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 [...]
Open Access Petition
May 21st, 2012 · No Comments
Tags: Law & Technology
On Fair Use at Georgia State
May 17th, 2012 · No Comments
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.
Tags: Law & Technology
Rushdie on Originality and Censorship
May 16th, 2012 · No Comments
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, [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Ouch.
May 16th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
The Carr-Benkler Wager, Revisited
May 15th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Taking Copyright Where You Find It
May 15th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Symposium Summary: Julie Cohen, Configuring the Networked Self
May 3rd, 2012 · 2 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Open Access Move at Harvard
April 25th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
On Frischmann on Infrastructure at Co-Op
April 24th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
I Love LA!
March 21st, 2012 · 2 Comments
@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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Leadership for Lawyers
March 6th, 2012 · 2 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Architecture, Agency, and Culture
March 5th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
On Configuring the Networked Self
March 5th, 2012 · No Comments
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; [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Not the Facts
February 26th, 2012 · 1 Comment
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Why I Teach
February 24th, 2012 · 1 Comment
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 [...]
Tags: Academia
Infrastructure and SOPA
February 14th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Commons · Law & Technology · Online Norms and Culture
Creative Challenge
February 6th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Art as Gift
January 31st, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Law & Technology
Best Practices in Fair Use for Research Libraries
January 30th, 2012 · No Comments
#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 [...]
Tags: Copyright Law
Branding Agave?
January 28th, 2012 · No Comments
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 [...]