Imagine you are a fisherman and haul in a catch with fish that are protected and that would get you in trouble. Quick! Hide it! Deny it! etc., right? Nope. The Times reports that a partnership among fishermen and the Nature Conservancy meant that this fisherman reported the catch so the overall area could thrive. [...]

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A New Wave is happening in publishing. Now I hear New Wave and think of the British invasion of the 80s. Today the new wave is happening in publishing in the U.S. And it may be that creative folks will not need the central publishing industries to reach their audiences. For the dream of interactive [...]

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This is the second post in a series looking at the Stop Online Piracy Act. In Part I of this series I looked at Section 102 and concluded that it was largely unobjectionable. Section 102 essentially provides the DOJ with supplemental provisional remedies it can use against sites that are violating U.S. criminal laws but [...]

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Many IP profs watch legislation, and we write about the way proposed laws are good or bad or wise or imprudent. I think the way the IP and online space are going will require more on the technology side. For example, the recent debates on the PROTECT IP Bill and SOPA had some interesting comments [...]

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The tech blogosphere is abuzz with discussion of yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261. (Mainstream news sites seem not to have noticed; the New York Times website front page mentions the impending sale of Yahoo, but not SOPA.) A good deal of that discussion refers to SOPA [...]

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On the eve of this year’s renewal of a college football rivalry that is meaningless to everyone except those who play and some who watch, Harvard has already one-upped Yale.
Yale’s Freshman College Council (FCC) designed a t-shirt to sell to students.  As per tradition, the shirt mocks the other school.  This year’s version, in its [...]

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This is an interesting story on a gallery exhibition of “24 hours of photos uploaded to Flickr.” It reminds me a bit of the Bright Eyes album “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn,” but in reverse: the very act of printing them all out seems to turn the creative efforts of millions into a [...]

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For all of the abstraction that drives intellectual property law, the conversation can sure turn earthy.
Whether gardeners create copyrightable works is a question that produced a provocative opinion earlier this year in Kelley v. Chicago Park District.
The musician/producer Brian Eno has a new talk up here about creators as gardeners, as part of a series [...]

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Ok so October is over, as is daylight savings, and cybersecurity awareness month. But, like all awareness months, I say why think about the issue for just that time? Nay, let us consider cybersecurity more often. Perhaps now. To start I offer Stefan Savage. Stefan is a professor of computer science and engineering at [...]

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Yes there is still more ambrosia, err cloud, to consider. I will keep this one brief. My colleague, Patrick Ryan, was a scholar in residence and now an Adjunct Professor in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at CU Boulder. He also works with me on Google’s policy team. Ronak Merchant, Sarah Falvey, and Patrick have a [...]

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“[2] It is undisputed that Liberty Media is a distributor of lawful, albeit hardcore, pornography, and the Motion Picture is itself hardcore pornography. Notably, it is a matter of first impression in the First Circuit, and indeed is unsettled in many circuits, whether pornography is in fact entitled to protection against copyright infringement. Copyright protection [...]

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With thanks to my colleague, Cassandra Robertson, for making this recommendation to me, I would suggest that those of us teaching TM law might assign our students the Scott Westerfeld novel, So Yesterday. It’s an easy and quick read which gives a fun and somewhat cynical view of consumers’ and business’s relationships with trademarks, branding, [...]

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Here are some pointed questions about science, innovation, and technological progress:
First: What can be done, consistent with military security, and with the prior approval of the military authorities, to make known to the world as soon as possible the contributions which have been made during our war effort to scientific knowledge?
The diffusion of such knowledge [...]

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Why should copyright law and policy care specially about the interests of professional creators and artists, as a class of people distinguishable from amateur creators and artists, from “ordinary” consumers and users, fans, and so forth, and from the mass of undifferentiated creators, re-mixers, and transformers?
This question has been lurking in the back of my [...]

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“If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain.
If you’re not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain.”
Bay Area radio struggles to have decent music. I tend to cycle through the few stations that may have something of interest. A recent addition to the dial focuses on 60s. 70s, and 80s. As a competitor [...]

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