Updated Sept. 1:  If you are interested in librarianship, cataloguing, and the metadata aspects of Google Book Search, then read not only Geoff Nunberg’s post linked below but the ongoing comments thread, which is, if anything, more interesting than the original post.  Both causes for and cures for metadata flaws are complex, and Google (which [...]

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As the NFL season gets underway and the Pittsburgh Steelers set off in pursuit of a seventh Super Bowl title (Pittsburghers used to say “One for the thumb” and now, fans call the city “Sixburgh”; what slogan comes next?), the local press is searching for feel-good fan stories.  One feel-good fan story offers some questions [...]

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My attention wandered for a moment and I failed to post a link to the second of Pam Samuelson’s excellent Huffington Post analyses of the Google Book Search settlement:  “Why is the Antitrust Division Investigating the Google Book Search Settlement?”
This also seems an apt moment to observe that the real import of the GBS settlement [...]

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So there you sit in the first year class. You have tracked down the assignment and read it in a vacuum. You thought you understood it. The professor seems to drone and then surprises the class with a question. Hands fly up. Bodies sink into seats. Anxiety sits next you. That was the question? That [...]

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This was apparently some kind of hack:

And Sears doesn’t think it was funny:

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Probably without authorization from the mark holders!

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Not much law here, yet. Researchers have taken theoretical work begun decades ago and developed a “brain port,” a device that uses technology to allow people to reorganize how they process sensory data. In the example below, blind people are able to see images. The device takes visual input, processes it, sends impulses to a [...]

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The Ninth Circuit has taken a swat computer searches and the plain view doctrine (pdf). I have not yet read the entire opinion but Orin Kerr has a series of posts about the decision here. And Shaun Martin for whom I have a ton of respect as well, covers the case here. Shaun’s post captures [...]

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In which I take a few whacks at lousy IP law reporting: Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Mandy Webster had come all the way from Pennsylvania to visit the house where Lizzie Borden once lived, and she was not about to go home empty-handed. After touring the three-story clapboard house, the site of one of [...]

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From Inside Higher Ed:
One deleted e-mail marked the beginning of my ordeal. It was finals week, just before Christmas break, when I received a strange message asking me to comment on some kind of online political essay that I had supposedly written. Since I’m not a blogger and make it a point to avoid the [...]

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Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people. From the NYT:
… Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — [...]

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Via.

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So some of you may have heard that Glenn Beck has managed to upset advertisers by calling President Obama a racist. I don’t have much to say about Beck. I was more interested in the advertiser reaction. I saw the article on Yahoo! but wanted a more stable URL. So I copied the AP news [...]

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As anyone who follows the music industry should know, the history of record labels, artists, and exploitation is long and a bit dirty. K.J. Greene has argued that the problems of race and music business practices should be part of the reparations debate. Today, however, it appears that a pioneer of hip-hop, Dr. Roxanne Shante, [...]

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So the weekend is upon us. For many of our readers law school and a fresh fall semester looms. What is one to do? Scurry to find the initial assignments for your class? Well, yes. But as a last, lingering gasp of summer I offer Blitzen Trapper and their song Furr. Dig it as you [...]

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Several news outlets are covering the hyped notion that gamers tend to be overweight, 35, and depressed. The first thing that crossed my mind was this fact: it was conducted in the the Seattle-Tacoma area. Wow, people in MSville which is known for no sunlight, coffe-compensation techniques, and a great era of rather depressing music [...]

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Here they are in “pat. pending” action:

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Dennis Crouch explains here.

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He explains why here. This particular section caught my attention:
Some very good friends — Theo Armour and M. David Peterson — have been volunteering time to do the mechanics of site maintenance. That has gotten overwhelming. Theo estimates that 1/3 of the 30,000 comments that were posted to the blog over these 7 years [...]

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A couple days ago I blogged about RECAP, a system that aims to enhance government transparency by increasing access to court documents. RECAP does this by making it easy for people to share PACER documents after they have paid for them. Today I read that a judge has vacated “legally significant” opinions in a tort [...]

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