With thanks for one of my students for fowarding this to me, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court has today cleared Chinese search engine Baidu on claims of copyright infringement for deep-linking to music downloads that infringe copyrights.  Reuters story here.

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A school district in California has banned Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th Edition) after a child found the definition for “oral sex” in its pages. The initial story made the decision seem a fairly done deal, but a later issued story indicates that the decision is under review. I wonder about the decision to first [...]

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Naturally, I’m still thinking about copyright law in the context of the Twilight franchise – what else would I be doing on a Tuesday morning?  I was looking again at some of the press coverage surrounding the young woman who was detained in custody for several days for making a three minute video-recording in an [...]

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Most of the country is facing some rather grim weather. Classes have begun. Grades are in. The holidays are over. There is work to do. Many things may be getting you down. So I offer this tune as a small pick-me-up for those who may need it. If the music doesn’t work for you, perhaps [...]

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From here:
You couldn’t blame Lauren McClusky of Chicago if she were a bit squeamish about using her last name in this story without fear of reprisal from Ronald McDonald and his legal posse.
For McClusky, 19, finds herself at the center of a thorny dispute that involves a series of charity concerts she’s put on over [...]

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Seems shocking because generally librarians are a superior class of people!

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Much is made of the fact that copyright attaches at the time expression is fixed in a tangible medium. To bring us (partially) in line with the Berne Convention, which convention the US joined in 1989, “formalities” of copyright protection — the requirement to give notice by putting the © symbol on the work [...]

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From today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Late Monday afternoon, employees at O’Hara grocer Giant Eagle Inc. got test results showing some hash brown products sold by the retailer contained a bacterium that can cause a potentially serious infection.
Within hours, an automated system was busy calling more than 300,000 Giant Eagle Advantage Card holders who records showed had purchased [...]

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For anyone who couldn’t make it to the domain name/online TM symposium at CWRU in the fall, the webcast is now available online.  Some additional web resources on areas associated with the symposium topics (along with speaker bios) are available on the bottom of this webpage.

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Erich Segal died the other day.  He was famous (or infamous) as the author of “Love Story,” the book and then movie that gave us the line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  The movie was a smash but is utterly forgettable; if you’re looking for a throwback experience featuring its star, Ryan [...]

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With gratitude to Eric Goldman for drawing my attention to more opportunities to blog about the Twilight franchise, the U.S. District Court in California on January 12 granted a preliminary injunction to Summit Entertainment (the movie studio that produces the Twilight movies) for copyright and trademark infringement in relation to the unauthorized activities of a [...]

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The Simpsons get Rick Rolled:

The Christians get Rick Rolled:

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I have to pay for every text, and Organizing for America won’t honor requests to knock it off. This is making Verizon rich but not very helpful to anybody else.

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I just returned from the Institute for Advanced Study’s Symposium on Technology and Education. Anyone interested in how education operates should contact the folks in today’s symposium or in the year-long seminar The Dewey Seminar: Education, Schools and the State. It is a great group of people thinking about justice, finance, the structure of schools, [...]

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The Google China news deserves some thought for a range of reasons. The questions about democracy, censorship, and more that swirled around Google and China’s relationship are important. One issue that is easily lost is the relationship between the claimed reasons for Google’s leaving China and policies about surveillance. My colleague at CITP, Timothy B. [...]

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Combine the Streisand Effect and a trademark lawyer with wit and resources, and you get the South Butt’s Answer to the lawsuit filed against it by the North Face. This is Half Dome versus Half Ass, the bullying socialism of the North Face (according to the Answer) against freedom of speech and the American Dream [...]

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One thing that Dan Burk, Mike Madison, Dan Solove, and a few others told me as I started my academic career was that it was important to read, read, read; attend conferences; and engage with other professors about their work. With that base one slowly but surely develops better material and grows a network of [...]

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As some of you know, I am at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy for the year. It is great to be around the folks here for a host of reasons. A big one is the speakers and conferences the Center hosts. I wanted to let folks know that next week, the Center is running [...]

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On the way back from the AALS Annual Meeting, I was chatting with co-blogger Deven Desai who will be familiar with this question but I’m not sure that either of us has a clear answer to it.  I was intrigued when Disney released its first full length animated feature with an African-American princess (The Princess [...]

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