Back in February, I was blogging about some of the expressed preferences of authors of supernatural fiction books in terms of fans suggesting new storylines and making other uses of characters from existing books (eg fan fiction).  Many authors in this genre (eg Stephenie Meyer, Anne Rice, and Charlaine Harris) have made comments on their [...]

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Let’s say you’re the plaintiff in a civil case against a neighbor, an employer, or a company you’ve done business with. And let’s say that you have a Facebook account. The other side believes that some of your Facebook communications might be relevant to the case, so they specifically request access [...]

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Some time back, I planned to post a short review of Bobbi Kwall’s recent book, The Soul of Creativity.  The book summarizes a lot of recent thinking (including her own) about the law of  moral rights and copyright and offers a new framework for adapting US copyright to international moral rights norms.  But Jacqui Lipton [...]

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The NYTimes offers this excellent account of an exhibit that opened recently at a gallery at Carnegie Mellon University:  “Whatever It Takes: Steelers Fan Collections, Rituals, and Obsessions.”
It’s an assembly of unlicensed black-and-gold artifacts that express and embody the passionate relationship between Pittsburghers worldwide and the Steelers’ NFL franchise.  The curator of the exhibit noted that [...]

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That is the title of this article, which does a great job of laying out the pitfalls of what Jonathan Zittrain calls generativity in the context of the Droid. Most people can’t take direct advantage of the generativity themselves, and without a legal framework that gives them rights as consumers they are at the mercy [...]

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I’ve always considered those in the IP field to be lucky in that, at least in recent years, we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of conferences and works-in-progress opportunities.  However, people have also complained that there are too many conferences, particularly of the works-in-progress variety, and that the works-in-progress conferences have become somewhat [...]

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See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

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Concurring Opinions is sponsoring a symposium on Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet, organized by Danielle Citron. There are lots of great commentaries in the 22 posts so far; we may well have matched the Boston Review. I continue doing my poor man’s Nicholas Carr impression at these three posts:
An [...]

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The pivot point in Jill Lepore’s review of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Isabel Wilkerson, 2010) nicely captures something that makes me uncomfortable in some contemporary legal scholarship.  Lepore:
[Wilkerson's] project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about [...]

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A sports law story making the rounds involves the ability of Seminole County high school cheerleaders to wear their cheerleader outfits on game day. Not long ago, the county implemented a stronger dress code that required skirts to be longer than mid-thigh. This code also banned “sexually suggestive” clothing and appeared designed to [...]

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Nice quotation from Sasha Frere-Jones’s current piece in The New Yorker, “Funky Precedent,” about modern musicians who are reviving (curating?) the work of soul, funk, and R&B acts of the 1960s and 1970s, such as James Brown and Otis Redding. He wrestles with the virtues of the modern acts, but concludes:
So why not just let [...]

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