Intellectual Property Law

Technology and Business Models

Posted on March 24, 2009
Here 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, 2009
CNET 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
News 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...

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?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, 2009
Story 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, 2009
From 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, 2009
That’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, 2009
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BlogRolling.com is Evil

Posted on March 20, 2009
It’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, 2009
The 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, 2009
New 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...

Fingerball

Posted on March 17, 2009
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Shameless Self-CNN-Plug

Posted on March 17, 2009
CNN’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)...

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Posted on March 17, 2009
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Amazon.com, the Kindle 2, and the Visually Impaired: Not a love story.

Posted on March 16, 2009
In 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
According to this report, anyway. No Tags

Peter Jaszi at Collectanea

Posted on March 13, 2009
Professor 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, 2009
Nonfiction 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, 2009
The 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

Slinky Dancer

Posted on March 12, 2009
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Jesus, he?s everywhere?

Posted on March 11, 2009
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Two Birds One Stone: Thoughts on Theory and Law Practice

Posted on March 11, 2009
As 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
Dave 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, 2009
Burj 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...

My Advice (and Paper) for The Coming Copyright Reform: Ignore Heirs

Posted on March 09, 2009

The Vader Project

Posted on March 08, 2009
There 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 ? [...

Urban Camoflage

Posted on March 06, 2009
More photos and examples here. Via. No Tags

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