Applications for new gTLDs will begin early in 2012.  It will be interesting to see how effectively this program is administered particularly in dealing with battles between trademark holders and others.  Additionally, it will be interesting to see if the possibility of so many new gTLDs actually does make any inroads into the prominence of the .com space over time.

An hour was devoted to each paper, and several more people attend/ comment than present. The price of admission is reading each paper, and very little time is spent by the author presenting each paper. I spoke for maybe 5 minutes before we got rolling with a “This is great and all that, but what’s your point…” type comment.  I think one presenter got three sentences in.

That’s really the benefit of a conference like this – it is hard to get the focused minds of 10 or more senior scholars on your problem. But that’s also the scary part – it occurred to me that I was one of very few untenured participants and I was presenting an early draft of a paper that I knew was outside my comfort zone. But that’s precisely why I needed to present.

Some people advise junior scholars to refrain from showing work that’s unpolished to senior scholars who might gossip about how dumb you are. To that, I say, “hogwash.” Sure, it’s better to have complete sentences and best to have complete thoughts, but sometimes you need a group of smart and experienced people to figure out why you aren’t making your point the way you wanted to.

You just can’t get that kind of help at a big conference where no one has read the paper and you get 8 minutes to present with another 10 minutes of comments. I don’t even think you can usually get that kind of help at your average faculty workshop, where you spend a lot of the time presenting your idea (and where your oral presentation might clarify some of the shortcomings of the paper so that you never get the right critical comment).

So, I got shredded, but in a good way, and the final paper that results will reflect that – I hope.

In a hospital in South Korea, leukemia patients are expelled as untreatable because a multinational drug company refuses to lower the price of a life-saving drug. Thousands of miles away, a U.S. group called the Rational Response Squad is forced by the threat of a copyright lawsuit to take down a YouTube video criticizing the paranormalist Uri Geller. Could we—should we—see these two events, so seemingly remote from one another, as related? Yes—or such is the premise of a new political formation on the global stage, one that goes under the name of the “access to knowledge movement”—or more simply, A2K.

A2K is an emerging mobilization that includes software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in South Africa, and college students who have created a new “free culture” movement to “defend the digital commons”—to select just a few. A2K can also be seen as an emerging set of theoretical commitments that both respond to and reject the key justifications for “intellectual property” law and that seek to develop an alternative account of the operation and importance of information and knowledge, creativity and innovation in the contemporary world.

Krikorian and Kapczynski have assembled a top-notch group of contributors, and we welcome comments from across the blogosphere.

Thus, whenever someone raises the idea of starting a new conference series, the response is usually that we already have too much of that in the field.

I suppose I’m wondering whether folks thinking of putting together new conferences should concentrate on different formats, and maybe limit them to a smaller number of speakers and focus from year to year on specific topics or specific “levels” of scholarship (eg junior scholars, mid level scholars etc).  I think what we’ve lost from becoming so inclusive is that the conferences do tend to get too large and we miss some of the benefits of, say, the early years of IPSC when we could all fit around a conference table and chat about ideas – and where everyone could catch up with everyone else over lunch or dinner.

I know lots of people blogged about the format of IPSC here while it was happening and it’s undoubtedly a fun conference with some great people, but I do think there is still room for smaller workshoppy conferences to be started perhaps on an “invitation only” basis to fill some gaps in conference format in the IP field.

“(1) We have posted a call for applications for the summer 2010 IPilogue
team and we would be very pleased to hear from students at your own
institution.  The call for editors has a deadline of 31 March 2010 and may
be found here:
http://www.iposgoode.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/IPilogue-Editors-Summer-2010.pdf
. Students from all schools are encouraged to get involved and we look
forward to their contributions! Please let me know if you have any
questions or suggestions as to how we might work together and further build
on this cross-institutional conversation.

