My attention wanders at times from the hard-nosed realities of the business of IP law to the slight soppy yet deeply resonant character of art and creation.  The wonderful website Letters of Note introduced me to a letter from the photographer Ansel Adams that includes this gem:
Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the [...]

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With thanks to Andrea Matwyshyn for bringing this to my attention, here’s an interesting article from the Seattle Times suggesting that teens are spending less time on Facebook and more on Twitter because of concerns about privacy (too many friends of friends) and the chance of unexpected communications with idols.  Interesting reading.
(URL: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017372375_tweetingteens30.html in case [...]

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#librarianscode .  Just released:  the newest Best Practices in Fair Use statement from American University’s Center for Social Media (in the School of Communication) and Washington College of Law: The Code of Best Practices for Academic and Research Libraries. The website  has generous amounts of background information and context.  I’ve been a member of [...]

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Megan and I have blogged recently (me less articulately than her) about the nature of creation in various different milieus.  I was taken today by Charles Baxter’s tongue-in-cheek description of the difference between poets and prose writers, in terms of poetry involving more flashes of insight and prose requiring more perspiration.  Some of my favorite [...]

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To follow Mike’s shift toward anti-competitiveness (and beverages):
Dublin Dr. Pepper and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group have settled their trademark licensing dispute and Dublin Dr. Pepper, the beverage darling of the Lonestar State, is no more.
Dublin Dr. Pepper is a Texas favorite.  This original Dr. Pepper was created in 1891, and its birthday is still celebrated [...]

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More on how the law defines things, this time for anti-competitive rather than pro-competitive purposes …
“Tequila” is registered appellation of origin for spirits produced in five Mexican states. A storm is now brewing over proposals in Mexico sponsored by the tequila industry that would limit the use of the word “agave” — the genus of [...]

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As reported originally here in Texas Monthly, and most recently here by the TM Daily Post, Robert Earl Keen has taken a creative approach to settling a score (not a lawsuit) with Toby Keith.  (Additional interviews with Keen here and here.)
In an interview with Texas Monthly, Robert Earl Keen discussed the release of his new album, [...]

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What makes an Oreo an Oreo?
So many IP things to blog about, so much to catch up on … I’ll start with this:
If an Oreo isn’t round and black and white and crazy sweet, is it still an Oreo? What is the essence of Oreoness?
What the Chinese team at Kraft figured out is that an [...]

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Megan’s post about copyright and the muse reminded me to get back to this post that I started to draft a couple of days ago and never got back to because my computer crashed.
As I mentioned in my comment on Megan’s post I’ve been reading a lot lately about the act of creating literary works.  [...]

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On behalf of the editors of JOLTI at Case Western Reserve, some readers may be interested in the following:
Call For Submissions
Case Western Reserve’s Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet is searching for a final article to publish in its spring edition. Any scholarly work related to cyber law, intellectual property law [...]

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In my Boston Review piece on SOPA, I mentioned a sad story about a drawn-out copyright lawsuit’s effect on an entrepreneur. I should have also brought up a whole book on the problem of IP overenforcement, Jason Mazzone’s Copyfraud. Important on the day it was published, it’s particularly salient now that Congress is considering expanding [...]

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I have been thinking a lot about authorship lately.  Perhaps this is because I am learning my first instrument and trying to write my first song.  Or because I failed miserably at a write-a-novel-in-a-month exercise last November.  Or because I am in the middle of a wrestling match with an article.
An interesting episode of the show [...]

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A few years ago I tried to express some anxieties about the rise of a remix culture that valued technology and novelty over timeless content. Those worries resurfaced while I was reading Rob Horning’s recent reflections on his own defensively reactionary tastes:
[T]he key issue is to think about why we choose novelty over immersion. [...]

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America’s bias toward “negative” conceptualizations of rights is on full display in Vint Cerf’s opinion piece in the NY Times entitled “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right.” Cerf states:
[A] report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had “become an indispensable tool for realizing [...]

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[Updated January 15, 2012:  I changed the post title, because I am still learning that search engines dislike non-literal titles.  The original title was "'W"'Stands for Infringement."]
An emerging by-product of Pittsburgh’s claim to be a new entertainment capital (see blog post here – the claim is not entirely without merit, as a lawyer might say) [...]

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David Brooks had an interesting column earlier this week in which he asked, “Why aren’t there more liberals in America?” According to Gallup Poll numbers, about 41% of Americans self-identify as conservative, versus 36% moderate and 21% liberal. This strikes Brooks as a bit of a puzzle, since the financial crisis and the economic downturn [...]

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Serious snow has yet to appear in many US states this winter, but it’s never too soon to dig out an old post about parking chairs. Long-time and sharp-eyed Madisonian readers will remember this post about said chairs, which was mostly an effort to extend the life of that same post in its native Pittsblog [...]

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Another thing I picked up while auditing a publishing course over the break was the statement by an instructor that “If you don’t copyright your manuscript, it is in the public domain.”
Obviously, this is incorrect on a number of levels, and again illustrates how difficult copyright law is to understand even for people who are [...]

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The Spring semester is about to start, and in my world that means that I will be teaching Copyright Law again.  Every year, like many IP teachers, I look for one or two contemporary examples of copyright in action to prime the students’ pumps, so to speak, during the first day of class, or two. [...]

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Katharine Gelber offers a thoughtful review of The Offensive Internet in the Australian Review. (David Levine conducted an interview with the book’s editors, Martha Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, available here.) I contributed an essay to this volume, and I found both the other essays in it and the conference it was based on very [...]

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