Intellectual Property Law

Hermione Granger Fan Tributes

Posted on February 08, 2009
Watch 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, 2009
Cripes, 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, 2009
From 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, 2009
Yes, 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...

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Possible History/Economics Lesson from Japan in the 1990s

Posted on February 02, 2009
Professor 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 [...

Compare and Contrast?

Posted on February 02, 2009
Via. No Tags

http://feministlawprofessors.com/

Posted on February 01, 2009
That’s where you will find Feminist Law Professors now! http://feministlawprofessors.com/ No Tags

Terroir in Iowa

Posted on February 01, 2009
When 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, 2009
Yahoo! 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Apparently 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, 2009
Story here. No Tags

Death, Grief, and the Internets

Posted on January 30, 2009
ABC 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, 2009
It’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 [...

I don?t want to marry Dick Armey either.

Posted on January 30, 2009
Context here: No Tags

Noted

Posted on January 30, 2009
Bruce 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Some 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, 2009
The 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...

ORANGE ?YOU GLAD FOR A CHANGE? COLA

Posted on January 26, 2009
Via. Via. No Tags

Obama Mask Factory

Posted on January 25, 2009
Whatever 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
International 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, 2009
From 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, 2009
Hard to believe that this is for real but apparently it is. No Tags

Live Action Web Browsing

Posted on January 22, 2009
No Tags

The White House Commons

Posted on January 22, 2009
The 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
From 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...

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