Glenn Greenwald has recently criticized Mike McConnell for outsourcing internet surveillance to corporations. As Greenwald relates, McConnell “went from being head of the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to [consulting firm] Booz Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors, then became Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then [...]

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Insidious Worm Makes Unauthorized Purchases When Computer User Is Drunk

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While attempting a family vacation last week, I was confronted with evenings watching seemingly endless ads on the Cartoon channel.  A couple of (oft-repeated) ads caught my eye as being newly marketed toys that are based on combining two well-known older toys.  The main examples – and, boy, did I see a lot of ads [...]

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In this post, I’m going to argue that prospective students should care whether a law school’s faculty publishes. Not everyone agrees, and we’ve all had professors who were great scholars but indifferent classroom teachers. I also freely concede that teaching ability does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with scholarly ability, so that a school’s [...]

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Via.

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I’ve long been interested in copyright and games—an interest that began with copyright and video games, but worked its way backwards to consider games generally. Games exist at the boundary of copyright law: they seem to include much that is protectable, and yet there is a general rule in copyright doctrine that games are not [...]

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Every prospective student notices the physical facilities of a school when he or she visits. Wood paneling, marble floors, and grand foyers create impressions about whether a law school is well-funded and a “nice” place to study. I’d like to suggest a few other ways in which prospective students should evaluate a school’s [...]

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From the file of “public goods are not always what they seem,” if they can be made the subject of curatorial exclusivity (can they?), the Museum of Modern Art in New York has added the “@” symbol to its permanent collection. From the museum’s site: “MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design has acquired the @ [...]

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That’s the way the Times describes it, which I found somewhat surprising.  I’ll have to read the opinion, but it sounds like the ruling provides Google with something like a DMTA-ish notice-and-takedown regime without absolving those who purchase trademarked terms from direct liability.  I’d welcome any insights by those more familiar with the French ECJ [...]

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While teaching secondary liability and fair use issues in my cyberlaw course in recent weeks, I’ve been struck by an aspect of many of the cases (Sony, Napster, Grokster etc) that we don’t necessarily focus on very often:  that is, the static nature of the fact scenarios under discussion.  In other words, courts have to [...]

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I thought I would say a bit about faculty – the people who teach all those classes in the curriculum. Every law school will tell you that its faculty is excellent, and with justification. Law teaching jobs are sufficiently desirable that law schools generally have many, many qualified applicants for openings. Law [...]

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The FCC’s just-released National Broadband Plan has so far failed to catch the public imagination, important and much-needed though it may be.  The problem may be branding.  Google Fiber – the prospect of certain American cities being selected as test beds for a new high-speed Internet service from the Drs. of Don’t-Be-Evil – has economic [...]

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I have spent a lot of time this Spring co-chairing an effort at Pitt to restructure some small parts of our curriculum.  Our labors have not yet borne fruit, but one theme – the notion that law students should learn more about alternative modes of dispute resolution (including but not limited to conventional forms of [...]

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Archiving our digital heritage becomes more important each day. We all generate an incredible amount of cultural and social content. As I wrote in my article, Property, Persona, and Preservation, “Before one can access, one must preserve.” Thus, I am happy to see what appears to be an movement towards greater preservation of our digital [...]

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The folks at CITP and many others are quite excited about open government. One specific project, RECAP, looks to open access to court cases. The briefs and opinions of federal courts would be available to the public. Although I tend to laud this effort, I have also started to press on exactly why such access [...]

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Law schools compete for students by touting the strength of their curriculum, and with every school claiming that it is strong in a particular area, it’s sometimes hard to get a handle on whether a particular school really would be better than another for a student interested in, for example, corporate law or environmental law. [...]

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According to today’s New York Times, mutual fund behemoth Vanguard is launching an ad campaign that turns “Vanguard” into a verb.
Curiously, the Times report contains nary a hint of the trademark lawyer’s common anxiety that using a mark as a verb runs the risk of causing a loss of distinctiveness and perhaps even genericide.  Google [...]

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The news media and the blogosphere are awash with reports of Pink Floyd’s victory last Thursday in a lawsuit in England against its label, EMI, over the right to distribute digital downloads of individual tracks from The Floyd’s classic concept album, The Wall.  The band insists that both its artistic vision and, more important, its [...]

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I was re-reading Perfect 10 v Google last night (and Perfect 10 v Visa) in preparaton for a cyberlaw class today and I was struck (again) by the 9th Circuit’s desire to maintain a clear distinction between contributory and vicarious liability in the ISP context.  While noting that the lines between contributory and vicarious liability [...]

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“The president is a person, not a product,” [David Axelrod] was said to tell [Desirée Rogers].  “We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand.”  — New York Times, 3/12/10.
Which recalls:

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