the Obama and McCain “tech plans” incredibly well. No Tags
Eyes on the Fair Use Prize
Posted on September 09, 2008J.K. Rowling has won her copyright infringement lawsuit against Steven Vander Ark; a trial judge in New York concluded that the defendant’s Harry Potter Lexicon is not protected under the fair use doctrine. The New York Times has a report on the case here...
Hup, Holland, Hup!
Posted on June 14, 2008I was traveling last week and caught only occasional highlights of the opening round matches in Euro 2008 — the international soccer tournament now happening in Austria and Switzerland. I plugged back into full matches yesterday and was wowed by the Netherlands, who dismantled France 4-1 yesterday to follow an earlier 3-0 thrashing of World [...
Yale Loses Another Provost
Posted on June 04, 2008Is there something in the water in New Haven? Yale President Richard Levin can’t keep a provost on his staff. It was announced yesterday that the current Provost, Andrew Hamilton, has been nominated to serve as the next Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford...
E-Books and Their Potential Impact on Book Law
Posted on June 04, 2008The New York Times reports that Amazon?s Kindle may be the sign of a tipping point for e-books. My previous posts about Kindle have expressed some praise but a fair amount of skepticism too. The device allows for too much control. Zittrain explores this issue as one of perfect enforcement...
Online Museum of IP
Posted on June 02, 2008Eric Johnson, at the University of North Dakota, has launched a project that bears watching: an online Museum of Intellectual Property. At his blog, Pixelization, he describes it this way: The aim of the museum is to serve as a resource for teachers, students, and scholars of IP law, and to preserve an important facet of legal [...
The Writing Packer Family
Posted on June 02, 2008I’ve posted enough about George Packer (example here) to make it clear that I’m a fan of him and his work. Over the weekend the San Francisco Chronicle published a long and thoughtful feature on the Packer family - George and his older sister Ann (a bestselling writer in her own right), mother Nancy (writer, [...
Reselling Software Legal ? For the Moment
Posted on May 28, 2008A little over a week ago, Judge Richard Jones of the Western District of Washington (Seattle) denied motions by software developer Autodesk for dismissal or summary judgment in its favor in a lawsuit brought by Timothy Vernor, who sells and re-sells things on eBay — including packages of AutoCAD, Autodesk’s flagship product...
Sherry Turkle on Things
Posted on May 28, 2008Regular madisonian readers (and a few others) know that I’m fascinated by legal “things.” I’m hardly alone. Sherry Turkle at MIT is the editor of a forthcoming book called “Falling for Science: Objects in Mind” (order it here), and in an excerpt from her contribution published online in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review she [...
The Power of Paper
Posted on May 27, 2008Two recent news items evoke the power of paper and similar objects in what we often assume is a purely digital world: First, as the New York Times reported, “In a decision that could radically change the size, the color and even the feel of American money, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the United [...
Microsoft Gives Up on Book Search
Posted on May 26, 2008Until last week Google had a competitor of sorts on the book scanning front. Now, however, Microsoft has abandoned its role in the book scanning world. One rather disturbing issue is that the service seems like it will go somewhat dark: “[T]he Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects ? will be taken [...
Blogger Power in Politics
Posted on May 26, 2008Many readers know about Talking Points Memo or Huffington Post. A New York Times article shows that in state races smaller, local blogs may have greater impact on a race. The Franken-Coleman race in Minnesota provides the backdrop to the story. Apparently an independent blogger who has previously worked for the Republican Party has [...
New Paper on Writing and Teaching IP
Posted on May 20, 2008Shameless self-promotion alert: I’ve posted a new paper to SSRN, titled “Writing to Learn Law and Writing in Law: An Intellectual Property Illustration.” It’s forthcoming in the St. Louis University Law Journal as part of a symposium on teaching intellectual property law...
News and Notes, and a Bankruptcy Question or Two
Posted on May 19, 2008I’m pulling myself out of Pittsburgh sports myopia today. We have this NHL hockey team, the Penguins, and the team are on an amazing playoff run, and they’re quite fun to watch and, well, the lunacy here is unbelievable. Of course, in most of the U...
