A petition at whitehouse.gov went live this morning, asking that the fruits of taxpayer-funded research be made publicly accessible — in effect broadening the existing NIH policy.  
Go to access2research.org for more information about this campaign, and a link to the petition page.  The organizers are hoping to get 25,000 signatures, and to get to that level [...]

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James Grimmelmann has a great post at The Laboratorium summarizing and critiquing the recent fair use opinion in the so-called Georgia State case, Cambridge University Press v. Becker.

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Salman Rushdie’s PEN lecture, posted in part at The New Yorker:
Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, [...]

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The economics of the legal profession are so bad …. (How bad are they?)  They’re so bad that bright students are advised to ram their heads into solid objects at high speed, repeatedly, for a chance to earn a living for a few years, rather than enroll in law school.  Here’s the take of Above [...]

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Yochai Benkler has launched a blog, and in his first post he addresses the Carr-Benkler Wager, the long-standing bet that he made with Nicholas Carr about whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized.

Benkler’s post
Carr’s response (also posted as a comment to Benkler)

They disagree about the most basic terms of [...]

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Copyright questions pop up in the most unexpected yet ordinary places.  I got in a cab late last night at the Pittsburgh airport.  As I sat down, the driver, an African-American man who looked to be younger than I am by maybe 10 years, turned down a hip hop track that he was playing very [...]

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Back in March, Concurring Opinions convened a wonderful virtual symposium on Julie Cohen’s new book, Configuring the Networked Self. 
Here, collected in one place, are all of the posts.  (At least, I believe that this is everything!)

Danielle Citron sets the stage.
Danielle Citron welcomes the guests.
Deven Desai on why now?
Julie herself offers some questions.
Hector Postigo on the [...]

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From the Guardian:  ”Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. … A memo from Harvard Library to the university’s 2,100 teaching and research staff called for [...]

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The Concurring Opinions online symposium on Brett Frischmann’s wonderful new Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources has just gotten started.

Here is Brett’s framing post.
Here is a post on education as infrastructure, from Deven Desai.
Marvin Ammori on the breadth of the book.
Adam Thierer on what the book does not address.
Barbara Cherry on infrastructure and governance.
Frank Pasquale on [...]

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@reaperthekeeper :  The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce apparently is trying to enforce its trademark in the “Hollywood” sign against LA Kings (ice hockey) goalie Jonathan Bernier, who wears a mask emblazoned with an image of the sign and other Southern California iconography.  So reports Yahoo! Sports.
On behalf of sensible trademark lawyers everywhere, let me say [...]

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I ran a leadership workshop for some law students and lived to tell the tale.
And it’s a good tale, I think.
Our law school like, I suspect, many law schools, talks a lot about producing leaders for the legal profession and beyond.  But as a school, we don’t do anything to teach our students how to [...]

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I’ve argued several times that human engagement with IP culture is guided metaphorically by a spatial sense that is related to the spatial sense that guides our engagement with the physical world.  See papers here and here.  Oh, and here.   Architecture … borders … boundaries:  these are the metaphors of IP and information law as [...]

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Julie Cohen’s Configuring the Networked Self, now available from finer booksellers everywhere, is the subject of a just-launched online symposium over at Concurring Opinions.  Some of the invited posters are Madisonians, so this blog will link to and perhaps even mirror some of their contributions.  Plus, I may have an opinion or two to share; [...]

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Blog: What’s a fact?
Today’s NYTimes contains not one but two essays excoriating the writer John D’Agata for what trademark lawyers recognize in a different setting as the tort of counterfeiting, or passing off.  In the world of goods, this is fake iPads on the streets of lower Manhattan. In the case of John D’Agata, it [...]

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Blog:  Why I Teach.
A former student writes:
Yesterday, I received some good news: I have been offered — and will be accepting — a job as a trademark examiner at the PTO starting in May. It took a little longer than expected, but I finally found a way to couple my interest in trademark law [...]

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Blog: A new book by Madisonian Brett Frischmann is on the cusp of release. “Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources” now has its own page at Amazon.com.
Its timing couldn’t be better. Passions over the proposed SOPA (and Protect IP/PIPA, and OPEN, and related) legislation have barely cooled, but debates will certainly continue over Internet [...]

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This is as good a place as any to note a couple of short pieces that caught my eye recently and that seem to have something to do with one another, at least to my way of thinking.  Because, in a sense, they each resonate with my ways of thinking.
First is Jonah Lehrer’s “Groupthink,” from [...]

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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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#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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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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