It is an old question (at least in Internet time): What is online privacy worth? Yet there seems to be a new wrinkle. Not just the Web sites or search companies want to track what one surfs. ISPs are now in the Web tracking game and stand to make “several dollars per month” per customer. […]

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Just watch. It is a little over ten minutes and fun. Basic premise: some birds you many not like may be rather smart.

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Wired reports that the FBI subpoenaed the Internet Archive and demanded that Brewster Kahle (the Archive’s founder) provide records about one of the library’s registered users, asking for the user’s name, address and activity on the site. The FBI used a National Security Letter (example) to make the request. As Wired explains this type of […]

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A U.S. District Judge has enjoined a defendant from using a term for its business. That is not an unusual result. The one part of the order that may be of note is that the defendant is not allowed to purchase ad words using the plaintiff’s mark and the defendant must use negative adwords […]

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The Computer History Museum “is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computing history.” A current exhibit is a working version of Charles Babbage’s difference engine which is seen as a 19th Century computer design that was never built for a host of reasons from personality to claims that it could not be built with […]

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Last week Thomas Jefferson had Professor James Hackney of Northeastern University School of Law as our last speaker in our colloquium series. His talk focused on his book, Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity (featured at this past year’s AALS conference) and about his next steps on this topic. […]

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CNET reports that PARC (formerly Xerox Parc) the folks who have had a large hand in “laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing” have invented vanishing ink. For those interested in the environmental side of things, it seems that making ONE SHEET of paper requires “about […]

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Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, was released today. There is much to recommend in the book and too much to address well in a blog post. Still, having finished it, I can say that it offers many insights.
In short, as Zittrain explains in three principles: […]

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The Madisionian Mobblog comes to a partial end today. The blog will now return to a mix of pieces on law, technology, and society. Nonetheless, there may be additonal posts on the topic so stay tuned for those.
In addition, I want to take a moment and thank all involved with this event. I had a […]

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In reading the posts in this mobblog one thing comes through: right now many factors push on law and legal education. One could say the game is over. One could say stay the course. One could say radical change is required. Whether such positions are accurate or apply to all depends on the facts. Nonetheless, […]

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Several posts have grappled with the basic structure of law schools. Al evokes the idea of a mini-university. Nancy has offered that a required pre-law curriculum would improve law schools as students would have better interdisciplinary training and better writing skills. Mike has asked “Why not offer undergraduate and graduate legal education programs in […]

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The idea of what is the social vision of law schools has permeated many of the posts here. These views remind me of a class I took in high school called Individual Humanities. We read The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, St. Joan, Don Juan, Faust, Don Quixote, Man and Superman, and Huckleberry Finn. We also […]

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Some posts in this series have suggested that business school models or integration with some business schools would make sense for a law school. That seems like specialist training. One could make an argument that intellectual property, health law, and other certificate programs try to offer ways for a student to graduate with greater depth […]

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Langdell, MacCrate, U.S. News, Carnegie, these names and more influence the structure of and debates about legal education. Recent attention to legal education has been strong. Schools are starting to experiment with different approaches to teaching law. Yet, as a professor who also has an interest in institution building, it occurred to me that legal […]

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In my few years as a professor I have been fortunate to have mentors who allow me to chew their ears and then offer their views on the many aspects of being a law professor. Although the issues and insights vary, one topic “What Kind of Institution Do We Want A Law School To Be?” […]

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As Mike Madison has noted almost two years ago, in general innovations in law school curriculum have not kept pace with business schools. That may be changing. Washington & Lee has made a splash by changing its curriculum to an experiential model. Irvine says it will embrace it. Vanderbilt, not to mention Harvard, […]

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Some may remember the actress Kristin Davis as the good girl from Sex and the City. Well good compared to the characters around her. The film based on the show is due to be released on May 30. And just in time pictures of someone naked and a sex video that are allegedly of Ms. […]

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As many who read this blog probably already know, Arthur C. Clarke died today at the age of 90. Given the length and breadth of his career other sources will have many views of his work. I personally recall his general displeasure at the millennium celebrations. Of course having writen a little thing called 2001: […]

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Law.com has a good summary of projects seeking to make opinions, statutes, and other legal materials free. The history of these efforts goes back to the early 90s, but the recent changes may the ones to threaten the big shots. According to the article Public Resource now offers “virtually all of the Federal Reporter second […]

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So the RIAA may be subject to a class action suit in Oregon. As the folks at Recording Industry v. The People note the 109 page complaint begins by invoking the RIAA’s statement that it sometimes catches dolphins when fishing. It is a bold way to show the possible callousness of the RIAA and MediaSentry […]

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