Law professors are spending a lot of time thinking these days about how to bring the practical world of lawyering into the classroom.  Part of the challenge is that the real world of deals simply doesn’t match up with what casebooks and theory predict, so it’s difficult to set a stage that exposes students to [...]

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In a widely-reported development, yesterday the Supreme Court agreed to hear Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Ltd., which challenges the existing framework for assessing the validity of an issued patent.
In a less widely-reported development, yesterday Justice Alito dissented from the denial of certiorari in Harper v. Maverick Recording Co., a case that held a teenager liable [...]

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Today’s NYTimes carries an interesting account of a debate over the alleged ownership of yoga by Hinduism, and the alleged “theft” of yoga by just about everyone else.
Yoga is already rich with the rhetoric of ownership, and in this instance it seems clear that both the Times and the protagonists of its story — particularly [...]

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Soccer’s peculiar systems of justice continue to work out their problems on the world stage.  The Italians, masters of faking injury on the ground, are being upstaged by the Spanish, who appear to have invented new forms of unsportsmanlike conduct while standing — and while touching neither man nor ball.  Is a soccer crime being [...]

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Boise State University has The Blue, its distinctive blue turf football field, which is now covered by a federal trademark registration.  Eastern Washington University now has a red synthetic surface for football. 
The University of Oregon is preparing to take the idea of a distinctive playing surface indoors.  The soon-to-open Matthew Knight Arena, the new home of [...]

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Media studies experts have demonstrated that cheap copy drives local news “it bleeds/it leads” programming decisions. It’s a lot easier to send a reporter to a crime scene than it is to investigate local corruption. The same dynamic explains a surfeit of reality TV:
One of the things that I think is core [...]

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I’ve been interested in the problem of self-reinforcing dominance lately. I’ve written a good deal about this in the area of search engines, but I’ve had less to say of late because I’ve felt that personalization makes it very difficult to study them. But I may be wrong about that; Ben Edelman has [...]

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The School of Communication and Information at Rutgers is planning a major conference to be held April 8-9, 2011.  The conference will cover the cultural, business, legal, and artistic aspects of the videogame and virtual worlds industries — pretty much everything practical and academic about gaming.  If you’d like to spend a couple of days [...]

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With thanks to one of my LL.M. students for sharing this video with me, this is a cute demonstration of one of the differences between rivalrous and nonrivalrous property with respect to copying.
(Nina Paley, Copying Is Not Theft)

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For those who may have missed Ben Zimmer’s article in the NY Times magazine last week about the origins of the term “world wide web”, here’s a link.
Apparently some of the other options for naming the web were “mine of information” and “the information mine”.  The article also speaks of prior literary and scientific allusions [...]

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Via.

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Jacqui pointed to the documents in this case a couple days ago and since then I’ve had a chance to read the argument transcript. Like I said in the comments to Jacqui’s post, I’m not really certain why the court granted cert in this case.  However, I did want to share my reactions to some [...]

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If you haven’t heard of the Cooks Source story yet, read this post at TechnoLlama (though you can find it retold many other places).  Andres adds an important and thoughtful note — he’s building on his prior observations about Anonymous (and that ties in with observations by Solove, Shirky, & others about the ups and [...]

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For all those cyberlaw/First Amendment profs following the “violent video games” case that arose recently in California, it was argued yesterday in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Podcasts and court documents are available here.  Judgment is expected sometime in the spring.  (And sadly Schwarzenegger is no longer the Gubernator…)

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2.5 MB PDF (CC BY-NC 3.0 & text is searchable)
Without a doubt, what I’m enjoying most about writing this book is giving it away.  Many thanks to Yale Press for letting me do that.
If I can get a cleaner version, I’ll put it at the same URL with the same file name. Cleaner version up [...]

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Copyright mavens are familiar with Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990), in which Sheldon Abend pursued the producers of the Hitchcock classic Rear Window all the way to the Supreme Court, and successfully, arguing that the re-release of the film infringed the renewal term of the copyright in Cornell Woolrich’s short story It Had [...]

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While I’m on a sports roll this morning, check out this quotation (NYT) from University of Oregon Ducks football coach Chip Kelly, after his team rolled over USC and took over the number 1 spot in the BCS rankings.  Oregon
showed in one of college football’s hallowed venues what many have been reluctant to acknowledge: that [...]

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I go on here occasionally about whether the jurisprudence of sport teaches anything about other kinds of jurisprudence, and vice versa.  A football (soccer) match yesterday in the English Premier League offers a relevant nugget for thought.
Manchester United was leading Tottenham Hotspur 1-0, late in the match, and Spurs were not playing the game as [...]

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