I spent the last couple of days at the Stanford Law Review symposium called The Future of Patents: Bilski and Beyond. I moderated one panel while Mark Lemley presented our article Life After Bilski, which Mark, Ted Sichelman, Polk Wagner, and I wrote. It will be published in the Stanford Law Review’s symposium issue. (If [...]

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There will be an online symposium on the new book Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property at Concurring Opinions this Tuesday to Thursday (Feb. 1 to Feb. 3, 2011). This book, edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, is available for free download here, and can also be purchased here. [...]

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Facebook has announced security changes at its site. First, it is enabling secure browsing over https for its site, including a setting in your account settings to make this your Facebook default. According to the Facebook blog post:
Facebook currently uses HTTPS whenever your password is sent to us, but today we’re expanding its usage [...]

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The LA Times Technology Blog reports that Facebook has the newest use for its users’ data, postings, and “content”: let advertisers use that content to advertise to users’ friends (Facebook calls them “sponsored stories”). According to the paper:
Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories feature will allow companies to take any user content — such as status [...]

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Last year I had the good fortune to be invited to participate in a paper symposium about fair use. The symposium was published late in 2010 as volume 57, no. 3 of the Journal of the Copyright Society, edited with extraordinary grace by a great team:  editors Stacey Dogan at Boston University and Jay Dougherty [...]

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I’ve been watching (and haven’t quite finished) the 2009 documentary, Tales from the Script, which I find very interesting from an IP point of view.  It’s basically a collection of interviews and interesting/frank war stories from Hollywood writers about their experiences preparing, selling, and working with producers and directors on scripts for movies and TV [...]

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A recent article on Kinect hackers mentions the ease with which the new Microsoft game platform can drive real world devices:
When Kinect appeared on store shelves, Adafruit Industries, an online seller of DIY electronics kits, offered $1,000, then $3,000, to the first person who could analyze Kinect’s innards and share the information with developers [...]

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Facebook is the site many of us love to hate – at least privacy-wise. The reason is simple – it skirts the many lines that appear when a site is designed to share information with others, exploit large membership numbers for revenue, yet supposedly give users some control over what gets shared.
There are a lot [...]

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For those of you following the various legal issues surrounding the founding of Facebook, it appears that the two Harvard grads who originally claimed that Facebook stole their idea for a social network and hampered their efforts to get to the market first are now seeking to reopen the settlement they agreed to some years [...]

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One year in 2 minutes from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

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After 13 months of use, my Android One started failing badly. I took it to a Verizon office and was told that a “hard boot” might fix the glitches; it would wipe out all my data, but since that was backed up by Google, this wouldn’t be a problem. I alerted the Verizon person to [...]

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I have a new paper up at SSRN:  “Beyond Invention: Patent as Knowledge Law.”
The abstract:
The decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Bilski v. Kappos, concerning the legal standard for determining patentable subject matter under the American Patent Act, is used as a starting point for a brief review of historical, philosophical, [...]

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More fun with the Google Ngram viewer: “Innovation” and “creativity”
 

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I just saw this image on amazon.com which immediately brought to mind Raiders of the Lost Ark and, to some extent, Romancing the Stone. Anyone think there could be potential problems here with copyright or trademark?

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American law professors are converging on San Francisco later this week for the annual AALS conference.  I won’t be there.  But as a Bay Area native, long-time resident, and frequent visitor I have a couple of tips for those who will be.  And those tips have to do with … food.
Given the ongoing brouhaha over [...]

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