Here Comes the Muxtape
Posted on May 16, 2008Making a mixtape is so 1980s. Now you can make a muxtape: [On the site,] you can upload . . . what the kids call playlists. [The program then streams the mp3s you chose on a url you pick.] I am not sure of the legal issues, but the system is smart [...
Little Brother
Posted on May 16, 2008Cory Doctorow?s latest novel, Little Brother, is technically a young adult novel, but there is something in there for anyone interested in cyberlaw, security, national security law, and oh yeah, a rather fun, although at times scary, tale. In classic Cory fashion, he has made the book available for free (yes well before law profs [...
What Is Online Privacy Worth?
Posted on May 16, 2008It is an old question (at least in Internet time): What is online privacy worth? Yet there seems to be a new wrinkle. Not just the Web sites or search companies want to track what one surfs. ISPs are now in the Web tracking game and stand to make ?several dollars per month? per customer...
Be A Bird Brain?
Posted on May 15, 2008Just watch. It is a little over ten minutes and fun. Basic premise: some birds you many not like may be rather smart. No Tags
Zittrain on Podcasts
Posted on May 14, 2008Jonathan Zittrain has been promoting his new book on some excellent radio programs, including On the Media and On Point (with Tom Ashbrook). On OTM, the host challenged him with the query, “We don’t want blank-slate cell phones that have to be programmed...
The Internet Archive Protects Privacy for Libraries
Posted on May 08, 2008Wired reports that the FBI subpoenaed the Internet Archive and demanded that Brewster Kahle (the Archive?s founder) provide records about one of the library’s registered users, asking for the user’s name, address and activity on the site. The FBI used a National Security Letter (example) to make the request...
Harvard, Fair Harvard
Posted on May 08, 2008Via Tim Armstrong at Info/Law, I learned today that the Harvard Law School faculty voted to create an online open access repository of their scholarship. To me, the vastly more interesting and provocative part of Tim’s post is a news item that I missed 10 days ago: Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new [...
Don?t Even Think About It: Negative Ad Words and Trademark Injunctions
Posted on May 06, 2008A U.S. District Judge has enjoined a defendant from using a term for its business. That is not an unusual result. The one part of the order that may be of note is that the defendant is not allowed to purchase ad words using the plaintiff?s mark and the defendant must use negative adwords [...
Showdown at West Virginia University
Posted on May 06, 2008When the national press focuses on academic questions at universities these days, the spotlight often shines on plagiarism. But there is a genuine academic scandal brewing in Morgantown, at West Virginia University, and the national media has only barely noticed...
IP Without IP?
Posted on May 05, 2008Rebecca Tushnet’s report on the recent IP Without IP Colloquium (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) is as interesting for its method as for its content. The Colloquium itself was a non-public affair at the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study...
Computer History Museum and the Babbage Engine
Posted on May 05, 2008The Computer History Museum ?is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computing history.? A current exhibit is a working version of Charles Babbage?s difference engine which is seen as a 19th Century computer design that was never built for a host of reasons from personality to claims that it could not be built with [...
JZ?s New Book on SSRN
Posted on May 01, 2008Personally, I bought the hard copy (I like bound books more than stacks of copy paper), but kudos go out to Jon Zittrain for putting his brand new hot-off-the-press book on SSRN. I’ve made the point before that many authors like reaching the public as much as making money- and often these aren’t mutually [...
Technology Policy ?08
Posted on April 30, 2008I just wanted to announce that the preliminary program for the 2008 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference (in New Haven, CT) has been announced. The theme this year is “Technology Policy ‘08,” and it includes several topical panels for the election year: Presidential Technology Policy: Priorities for the Next Executive States as Incubators of Change Activism and [...
Noted Elsewhere
Posted on April 30, 2008Posts by others that caught my eye recently: Rebecca Tushnet summarizes a very interesting public discussion on Bridgeman v. Corel, the district court opinion by Judge Kaplan, now nine years old, that holds that copyright does not attach to especially good photographic reproductions of public domain works of fine art...
