“Googlement,” rather than “government,” seems to be the theme of Jeffrey Rosen’s NYT piece today on how Google decides what stays and what goes on its various platforms.  Frank Pasquale offered his own take on the piece here:  The ostensibly public-spirited motives of an enormous, for-profit enterprise ought to be examined critically.
My take differs from [...]

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Via this online periodical, which reports in pertinent part:
A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.
“I brought [...]

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So I spent the past few days visiting family in rural parts of the Northeast, and though I visited four fairly widely dispersed residences, not a single one had cell phone access via either Verizon or AT&T. That’s all I could check, but I don’t think any other company facilitated service in any of these [...]

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Jeffrey Rosen had an excellent article on “Google’s Gatekeepers” today, focusing on the company’s legal and policy decisions about what content to index. For example, after a group of videos mocked Turkey’s founder, Google’s deputy general counsel Nicole Wong
decided that Google . . . would prevent access to videos that clearly violated Turkish law, [...]

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Via.

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Some music videos are really entrancing. Kelly Osbourne’s recent One Word is directly inspired by the great film Alphaville, as Ms. Osbourne happily acknowledges:
“I’m going for something like very ‘Alphaville,’ ” Osbourne told MTV News last month when she was dreaming up the concept….”Very ’60s, nothing that I thought I’d ever do, like [...]

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Last Sunday’s NYTimes allegedy devoted its whole magazine to the notion of “screens” everywhere.  I write “allegedly,” because the cover featured an odd photo of Jennifer Aniston, and the accompanying interview seemed to have little to do with the theme.  I would write here about Tony Scott’s “The Screening of America,” which takes up a [...]

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Left over from the weekend’s reading is this fascinating account of the emerging conflict between playwrights and their not-for-profit producers.  Playwrights, like other artists, struggle to find venues to distribute their work.  Nonprofit theaters, struggling to find revenue, require that the authors of the plays that they produce commit to pay a continuing royalty based on [...]

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A reservist friend alerted me to this story, which puts questions of IP rights for fashion design in a different light: 
One of the stranger questions to emerge after the August conflict between Russia and Georgia: Did Russians go to war in camouflage filched from Finland?

Officials were trying to determine whether the Finnish M/05 camouflage, top, [...]

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Before the election was even held, Barack Obama was named Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year for 2008, beating out runners-up Apple and Zappos.com and other strong corporate competitors, as well as John  McCain, to be lauded as the nation’s top brand builder.

According to this account:
Ad Age has picked its marketer of the year, and [...]

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Rob Frieden has posted an interesting and provocative paper, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics: Developing a Clearer Assessment of Market Penetration and Broadband Competition in the United States. It is well worth a read and is bound to spark a debate. Among other things, it challenges the FCC’s misuse of statistical evidence to [...]

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It’s not often that 21st century gets in my face.  Computers and computer networks blend seamlessly into work and home and social life; since my first encounters with online games 35 years ago, my reaction has usually been one of degree rather than kind.
But last week, when I rented a car, a Prius was delivered [...]

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Last Sunday’s New York Times included a provocative piece about commons environments that should interest all intellectual property lawyers, scholars, and policymakers. No, I’m not talking about the lengthy and fascinating profile of Lewis Hyde, which intellectual property lawyers, scholars and policymakers should read, too. I’m talking about “A Seafood Snob Ponders the Future of [...]

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This is technology, law, and society only in the most indirect way, but I can’t resist acknowledging the most recent symposium produced by the Yale Law Journal’s Pocket Part, on Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs).  We will all be hearing a lot more about SWFs and their US-based regulatory correspondent, CFIUS (the Committee on Foreign Investment [...]

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In college I took a course on the ancient origins of modern comedy.  Plautus and his antecedents and all that.  Comes now news that one of most brilliant and apparently original modern comic bits — Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch — likewise is grounded in the work of the ancients.  In this case it’s an [...]

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Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach will head the Federal Communications Commission transition team.

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From New York magazine:
Phat Fashions sued Victoria’s Secret in March because the logo for its Pink line closely resembled the Phat Fashions logo, but the case was recently settled. On Wednesday a judge dismissed the suit after both parties reached a mutual agreement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Phat Fashions was seeking [...]

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