A little over a week ago, Judge Richard Jones of the Western District of Washington (Seattle) denied motions by software developer Autodesk for dismissal or summary judgment in its favor in a lawsuit brought by Timothy Vernor, who sells and re-sells things on eBay — including packages of AutoCAD, Autodesk’s flagship product. 
Autodesk repeatedly sent DMCA […]

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Regular madisonian readers (and a few others) know that I’m fascinated by legal “things.”  I’m hardly alone.  Sherry Turkle at MIT is the editor of a forthcoming book called “Falling for Science: Objects in Mind” (order it here), and in an excerpt from her contribution published online in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review she […]

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Two recent news items evoke the power of paper and similar objects in what we often assume is a purely digital world:
First, as the New York Times reported, “In a decision that could radically change the size, the color and even the feel of American money, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the United […]

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Until last week Google had a competitor of sorts on the book scanning front. Now, however, Microsoft has abandoned its role in the book scanning world. One rather disturbing issue is that the service seems like it will go somewhat dark: “[T]he Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects … will be taken […]

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Many readers know about Talking Points Memo or Huffington Post. A New York Times article shows that in state races smaller, local blogs may have greater impact on a race. The Franken-Coleman race in Minnesota provides the backdrop to the story. Apparently an independent blogger who has previously worked for the Republican Party has […]

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Shameless self-promotion alert: I’ve posted a new paper to SSRN, titled “Writing to Learn Law and Writing in Law: An Intellectual Property Illustration.” It’s forthcoming in the St. Louis University Law Journal as part of a symposium on teaching intellectual property law. Here is the abstract:
This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on teaching intellectual […]

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I’m pulling myself out of Pittsburgh sports myopia today.  We have this NHL hockey team, the Penguins, and the team are on an amazing playoff run, and they’re quite fun to watch and, well, the lunacy here is unbelievable.  Of course, in most of the U.S. ice hockey is at best a minor league sport.  […]

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Making a mixtape is so 1980s. Now you can make a muxtape:
[On the site,] you can upload . . . what the kids call playlists. [The program then streams the mp3s you chose on a url you pick.] I am not sure of the legal issues, but the system is smart […]

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Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother, is technically a young adult novel, but there is something in there for anyone interested in cyberlaw, security, national security law, and oh yeah, a rather fun, although at times scary, tale. In classic Cory fashion, he has made the book available for free (yes well before law profs […]

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It is an old question (at least in Internet time): What is online privacy worth? Yet there seems to be a new wrinkle. Not just the Web sites or search companies want to track what one surfs. ISPs are now in the Web tracking game and stand to make “several dollars per month” per customer. […]

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Just watch. It is a little over ten minutes and fun. Basic premise: some birds you many not like may be rather smart.

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Jonathan Zittrain has been promoting his new book on some excellent radio programs, including On the Media and On Point (with Tom Ashbrook). On OTM, the host challenged him with the query, “We don’t want blank-slate cell phones that have to be programmed. I want to buy it, take it out of the box, […]

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Wired reports that the FBI subpoenaed the Internet Archive and demanded that Brewster Kahle (the Archive’s founder) provide records about one of the library’s registered users, asking for the user’s name, address and activity on the site. The FBI used a National Security Letter (example) to make the request. As Wired explains this type of […]

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Via Tim Armstrong at Info/Law, I learned today that the Harvard Law School faculty voted to create an online open access repository of their scholarship.
To me, the vastly more interesting and provocative part of Tim’s post is a news item that I missed 10 days ago:  Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new […]

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A U.S. District Judge has enjoined a defendant from using a term for its business. That is not an unusual result. The one part of the order that may be of note is that the defendant is not allowed to purchase ad words using the plaintiff’s mark and the defendant must use negative adwords […]

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When the national press focuses on academic questions at universities these days, the spotlight often shines on plagiarism.  But there is a genuine academic scandal brewing in Morgantown, at West Virginia University, and the national media has only barely noticed.  What’s worse, from what I can tell, outside of West Virginia itself the blogosphere has […]

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Rebecca Tushnet’s report on the recent IP Without IP Colloquium (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) is as interesting for its method as for its content. 
The Colloquium itself was a non-public affair at the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study.  It was described at the Center’s site as follows:
IP without IP
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities, Social Sciences, […]

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The Computer History Museum “is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computing history.” A current exhibit is a working version of Charles Babbage’s difference engine which is seen as a 19th Century computer design that was never built for a host of reasons from personality to claims that it could not be built with […]

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Personally, I bought the hard copy (I like bound books more than stacks of copy paper), but kudos go out to Jon Zittrain for putting his brand new hot-off-the-press book on SSRN. I’ve made the point before that many authors like reaching the public as much as making money- and often these aren’t mutually […]

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