Equitable Servitudes in Packaging
Posted on April 30, 2008With so many interesting information law and policy topics floating around the blogosphere, you would think that something more, well, substantial, would catch my eye. But instead I’ve been hooked by cardboard boxes. Out of Denver yesterday came the news that a man was threatened with a violation of federal law for recycling U...
Science, Math, and the Essence of All Things
Posted on April 30, 2008Last week Thomas Jefferson had Professor James Hackney of Northeastern University School of Law as our last speaker in our colloquium series. His talk focused on his book, Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity (featured at this past year?s AALS conference) and about his next steps on this topic...
Thoughts on Scott Hemphill?s Network Neutrality paper
Posted on April 29, 2008Scott Hemphill has posted an excellent, thoughtful paper on network neutrality. I’ll post the abstract along with a few comments on the paper below the fold: Abstract: This Article examines zero?price regulation, the major distinguishing feature of modern “network neutrality” proposals compared to traditional regulation of infrastructure industries...
Remember Invisible Ink? How About Vanishing Ink?
Posted on April 29, 2008CNET reports that PARC (formerly Xerox Parc) the folks who have had a large hand in “laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing” have invented vanishing ink...
New Paper on Cultural Models
Posted on April 23, 2008Shameless self-promotion alert: I’ve just posted a short paper on SSRN, titled “Intellectual Property and Americana, or Why IP Gets the Blues.” (Download it here.) It’s just been published in a symposium issue of the Fordham Intellectual Property Media & Entertainment Law Journal, along with pieces by Mark Lemley, Dan Burk, Rob Frieden, and Tal [...
The Webbies are Coming: Vote Today
Posted on April 17, 2008As many people know, there is an election brewing in Pennsylvania. As fewer people know, that election involves the annual awards known as “The Webbies,” sometimes known — semi-seriously at least, and undoubtedly without the blessing of AMPAS — as the Oscars of the Internet...
Against Cyberproperty
Posted on April 15, 2008This post is a plug for an article that I’ve recently completed with my colleague Michael Carrier at Rutgers-Camden. The article is here. It is very short (for a law review article — 36 pages) and is our best effort to decisively end to the doctrine of “cyberproperty,” a...
Trademark use, Pepsi, and new technology
Posted on April 15, 2008In case anyone did not catch it, Rebecca Tushnet has a very nice recap of a recent conference in Iowa on the subject of trademark use. I’m very grateful to Rebecca for all the conference blogging she’s done over the past few years — it’s been wonderful to be a virtual attendee at so [...
Alcott Update
Posted on April 15, 2008A year and a half ago, I posted a brief note on a non-law, non-IP topic: My friend John Matteson, a recovering lawyer now teaching English at John Jay College, had just published a well-received biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott...
A Fair Use Lexicon
Posted on April 14, 2008Even the person who gets the news from CNN.com (which is today, much of American humanity) knows that the much-anticipated copyright trial of the young century started today in New York: J.K. Rowling and all things Harry Potter vs. Steve Vander Ark, publisher of The Harry Potter Lexicon, online here and, the federal courts willing, [...
a late post on legal education
Posted on April 14, 2008Last week, I was busy and so I tried to follow the discussion; in fact, I had a few discussions in “real space” with colleagues about some of the posts. But I did not post anything; so here goes, a little late. It’s been a fantastic discussion on a wide array of [...
Getting a Tax Refund? Buy A Book ? Zittrain?s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
Posted on April 14, 2008Jonathan Zittrain?s new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, was released today. There is much to recommend in the book and too much to address well in a blog post. Still, having finished it, I can say that it offers many insights. In short, as Zittrain explains in three principles: [...
Mobblog Wrap-Up
Posted on April 12, 2008The Madisionian Mobblog comes to a partial end today. The blog will now return to a mix of pieces on law, technology, and society. Nonetheless, there may be additonal posts on the topic so stay tuned for those. In addition, I want to take a moment and thank all involved with this event...
