Intellectual Property Law

Innovation Thought of the Day

Posted on July 12, 2010
From Andrew Thompson, Co-Founder and CEO, Proteus Biomedical, Inc.: We have historically relied on patents as a way to encourage people to make innovations. As a company, our view is that that system is going away. Emerging economies have much less appetite for it...

Access to HIV/AIDS Medicines

Posted on July 11, 2010
The Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines explains why UNITAID’s efforts to develop a patent pool of HIV/AIDS treatments are so important: Meanwhile, the US health care finance system appears to be getting into a bit of a standoff with HIV/AIDS drug makers: Without reliable access to the medications, which cost patients in the AIDS [...

Ambient Urban Informatics

Posted on July 11, 2010
I was just looking through a series of pamphlets on “situated technologies,” and I found this one on Urban Computing and Its Discontents very interesting. A quote: Stamen Design?s Oakland Crimespotting . . . is a nifty hack that imports Oakland Police Department crime data into a Google Maps mash-up, and does so not [...

Farewell Online Anonymity?

Posted on July 09, 2010
With thanks to one of my students for passing this along, the makers of World of Warcraft are apparently considering a requirement that users post their real names on bulletin boards about popular games in an effort to promote more civil discourse on the boards...

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Digital Labor

Posted on July 08, 2010
After intensively doing the IP law conference circuit for a few years, I’ve spent much of the past year reaching out to scholars in critical internet studies, design, and information science, along with activists in the global justice field. I think it’s been a good way to “re-charge” some of my own scholarship as [...

Pernicious Persistence for ?Old? Media

Posted on July 08, 2010
I’ve written here a couple of times about the idea of “pernicious persistence”: the idea that the media that is created today may persist in ways that “old” media artifacts — newspaper stories, photographs, home videos — did not (mainly because of the “new” creation, distribution and search abilities enabled by the Internet)...

Innovation and Globalization: A Misunderstood Relation?

Posted on July 05, 2010
In a recent article called “How to Build an American Job,” former Intel chairman Andy Grove suggests that there is no neat division between “high-value” design and conceptual work and the “scaling” necessary to bring products to market...

World Cup Intermezzo: Reflections on Law, Football, Ethics, and Technology

Posted on July 01, 2010
In the wake of the 2006 World Cup finals, I blogged a bit about sport and institutional governance, trading thoughts with William Birdthistle, who was guest blogging at the VC. You can find my posts here and here, and from there you can follow the links back to his...

As Seen On TV!

Posted on June 28, 2010
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Harley Gets Parody Puskback

Posted on June 28, 2010
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Open Internet Comment

Posted on May 25, 2010
The Economist piece I just mentioned here reminded me to post a link to my comment in the FCC’s Open Internet proceeding. In the comment, I make two basic points: First, I argue that the FCC must resist falling into the rhetorical trap set by many participants in the debate who attempt to frame the [...

From ships to bits: Common carriage is an ancient idea being applied to a modern problem?internet access

Posted on May 25, 2010
Check out this piece in the Economist. It refers to Jim Speta’s excellent article, which sets forth: three broad historical justifications for applying common carriage to regulate prices and access. First, many transporters enjoy a natural or state-granted monopoly and need to be restrained from exercising it with too much abandon...

World Cup Finals Coming: Law, Tech, Culture, etc.

Posted on May 24, 2010
I just returned froma week-long stay in London, where I was blissfully immune to news of US politics, television, and most important, sport.  As most Americans know, the English have other passions.  On our taxi ride to Victoria Station yesterday morning, the driver carried on a great length about the latest scandal involving Sarah Ferguson, [...

The Unsolved Mysteries of ?Unsolved Mysteries?

Posted on May 23, 2010
(Part 2 of 2) I fully expect that we will get some resolution to several important plot threads in Lost’s finale tonight, particularly matters that have been developed over the last season and Season 5’s finale: what “sideways world” is, what Desmond is up to, how MIB is going to be defeated, what happens to [...

Lost Potential

Posted on May 22, 2010
(Part 1 of 2) Back when I was a teenager, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of friends. D&D, for those who have never played it, is essentially a pen-and-paper version of World of Warcraft. Instead of a computer running the game, that role in D&D was served by a person?the [...

