I’ve been auditing a magazine writing/publishing course run through my local rec center over the break, partly for fun and partly to find out how professional and semi-professional writing teachers who are not copyright lawyers understand the nature of authors’ rights.
I wasn’t necessarily surprised at the number of inaccuracies in the lecture on copyright law.  [...]

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I’m not a First Amendment scholar, nor am I an employment discrimination scholar. I did, however, go through a hiring process twice, and this decision by the Eighth Circuit surprised the heck out of me. The gist of the opinion is that a jury must decide if a professor who was not hired at a [...]

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Back in October, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell explained the economics of video games as his company sees it. The Geekwire article is worth the read. For now, I’ll point out that he admits “We don’t understand what’s going on” and uses the language of co-creation of value, which I happen to believe is the current [...]

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OK, that title is a riff on a line from The Player. I loved it when the film came out and still do. It says so much of nothing, but captures a vibe that persists. Yet again it seems the film industry is in trouble, or rather doldrums. The Times reports that this year’s box [...]

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So, I read that Louis Vuitton is suing Warner Brothers for the line “Careful, that is a Louis Vuitton” in the movie “The Hangover II.” This got my hackles up – after all this IS a nominative use, unlike Bella’s Twighlight Jacket, and it is a non-trademark use – a description of the bag that’s presumably [...]

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Some may remember Trading Places and the importance of the crop report on frozen concentrated orange juice to that movie. It turns out USDA commodities reports and their data are still important. For example, the Times reports that when the USDA decided to cut a program that produced “dozens of long-standing statistical reports on a [...]

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As Deano and others might say Baby, It’s Cold Outside. And, heating costs are no joke. Neither is about $250 for a thermostat. Nonetheless, data and networks are changing the way we manage heating. As Wired reports, Tony Faddell, founder of Nest Labs makes this compelling point:
Untold tons of carbon were being pumped into the [...]

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Some months ago I mentioned a textbook called Networks, Crowds, and Markets to Susan Crawford (hat tip for the book recommendation: Nicklas Lundblad). After I told her how the text helps explain the basics about networks, game theory, and more, she said that I had to tell people about the book. So now I am. [...]

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We have received a cease and desist letter demanding that we change the name of our IP center from “Center for Law and Intellectual Property” because it infringes the rights of Fordham University’s “Center on Law and Information Policy.”  The letter also demands that we not use the acronym CLIP whatsoever in reference to our [...]

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The Supreme Court heard oral argument in Mayo v. Prometheus Labs.  The case will hopefully provide some guidance on the patenting of medical diagnostics, but because the patent suffers from some real drawbacks, I’m not so sure.  I’ll explain why below. If you are interested in more detail, my 2008 article “Everything is Patentable” discusses [...]

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David Segal’s most recent NYTimes foray into the pathologies of legal education — “The Price to Play Its Way,” about the history, operation, and influence of the ABA/law school faculty accreditation process on the structure of law schools — is, on the whole, a pretty good account of the macro problems facing American law schools, [...]

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Once upon a time, I was publishing or contributing to five blogs at the same time:  madisonian.net, Pittsblog (about arts, tech, and economic development in Pittsburgh), Blog-Lebo (goings on in my Pittsburgh suburb), a faculty blog for the University of Pittsburgh School of Law (something I started and wrote when I was the Research Dean), [...]

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The House Judiciary Committee held a markup hearing today on the Stop Online Piracy Act, H.R. 3261, the bill that is quickly shaping up to be this year’s big copyright battle. I’ve written two prior posts on the bill, Part I and Part II.
This is a good opportunity to recap where I came out at [...]

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SOPA — the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, and its cousins and substitutes — has been all over the news recently.  Proponents rely heavily on rhetorical appeals to the idea that the US must act aggressively to stop “theft” of intellectual property by “rogue” website operators.  That “theft” business has been endlessly and repeatedly critiqued by analysts of [...]

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I really enjoyed this OTM story on Ian Bogost’s game, CowClicker. The game allowed players to click on a cow, which would moo. It was as easy as hitting the broad side of a barn door with a snow shovel. So far, so Pavlovian. But, as Janet Murray explains, the game changed [...]

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After being burned by an utterly unusable New Yorker archive I purchased a few years ago, I’ve been wary of magazines’ efforts to market archival access. Apparently, magazines are very careful about granting access, too: the Vogue archive will cost $1575 per year for access. A post on the archive by Joshua Gans [...]

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Recent readings and reports turn up some provocative examples of what Brett Frischmann, Kathy Strandburg, and I call cultural commons — institutions that enable the structured sharing of knowledge and information rights and resources. The examples illustrate many of the promises and perils of institutions colored by degrees of openness and closure.
From the New York [...]

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Recent readings and the time of year lead me to two lessons. First, for those of us who can, let’s give to those in need. Second, let’s use science, data, and reason to guide policy. Extreme views for or against modes of farming and issues of the environment lead to mistrust, failures, and, in this [...]

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Last April, I blogged about the Nosal case, which led to the scary result that just about any breach of contract on the internet can potentially be a criminal access to a protected computer. I discuss the case in extensive detail in that post, so I won’t repeat it here. The gist is that employees [...]

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I want to pick up on a topic nicely covered by Greg Lastowka — the recent case involving Bella’s jacket from the movie Twilight. Perhaps you’ve heard of it — the movie, I mean, not the case.
There is a maxim that “Hard Cases Make Bad Law.” Today I want to talk about a lesser used [...]

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