Intellectual Property Law

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, 2009

?You?ve heard of kosher salt? Now there?s a Christian variety.?

Posted on March 02, 2009

March 3rd is Square Root Day!

Posted on March 02, 2009

Mark Lemley cited more often than Louis Brandeis; God doesn?t even make the Top 50

Posted on March 01, 2009

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

If lawyers talked like they wrote?

Posted on February 28, 2009

Possibly the worst 9/11 commemorative objects ever.

Posted on February 27, 2009

?Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.?

Posted on February 25, 2009
The 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...

?Everything is Amazing And Nobody is Happy?

Posted on February 25, 2009
No Tags

Backlash Persuades Tropicana To Abandon New Packaging

Posted on February 23, 2009
From 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 [...

I?m a Fan

Posted on February 21, 2009
Roger Ebert makes me want to be a better writer. No Tags

No More What?s His/Her Face? iPhoto and Face Recognition

Posted on February 20, 2009
CNET 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, 2009
Five 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, 2009
If 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...

Guitar Store

Posted on February 19, 2009
Via. No Tags

Scholarship as Storytelling

Posted on February 18, 2009
Have 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, 2009
Some 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, 2009
I’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, 2009
Before 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, 2009
Seems even longer! More here. No Tags

Likelihood of Confusion

Posted on February 17, 2009
From 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, 2009
Google 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, 2009
Major 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, 2009
I’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, 2009
A 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
So 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, 2009
At 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, 2009
It’s only false advertising if the misleading sobriquet is material. Via. No Tags

John Stewart, Bill O?Reilly and Privacy

Posted on February 10, 2009
I 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...

Clangs We Can Believe In

Posted on February 10, 2009
Via. No Tags

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.