Scanning the Public Domain

Posted on May 21, 2010
I am working on a paper on the history of razors and blades (yes, I know that sounds obscure, even for an ivory tower sort; I?ll leave it to another day to try to persuade you that you should be fascinated, too). I have been reading turn of the century?that is the 19th century?catalogues...

Hershey Wants To Enjoin Chocolate Bar-Shaped Brownie Pan

Posted on May 19, 2010
From Law.com: … when the folks at Williams-Sonoma Inc. started to market a brownie pan in the shape of a chocolate bar, Hershey’s lawyers went to court seeking an injunction to block any further sales. In a Lanham Act suit filed in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, Pa...

Fair Use Meets Reciprocal License: Who Wins?

Posted on May 14, 2010
Over on Concurring Opinions, Dave Hoffman has an interesting post concerning a fantasy author, George Martin, who has somewhat peculiar notions concerning copyright and fair use. In the course of explaining why, in his view, science fiction and fantasy authors must sue to shut down fan fiction wherever they find it, Martin cites as anecdotal [...

?Constructing Commons? Published in Cornell Law Review

Posted on May 13, 2010
It’s out:  “Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment,” co-authored by me, Brett Frischmann, and Kathy Strandburg, is now available in its final version via the Cornell Law Review website.  (H/T:  CoOp.)   The final version  is also up at SSRN...

Souls and Demons

Posted on May 11, 2010
From Freakonomics: GameStation, a British computer game retailer, added an ?immortal soul? clause to the contract signed by online shoppers on April 1, 2010. Thousands of customers agreed to the following stipulation: ?By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you [...

What hath New Media Wrought

Posted on April 25, 2010
There is a lot of discussion these days of new media and what new media mean to old media. In some cases, existing (or mainstream) media have attempted to adapt to the new technologies of distribution. Sometimes they do a good job. At other times, not so much...

You Are a Pirate!

Posted on April 23, 2010
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Porn and Copyright Computer Scams ?

Posted on April 15, 2010
With thanks to one of my students for passing this along to me, it seems that some clever digital scammers have come up with a couple of interesting new kinds of online attacks.  One involves hacking an individual’s computer and publishing the person’s search history list (including any porn sites visited etc), then offering for [...

Superhero or Household Cleaner?

Posted on April 14, 2010
Take the quiz here. No Tags

U.S. News IP Rankings 2011

Posted on April 14, 2010
For those rankings mavens amongst us, it appears that the U.S. News Rankings for 2011 leaked yesterday.  What do people think of this year’s IP specialty rankings (assuming the list is accurate)? 1. Berkeley 2. Stanford 3. George Washington 4. Boston University 5...

Posting Online Reviews: Hyperbole, Facts and Defamation

Posted on April 13, 2010
Prior to widespread use of the Internet, someone who had a poor experience with a provider of goods or services could do little more than sue and spread word of their experience to friends and colleagues. Reports to the local Better Business Bureau or a state Attorney General’s office might also follow, but there was [...

Hanson Brothers on Ice?

Posted on April 12, 2010
If you don’t read the NYTimes Sports section, you might have missed reports that Nancy Dowd, who wrote the greatest hockey movie ever, Slap Shot (1977, with Paul Newman), is trying to shut down public appearances by the actors — Dave “Killer” Hanson, and the Carlson brothers, Steve and Jeff, who played the Hanson brothers [...

Google and the Visual Artists

Posted on April 12, 2010
Late last week, a suit was filed against Google in the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York by a variety of organizations representing visual artists with respect to unauthorized scanning of visual images in Google’s Library Project and on other Google services...

Generativity, Openness and Apple

Posted on April 11, 2010
I’m drowning in administrative work, travel, conferences, and the approaching end of the Spring semester, so my posting has been off.  But I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to note Steven Johnson’s essay in the New York Times this morning, writing about the iPhone and the Apple App Store: For about a decade now, ever since [...

Happy 300th B-day (c)

Posted on April 10, 2010
Copyright law turns 300 today.  As I regularly explain to my students, compared to the laws of property or crime, copyright is pretty darn young.  But in the space of 300 years, it sure has grown fast, as The Economist notes.  Has it grown too fast?  Will it survive to 400?  Check out these comments...

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