I am just finishing a marvelous book about cartography and the discovery and naming of America, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name (by Toby Lester, Simon & Schuster, 2009).  The Fourth Part of the World [...]

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Posted at the request of Prof Giuseppina D’Agostino, Director, IP Osgoode, Intellectual Property, Law and Technology Program, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada:
“(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 [...]

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From Pittsburgh to Washington DC and north to Baltimore and Boston, cars in giant snowbanks mean that the thoughts of property law professors turn again to an eternal phenomenon:  If I dig out a parking spot to free my car, do I “own” the resulting parking space?  If so, why, and in what sense?  Yes, [...]

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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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I call friends and family during the holidays. For me, unlike email and social networking options, talking to someone is a more intimate and fun experience. Regardless of how one “reaches out and touches someone” as AT&T used to say, it is easy to take the ability to do so for granted. As I thought [...]

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Here’s just a little free association for what I hope are ongoing happy holidays for everyone. Sherlock Holmes opens on Christmas Day and is a front runner for holiday films I want to see. I happen to think that Robert Downey Jr. is in a great groove. I loved his acting in Chaplin and am [...]

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Although I tend to prefer less regulation in many cases, the pictures below seem to call for a little more discussion about how products are marketed to kids. Candy in that mimics many of the attributes of adult products such as cigarettes probably makes it easier for a kid to think they ought to try [...]

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I am a big fan of the Planet Money series on NPR. Any student struggling with the economic aspects of business associations can use Planet Money and NPR’s other financial series, Marketplace, to get grasp of what is going on. Marketplace tends to focus on the day’s events. PM takes a little time and explores [...]

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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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If there is an intellectual property angle to the Tiger Woods affair (or perhaps I should say “affairs”), it may be this: When a celebrity turns himself or herself into a brand, as Tiger has done so effectively, then the challenges of maintaining brand integrity, and the risks associated with what trademark lawyers sometimes [...]

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Networks. In my youth, the term was most familiar to me as the word for large, national television stations. NBC was at the bottom of a small heap in the late 1970s. If I recall correctly, Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show supported most of the network in general. Now remember, there were only three [...]

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One of my favorite things in the Sunday New York Times these days is the Corner Office column, which reports a bit of an interview each week on “leadership” from the perspective of a CEO.  Usually, these interviews consist not of tips from would-be management gurus, but instead anecdotes about the interviewees’ own experiences.
Last [...]

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Jotwell, the “Journal of Things We Like (Lots),” has been incubating for a long time, and at last it’s alive, thanks to the persistence of Michael Froomkin and lots of support from the University of Miami, including students there.
Jotwell is an effort to look at the mass of new legal scholarship and highlight books and [...]

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The New York Times op-ed by Calvin Trillin, Wall Street Smarts, has a parable-like quality with the two characters meeting and exchanging wisdom. The lesson offered by the wiseman: “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” The piece goes on to explain why that is a [...]

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Those of us with interests in common property regimes and new institutional economics are buzzing this morning over the news that Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson are being awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics.   Here is the text of the press release:
12 October 2009
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The [...]

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From the MIT Labs Personas Web page:

“Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. [...]

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I spent last week in Amsterdam, enjoying the city as a result of an invitation to speak at an international conference on urban planning: Morgen/Tomorrow: International Urban Planning Congress Amsterdam. I spoke about Pittsburgh; others spoke about Chicago, Mumbai, London, Helsinki, Rotterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Hamburg, and Tirana. We also heard quite a bit about [...]

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Tennis fans are still buzzing about the unbelievable scene that unfolded late last night at the US Open tournament.  Kim Clijsters faced Serena Williams in one of the semi-final matches.  Clijsters was dominating Williams, to the latter’s enormous and obvious frustration.  Clijsters was leading 6-4, 6-5, with Williams serving at 15-30.  On her second serve, [...]

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