Renaissance Education
Posted on April 11, 2008In reading the posts in this mobblog one thing comes through: right now many factors push on law and legal education. One could say the game is over. One could say stay the course. One could say radical change is required. Whether such positions are accurate or apply to all depends on the facts...
?Because things are not so bad the way they are?(on the law review front)
Posted on April 11, 2008Perhaps appropriately on the last day of this fascinating stream of mobbloging, I thought I would try and offer a partial defense of the-way-things-are-right now on the law review front: Don?t romanticize the alternative: When one begins to publish in the peer-reviewed world, the whole romantic notion of blind review becomes somewhat tainted — in all [...
Congressional Hearing on Virtual Worlds
Posted on April 02, 2008Today there was a hearing convened by the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet (a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee) on the potentials and policy concerns raised by virtual worlds. Archives of the hearing are here...
Thought Experiment: Why Not A Teaching Law Firm To Increase Experiential Learning?
Posted on March 27, 2008As Mike Madison has noted almost two years ago, in general innovations in law school curriculum have not kept pace with business schools. That may be changing. Washington & Lee has made a splash by changing its curriculum to an experiential model...
Yari Loses
Posted on March 27, 2008Just over a year ago I pointed to a lawsuit brought by Bob Yari, producer of the 2006 Best Picture Oscar winner Crash, against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the Producers Guild of America. AMPAS writes the rules for the Academy Awards, and in 2005, before the competition that resulted [...
USNews Rankings and Fair Use
Posted on March 27, 2008The annual USNews ranking of law schools (indeed, of graduate programs generally) became broad blogospheric knowledge yesterday, thanks to “leaked” announcements (see here and here). The magazine is supposed to be released tomorrow — Friday...
The Future of IP Reform
Posted on March 25, 2008Jessica Litman came to Pitt last week to deliver our annual “Distinguished Intellectual Property Lecture,” and she argued from the following premise: Not only are the stars are aligned such that comprehensive copyright reform may be possible — roughly equivalent to what we experienced during the 1960s and early 1970s — but that it is [...
More on Gender
Posted on March 24, 2008Jill Lepore has a very interesting and provocative essay in a recent New Yorker, teasing apart distinctions between fact and fantasy, between works of popular history and works of popular fiction. Her thesis? That the distinction may be gendered: By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, [...
IP Notes from All Over
Posted on March 24, 2008New and upcoming things: First: The excellent IP team at American University’s Washington College of Law prompts me to remind everyone that the annual symposium titled “IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections” is just around the corner. The symposium will take place on Friday, April 4, at the WCL campus, 4801 Massachusetts Ave...
Kristin Davis?s Future (and Now Current) Reputation
Posted on March 19, 2008Some may remember the actress Kristin Davis as the good girl from Sex and the City. Well good compared to the characters around her. The film based on the show is due to be released on May 30. And just in time pictures of someone naked and a sex video that are allegedly of Ms...
Unlimited Music with your iPod?
Posted on March 19, 2008Arstechnica has a story suggesting that Apple is negotiating to offer unlimited downloads to iPod owners who pay a set fee. The scheme essentially means raising the price of iPods, and “giving away” the music. I speculate that this makes sense as the next development in how consumers spend their entertainment dollars...
Back From the ? (and shameless self-promotion)
Posted on March 19, 2008Well, I admit to a looonnnggg period away from blogging, but I have an explanation (if not an excuse). My co-author Joe Liu and I have finished a new casebook on copyright that will be published by West in time for fall adoption. One thing I have learned for sure - the last [...
Virtual Law Articles
Posted on March 18, 2008I’m currently writing a book about law and virtual worlds, and in the course of that I’ve been collecting what I hope is a comprehensive list of published law review articles and student notes that focus primarily on the intersection of law and virtual worlds...
Arthur C. Clarke Is Dead
Posted on March 18, 2008As many who read this blog probably already know, Arthur C. Clarke died today at the age of 90. Given the length and breadth of his career other sources will have many views of his work. I personally recall his general displeasure at the millennium celebrations...
