In preparation for an upcoming conference paper, I’ve been doing some research into the role of intent in copyright law, particularly in the context of direct infringement.  I understand that Steven Hetcher may have presented a paper along these lines at IPSC this year, but I was one of the unfortunate few who missed the [...]

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According to Yahoo Sports, Florida State University has decided it wants to be the only Seminoles. FSU has apparently sent a demand letter to a high school 50years after learning that the school calls its teams the Seminoles.

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Where intermediaries and bots rule, de facto fair use (or at least tolerated use) may end up being whatever slips by the anti-piracy program. Experimenter Scott Smitelli reveals the following:
It is quite possible to thwart the YouTube Content ID system, but some methods mangle the song too much to be used in anything [...]

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Everybody hates a patent troll. But the broader economy of Web 2.0 is not exactly a landscape of virtue rewarded and failure punished. One of the recent put-downs of Paul Allen’s patent lawsuit inadvertently puts that fact into high relief.
Describing Allen’s gambit, Dean Takahashi writes:
[I]t looks like Interval patented [...]

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If this song can reach just one person…
(Via The SprigMan)

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As the 2010-2011 academic year gets underway, congratulations are in order for several Madisonian.net contributors who have new faculty appointments.  In alpha order:
Brett Frischmann has moved to Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University.
Rob Heverly has moved to Albany Law School
and Josh Sarnoff has moved to DePaul University College of Law.
May the blogging continue.

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At Info/Law, Tim Armstrong has a terrific post that surveys the current state of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A snippet:
I can’t help noticing, however, that since the high-water mark of 2001 or thereabouts, the progression of developments under the DMCA has almost uniformly been in the direction of recognizing greater rights for users and [...]

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Here’s a fascinating visualization of soft drink brands, showing how Coke and Pepsi dominate about 74% of the market via a kaleidoscope of brands. The creator of the visual argues that the industry’s concentration is “obscured from us by the appearance of numerous choices on retailer shelves,” which Steve Hannaford “refers to . . [...]

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Here is an outlier post that uses the law review manuscript submission “system” as the starting point for a new model of manuscript submission and review at social science journals.  Note the post’s description of how the law review world works:
The idea stems from the law review system in which people submit their papers to [...]

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The semester starts tomorrow morning, and I am teaching Trademark Law this Fall.  Happily for me, the NYTimes Magazine published this engaging review of the counterfeit sneaker industry in Putian, in China.   The piece features this wonderful quote:
As one Chinese salesman selling counterfeits in Beijing told me: ‘The shoes are original. It’s just the brands [...]

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My in-box today featured two links, each of which is all the more striking because of its juxtaposition with the other.
This piece from the German publication Der Spiegel, “The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion?,” summarizes a recent book by the German historian Eckhard Höffner.
Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany [...]

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Having written a long post on the topic, I just wanted to recommend a few pithier takes on the issue:
Bill McGeveran, “the Google defection:”
Google’s defection from the supporters of an open internet changes the political dynamics for the worse, opens the door to creation of a second-class internet for non-corporate content, and tries to [...]

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I recently noticed some publicity about a court case in Italy involving a clothing line using the trademark “GC by George Clooney” which has no affiliation with the popular actor George Clooney.  Looking at this online write up of the dispute (source here), it strikes me that one could construct a neat exam hypothetical in [...]

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The New York Times highlighted the recent opinion of the Third Circuit in Bimbo Bakeries v. Botticella, upholding a preliminary injunction against a former senior employee of Bimbo Bakeries and keeping him from assuming a position at rival baker Hostess.  The former employee, Botticella, was accused of misappropriation of trade secrets.  The injunction was issued and [...]

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I will be attending the 2010 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference next week at UC Berkeley, as an observer rather than a presenter. I’m looking forward to the conference: seeing lots of friends, listening to presentations, fishing for great new papers. But I have a curmudgeon’s view of much of the working-paper-conference phenomenon. [...]

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The NYTimes reports that knockoffs are going down market:
After years of knocking off luxury products like $2,800 Louis Vuitton handbags, criminals are discovering there is money to be made in faking the more ordinary — like $295 Kooba bags and $140 Ugg boots. In California, the authorities recently seized a shipment of counterfeit Angel Soft [...]

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Once again the mass media are shocked – shocked! – to discover that today’s college and high school students have no respect for their sources, for their teachers, for their forebears, for the difficulty of writing, and ultimately for themselves. They plagiarize, willy-nilly, just like they download and Facebook (that’s a verb) and “try [...]

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