A ton of virtual ink has been spilled in recent days over the IP issues surrounding tattoos, Mike Tyson, plastic surgery, and body modification.   Just in the legal academic blogosphere, see here,  here, and of course here.  Perhaps it is time for a different minor topic.
Out in Colorado, the nose of Hall of Fame [...]

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Saturday’s Champions League final between Manchester United and FC Barcelona is being touted in many American media, at least, as a showdown between two of the sport’s superstars:  Wayne Rooney of Man U, and Lionel Messi of Barça.
As The Economist points out, however, Barça’s success and Messi’s success at Barça are due at least as much [...]

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Daniel Solove is garnering a lot of positive attention for an essay he published in the Chronicle of Higher Education to promote his new book.
It was republished in part here, here and here and no doubt other places as well.  The thesis of the essay is that privacy is important even to people who have [...]

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The fracas in Wisconsin this Spring over collective bargaining for public employees had (and has) a variety of interesting spillovers, among them this interesting post from a UW faculty member reflecting on the future role of “public” in “public higher education.   The bottom line isn’t really new; it is merely a reminder of things that we, [...]

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Check out paragraphs 15 through 17 of David Nimmer’s declaration on behalf of Warner Brothers in the Mike Tyson tattoo case. Nimmer admits in paragraph 15 that he “used to” think tattoos were eligible for copyright protection and “even posited one line to that effect in a footnote” in his copyright treatise. But now he [...]

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Musician Jonathan Coulton made over $500,000 last year by cutting out the middleman and selling his songs directly online. (The zombie ballad “re: Your Brains” is one of his classics.) The NPR Planet Money team featured a debate on whether Coulton’s success was a fluke, or presaged a new golden age for [...]

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Free as a verb, not as an adjective.  David Dobbs has an engaging article about publishing and modern science up at Neuron Culture.
It begins:
On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of [...]

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That’s the name of this college kid crafted music blog. Enjoy!

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A small corner of the world of search took another step toward personalization today, as Bing moved to give users the option to personalize their results by drawing on data from their Facebook friends:
Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This [...]

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Copyright lawyers are looking forward to the soon-to-begin trial in Cambridge University Press v. Becker, the case challenging reproduction and distribution practices regarding course reserve and classroom materials at Georgia State University.  The legal issue remaining in the case is the university’s contributory liability for alleged primary infringement, but ground down to its essence, the case [...]

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I just came across Powell v. State, an appellate case from the criminal court system in Alabama, dated April 29, 2011.  The citation is 2011 WL 1605067.
Here are the facts, as recited by the court:
The appellant, Johnson Augustus Powell, was convicted of one count of unlawful transport of articles containing sounds transferred without the consent [...]

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I have just finished reading John Tehranian’s new book, Infringement Nation:  Copyright 2.0 and You, which I mentioned in a previous post.
While there are a lot of books about digital copyright law already out there, this one is definitely worth a read as it tackles a number of issues differently – or with a [...]

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When I’ve been away from the blog for awhile, getting back in the saddle can be a challenge. Fortunately, Andy Samberg / The Dudes / Lonely Island have released a new video custom-made for copyright and trademark folks. This was the SNL Digital Short from last Saturday night, and it’s now up on YouTube.
Nb.: NSFW, [...]

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I’ve often wondered whether it is technically correct to refer to intellectual property infringement as a species of tort law.  We tend not to equate torts with IP in common parlance, but there are certainly similarities, notably with property-based torts like trespass and conversion.  Maybe we don’t use the tort terminology because it runs up [...]

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