Call for Papers: Seton Hall Symposium on Pandemic Flu
Posted on March 18, 2008Having learned a great deal at Maryland’s conference on a similar topic, I am proud to announce that Seton Hall Law is hosting a symposium on pandemic flu this fall. Proposals are due by 4/15; here is the call for papers: No TagsShare This
Mentoring Prawfs
Posted on March 18, 2008Law professors who teach intellectual property and information law subjects are, on the whole, a pretty lively, friendly, and social bunch, and our numbers are growing. The market has a seemingly endless capacity to absorb new faculty, as law schools across the rankings spectrum hire first one, then a second, and increasingly a third IP specialist...
More Free and Open Source Law Resources
Posted on March 18, 2008Law.com has a good summary of projects seeking to make opinions, statutes, and other legal materials free. The history of these efforts goes back to the early 90s, but the recent changes may the ones to threaten the big shots. According to the article Public Resource now offers “virtually all of the Federal Reporter second [...
Lawyers and Innovation
Posted on March 18, 2008In the most recent issue of The Economist, I found an ad for the upcoming “General Counsel West Coast Roundtable.” Kent Walker, Google’s GC, will give the keynote presentation. According to the ad copy, he “argues that lawyers play a critical role in promoting innovation...
Class Action Against RIAA
Posted on March 16, 2008So the RIAA may be subject to a class action suit in Oregon. As the folks at Recording Industry v. The People note the 109 page complaint begins by invoking the RIAA’s statement that it sometimes catches dolphins when fishing. It is a bold way to show the possible callousness of the RIAA and MediaSentry [...
Is Web 2.0 an Engine of Inequality?
Posted on March 11, 2008According to a Stephen Carr review of Nicholas Carr’s new book comparing the economic impact of the rise of the electrical grid and the rise of the internet, it may well be: [Carr] describes a world in which a handful of lucky and brilliant entrepreneurs uses the World Wide Computer to tap humanity’s smarts and creativity [...
Who Owns Your Emails, Blog Posts, or FaceBook Pages? How About You?
Posted on March 07, 2008Dan Solove’s recent post about David Lat and Facebook and Bruce Boyden’s post about the possible destruction of Nabokov’s unpublished novel raise some questions. Who owns your emails, blog entries, FaceBook pages, and so on? What about when you die? Does your family get the material? What if you wanted it destroyed? What if one [...
NC-17 and markets ? a thought experiment
Posted on March 06, 2008NC-17 is often the kiss of death. But there may be a way to fix that. Consider that DVDs often come packed with the extra footage that could not be shown (or could have been shown but only with an NC-17 rating). Why not see what the market wants? Release both versions of the film, [...
?Loser Generated Content?
Posted on March 05, 2008That’s one creative title for an article in what looks to be a fascinating issue of First Monday. The issue offers a critical take on Web 2.0; here’s Michael Zimmer on its theme: In Technopoly, Neil Postman warned that we tend to be ?surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to [...
The Design Cult
Posted on March 05, 2008Rob Horning’s columns at PopMatters are always thought-provoking, and his recent commentary on Virginia Postrel’s and Rich Gold’s paeans to design is no exception. Gold and Postrel celebrate design, but Horning looks at its dark side: If the design cult had its way, we wouldn?t even be able to carry a coffee mug without [...
Call for Proposals for the Computers, Freedom, & Privacy Conference
Posted on March 04, 2008I just wanted to post this announcement; this has been a great conference and I’m sure this year’s will be a terrific event. Note that the deadline for Panel, Tutorial, and Speaker proposals is March 21, 2008. COMPUTERS, FREEDOM, AND PRIVACY: TECHNOLOGY POLICY ‘08 18th Annual CFP conference May 20-23, 2008 Omni Hotel New Haven, CT CALL FOR PROPOSALS This election [...
Swede This Film!
Posted on March 02, 2008Three things seem related today: First: I saw Be Kind, Rewind this weekend. The movie has an amiable charm. It’s a goofball of a film, wildly implausible at every level and built out of devices that scrape the pavement of the plot like broken mufflers...
Economist Humor
Posted on March 02, 2008The Standup Economist, Yoram Bauman, just presented a humorous take on Gregory Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics. Mankiw is a professor at Harvard. His textbooks on economics are apparently widely used. Bauman presented this take to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting...
