I just wanted to announce that the preliminary program for the 2008 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference (in New Haven, CT) has been announced. The theme this year is “Technology Policy ‘08,” and it includes several topical panels for the election year:

Presidential Technology Policy: Priorities for the Next Executive
States as Incubators of Change
Activism and […]

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Posts by others that caught my eye recently:
Rebecca Tushnet summarizes a very interesting public discussion on Bridgeman v. Corel, the district court opinion by Judge Kaplan, now nine years old, that holds that copyright does not attach to especially good photographic reproductions of public domain works of fine art.
Siva Vaidhyanathan tackles the rhetorics of “open” […]

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With so many interesting information law and policy topics floating around the blogosphere, you would think that something more, well, substantial, would catch my eye.  But instead I’ve been hooked by cardboard boxes.
Out of Denver yesterday came the news that a man was threatened with a violation of federal law for recycling U.S. Postal Service […]

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Last week Thomas Jefferson had Professor James Hackney of Northeastern University School of Law as our last speaker in our colloquium series. His talk focused on his book, Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity (featured at this past year’s AALS conference) and about his next steps on this topic. […]

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Scott Hemphill has posted an excellent, thoughtful paper on network neutrality. I’ll post the abstract along with a few comments on the paper below the fold:
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CNET reports that PARC (formerly Xerox Parc) the folks who have had a large hand in “laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing” have invented vanishing ink. For those interested in the environmental side of things, it seems that making ONE SHEET of paper requires “about […]

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Shameless self-promotion alert:  I’ve just posted a short paper on SSRN, titled “Intellectual Property and Americana, or Why IP Gets the Blues.” (Download it here.) It’s just been published in a symposium issue of the Fordham Intellectual Property Media & Entertainment Law Journal, along with pieces by Mark Lemley, Dan Burk, Rob Frieden, and Tal […]

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As many people know, there is an election brewing in Pennsylvania.  As fewer people know, that election involves the annual awards known as “The Webbies,” sometimes known — semi-seriously at least, and undoubtedly without the blessing of AMPAS — as the Oscars of the Internet.
My colleague Bernard Hibbitts is the Editor in Chief and publisher […]

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This post is a plug for an article that I’ve recently completed with my colleague Michael Carrier at Rutgers-Camden. The article is here. It is very short (for a law review article — 36 pages) and is our best effort to decisively end to the doctrine of “cyberproperty,” a.k.a. “cybertrespass,” a.k.a. the Internet […]

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In case anyone did not catch it, Rebecca Tushnet has a very nice recap of a recent conference in Iowa on the subject of trademark use. I’m very grateful to Rebecca for all the conference blogging she’s done over the past few years — it’s been wonderful to be a virtual attendee at so […]

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A year and a half ago, I posted a brief note on a non-law, non-IP topic:  My friend John Matteson, a recovering lawyer now teaching English at John Jay College, had just published a well-received biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott.  It’s called “Eden’s Outcasts”; buy the book here.
The Madisonian mobblog forced me […]

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Even the person who gets the news from CNN.com (which is today, much of American humanity) knows that the much-anticipated copyright trial of the young century started today in New York:  J.K. Rowling and all things Harry Potter vs. Steve Vander Ark, publisher of The Harry Potter Lexicon, online here and, the federal courts willing, […]

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Last week, I was busy and so I tried to follow the discussion; in fact, I had a few discussions in “real space” with colleagues about some of the posts. But I did not post anything; so here goes, a little late.
It’s been a fantastic discussion on a wide array of […]

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Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, was released today. There is much to recommend in the book and too much to address well in a blog post. Still, having finished it, I can say that it offers many insights.
In short, as Zittrain explains in three principles: […]

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The Madisionian Mobblog comes to a partial end today. The blog will now return to a mix of pieces on law, technology, and society. Nonetheless, there may be additonal posts on the topic so stay tuned for those.
In addition, I want to take a moment and thank all involved with this event. I had a […]

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In reading the posts in this mobblog one thing comes through: right now many factors push on law and legal education. One could say the game is over. One could say stay the course. One could say radical change is required. Whether such positions are accurate or apply to all depends on the facts. Nonetheless, […]

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Perhaps appropriately on the last day of this fascinating stream of mobbloging, I thought I would try and offer a partial defense of the-way-things-are-right now on the law review front:

Don’t romanticize the alternative: When one begins to publish in the peer-reviewed world, the whole romantic notion of blind review becomes somewhat tainted — in all […]

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The conversation here at Madisonian about law schools and “what kind of institution” they should be has been fascinating.  I regret coming in so late. 
I have probably spent more time thinking about what kind of institution my law school — Notre Dame Law School, a Catholic law school — should be than about what kind […]

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Today is the last day of Madisonian’s full-time attention to the future of legal education, and Jim Chen has energized the mobblog with a sweeping, challenging post about focus.  Again, I want to broaden and narrow the conversation, all at once.
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With apologies to Larry Lessig, whose classic law review article title I am snagging and translating quite faithlessly, and with kudos to Al Brophy, who has stated the financial realities as bluntly as anyone in this mobblog has.
What kind of institution do we want our law schools to be? Legal educators should strive to […]

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