Intellectual Property Law

Classes Begin: Tips for Newbies

Posted on August 28, 2009
So 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
Probably without authorization from the mark holders! No Tags

Seeing With Your Tongue: No Really

Posted on August 28, 2009
Not 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...

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I See Code: Plain View and Computer Searches

Posted on August 27, 2009
The 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Via. No Tags

The Scary Spectre of Professional Identity Theft

Posted on August 25, 2009
From 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, 2009
Wikipedia 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, 2009
So 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
So 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, 2009
Several 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, 2009
Here 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, 2009
Dennis Crouch explains here. No Tags

Lessig is Hibernating His Blog

Posted on August 20, 2009
He 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
As 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...

Air Conditioner for Faculty Meetings

Posted on August 18, 2009
No Tags

Bill Patry?s New Copyright Book

Posted on August 18, 2009
The 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, 2009
Two 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...

Opening Up the Law: Pacer, CITP, and the RECAP the Law Project

Posted on August 14, 2009

Windows Vista Toilet Paper

Posted on August 13, 2009
Via. No Tags

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, 2009
I 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...

Who Knew? Patents Don?t Really Promote the Useful Arts

Posted on August 13, 2009

Weird Law Day: Big Time Jewel Heists and MS Word Enjoined

Posted on August 12, 2009
Yesterday 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, 2009
For 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 [...

Google Search

Posted on August 10, 2009
No Tags

Could Yahoo! + Bing = Death to Google?

Posted on August 10, 2009

Taking the Google Book Search Settlement to Another Level

Posted on August 10, 2009
Academic 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 [...

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