A school district in California has banned Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th Edition) after a child found the definition for “oral sex” in its pages. The initial story made the decision seem a fairly done deal, but a later issued story indicates that the decision is under review. I wonder about the decision to first [...]

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Much is made of the fact that copyright attaches at the time expression is fixed in a tangible medium. To bring us (partially) in line with the Berne Convention, which convention the US joined in 1989, “formalities” of copyright protection — the requirement to give notice by putting the © symbol on the work [...]

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I’m guessing quite a few of us media/ip/tech law professor-type-folks can make use of this new site from Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped:
The site features a browsable and searchable gallery of over 100,000 print ads which I’ve categorized into tags and years, where available, cropped, scanned from books (mostly with the help of [...]

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The NY Times runs a story today entitled, “How to Train the Aging Brain.” As someone with an aging brain, I was intrigued. According to the story, neural connections in your brain — those things that receive, process and transmit information — weaken with disuse and age. Is there anything that can be done? The [...]

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For the second time in two days, Google has shown up on my “hmm, what’s going on there?” radar. Today I want to put search behind me and look at how Google is alleged to have leveraged its video content position by changing the terms of service for YouTube’s APIs (application programming interfaces) to [...]

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This is being widely reported elsewhere, most notably by Michael Geist (who includes a copy of the 47 page decision) and ArsTechnica, among others, but the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of California has granted summary judgment to the film industry in its suit against Gary Fung and isoHunt, a BitTorrent search site. [...]

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I appreciate Frank’s addition to the discussion here, started by Greg and based on Frank Raff’s NY Times Op-Ed. That said, I think we’re at least somewhat talking around each other, and the major reason is that the primary legal structures designed to handle the problems that Raff is really upset about — Google’s dominant [...]

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Greg usefully started the conversation on today’s NY Times Op-Ed by Adam Raff, founder of “foundem.co.uk,” a UK price comparison site, by asking, “What is search engine neutrality?” I was drafting a too-long post about this when I noticed Greg’s was already up, so thought I would shorten mine considerably. My short answer is to [...]

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The Sixth Circuit decided on Thursday that someone who paid nearly $80 to join a child pornography site can have that fact used against them as part of the facts justifying a finding of probable cause for a search warrant related to child pornography on his computer. This is probably not surprising when put this [...]

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Needles, Haystacks and Stuff (from Indexed)

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I almost titled this post, “Wut?”, but decided against it. It was, however, my initial reaction to this ArsTechnica story, Feeling guilt over P2P use? Piracy Payback wants to help. From the article:
Feeling a sense of remorse, contrition, guilt, shame, and self-loathing over all that unauthorized peer-to-peer downloading you’ve been doing? Salve that stinging conscience [...]

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We’ve read a few examples recently of lawyers getting in trouble for what they post online: a lawyer disciplined for posts about a judge and another charged with revealing client confidences (here are other examples from the ABA journal and the NY Times). But it’s not just lawyers getting in trouble.
In an unreported opinion out [...]

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From the MIT Labs Personas Web page:

“Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. [...]

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Peter M. Shane, Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law, Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, is a Blogger. Or, more properly (as he notes), he now has his own blog, Shane Reactions. Welcome to your own place in the Blogosphere, Peter!
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I’m really glad to be joining my colleagues here at Madisonian.net, and appreciate the invitation. I hope I can contribute something to the conversation.
As a start, I thought I would make note of Judge Bybee’s Kleinfield’s dissent in two cases decided this week by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (he filed the same [...]

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