(2) We are recruiting a new Assistant Director and would welcome you
passing on details to any who you think might be interested (see job ad
attached). Applications are due March 12, 2010

Last, on a somewhat unrelated note, I would like to seize this occasion to
inquire as to whether you have any articles/reviews/notes etc ready or soon
to be ready for publication. David Vaver … and I will be relaunching
the Intellectual Property Journal (IPJ) and are seeking submissions. As you
may know, the IPJ was first launched by David Vaver in 1984 and made a
unique contribution to the scholarly and practicing IP community in Canada
and around the world. The IPJ is a quarterly publication and there are 3
more issues that will be published this year. Please feel free to get in
touch with either of us on this front as we would be pleased to be able to
work with you.”

Prof D’Agostino’s email address:  gdagostino@osgoode.yorku.ca

What intrigued me about this was not that she is gay, nor that she chose to come out publicly (apparently prompted by threats of exposure from the tabloid press).  I was interested in her choice of venue and interviewer for this news.  Why Matt Lauer?  Wouldn’t Ellen or Oprah have been more to the point?  Or even “The View”?  Or am I gender stereotyping by thinking that?

I’m not trying to say that she should talk to female rather than male reporters about being gay, but Matt Lauer as a person just doesn’t strike me as the obvious choice for this kind of story.  I’m not sure I can put my finger on exactly why though.  Baxter was obviously happy with her choice of interviewers as she closed the session by saying to him:  “Thank you for being the guy.”

I guess I should end my obsession with pop culture and start thinking about more “legal” issues.  But the pop culture has been interesting me lately because I’ve been thinking so much about personality rights law.  In the context of this kind of interview, one does see an undercurrent of a sense that some celebrities want a right to control their public persona not for commercial gain (as much right of publicity theory suggests), but out of a sense of control of aspects of their personhood and personal dignity.  I have long suspected that the right of publicity, if it should exist at all, should be more than just a commercial property right.

The first point of note was the idea of organizing a symposium based around one particular scholar’s recent work.  While this has obviously been done before, I’m not aware of it being done very often in the cyberlaw area and I really enjoyed it.

The other point – and I was not the only person to make this observation – was that this was an entire day long symposium about cyberlaw with only ONE PowerPoint presentation.  The rest of the day was broken up into short papers interspersed with commentators and audience Q&A sessions.  It goes to show that even cyberlawyers can interface in person when we have to.

Congratulations to Danielle and the Denver University Law Review for their terrific work today.  More information about the symposium including a full list of speakers is available here.

The Legal Scholarship Blog, co-produced with the University of Washington School of Law, keeps up with law-related calls for papers, conferences, and workshops across all disciplines.  You can find it at http://legalscholarshipblog.com/  To have an event or CFP added to the blog, email them at legalscholarshipblog|at|gmail.com.

The IP and IT Conferences blog offers the same kind of functionality but is limited, not surprisingly, to academic programs in intellectual property law and its sometimes distant relatives — cyberlaw, privacy law, art law, biotech law, sports and entertainment law, etc. Like the Legal Scholarship Blog, it concentrates on American law schools, but from time to time you will find information about programs at Canadian schools (more information about programs up north would be welcome) and even about programs in Europe, Central and South America, and Asia (especially if US law faculty are participating).  You can find it at http://madisonian.net/conferences/.  To have an event or CFP added to the blog, email — me.

HT: James G.

Update: Now Malcolm Gladwell lends his brand to Free in the pages of the New Yorker.  He’s mostly skeptical of the premise that free is the future — no comment on the Wikipedia scandal.  I’m skeptical of Anderson’s writing too, but not very impressed by Gladwell’s analysis, which feels five to ten years out of date.  Lots of recycled anecdotes to be found: e.g., the tired distinction between the online models of the New York Times and the WSJ.

Update 2: Janet Maslin from The New York Times takes a look at Free and is not too impressed:

Here is what he means by “Free”: If you want to know what he really thinks, you’re going to have to pay for more than his book. He acknowledges that he is giving his book away online, as well as selling it at the not-free price of $26.99, so he can be hired for much more lucrative speaking and consulting jobs.

So “free” can be another word for self-promotion designed to obtain other desirable forms of profit.  A.k.a. “it’s a reputation economy.”  HT:  Lisa Gold.