2010 seems destined to be the year of the book. There is only time today to collect a handful of links to pieces that have caught my eye recently as I’ve been hopping around the country.  That time exists because my university has declared a snow day – for the second day in a [...]

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Brian Leiter is posting occasional links to law faculty blogs.
Here is an updated version of an inventory of law faculty blogs from around the world that I posted back in 2007.

University of Pittsburgh School of Law
University of Houston Law Center
Georgetown University Law Center
University of Chicago Law School
University of Toronto Faculty of Law
University of Alberta Faculty of Law
University [...]

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There’s a new joint venture in town:  A website that aggregates academic research on IT policy, from IP to privacy, to network governance, to the cloud, to antitrust, to economic growth.
Technology | Academics| Policy (TAP).  http://www.techpolicy.com/
Interesting collection of sponsors.  Check it out.
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From today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Late Monday afternoon, employees at O’Hara grocer Giant Eagle Inc. got test results showing some hash brown products sold by the retailer contained a bacterium that can cause a potentially serious infection.
Within hours, an automated system was busy calling more than 300,000 Giant Eagle Advantage Card holders who records showed had purchased [...]

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Erich Segal died the other day.  He was famous (or infamous) as the author of “Love Story,” the book and then movie that gave us the line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”  The movie was a smash but is utterly forgettable; if you’re looking for a throwback experience featuring its star, Ryan [...]

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Combine the Streisand Effect and a trademark lawyer with wit and resources, and you get the South Butt’s Answer to the lawsuit filed against it by the North Face. This is Half Dome versus Half Ass, the bullying socialism of the North Face (according to the Answer) against freedom of speech and the American Dream [...]

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The following is a first cut at a list of Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law – Patent.
For background and explanation of the Lost Classics series, read this earlier post.
(Ordered alpha by author)
Donald W. Banner, Innovation, Patents and the National Interest, 12 Intell. Prop. L. Rev. 37 (1980)
Ward S. Bowman, Jr., Patent and Antitrust: A [...]

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The following is a first cut at a list of Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law – Trademark.
For background and explanation of the Lost Classics series, read this earlier post.
(Ordered alpha by author)
Ralph S. Brown, Jr., Advertising and the Public Interest: Legal Protection of Trade Symbols, 57 Yale L.J. 1165 (1948)
Rudolf Callmann, The Law of [...]

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The following is a first cut at a list of Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law – Copyright.
For background and explanation of the Lost Classics series, read this earlier post.
(Ordered alpha by author)
Horace G. Ball, The Law of Copyright and Literary Property (1944)
Augustine Birrell, Seven Lectures on the Law and History of Copyright in Books [...]

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
It is 1710 all over again. Like their ancient English ancestors, 21st century book publishers are throwing authors under the bus in a race to secure rights in the electronic economy. Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the [...]

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Some time ago on this blog, I ranted a bit about how younger IP scholars either have lost the knack of knowing something about the history of the discipline – or never acquired it in the first place.
Off and on over the last year, I assembled lists of key pieces of scholarship and key [...]

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Dangerous Minds meets Harry Potter in this vid from CollegeHumor:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
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American University law professor and madisonian.net contributor Mike Carroll asked me to post a link to the annual fundraising drive for Creative Commons, where Mike has been a board member since its founding.  Happy to!
Here is Mike’s pitch.  To donate and to read more, click over to the Creative Commons site:
Dear Friends –
I’m asking you [...]

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[H/T here to the IPKat, and particularly the AmeriKat.]
In this recent post I pointed to the recent statement of the United States at the WIPO meeting considering an proposed international treaty governing copyright in works for persons who are blind, visually impaired or have other disabilities.
Earlier in the Fall, the US Copyright Office issued a Notice [...]

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From the Department of Joys of the Season to You, Too comes news that the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership not only owns a trademark registration for the phrase “Light Up Night” but is now — and I mean that almost literally, as in “in the middle of the holiday season” — sending out cease-and-desist letters to [...]

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I was intrigued by this item in the NYT “Ideas” report last Sunday:
Wearing imitation designer clothing or accessories can fool others — but no matter how convincing the knockoff, you never, of course, fool yourself. It’s a small but undeniable act of duplicity. Which led a trio of researchers to suspect that wearing counterfeits might [...]

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Justin Hughes, on the faculty at Cardozo Law School and currently leading the US delegation at WIPO in Geneva – the meeting of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), which is focusing on exceptions and limitations – suggested that I post a note pointing to the US Statement on a new WIPO [...]

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From Charbucks to South Butt …
Recent Pitt grad and my former research assistant Dan Corbett is now a Pittsburgh trademark lawyer with his own blog – Pittsburgh Trademark Lawyer, and please send some traffic his way — and via Dan I learn that the North Face has gone ahead and sued the seller of “South [...]

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I picked this up via SSRN:
David W. Galenson, From ‘White Christmas’ to Sgt. Pepper: The Conceptual Revolution in Popular Music
The paper has nothing directly to do with intellectual property law, but its description of the evolution in popular music during the 20th century suggests some provocative hypotheses.  Here is one:  If, as the paper argues, [...]

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As the Wall Street Journal put it the other day,
Random House has sent a letter to literary agents claiming the digital rights to books it published before the emergence of a thriving electronic-book marketplace.
The New York Times also covered this story. The issue is ownership of rights to publish backlist titles as e-books, where the [...]

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