Cross posted from The Faculty Lounge.
I had been meaning to post about this for a while but life got on top of me.  Jeanne Fromer at Fordham has written a great essay on trade secret law with reference to the confectionery industry and with specific reference to Roald Dahl’s creation of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.  [...]

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In case anyone is going to be in or around Cleveland on November 12-13 (and needs a break after the hiring conference!), we are hosting a symposium on trademark and domain name issues in cyberspace with a terrific group of speakers.  Keynotes to be provided by Daniel Gervais (Vanderbilt) who will be speaking on geographic [...]

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From here of course.

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From the NYT:
…Twelve years after the hit pop tune “Barbie Girl” raised the hackles of the toymaker that sells Barbie, Mattel, the song is being adapted for Barbie advertising.
Mattel has uploaded to YouTube a video clip of a dance called the Barbie, which is danced to a rerecorded version of “Barbie Girl.” The video is [...]

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Trebor Scholz and the New School for Social Research are sponsoring a conference in a few weeks on the political economy of Web 2.0 called “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” Participants have been having a fascinating discussion on the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity. Here are some ideas [...]

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Via.

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October 22, 2009
The Honorable Julius Genachowski
Chairman, Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, DC 20554
Dear Chairman Genachowski:
The undersigned are a diverse group of academic researchers who study Internet policy. We applaud the Federal Communications Commission for launching the Open Internet proceeding. It is an essential step forward in the ongoing public debate over the future of [...]

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Along with other academic researchers who study Internet Policy, I am going to file a letter supporting the NPRM. I’ll post the letter tomorrow. I will also post some additional thoughts over the next week or so.
Here are various public docs:
NPRM: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A1.pdf
Press Release: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-294159A1.pdf
Genachowski Statement: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A2.pdf
Copps Statement: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A3.pdf
McDowell Statement: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A4.pdf
Clyburn Statement: http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A5.pdf
Baker [...]

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Apparently Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, started writing a version of the series from a different character’s (Edward’s) point of view and the early, incomplete draft was leaked onto the Internet. Jacqui Lipton’s post about Stephenie Meyer’s “reaction to the unauthorized release” of her partial draft reveals another way to think about [...]

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Mike Dorf posted a rules v. standards meditation on the recent kerfuffle over whether a six-year-old child should be disciplined for violating a school rule that prohibits bringing knives to school, when the object in question was a folding knife/fork/spoon in common use among campers, including young ones.
Not surprisingly given the inevitable difficulties of settling [...]

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Via.

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From Yahoo News:
… Plagiarism-detection software was created with lazy, sneaky college students in mind – not the likes of William Shakespeare. Yet the software may have settled a centuries-old mystery over the authorship of an unattributed play from the late 1500s called The Reign of Edward III. Literature scholars have long debated whether the play [...]

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With the second movie in the Twilight series (New Moon) imminently about to appear on the big screen, I found myself getting interested in this pop culture phenomenon, particularly as I strolled around a bookstore this afternoon and found just about every magazine cover devoted to the exploits of the teenage vampires and werewolves in [...]

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As I have noted often in the past, IP law sometimes echoes Dr. Seuss. Do we have One Thing or Two Things? Things matter, again. I’m catching up with a district court case from earlier this month, in which the court wrestled with the following argument:
A cell phone is sold to a [...]

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I recently listened to the Federalist Society’s ScotusCast debate among Mark Lemley, Richard Epstein, Fred Von Lohmann, and Scott Kieff (in order of presentation), moderated by Adam Mossoff, on the issue of patent exhaustion after the Supreme Court’s Quanta v. LG decision. The discussion is timely, particularly given the recent CVSG on the somewhat [...]

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One of my best friends gave me the album Kiko by Los Lobos as a college graduation gift. I love the album to this day. The title track, Kiko and the Lavender Moon, is great. It always reminds me of old spooky cartoons from the Bugs Bunny era with the sheet-like ghosts drifting, floating, bobbing [...]

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The New York Times op-ed by Calvin Trillin, Wall Street Smarts, has a parable-like quality with the two characters meeting and exchanging wisdom. The lesson offered by the wiseman: “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” The piece goes on to explain why that is a [...]

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(This is the 8th in a series of posts on Fairey v. Associated Press. See below for other posts in the series.)
I’ve been too busy to blog recently about the Hope poster case, but aside from the AP’s answer to Garcia’s claims of ownership, not much has happened. And frankly, given my schedule, I was [...]

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From here:
Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right, YLE, the country’s national broadcasting company, reported on Wednesday.
According to the report, every person in Finland (a little over 5 million people, according to a 2009 estimate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broadband connection starting [...]

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What the Federal Circuit Can Learn from the Supreme Court — and Vice Versa
Professor Rochelle C. Dreyfuss, the Pauline Newman Professor of Law at New York University Law School, will deliver the Fifth Annual Finnegan Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Property on October 20, 2009 at 6:00 p.m. EDT. For those outside the DC [...]

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