The Ninth Circuit has ruled that online companies do not bind customers when the company changes the contract and fails to notify the customer of the change. The opinion is available here. The parties involved are an individual and an online phone service. The individual started with Company A and set up continual credit card payment. [...]

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I love Sven Birkerts’s literary criticism, and I found Gutenberg Elegies a deep and important book. But his latest jeremiad on the fate of the printed book review strikes me as wrongheaded. He suggests that bloggers are to blame for its decline:
[P]eople in various quarters, literary bloggers prominently among them, are proposing that [...]

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Having written a bit on the subject, I was glad to see NYT writer Jim Holt take on the topic of “scientifically verified immortality.” He writes about those who, “while secular in outlook, still pine after immortality,” mentioning William James’s interests here. (For a fascinating piece of intellectual history, check out the [...]

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My co-authored piece on search engines is up on SSRN.  A short piece called “Technology, Competition, and Values” has also been posted.  I definitely hope to revise the latter, or perhaps develop its themes in an article, having just read both Enhancing Human Traits and an interesting article by Dov Fox in the Michigan State Law [...]

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Via Peter Suber, an interesting counterpoint between Weinberger and Keen.  Weinberger:
The people who make my life on the Web so positive intellectually include a brilliant but crazy college drop-out, a practicing medical doctor who is interested in information theory on the side, a struggling working mom who has a keen eye for bulls—, a theologian [...]

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Anyone still skeptical of even a touch of dirigisme in telecom policy should take a quick look at this piece in Spiegel on France’s broadband boom:
In 2000, France’s national telecom regulator forced former state-owned monopoly France Telecom (FTE) to open up its network to rival operators, a process known as “local loop unbundling.” . . [...]

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Over at Concurring Opinions, Drexel’s Dan Filler has decided that his day job is busy and challenging enough without the felt obligation to be busy and challenging as a regular blogger.  Dan’s “farewell” post reminds me of what I like most about this medium.  It’s not the opportunity to build a short soapbox and share [...]

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By now, most have heard about the unauthorized postings of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Count me among those who think that this copyright infringement won’t damage sales of the book. It’s only more free advertising. I hope that people don’t use the unauthorized posting problem to argue for more draconian [...]

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Sivacracy’s Siva Vaidhyanathan has a new server, a new domain, and a new virtual home at the Institute for the Future of the Book.  The IF:book announcement is worth noting:
Siva is one of just a handful of writers to have leveled a consistent and coherent critique of Google’s expansionist policies, arguing not from the usual kneejerk [...]

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From last Sunday’s New York Times:
The problem with cheap, abundant, knockoff AK-47s is not that they are cheap, or abundant, but that they are counterfeit.  Who says the Russians don’t get IP rights?
“More than 30 foreign companies, private and state based, continue the illegal manufacturing and copying of small arms,” said Sergey V. Chemezov, the [...]

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The Writer’s Guild of America’s contract with the producers is up on October 31, 2007 and the fight is on over residuals, the payments writers receive for reruns, DVDs, and other uses of material occurring after the initial issuance of the entertainment product. The guild went on strike in 1988 and the fall television season [...]

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Currently, about 80 percent of Americans do not have a passport.  So the vast majority of Americans have never experienced something as radical as, say, cell phones untethered to a particular carrier.  (Just try and visualize a mobile that can do something as advanced as let you know how many minutes you’ve already used in [...]

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I just saw in Newsweek (July 18, Periscope) an “offenses index” that lists the fines/damages that parents can face if their children misbehave.  Leading the list of monetary fines (there is also listed a 6 months jail sentence in Kansas for allowing underage drinking at home) was “illegal downloads,” with a fine of “up to [...]

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Never one to shy away from music controversy, Prince has entered into a marketing deal with England’s The Daily Mail under which his new album, Planet Earth, is being given away with the Mail’s Sunday edition for free. The issue itself costs $2.80. This move preempts the international launch date of July 16 and the [...]

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The recent coverage of former Surgeon General Carmona’s experiences working within the Bush Administration may be seen as another example of the Administration running roughshod over and ignoring experts. But at a more general level it raises an issue that may never go away in politics: where do science and policy intersect, if ever? One could claim that science is objective and should always [...]

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The Ninth Circuit has affirmed the dismissal of Perfect 10’s complaint against Visa and MasterCard for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement (opinion here).  The court’s opinion, though not perfect, laudably recognizes that a decision in Perfect 10’s favor would have opened potentially endless claims of liability against a wide range of potential defendants who simply [...]

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America has faced an obesity epidemic for some time, leading to a thriving diet business.  But it turns out that dieting may be counterproductive.  More on this finding, and liposuction as a technology for the compression of discomfort into pain, below.
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Today’s theme is IP in uncommon places.
First:  When is an iPhone not an iPhone?  Answer:  When it’s a terrific handheld, stripped of the required activation of AT&T phone service.  The iPhone comes bundled with the requirement — both technical and, apparently, contractual — that iPhone functions at all only once AT&T phone service has been [...]

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Associated Press has reported that the administrative law judge who sued a dry cleaner for $54 million over a lost pair of pants now plans to file a motion for the trial judge to reconsider or reverse her ruling against him.  Meanwhile, the defendants have filed a motion to have the judge pay their attorneys’ [...]

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Frank’s post about Social Search reminds me of some work going on in artificial intelligence right now. On the down side, this area is being called Web 3.0. Other than that unfortunate moniker, as the NY Times reported last November, the growth in using AI to build a semantic Web — that is “a system [...]

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