Intellectual Property Law

Animal House and Cultural Remixing

Posted on December 29, 2008
Yesterday’s NFL game between the Pittsburgh Steelers (31) and the Cleveland Browns (0) prompted one of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s sportswriters to note that the Browns’ quarterback narrowly missed a Blutarsky.  The QB, one Bruce Gradkowski, achieved a passer rating — a measure of the player’s efficiency — of 2...

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre Performs Hallelujah

Posted on December 29, 2008
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Marley, Happy Birthday, and Me

Posted on December 28, 2008
This year, part of our family’s annual orgy of holiday film-going included Marley & Me. I usually make a point of sitting all the way through the closing credits, and that’s a good thing, too, because it took me almost two hours to notice something worth blogging about the movie...

Literalism

Posted on December 26, 2008
Via Andrew Sullivan, the the long-awaited explanation of that classic A-ha video: See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. Which reminds me of Howard Jones’s Everlasting Love, the most visually literal video I can remember…...

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Wrongcards.com

Posted on December 26, 2008
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Who Owns Your Fat?

Posted on December 26, 2008
Forbes reports that a Beverly Hills physician who removes human fat by liposuction uses the fat as fuel for two biodiesel SUVs (his Ford model and his girlfriend?s Navigator). Apparently, ?A gallon of grease will get you about a gallon of fuel, and drivers can get about the same amount of mileage from fat [...

Should you forward that email?

Posted on December 25, 2008
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Lessig on Fresh Air

Posted on December 23, 2008
Larry Lessig was on Fresh Air yesterday talking about his new book and the Stanford -> Harvard switch.  For diehard Lessig fans and followers (like me) there wasn’t much you haven’t already heard, but then again, it’s always interesting to listen to attempts to educate the public (well, the NPR listenership at least) in the [...

Christmas Cards for Geeks

Posted on December 23, 2008
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Blast From Overhyped Christmas Presents Past: Furbies

Posted on December 23, 2008
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?Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes? by Elizabeth Losh

Posted on December 22, 2008
From the MIT Press page: Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government?even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and [...

How to Be a Useless Company: ATT and iPhones (with irony and a request)

Posted on December 22, 2008
I don?t buy Apple products. I was just starting to change my mind but Apple has managed to annoy me yet again. I wanted an iPhone. My brother noted that and thought he was getting me a gift card for the iPhone. But wait, I am an ATT customer for ten, yes ten, years...

Holy Crap: Catholic Google

Posted on December 22, 2008
Catholic search engine powered by Google striving to provide an easy to use resource to anyone wanting to learn more about Catholicism and provide a safer way for good Catholics to surf the web. CatholicGoogle is powered by Google using “safe search” technology, it produces results from all over the internet with more weighting to given to [...

Public Service for Creative Commons

Posted on December 22, 2008
Folks, If you don’t know Mike Carroll, fix that. He is currently a visiting professor at American University and an all-around great person. In addition to many accomplishments such as publishing insightful articles and running Carrollogos, Mike is on the board of Creative Commons...

BRIGHT IDEAS SERIES

Posted on December 22, 2008
Over at Concurring Opinions I have launched a series called Bright Ideas. My goal is to offer authors a way to share how they came to write a book or other major work. These efforts require huge amounts of time and thought. Often ideas shift and evolve...

Levitt?s Honesty About Economics

Posted on December 21, 2008
Should we, or can we, stop pretending we know what lies ahead or should we see what we can do when we know that predictability is an illusion? Steven Levitt of Freakonmics fame did a recent interview on NPR about the current economy that points to this question...

Music, The Internet, Business Models, and Freedom

Posted on December 20, 2008
Everything old is new again. Lawsuits regarding music use, confusion over how to make money in the digital age, content and distribution revenue models, all of these issues seem never to go away. They are the chicken or the egg questions for creation and its relationship to making money from creation...

Light Empirical Data On Films and Search

Posted on December 20, 2008
IMDb has a feature called MOVIEmeter Top 25 Films of 2008. It claims to be a distillation of the most popular films based on searches. So these rankings are “based not upon critical assessments or box-office performance, but the actual search behavior of over 57 million users of IMDb...

Lighter In A Blender

Posted on December 19, 2008
From Geeks Are Sexy, which notes: Warning: Do not attempt to do this at home, or in fact, anywhere, ever No Tags

Music Industry Abandons Suits Against Individual File Sharers

Posted on December 19, 2008
Today’s Wall Street Journal online reports that the RIAA will no longer sue individuals it suspects of sharing copyrighted music files online. Instead, the RIAA will notify ISPs on the assumption that ISPs will try to stop their users’ behavior...

Drug Cartels And Propaganda

Posted on December 19, 2008
What if major crime groups started to post banners, drop leaflets, use noise campaigns (cars with speakers broadcasting a message), run Internet videos with gruesome scenes, and other propaganda techniques to question the government? What if the messages stated that a public official, a police officer, a special agent, a whole department, and so on [...

Symbolic Control ? Movie Studio Logos Over Time

Posted on December 19, 2008
As many of you know I love films and pop culture. They intersect with trademark and copyright all the time. As far as the idea that the symbols are consistent and always or only communicates what the purveyor of the mark wishes, I have doubts. For example, 20th Century Fox has music, “20th Century Fanfare,” [...

The Great Convergence

Posted on December 17, 2008
Here’s a nice passage from a piece by Alistair Duff entitled “The Normative Crisis of the Information Society.” The piece looks at problems ranging from copyright to privacy to terror investigations, and considers the convergence of functions on the internet that lead to normative disputes: It has long been evident that cyberspace poses new regulative [...

Get some rock, paper, scissors and tape.

Posted on December 17, 2008
Actually jazz would work okay too: No Tags

Again With the Law School Rankings

Posted on December 17, 2008
In the National Law Journal, dated December 22, 2008, Peter Kalis, chair and global managing partner of K&L Gates offers a response by BigLaw to the USNews rankings of law schools: The ranking sells magazines. It generates heat, not light. In the legal industry, we’re used to this art form ? a magazine develops a ranking using [...

Cars & Culture

Posted on December 17, 2008
Over at his art blog, Gurney Journey, Dan Gurney points to a recent book published by Brian Ladd (University of Chicago Press) called Autophobia.  The teaser on the press website asks the following question: Cars are the scourge of civilization, responsible for everything from suburban sprawl and urban decay to environmental devastation and rampant climate change?not [...

Will These Folks Get Sued?

Posted on December 17, 2008
They synchronized their holiday lights display to the “Coca Cola Holiday Song”: No Tags

Frontiers of Net Neutrality: Recognizing the Bottlenecks

Posted on December 16, 2008
The front-page WSJ article on Google’s alleged backsliding on net neutrality has spawned a lot of controversy on the web. Google has articulately defended the practices at issue in the article. But the piece does focus internet policymakers on some basic truths: there are many potential bottlenecks on the internet, and antitrust law [...

Challenging the ?Long Tail? by Cartoon

Posted on December 16, 2008
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Trademark, Fandom, and Steelers Nation

Posted on December 16, 2008
Just a bit too late to work into a hypothetical for my Trademark Law class comes news of a new t-shirt being sold in the Pittsburgh region, featuring the image at left. If you are not a Pittsburgh Steelers or National Football League follower, note that the man pictured is Mike Tomlin, coach of the team [...

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