Intellectual Property Law

Is Web 2.0 an Engine of Inequality?

Posted on March 11, 2008
According to a Stephen Carr review of Nicholas Carr’s new book comparing the economic impact of the rise of the electrical grid and the rise of the internet, it may well be: [Carr] describes a world in which a handful of lucky and brilliant entrepreneurs uses the World Wide Computer to tap humanity’s smarts and creativity [...

Who Owns Your Emails, Blog Posts, or FaceBook Pages? How About You?

Posted on March 07, 2008
Dan Solove’s recent post about David Lat and Facebook and Bruce Boyden’s post about the possible destruction of Nabokov’s unpublished novel raise some questions. Who owns your emails, blog entries, FaceBook pages, and so on? What about when you die? Does your family get the material? What if you wanted it destroyed? What if one [...

NC-17 and markets ? a thought experiment

Posted on March 06, 2008
NC-17 is often the kiss of death. But there may be a way to fix that. Consider that DVDs often come packed with the extra footage that could not be shown (or could have been shown but only with an NC-17 rating). Why not see what the market wants? Release both versions of the film, [...

?Loser Generated Content?

Posted on March 05, 2008
That’s one creative title for an article in what looks to be a fascinating issue of First Monday. The issue offers a critical take on Web 2.0; here’s Michael Zimmer on its theme: In Technopoly, Neil Postman warned that we tend to be ?surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to [...

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The Design Cult

Posted on March 05, 2008
Rob Horning’s columns at PopMatters are always thought-provoking, and his recent commentary on Virginia Postrel’s and Rich Gold’s paeans to design is no exception. Gold and Postrel celebrate design, but Horning looks at its dark side: If the design cult had its way, we wouldn?t even be able to carry a coffee mug without [...

Call for Proposals for the Computers, Freedom, & Privacy Conference

Posted on March 04, 2008
I just wanted to post this announcement; this has been a great conference and I’m sure this year’s will be a terrific event. Note that the deadline for Panel, Tutorial, and Speaker proposals is March 21, 2008. COMPUTERS, FREEDOM, AND PRIVACY: TECHNOLOGY POLICY ‘08 18th Annual CFP conference May 20-23, 2008 Omni Hotel New Haven, CT CALL FOR PROPOSALS This election [...

Swede This Film!

Posted on March 02, 2008
Three things seem related today: First:  I saw Be Kind, Rewind this weekend.  The movie has an amiable charm.  It’s a goofball of a film, wildly implausible at every level and built out of devices that scrape the pavement of the plot like broken mufflers...

Economist Humor

Posted on March 02, 2008
The Standup Economist, Yoram Bauman, just presented a humorous take on Gregory Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics. Mankiw is a professor at Harvard. His textbooks on economics are apparently widely used. Bauman presented this take to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting...

Jack Approved But Did Everyone Else?

Posted on March 01, 2008
Jack Nicholson appears in an ad for Hilary Clinton (video below). But who approved the ad is a multi- level question. Huffington Post claims ?The Hillary Clinton Campaign released a video starring Jack Nicholson today.? The New York Times, however, noted “The video was not posted by the Clinton campaign, and somehow we doubt Mr...

Fear of Helmet Hair? Coaches Refuse To Wear Helmets

Posted on March 01, 2008
Fred is the resident sports person, but here is an interesting one for sports and law or law like discussions. MLB has a rule that all base coaches must wear a helmet. The rule was a response to a minor league coach being killed by a line drive last year...

The GoogleWeb

Posted on February 29, 2008
I don’t like to pick on journalists for not being perfect, but I’m constantly surprised at how reporters seem willing to give Google credit for the resources available on the Web. About two years ago, USA Today ran an article entitled “This the Google side of your brain” where the reporter suggested that Google [...

It?s the Cheese

Posted on February 27, 2008
As is often the case for IP news from Europe, the IPKat has the best coverage of recent news that Parmesan cheese comes from Parma.  More precisely, the European Court of Justice ruled that “Parmigiano Reggiano,” a protected designation of origin (PDO), covers the translation “Parmesan” for cheese, because the latter “constitutes an evocation of that PDO,” [...

Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA

Posted on February 27, 2008
It’s a good thing that I have a couple of trips to New York City planned for later this Spring, because what looks like a can’t-miss exhibition has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art:  Design and the Elastic Mind. Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, [...

Law School Ratings

Posted on February 26, 2008
For better or for worse, ratings and rankings of U.S. law schools are here to stay.  Citation count studies of law professors are often held up as the best alternative to U.S. News rankings of law schools, but other “non-flaky” systems are out there...

The Law Faculty Combine

Posted on February 25, 2008
Passionate followers of professional football know that the National Football League is just now concluding its annual “combine,” the camp where would-be draftees get timed, tested, and measured by pro scouts in anticipation of draft day.  There are speed tests, jumping tests, “position specific events,” measurements, and the famous or infamous Wonderlic intelligence test...

