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I arrived at college the same year that ABC launched Nightline (originally: the late, great Frank Reynolds hosting “America Held Hostage”), and Ted Koppel’s face graced my dorm room almost every night for four years. I learned to love TV news in high school, however, and that’s because I was a huge fan of Irving [...]

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Six murders were linked by DNA that probably had nothing to do with the killer(s).
From the BBC:
Police in Germany have admitted that a woman they have been hunting for more than 15 years may never have existed. Dubbed the “phantom of Heilbronn”, the woman was described by police as the country’s most dangerous woman. Investigators [...]

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Via.

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In an earlier post I suggested that the contemporary intersections of newspapers and technology could be contrasted in interesting ways with the last ten years’ worth of intersections of recording companies, motion picture studios, and software companies and technology.  Discussions of the former are playing out largely in the absence of copyright concerns.  Discussions of [...]

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About three years ago, I wrote a short essay on law reviews and open access publishing that characterized legal scholarship in student-edited journals in glib and uncharitable terms: “The theory of the economy of prestige holds that we see a grumpily mutually-reinforcing symbolic economy of law professors, lawyers, law students, law schools and their universities [...]

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“Here, there be dragons” has long served as a metaphor for the unknown. An unfortunate Indonesian fisherman recently discovered that sometimes, there really are dragons.
Slaying Komodo dragons may be a bad idea, but slaying their metaphorical brethren is a different matter.  But you have to find someone willing to do the dirty work, in life [...]

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Here some thoughts prompted by the Q&A for Panel 1 at Southwestern’s Copyright Reform Conference.
One idea that came up was the way in which law and technology intersect. Nimmer claimed that the 1976 Act would have addressed DeCSS. Fred von Lohmann said no, Betamax and other cases would have said non-infringing uses mean DeCSS [...]

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CNET reports that SpiralFrog, a company that was, yes was, in the online music game is closing its doors. If one was a customer, music covered by SprialFrog’s DRM software will be unusable 60 days from the closing date which seems to have been on March 20, 2009. This problem looks a little like Zittrain’s [...]

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A few weeks back, I wrote a post about my views on a big issue in copyright reform and my paper, Copyright’s Hidden Assumption: A Critical Analysis of the Foundations of Descendible Copyright, which addresses what I think will yet again be a major theme in copyright reform: term extension justified as way to [...]

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News that the University of Michigan Press will publish primarily electronically, rather than in print form, is not particularly interesting in the “book v. e-book” sense. The print monograph is cooked, just like printed daily journalism is cooked. University presses may have a chance to evolve and save themselves; that’s what the U [...]

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Story at Inside Higher Ed. One blogging historian express doubts about this here. I have mixed feelings. I like reading actual books better then staring at a computer monitor, but for research and reference purposes the electronic format sure is handy.

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From this post at Language Log:
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994) says of incentivize that “This is perhaps the most recent of the infamous verbs that end in -ize”, noting that the members of a usage panel in 1985 “rejected it almost unanimously with varying degrees of disgust and horror”.
But why are coinages in -ize [...]

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That’s paragraph 11. The preamble to the Licensing Agreement says “it is advisable that You print or save a soft copy of this Licensing Agreement for record purposes.” Which I might have done if I could figure out how – I couldn’t even make my Firefox browser super copy the Licensing Agreement, no less print [...]

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It’s causing me to see pop up like advertisements at the top of almost every blog I visit, including my own. How do I make it go away? The solution the company suggests doesn’t work – the ad goes away briefly but another one appears if you refresh. I use a Firefox browser.

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The post title is the premise of the CNN piece that was supposed to air last night on Anderson Cooper 360 but that got preempted by Natasha Richardson and AIG (not that those two things have anything to do with each other). I was interviewed on camera for the story, so there goes my [...]

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New books on Google by Randall Stross, Alexander Halavais, and Jeff Jarvis have been getting a good deal of media attention lately. I highly recommend the Stross and Halavais volumes because they recognize that the unique power of Google is likely to be lasting. Stross notes that the company may be using a [...]

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CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 is doing a series this week on how different cities across America are faring during the economic crisis.  I was interviewed by the program (the reporter was Randi Kaye) about how Pittsburgh is doing (reasonably well, all things considered).  I’m told that the segment will air tomorrow (Wednesday) night.  Or not.  But [...]

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