The Dutch Supreme Court issued its long-awaited ruling in the Runescape theft case today.  You can find the ruling here, and here’s a Google-translated version.  The ruling cites to the work of my friend Professor Arno Lodder, who has been keeping close tabs on the case, as well as to my book and to my [...]

[Read more →]

I feel like I’m scooping Jacqui here, since she’s the Madisonian Twilight expert, but I was so bothered by the recent district court decision in the Bella’s Jacket Brouhaha that I’m chiming in on the intersection of intellectual property and teen vampires.
Twilight is probably part of basic 21st century cultural literacy, so I’ll presume [...]

[Read more →]

Interesting YouTube contest circa 2008 — Aimee Mann invited fans to cover one of her songs and upload a video.  A video of the winners is here, but there were plenty of other good versions that didn’t make the cut.  (e.g. this).
Thought I would share it here because:
1) I’m going to be looking at various [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve just posted a draft of a book chapter on amateur creativity and digital games: Minecraft as Web 2.0.
I’m not sure whether or not this is a “law” paper, which means that it probably is not.   The footnotes are certainly not the sort I do in my legal writing — I was asked to [...]

[Read more →]

[Post title playing on Mike's post re Harry Potter...]
In my article written a few years back about Google, trademark, and search regulation, I used “Cars” (more or less randomly) as a representative search term with both a trademark and a descriptive meaning.  I found it interesting that about half of Google’s results were for automobiles [...]

[Read more →]

The Supreme Court just struck down the California statute challenged in Brown v. EMA, upholding the lower court decision.  The opinion is here.  I think Scalia, writing for the majority, gets the doctrine quite right.  You can’t just add videogame violence as a new carve-out from the realm of protected speech. Scalia also writes at [...]

[Read more →]

(NB: This rather longish post is cross-posted at Terra Nova, where the average readers are a bit less erudite about copyright law than present company.  Apologies if it gets a bit pedantic/pedestrian.)
Legal commentators in the blogosphere (e.g. Nic Suzor, Technollama, Rebecca Tushnet, Venkat & Eric) have already offered some initial thoughts on the Ninth Circuit [...]

[Read more →]

The School of Communication and Information at Rutgers is planning a major conference to be held April 8-9, 2011.  The conference will cover the cultural, business, legal, and artistic aspects of the videogame and virtual worlds industries — pretty much everything practical and academic about gaming.  If you’d like to spend a couple of days [...]

[Read more →]

Jacqui pointed to the documents in this case a couple days ago and since then I’ve had a chance to read the argument transcript. Like I said in the comments to Jacqui’s post, I’m not really certain why the court granted cert in this case.  However, I did want to share my reactions to some [...]

[Read more →]

If you haven’t heard of the Cooks Source story yet, read this post at TechnoLlama (though you can find it retold many other places).  Andres adds an important and thoughtful note — he’s building on his prior observations about Anonymous (and that ties in with observations by Solove, Shirky, & others about the ups and [...]

[Read more →]

2.5 MB PDF (CC BY-NC 3.0 & text is searchable)
Without a doubt, what I’m enjoying most about writing this book is giving it away.  Many thanks to Yale Press for letting me do that.
If I can get a cleaner version, I’ll put it at the same URL with the same file name. Cleaner version up [...]

[Read more →]

The Social Science Research Network is one of the primary ways that most law professors share drafts of their papers.  In many case, they provide access to their published work there as well.  The ability to post draft papers quickly on SSRN and other sites, such as Berkeley Electronic Press, has really changed the pace [...]

[Read more →]

So, apologies for the self-promotion, but my new book, Virtual Justice, is now on sale in the bookstores.  It was also recently featured in a short segment of NPR’s On The Media, which you can find here.
The book is subtitled “The New Laws of Online Worlds,” and that’s pretty much the topic.  I start [...]

[Read more →]

The Copyright@300 conference is now available online.  (via Pam Samuelson.)  It’s a fabulous lineup of speakers and I can’t wait to listen to these presentations & discussions.  There’s something wonderfully ironic, isn’t there, about how this sort of open Web-based content “encourages learning”?

[Read more →]

Copyright law turns 300 today.  As I regularly explain to my students, compared to the laws of property or crime, copyright is pretty darn young.  But in the space of 300 years, it sure has grown fast, as The Economist notes.  Has it grown too fast?  Will it survive to 400?  Check out these comments.  [...]

[Read more →]

Back in 2004, USA Today, and many other news organizations, reported on Tiffany’s lawsuit against eBay.  The trademark issue is fairly simple to grasp — a lot of the Tiffany jewelry sold on eBay is apparently not authentic Tiffany jewelry.  So is eBay liable for the sale of these fakes?  The district court said no.  [...]

[Read more →]

That’s the way the Times describes it, which I found somewhat surprising.  I’ll have to read the opinion, but it sounds like the ruling provides Google with something like a DMTA-ish notice-and-takedown regime without absolving those who purchase trademarked terms from direct liability.  I’d welcome any insights by those more familiar with the French ECJ [...]

[Read more →]

Eric Goldman reports here that Rescuecom has dismissed its lawsuit against Google.  Eric strongly suggests this was primarily about Google outlasting a smaller plaintiff with fewer resources, which may well be the case.  And although I was pleased when Rescuecom won on the trademark use issue, as I explained in this post from last year, [...]

[Read more →]

Adam Raff, in an Op-Ed in the New York Times yesterday, says that Google
“faces a difficult choice. Will it embrace search neutrality as the logical extension to net neutrality that truly protects equal access to the Internet? Or will it try to argue that discriminatory market power is somehow dangerous in the hands of a [...]

[Read more →]

Our Rutgers-Camden librarian, John P. Joergensen, tipped me off to this. Paul Caron has some details.  Here’s what comes up for Kremen v. Cohen.  More open access to law is always a good thing, imho.

[Read more →]