Digitizing and Copyright

Posted on February 20, 2008
Lest I get too carried away by the prospect of “Rep. Lessig,” I want to add my voice to the chorus of praise for an upcoming copyright conference that I have nothing to do with and cannot attend: AHRC Primary Sources on Copyright History Project: Conference ? Wednesday 19th and Thursday 20th March 2008 ? Stationers’ Hall, [...

Stanford Law in Politics, Again?

Posted on February 20, 2008
Stanford lawprof Larry Lessig is thinking of running for Congress.  Should he do it?  Is this the most effective way to leverage his anti-corruption message? I believe that the last time a brilliant young Stanford law faculty member ran for Congress, he ended up serving several (non-sequential) terms...

Lunar Eclipse Tonight

Posted on February 20, 2008
Some of you may have heard that tonight there will be total lunar eclipse. NASA has a nice page on tonight’s event. Of course east coast bias abounds and it begins with the details for EST experience (tip: partial eclipse starts at 8:43 pm EST and the full eclipse starts at 10:01 pm)...

3 Million Record Albums

Posted on February 19, 2008
A friend in Pittsburgh sent me a link yesterday to this eBay auction of what’s being billed as the world’s greatest collection of recorded music.  I thought that it was too odd to be true, but the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and NPR have both run interviews with the collector, a man in Pine, a Pittsburgh suburb, who [...

Virtual Trademarks

Posted on February 15, 2008
In the past year, there have been some interesting developments in trademark law and virtual worlds, including the Eros lawsuits in Second Life and increased attention from legal practitioners (e.g., see this from WIPO). So, when I was recently invited by the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal to write about user-generated [...

Trial Tactics, Boundaries, and Penalties

Posted on February 15, 2008
The idea that one should be a zealous advocate for my client may be good, but it can also lead to large sanctions. The image of the ?I?ll do anything to win? lawyer may be exacerbated by media; yet many firms have that attitude without any need of media reinforcement...

Quick Links

Posted on February 14, 2008
The (virtual) law of nuisance and zoning may be entering into Second Life, according to Reuters. “Linden Lab has banned ‘ad farms,’ the small plots of land with gaudy advertisements that are designed to extort neighboring landowners...

Harvard as First Mover

Posted on February 13, 2008
For the second time in three months, Harvard has moved aggressively to stake out a leadership position at the intersection of higher education, public policy, and distributive justice.  Whether or not you agree with the merits of Harvard’s positions, in some very specific ways it is interesting to watch Mother Harvard assert itself, both on [...

Open Crimson: Harvard?s Arts and Sciences Goes Open Access

Posted on February 13, 2008
According the Chronicle of Higher Education “Harvard University?s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy … that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.” Faculty may ask for a waiver of the policy but the default will be that they provide an electronic copy to the [...

The New Medical Consent

Posted on February 11, 2008
There is a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal on hospitals’ efforts to assure that their patients understand the consent forms they are signing. Here is a description of the VA’s efforts: The Department of Veteran’s Affairs, with 153 hospitals, has over the past several years adopted a new electronic informed-consent software [...

Does Fair Use Matter?

Posted on February 10, 2008
There’s nothing like a juicy fair use lawsuit to get copyright lawyers all wound up. Yesterday, the New York Times published this Joe Nocera column revisiting the Harry Potter/RDR Books/HP Lexicon lawsuit, fanning the embers of a debate that burned through the blogosphere last Fall and earlier this Spring...

Mobblog on Servitudes

Posted on February 09, 2008
This week at the Chicago Faculty Blog, a mobblog of distinguished commentators has been kicking around Molly Van Houweling’s interesting recent article, The New Servitudes (Georgetown Law Journal, forthcoming, I believe).  (Here’s a link to the list of posts...

Tweaking Your Google Experience

Posted on February 04, 2008
Google Co-op is a “platform which enables you to use your expertise to help other users find information.” According to the FAQs, “When you subscribe to someone in the Google Co-op directory, all of that provider’s labels and subscribed links will be added to your Google search results for relevant searches...

Keith Jarrett and the Inexpressible

Posted on February 03, 2008
I saw a great concert by Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette at Newark’s NJPAC last night (which Jarrett called “one of the best halls–if not the best–in the US”). It was a really extraordinary performance, especially during one transcendent passage near the end where he was seamlessly interweaving some classical themes with [...

A few Googlish things?

Posted on January 31, 2008
Unlike Siva and Philipp Lenssen, I can’t manage to blog full-time on all things Google. But I do try to keep tabs on the search giant. After the break, I’ll share a few interesting things that have recently come across my screen.  (Updated: (2/4/08)) No TagsShare This

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