Ernie Miller and IT Conversations have posted an audio interview on the the Battle.net case (Davidson & Associates v. Internet Gateway) with me and Seth Finkelstein.

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Jason Schultz at Copyfight is blogging excerpts from today’s opinion on the DMCA and ink jet printer cartridges in Lexmark Int’l v. Static Control Components (pdf opinion here.), and there will surely be more analysis to come.
Three thoughts:
First, this represents a first-rate job of lawyering by Seth Greenstein at McDermott, Will & Emery and the [...]

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Richard Posner (and Brian Leiter, commenting on Posner) weighs in with an up-to-date version of the argument against student-edited law reviews — that they reinforce intellectual laziness among the nation’s legal academy, bccause student editors aren’t sufficiently well-trained to discriminate meaningfully among genuine scholarly contributions and dreck, or to provide meaningful editorial support even for [...]

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The Australian newspaper The Age reports that Iraqi kidnappers freed an Australian journalist after researching his background on Google and discovering that he really was an Australian journalist, not an American informant.

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Brian Leiter (Texas) and Gordon Smith (Wisconsin) have recent posts for law teaching candidates on what to expect at the upcoming “meat market” of screening interviews in Washington, DC.
I’m happy to add my two cents to this cottage industry, though for completeness I should note that Eric Goldman (Marquette) has a good page of information [...]

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Richard Epstein has a new essay out on open source software, which is justly and richly criticized at Larry Lessig’s blog.
Not all of the comments are clearer in defending free software than Epstein is in attacking it. What Epstein doesn’t do, and what both lawyers and non-lawyers often fail to do, is this: [...]

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I’m catching up on some older items. Via a pointer at Boing Boing, I spotted this item at the Creative Commons blog pointing to an SF Bay Area public radio show on creative remixing. In a comment, a listener characterizes the show as focused, first, on “the important concept of keeping creativity and [...]

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Much is being made of the the enthusiastic and successful bedding of the Justice Department by the MPAA and the RIAA. There are also more subtle changes afoot, and what dangers lurk — I cannot say for sure. But beware. Take a look at the bill (H.R. 1417) overhauling the Copyright [...]

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In a bit of news that’s depressing to me personally, my former law firm, Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich, is being acquired by the Piper Rudnick firm. The combined firm will have over 1,300 lawyers in a bunch of offices around the country and around the world.
Piper Rudnick, the East Coast half of this [...]

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Natalie Jeremijenko (now at UCSD) and Eugene Thacker (Georgia Tech) have released Creative Biotechnology: A User’s Manual, an outgrowth of the Biotech Hobbyist collective.
From the book’s website:
The Biotech Hobbyist collective includes a multi-disciplinary group of [media] artists, scientists, engineers, activists, and cultural theorists that is dedicated to working with biotechnology in a creative and critical [...]

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Susan Crawford asks, a propos of HBO’s warning that time-shifting of its non-broadcast content is not permitted,
The interesting question is how subscribers to HBO will feel about this. Are they so used to making copies that they’ll leave HBO in droves? Will they generally abandon cable for online sources of content? [...]

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Until I started teaching copyright law, I hadn’t had much use for science fiction since, oh, about the eighth grade. Copyright reminds us that the line between the conceptual and the material is pretty thin, and now I find that great sci fi authors have a much better grip on what’s real — and [...]

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Once in a while, and perhaps more often than academics sometimes concede, the court gets it right. Take Compaq Computer Corp. v. Ergonome Inc. (pdf link to the opinion), in which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a jury finding of fair use. Compaq distributed a booklet on ergonomics that [...]

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Sometimes, though, a little copyright goes a long way. Take Grosso v. Miramax (pdf link to the court’s opinion), where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that a screenwriter who sent an unsolicited script to Miramax could sue Miramax for breach of an implied contract — a state law claim — [...]

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The conventional “copyfight” wisdom is that excessive emphasis on copyright’s property-like character can lead to quashing, instead of promoting, innovation and creativity.
Too much copyright (and badly understood copyright) has other pernicious effects. Today’s example: the recent opinion of the Supreme Court of Arkansas in Arkansas Democrat-Gazette v. Brantley. There was an [...]

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Ed Felten updates the discussion about experimental use in patent law with a comment on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story about Madey v. Duke University. (Ed’s post picks up on a post by Doug Tygar.)
The WSJ implied that there is a showdown coming in the trial of that case. That’s misleading. [...]

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Steven Johnson posts an interesting remembrance of Jacques Derrida, which includes this gem of an observation:
[Derrida] once showed up as a surprise guest at a graduate seminar Spivak was teaching on his work — he arrived before Spivack did, and so there was a hilarious period for about ten minutes where all these over-caffeinated grad [...]

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United States World Cup soccer hopes (Munich ‘06) took a major step forward on Saturday with a 2-0 victory over El Salvador, in San Salvador.
The U.S. starters were Keller, Pope, Berhalter, Gibbs, Hejduk, Zavagnin, Beasley, Donovan, Mathis (Lewis, 68), McBride (Johnson, 71), and Wolff (Jones, 88). Whether it’s age or injury, it’s difficult [...]

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The comparative political economy of broadcasting and publishing is fascinating. On the one hand, we have film and television producers about to persuade Congress that using a technology to skip commercials constitutes copyright infringement. Susan Crawford explains. On the other hand, there is Google’s new Google Print service, which walks all over [...]

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The New York Times has a feature this morning on the sale of Thorsten Veblen’s house in Menlo Park, the irony being that Veblen — the coiner of the phrase “conspicuous consumption” would undoubtedly be chagrined to see his little shack being sold as a tear-down for more than $1 million.
I spent the first six [...]

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