I apologize for being away from Madisonian for so long. Two new health law preps will do that to a guy! Luckily, one of them is on the law of health information technology, so hopefully that will be a new angle for blogging.
As someone who’s done many skeptical pieces on [...]

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Analog: The Resurrection is coming to a store near you. At least it looks that way. The Times reports that vinyl is making a comeback. I happen to have a fair amount of vinyl from when I saved up to buy LPs as a kid. But now companies like Goota Groove are among about 20 [...]

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Right then. My plea for sharing good work on the cloud has failed. I did what professor/nerd types do. I researched a bit more. So I now taunt you with more sharing by me. Christopher Yoo appears to be diving into Ambrosia (as I like to call the cloud). His paper, Cloud Computing: Architectural and [...]

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Instead of cloud how about rain? No, no. Maybe ether? Blast, that’s taken. Ambrosia! Yes that’s it. Ambrosia services. But what are ambrosia services? That’s the same question we should ask about the cloud (I know, I know I succumbed, and rather quickly at that). I do not purport to be able to answer what [...]

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Yet again I say I am back. We’ll see how long it lasts; but as I will be moving closer to work, I am sanguine.
One reason I came to Google was to see what I might be missing. Cafes and more? Sure. But food for me is the tech knowledge that I, a humble unfrozen [...]

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All-World Pittsburgh Steelers free safety Troy Polamalu was fined $10,000 by the National Football League last week.  His offense?  Using a cell phone on the sideline during a game.  The NFL bans the sideline use of personal communication devices by players and coaches during games.  Wouldn’t want anyone to get an unfair advantage.  Troy, however, [...]

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The Internet and “user-generated [amateur and homemade] content” have decimated much of professional porn, but the so-called “Golden Age of Porn” remains — decades later — more than a matter of historical interest.  The copyright owners of two porn “classics,” Debbie Does Dallas and Deep Throat, have settled their differences via a consent decree, each [...]

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Quick, everyone dropout because school will fail you, and you can go create JOBS! Jobs, not Steve but those things we all want and need, are the topic of the year. How do we generate them? What skills do new graduates (and really even us old ones) need? Is the future all digital or are [...]

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via Reddit.

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Interesting YouTube contest circa 2008 — Aimee Mann invited fans to cover one of her songs and upload a video.  A video of the winners is here, but there were plenty of other good versions that didn’t make the cut.  (e.g. this).
Thought I would share it here because:
1) I’m going to be looking at various [...]

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[This is largely a comment to Alfred’s post below, but it’s long and I wanted to include some links so put it here as a separate post.  MC]
Perhaps the lawsuit Alfred discusses below could also be filed under “karma”… Last November, Twin Peaks filed a complaint here in the Northern District of Texas alleging that [...]

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John Morton Blum died yesterday.
Like most of the great Yale historians of the latter 20th century, he was known to students mostly by his last name:  Blum.  Morgan.  Spence.  Kagan.  They weren’t just masterful scholars; they were masterful storytellers, and masterful teachers.
Thirty years after I sat through a semester of lectures on the Progressive Era, [...]

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The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act was signed into law a month ago by President Obama, after the Senate ultimately accepted the House version of the bill. When signing, Obama noted that he had “asked Congress to send me a bill that reforms the outdated patent process, a bill that cuts away the red [...]

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Trademark scholars, take note of a trade name that could have — but did not — become generic for something truly awful, and at the instance of Thomas Edison no less.  Google, Inc. worries about consumers using “to google” as a verb.  George Westinghouse had other things to fry.  Or so Edison claimed.
In the wake [...]

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From the Shanghai Daily News:
A HONG Kong design student’s tribute to Steve Jobs that generated a buzz online following the death of the co-founder of Apple last week is not original, the teenager said yesterday.
Jonathan Mak, 19, said he was not the first to come up with the design that fits Jobs’ silhouette into the [...]

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Much of the media blitz surrounding the death of Steve Jobs focused not only on amazing Apple products (AAP) that he shepherded to the market, and not only on what an inspirational, visionary leader he became, but also on How Can We Find More People Like Steve?
Steve Jobs, visionary leader that he was, thought about [...]

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I’ve just posted a draft of a book chapter on amateur creativity and digital games: Minecraft as Web 2.0.
I’m not sure whether or not this is a “law” paper, which means that it probably is not.   The footnotes are certainly not the sort I do in my legal writing — I was asked to [...]

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As an IP guy, one of my long-time interests is the intersection between IP rights and the social and cultural institutions that IP rights enable (and at times, disable).
What should we make of this essay, in Salon?
Its argument is essentially this:  The so-called “Creative Class,” the tier of knowledge workers who were going to drive [...]

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The IPKat has published a request for suggestions: scholarship about and scholars who study the economics of intellectual property and intellectual property law from a non-US perspective.
Read the post here, and send your suggestions to Jeremy at the address listed.
My own list would like start with folks such as Peter Drahos, Carlos Correia, and Annette [...]

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But as the IPKat reports, quoting a press release announcing a new judgment from the European Court of Justice,
A system of licences for the broadcasting of football matches which grants broadcasters territorial exclusivity on a Member State basis and which prohibits television viewers from watching the broadcasts with a decoder card in other Member States [...]

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