(NB: This rather longish post is cross-posted at Terra Nova, where the average readers are a bit less erudite about copyright law than present company.  Apologies if it gets a bit pedantic/pedestrian.)
Legal commentators in the blogosphere (e.g. Nic Suzor, Technollama, Rebecca Tushnet, Venkat & Eric) have already offered some initial thoughts on the Ninth Circuit [...]

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I don’t usually write about politics in my blog posts (or otherwise) for a variety of reasons. I’ll make an exception for this NY Times article in which many people lament that the lame duck congress has no business making important decisions for our country.
My reaction is exactly the opposite – it is during the [...]

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For those of you who follow Crazy Frog on YouTube, here’s the seasonal Last Christmas video…

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Google’s Ngram viewer provides endless amusement.   (The project is explained here, with a bonus WKRP reference for good measure!)  I searched the database for “intellectual property,” “copyright,” “patent,” and “trademark” to see what I could find about word-frequency.  The results:
Intellectual property:

Copyright:

Patent:

Trademark:

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With thanks to one of my Canadian students for forwarding this to me, it appears that the the Supreme Court of Canada will soon be deciding a case which will determine whether hyperlinks may constitute publication for the purposes of defamation law, such that a person who publishes a hyperlink would be potentially liable in [...]

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Don’t worry, it’s not another prolix post from me, just commentary on Jack Goldsmith’s Seven Thoughts on Wikileaks and Lovink & Riemens’s Twelve theses on WikiLeaks. (And here’s an FAQ for those confused by the whole controversy.)

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So in my continuing quest to complete the Harry Potter series of books before watching the new movie, I’m plugging through Book 7 now.  I started wondering, though, what would happen if a real high school decided to name its houses after those in Harry Potter ie Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin?  Would there be [...]

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Thanks to Mike and all the other folks for having me here- I look forward to being a regular contributor.  For my first post, I want to note a few lawsuits filed by Intellectual Ventures, probably the largest (by patent holdings) “non-practicing entity” (or NPE, or more pejoratively “patent troll”). Thanks to Dennis Crouch for [...]

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I’m delighted to note another addition to the roster of Madisonian.net permabloggers:  Professor Michael Risch, who teaches at Villanova University School of Law.
Michael writes about IP, with an emphasis on patents and trade secrets.  He joined the Villanova faculty this year after a stint at the West Virginia University College of Law, and before starting [...]

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The metaphor in the post title isn’t mine, but it was the first thing that came to mind as I read through Google’s announcement today of its newest copyright policy initiatives.  All told:  In order to get out of the copyright compliance business, Google is getting much more heavily involved in the copyright compliance business.  [...]

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With a tremendous debt of gratitude to all of those in IP and cyberlaw circles who have helped me along the way with this project, I wanted to let you know that my book Internet Domain Names, Trademarks, and Free Speech has come out this week in hard copy and eBook formats.  Publisher website details [...]

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As the EU antitrust probe of Google begins, it’s a fitting time for a documentary about the role of search in society. I’ll be appearing one on CBC Radio on Dec. 5; here’s some background on the program, called “Engineering Search: The story of the algorithm that changed the world.” It “tracks the [...]

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Two interesting items in the global press today. First, a harrowing account of copyright enforcement in Argentina:
On the list of countries with the most draconian laws on authors’ rights, Argentina occupies 6th place. . . . The restrictive nature of the intellectual property law number 11.723 brought things to a head. Until that [...]

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