Via Tim Armstrong at Info/Law, I learned today that the Harvard Law School faculty voted to create an online open access repository of their scholarship.
To me, the vastly more interesting and provocative part of Tim’s post is a news item that I missed 10 days ago:  Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new […]

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When the national press focuses on academic questions at universities these days, the spotlight often shines on plagiarism.  But there is a genuine academic scandal brewing in Morgantown, at West Virginia University, and the national media has only barely noticed.  What’s worse, from what I can tell, outside of West Virginia itself the blogosphere has […]

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Rebecca Tushnet’s report on the recent IP Without IP Colloquium (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) is as interesting for its method as for its content. 
The Colloquium itself was a non-public affair at the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study.  It was described at the Center’s site as follows:
IP without IP
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities, Social Sciences, […]

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Posts by others that caught my eye recently:
Rebecca Tushnet summarizes a very interesting public discussion on Bridgeman v. Corel, the district court opinion by Judge Kaplan, now nine years old, that holds that copyright does not attach to especially good photographic reproductions of public domain works of fine art.
Siva Vaidhyanathan tackles the rhetorics of “open” […]

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With so many interesting information law and policy topics floating around the blogosphere, you would think that something more, well, substantial, would catch my eye.  But instead I’ve been hooked by cardboard boxes.
Out of Denver yesterday came the news that a man was threatened with a violation of federal law for recycling U.S. Postal Service […]

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Shameless self-promotion alert:  I’ve just posted a short paper on SSRN, titled “Intellectual Property and Americana, or Why IP Gets the Blues.” (Download it here.) It’s just been published in a symposium issue of the Fordham Intellectual Property Media & Entertainment Law Journal, along with pieces by Mark Lemley, Dan Burk, Rob Frieden, and Tal […]

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As many people know, there is an election brewing in Pennsylvania.  As fewer people know, that election involves the annual awards known as “The Webbies,” sometimes known — semi-seriously at least, and undoubtedly without the blessing of AMPAS — as the Oscars of the Internet.
My colleague Bernard Hibbitts is the Editor in Chief and publisher […]

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A year and a half ago, I posted a brief note on a non-law, non-IP topic:  My friend John Matteson, a recovering lawyer now teaching English at John Jay College, had just published a well-received biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott.  It’s called “Eden’s Outcasts”; buy the book here.
The Madisonian mobblog forced me […]

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Even the person who gets the news from CNN.com (which is today, much of American humanity) knows that the much-anticipated copyright trial of the young century started today in New York:  J.K. Rowling and all things Harry Potter vs. Steve Vander Ark, publisher of The Harry Potter Lexicon, online here and, the federal courts willing, […]

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Today is the last day of Madisonian’s full-time attention to the future of legal education, and Jim Chen has energized the mobblog with a sweeping, challenging post about focus.  Again, I want to broaden and narrow the conversation, all at once.
No Tags

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The prompt for this mobblog is “What kind of institution do we want a law school to be?,” and most of the posts have focused on content and method — what and how do law schools teach, what and how do law faculties study, how many law schools do we need, and where?
Dan Filler’s post […]

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Consider the existing law school as an institution, or as kind of community, and as faculty we are touched with the warm fuzzies.  I share many of those fuzzy thoughts, but my contrarian streak will out.  Law professors cannot construct or reconstruct legal education without accounting for its place in law and justice generally.  Do […]

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Here are some questions that I’ve been pondering, and the mobblog gives me an opportunity to ask them — and hope that one or more people will jump in with their thoughts:
Does legal education today offer any distinct value to students and society aside from its function as a signaling and sorting device? Why […]

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Thanks to Deven Desai for pulling together an exciting group of mobbloggers for this very timely and provocative topic.
I want to expand and focus the topic a bit, all in one fell swoop. 
Here’s the expansion:  As I think about what law schools should be, I inevitably think about what the legal profession should be.  Law […]

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Copyright mavens must read Bill Patry’s post today on a “whispering campaign” in international circles trying to quash an emerging platform that would shore up the international framework for copyright’s limitations and exceptions — including, but hardly limited to, American-style fair use and its commonwealth cousin, fair dealing.  A taste:
The purpose of the movement is […]

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Just over a year ago I pointed to a lawsuit brought by Bob Yari, producer of the 2006 Best Picture Oscar winner Crash, against the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the Producers Guild of America.  AMPAS writes the rules for the Academy Awards, and in 2005, before the competition that resulted […]

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The annual USNews ranking of law schools (indeed, of graduate programs generally) became broad blogospheric knowledge yesterday, thanks to “leaked” announcements (see here and here).  The magazine is supposed to be released tomorrow — Friday.
I put “leaked” in quotation marks because the first link above points to images of the law school report snapped from […]

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Jessica Litman came to Pitt last week to deliver our annual “Distinguished Intellectual Property Lecture,” and she argued from the following premise:  Not only are the stars are aligned such that comprehensive copyright reform may be possible — roughly equivalent to what we experienced during the 1960s and early 1970s — but that it is […]

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Jill Lepore has a very interesting and provocative essay in a recent New Yorker, teasing apart distinctions between fact and fantasy, between works of popular history and works of popular fiction.  Her thesis?  That the distinction may be gendered:
By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, […]

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New and upcoming things:
First:
The excellent IP team at American University’s Washington College of Law prompts me to remind everyone that the annual symposium titled “IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections” is just around the corner.  The symposium will take place on Friday, April 4, at the WCL campus, 4801 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington DC, Room 528, 10am-4pm.  […]

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