Serious snow has yet to appear in many US states this winter, but it’s never too soon to dig out an old post about parking chairs. Long-time and sharp-eyed Madisonian readers will remember this post about said chairs, which was mostly an effort to extend the life of that same post in its native Pittsblog [...]

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The Spring semester is about to start, and in my world that means that I will be teaching Copyright Law again.  Every year, like many IP teachers, I look for one or two contemporary examples of copyright in action to prime the students’ pumps, so to speak, during the first day of class, or two. [...]

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David Segal’s most recent NYTimes foray into the pathologies of legal education — “The Price to Play Its Way,” about the history, operation, and influence of the ABA/law school faculty accreditation process on the structure of law schools — is, on the whole, a pretty good account of the macro problems facing American law schools, [...]

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Once upon a time, I was publishing or contributing to five blogs at the same time:  madisonian.net, Pittsblog (about arts, tech, and economic development in Pittsburgh), Blog-Lebo (goings on in my Pittsburgh suburb), a faculty blog for the University of Pittsburgh School of Law (something I started and wrote when I was the Research Dean), [...]

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SOPA — the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, and its cousins and substitutes — has been all over the news recently.  Proponents rely heavily on rhetorical appeals to the idea that the US must act aggressively to stop “theft” of intellectual property by “rogue” website operators.  That “theft” business has been endlessly and repeatedly critiqued by analysts of [...]

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Recent readings and reports turn up some provocative examples of what Brett Frischmann, Kathy Strandburg, and I call cultural commons — institutions that enable the structured sharing of knowledge and information rights and resources. The examples illustrate many of the promises and perils of institutions colored by degrees of openness and closure.
From the New York [...]

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On the eve of this year’s renewal of a college football rivalry that is meaningless to everyone except those who play and some who watch, Harvard has already one-upped Yale.
Yale’s Freshman College Council (FCC) designed a t-shirt to sell to students.  As per tradition, the shirt mocks the other school.  This year’s version, in its [...]

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For all of the abstraction that drives intellectual property law, the conversation can sure turn earthy.
Whether gardeners create copyrightable works is a question that produced a provocative opinion earlier this year in Kelley v. Chicago Park District.
The musician/producer Brian Eno has a new talk up here about creators as gardeners, as part of a series [...]

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Why should copyright law and policy care specially about the interests of professional creators and artists, as a class of people distinguishable from amateur creators and artists, from “ordinary” consumers and users, fans, and so forth, and from the mass of undifferentiated creators, re-mixers, and transformers?
This question has been lurking in the back of my [...]

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All-World Pittsburgh Steelers free safety Troy Polamalu was fined $10,000 by the National Football League last week.  His offense?  Using a cell phone on the sideline during a game.  The NFL bans the sideline use of personal communication devices by players and coaches during games.  Wouldn’t want anyone to get an unfair advantage.  Troy, however, [...]

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The Internet and “user-generated [amateur and homemade] content” have decimated much of professional porn, but the so-called “Golden Age of Porn” remains — decades later — more than a matter of historical interest.  The copyright owners of two porn “classics,” Debbie Does Dallas and Deep Throat, have settled their differences via a consent decree, each [...]

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John Morton Blum died yesterday.
Like most of the great Yale historians of the latter 20th century, he was known to students mostly by his last name:  Blum.  Morgan.  Spence.  Kagan.  They weren’t just masterful scholars; they were masterful storytellers, and masterful teachers.
Thirty years after I sat through a semester of lectures on the Progressive Era, [...]

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Trademark scholars, take note of a trade name that could have — but did not — become generic for something truly awful, and at the instance of Thomas Edison no less.  Google, Inc. worries about consumers using “to google” as a verb.  George Westinghouse had other things to fry.  Or so Edison claimed.
In the wake [...]

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Much of the media blitz surrounding the death of Steve Jobs focused not only on amazing Apple products (AAP) that he shepherded to the market, and not only on what an inspirational, visionary leader he became, but also on How Can We Find More People Like Steve?
Steve Jobs, visionary leader that he was, thought about [...]

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As an IP guy, one of my long-time interests is the intersection between IP rights and the social and cultural institutions that IP rights enable (and at times, disable).
What should we make of this essay, in Salon?
Its argument is essentially this:  The so-called “Creative Class,” the tier of knowledge workers who were going to drive [...]

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The IPKat has published a request for suggestions: scholarship about and scholars who study the economics of intellectual property and intellectual property law from a non-US perspective.
Read the post here, and send your suggestions to Jeremy at the address listed.
My own list would like start with folks such as Peter Drahos, Carlos Correia, and Annette [...]

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But as the IPKat reports, quoting a press release announcing a new judgment from the European Court of Justice,
A system of licences for the broadcasting of football matches which grants broadcasters territorial exclusivity on a Member State basis and which prohibits television viewers from watching the broadcasts with a decoder card in other Member States [...]

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The owner of a Birmingham (UK) comedy club named “Glee” has sued 20th Century Fox, producer of the television show “Glee” (now broadcast in England) for trademark infringement.
Apparently, he has a registration for “The Glee Club,” dating from 2001, or perhaps 1999, for entertainment services.  According to the local paper:
The 43-year-old claimed the hugely-successful series [...]

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At Prawfsblawg, Derek Bambauer has some provocative thoughts about cultural commons that follow up on the “Convening Cultural Commons” workshop that I co-hosted a week ago at NYU, with Brett Frischmann and Kathy Strandburg.
Derek writes:
[T]here was one looming issue that the conferees couldn’t resolve: what, exactly, is a commons?
The short answer is: no one knows. Ostrom’s [...]

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Oh my, as Dick Enberg (or was it Dorothy Gale?) would say.
A federal magistrate judge in Louisiana granted a defense motion for summary judgment the other day in a case brought by Firefly Digital against Google, seeking to enforce Firefly’s “Gadget” mark, and some related marks (”Website Gadget”) registered at both federal and state levels, with [...]

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