Jack Approved But Did Everyone Else?
Posted on March 01, 2008Jack Nicholson appears in an ad for Hilary Clinton (video below). But who approved the ad is a multi- level question. Huffington Post claims ?The Hillary Clinton Campaign released a video starring Jack Nicholson today.? The New York Times, however, noted “The video was not posted by the Clinton campaign, and somehow we doubt Mr...
Fear of Helmet Hair? Coaches Refuse To Wear Helmets
Posted on March 01, 2008Fred is the resident sports person, but here is an interesting one for sports and law or law like discussions. MLB has a rule that all base coaches must wear a helmet. The rule was a response to a minor league coach being killed by a line drive last year...
The GoogleWeb
Posted on February 29, 2008I don’t like to pick on journalists for not being perfect, but I’m constantly surprised at how reporters seem willing to give Google credit for the resources available on the Web. About two years ago, USA Today ran an article entitled “This the Google side of your brain” where the reporter suggested that Google [...
It?s the Cheese
Posted on February 27, 2008As is often the case for IP news from Europe, the IPKat has the best coverage of recent news that Parmesan cheese comes from Parma. More precisely, the European Court of Justice ruled that “Parmigiano Reggiano,” a protected designation of origin (PDO), covers the translation “Parmesan” for cheese, because the latter “constitutes an evocation of that PDO,” [...
Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA
Posted on February 27, 2008It’s a good thing that I have a couple of trips to New York City planned for later this Spring, because what looks like a can’t-miss exhibition has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art: Design and the Elastic Mind. Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, [...
Law School Ratings
Posted on February 26, 2008For better or for worse, ratings and rankings of U.S. law schools are here to stay. Citation count studies of law professors are often held up as the best alternative to U.S. News rankings of law schools, but other “non-flaky” systems are out there...
The Law Faculty Combine
Posted on February 25, 2008Passionate followers of professional football know that the National Football League is just now concluding its annual “combine,” the camp where would-be draftees get timed, tested, and measured by pro scouts in anticipation of draft day. There are speed tests, jumping tests, “position specific events,” measurements, and the famous or infamous Wonderlic intelligence test...
Digitizing and Copyright
Posted on February 20, 2008Lest I get too carried away by the prospect of “Rep. Lessig,” I want to add my voice to the chorus of praise for an upcoming copyright conference that I have nothing to do with and cannot attend: AHRC Primary Sources on Copyright History Project: Conference ? Wednesday 19th and Thursday 20th March 2008 ? Stationers’ Hall, [...
Stanford Law in Politics, Again?
Posted on February 20, 2008Stanford lawprof Larry Lessig is thinking of running for Congress. Should he do it? Is this the most effective way to leverage his anti-corruption message? I believe that the last time a brilliant young Stanford law faculty member ran for Congress, he ended up serving several (non-sequential) terms...
Lunar Eclipse Tonight
Posted on February 20, 2008Some of you may have heard that tonight there will be total lunar eclipse. NASA has a nice page on tonight’s event. Of course east coast bias abounds and it begins with the details for EST experience (tip: partial eclipse starts at 8:43 pm EST and the full eclipse starts at 10:01 pm)...
3 Million Record Albums
Posted on February 19, 2008A friend in Pittsburgh sent me a link yesterday to this eBay auction of what’s being billed as the world’s greatest collection of recorded music. I thought that it was too odd to be true, but the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and NPR have both run interviews with the collector, a man in Pine, a Pittsburgh suburb, who [...
Virtual Trademarks
Posted on February 15, 2008In the past year, there have been some interesting developments in trademark law and virtual worlds, including the Eros lawsuits in Second Life and increased attention from legal practitioners (e.g., see this from WIPO). So, when I was recently invited by the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal to write about user-generated [...
Trial Tactics, Boundaries, and Penalties
Posted on February 15, 2008The idea that one should be a zealous advocate for my client may be good, but it can also lead to large sanctions. The image of the ?I?ll do anything to win? lawyer may be exacerbated by media; yet many firms have that attitude without any need of media reinforcement...
