Wired editor Chris Anderson, in a book entitled Free, in passages defining “free lunch” and the “TANSTAAFL” acronym, decides to get his authorial words for free from Wikipedia and to include them in Free without attribution. Guess what? Turns out that when it comes to lifting other people’s writing, there’s no such thing [...]

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I’ll be talking next Friday at a conference at Columbia on the effects of User-Generated Content.  Here’s the overview:
The rapid increase of user-generated content on the Internet is a source of concern for traditional media firms. Will the YouTubes, Facebooks, Flickrs, Second Lifes and the HuffPos take away significant audience segments on a sustaining basis? [...]

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So the Rescuecom.com case was just decided.  I will have to parse it carefully, but my initial impression is that it brings the Second Circuit into harmony with the other federal circuits.  As I argued in my Google’s Law article, I think this is the right result on the doctrinal issue of trademark use (I [...]

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If you do any significant internet-related research, chances are you know who danah boyd is.  If not, there’s a Wikipedia page with a run-down of relevant details and links.  What I did not know until just now is that her PhD thesis on teens and social software is posted online.  You can find a link [...]

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Evan Brown has a recap of some recent CFAA cases here.  I’ve been following CFAA litigation for awhile and it seems that (putting to one side the Lori Drew conviction) courts may now be getting a better handle on how to interpret a badly drafted statute.
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Mira Burri-Nenova has just posted a working paper on SSRN: “User Created Content in Virtual Worlds and Cultural Diversity ”
User created content (UCC) has often been celebrated as a grassroots cultural revolution that as a genuine expression of creativity, localism and non-commercialism can arguably also cater for a sustainable culturally diverse environment. The present article [...]

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Larry Lessig was on Fresh Air yesterday talking about his new book and the Stanford -> Harvard switch.  For diehard Lessig fans and followers (like me) there wasn’t much you haven’t already heard, but then again, it’s always interesting to listen to attempts to educate the public (well, the NPR listenership at least) in the [...]

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Over at his art blog, Gurney Journey, Dan Gurney points to a recent book published by Brian Ladd (University of Chicago Press) called Autophobia.  The teaser on the press website asks the following question:
Cars are the scourge of civilization, responsible for everything from suburban sprawl and urban decay to environmental devastation and rampant climate change—not [...]

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I find the topic of technology-specific rules fascinating & I have really learned a lot about law and rules from reading Fred Schauer’s work.  He has a recent paper on SSRN about the famous example of a rule prohibiting “vehicles in the park.”  It got me wondering about Segways in the park.  Are they vehicles?  [...]

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In response to Mike and Ann’s meme, I’m not going to tag anyone new, but I think sharing non-legal RSS feeds is all good. So I suggest:

Pasta & Vinegar. Cognitive scientist Nicolas Nova’s research blog.  Very interesting stuff.
Google Blogoscoped. I try to keep up, given that Scott McCloud sometimes sends important comic strips [...]

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A while ago, I mentioned here that Reuters was reporting how Linden Lab was thinking of introducing zoning into Second Life. Well, now they’ve gone and done it, again reported by Reuters.  Luckily for Second Life residents, virtual lawns can be programmed to mow themselves — the concern here is with affirmative acts [...]

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Google has launched a virtual world called Lively.  There’s some news coverage here (via Google.)
I set up a virtual coffee shop, embedded below. If you download the Lively client from Google, you can stop in and re-arrange the furniture (it has been set to public editing).

Unfortunately, you can’t really add anything *too* original, [...]

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Personally, I bought the hard copy (I like bound books more than stacks of copy paper), but kudos go out to Jon Zittrain for putting his brand new hot-off-the-press book on SSRN. I’ve made the point before that many authors like reaching the public as much as making money- and often these aren’t mutually [...]

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This post is a plug for an article that I’ve recently completed with my colleague Michael Carrier at Rutgers-Camden. The article is here. It is very short (for a law review article — 36 pages) and is our best effort to decisively end to the doctrine of “cyberproperty,” a.k.a. “cybertrespass,” a.k.a. the Internet [...]

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In case anyone did not catch it, Rebecca Tushnet has a very nice recap of a recent conference in Iowa on the subject of trademark use. I’m very grateful to Rebecca for all the conference blogging she’s done over the past few years — it’s been wonderful to be a virtual attendee at so [...]

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Today there was a hearing convened by the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet (a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee) on the potentials and policy concerns raised by virtual worlds. Archives of the hearing are here. An MP3 of the proceedings can be found here. Many news reports about the substance here.
Mike [...]

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I’m currently writing a book about law and virtual worlds, and in the course of that I’ve been collecting what I hope is a comprehensive list of published law review articles and student notes that focus primarily on the intersection of law and virtual worlds.
The current version is attached below in case folks are interested. [...]

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I don’t like to pick on journalists for not being perfect, but I’m constantly surprised at how reporters seem willing to give Google credit for the resources available on the Web. About two years ago, USA Today ran an article entitled “This the Google side of your brain” where the reporter suggested that Google [...]

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In the past year, there have been some interesting developments in trademark law and virtual worlds, including the Eros lawsuits in Second Life and increased attention from legal practitioners (e.g., see this from WIPO). So, when I was recently invited by the Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal to write about user-generated [...]

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The (virtual) law of nuisance and zoning may be entering into Second Life, according to Reuters. “Linden Lab has banned ‘ad farms,’ the small plots of land with gaudy advertisements that are designed to extort neighboring landowners.” I suppose this will be a new way that virtual “neighbors settle disputes“?
The Naked Cowboy is [...]

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