Quick Links
Posted on February 14, 2008The (virtual) law of nuisance and zoning may be entering into Second Life, according to Reuters. “Linden Lab has banned ‘ad farms,’ the small plots of land with gaudy advertisements that are designed to extort neighboring landowners...
Harvard as First Mover
Posted on February 13, 2008For the second time in three months, Harvard has moved aggressively to stake out a leadership position at the intersection of higher education, public policy, and distributive justice. Whether or not you agree with the merits of Harvard’s positions, in some very specific ways it is interesting to watch Mother Harvard assert itself, both on [...
Open Crimson: Harvard?s Arts and Sciences Goes Open Access
Posted on February 13, 2008According the Chronicle of Higher Education “Harvard University?s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy … that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.” Faculty may ask for a waiver of the policy but the default will be that they provide an electronic copy to the [...
The New Medical Consent
Posted on February 11, 2008There is a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal on hospitals’ efforts to assure that their patients understand the consent forms they are signing. Here is a description of the VA’s efforts: The Department of Veteran’s Affairs, with 153 hospitals, has over the past several years adopted a new electronic informed-consent software [...
Does Fair Use Matter?
Posted on February 10, 2008There’s nothing like a juicy fair use lawsuit to get copyright lawyers all wound up. Yesterday, the New York Times published this Joe Nocera column revisiting the Harry Potter/RDR Books/HP Lexicon lawsuit, fanning the embers of a debate that burned through the blogosphere last Fall and earlier this Spring...
Mobblog on Servitudes
Posted on February 09, 2008This week at the Chicago Faculty Blog, a mobblog of distinguished commentators has been kicking around Molly Van Houweling’s interesting recent article, The New Servitudes (Georgetown Law Journal, forthcoming, I believe). (Here’s a link to the list of posts...
Tweaking Your Google Experience
Posted on February 04, 2008Google Co-op is a “platform which enables you to use your expertise to help other users find information.” According to the FAQs, “When you subscribe to someone in the Google Co-op directory, all of that provider’s labels and subscribed links will be added to your Google search results for relevant searches...
Keith Jarrett and the Inexpressible
Posted on February 03, 2008I saw a great concert by Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette at Newark’s NJPAC last night (which Jarrett called “one of the best halls–if not the best–in the US”). It was a really extraordinary performance, especially during one transcendent passage near the end where he was seamlessly interweaving some classical themes with [...
A few Googlish things?
Posted on January 31, 2008Unlike Siva and Philipp Lenssen, I can’t manage to blog full-time on all things Google. But I do try to keep tabs on the search giant. After the break, I’ll share a few interesting things that have recently come across my screen. (Updated: (2/4/08)) No TagsShare This
Can the Doodle Be Saved?
Posted on January 31, 2008From the Department of Aren’t There More Pressing Issues in the World: Yale alumni are rallying to save the Yankee Doodle. From the Yale Daily News: Yankee Doodle may come back to town, riding on support from University students and alumni. Since the restaurant closed Monday, citing ?economic considerations? ? and provoking sadness and shock among Yalies past [...
Law and Lakoff at Pitt
Posted on January 30, 2008The PR about this conference is going out way late, so I volunteered to multiply the message a bit: Next Friday, February 8, Pitt Law is hosting a terrific one-day symposium titled “The 21st Century Brain: Why It Matters for the Academic and Political Worlds...
The Science of Happiness: Comfortably Numb?
Posted on January 30, 2008The cyber-yenta is thriving: Once upon a time, finding a mate was considered too important to be entrusted to people under the influence of raging hormones. Their parents, sometimes assisted by astrologers and matchmakers, supervised courtship until customs changed in the West because of what was called the Romeo and Juliet revolution...
The Doodle is Done
Posted on January 29, 2008The Yankee Doodle, a New Haven institution, closed for good today after 58 years in business, a victim of the rising economic tide in the Broadway area near the Yale campus. Tyco, the Doodle’s neighbor and owner of the building, raised the rent...
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