In recent years (and particularly since reading a lot of Bobbi Kwall’s work), I’ve been increasingly interested in motivations for why authors/artists create and in the relationship between economic incentives and creativity.  One of this year’s Oscar nominated documentaries (Exit Through the Gift Shop) is actually an interesting exploration of some of these issues.
It explores [...]

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With thanks to Jim Gibson for initiating a thought-provoking discussion on cyberprof about this issue, apparently Google has just caught out rival search engine Bing in a sting operation for copying Google’s search results (by inserting fake search results in the manner of the Feist case and determining that Bing was copying the fake results).  [...]

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I spent the last couple of days at the Stanford Law Review symposium called The Future of Patents: Bilski and Beyond. I moderated one panel while Mark Lemley presented our article Life After Bilski, which Mark, Ted Sichelman, Polk Wagner, and I wrote. It will be published in the Stanford Law Review’s symposium issue. (If [...]

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For those of you following the various legal issues surrounding the founding of Facebook, it appears that the two Harvard grads who originally claimed that Facebook stole their idea for a social network and hampered their efforts to get to the market first are now seeking to reopen the settlement they agreed to some years [...]

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So in my continuing quest to complete the Harry Potter series of books before watching the new movie, I’m plugging through Book 7 now.  I started wondering, though, what would happen if a real high school decided to name its houses after those in Harry Potter ie Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin?  Would there be [...]

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Law professors are spending a lot of time thinking these days about how to bring the practical world of lawyering into the classroom.  Part of the challenge is that the real world of deals simply doesn’t match up with what casebooks and theory predict, so it’s difficult to set a stage that exposes students to [...]

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Soccer’s peculiar systems of justice continue to work out their problems on the world stage.  The Italians, masters of faking injury on the ground, are being upstaged by the Spanish, who appear to have invented new forms of unsportsmanlike conduct while standing — and while touching neither man nor ball.  Is a soccer crime being [...]

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For those who may have missed Ben Zimmer’s article in the NY Times magazine last week about the origins of the term “world wide web”, here’s a link.
Apparently some of the other options for naming the web were “mine of information” and “the information mine”.  The article also speaks of prior literary and scientific allusions [...]

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Those of us with small children may have noticed the recently filed lawsuit by the second actress to voice Dora the Explorer in the popular children’s television show – Caitlin Sanchez.  Hollywood Reporter story here.  After 3 years on the show, Sanchez was “fired” (although that doesn’t seem to be the basis of the claim) [...]

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The pivot point in Jill Lepore’s review of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (Isabel Wilkerson, 2010) nicely captures something that makes me uncomfortable in some contemporary legal scholarship.  Lepore:
[Wilkerson's] project has less in common with the documentary populism of the nineteen-thirties, which, like Chicago School sociology, was always about [...]

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“Oh, the humanity,” the now-trite Herbert Morrison radio call of the Hindenburg disaster, came to mind today as I read Jeffrey Rosen’s “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” a NYTimes Magazine popularization of a theme heard in cyberlaw circles for some time:  The Internet never forgets.

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In a recent article called “How to Build an American Job,” former Intel chairman Andy Grove suggests that there is no neat division between “high-value” design and conceptual work and the “scaling” necessary to bring products to market. He calls on the US to “rebuild our industrial commons,” lest we get locked out of [...]

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Having just attended the Privacy Law Scholars’ Conference a couple of weeks ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to protect our private personal information from those who might use it to harm us.  However, I’ve just read an interesting take on the “personal information” issue, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell’s recent [...]

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I just came across a story by NPR’s Margot Adler from February, where she admits to being a vampire book fan and creates a list of her Top 75 vampire books.  Do those who follow vampire books agree with her list?  Apologies to those who hate Twilight because they seem to be at the top [...]

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In a futile attempt to break up the soccer blogging (no offense, Mike!), I wanted to raise something Mike and I were recently talking about.  Is there still room for a scholarly field called “cyberlaw”?  Or have we reached the point where cyberlaw scholarship has more or less collapsed into other fields like IP, privacy, [...]

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From the file of “public goods are not always what they seem,” if they can be made the subject of curatorial exclusivity (can they?), the Museum of Modern Art in New York has added the “@” symbol to its permanent collection. From the museum’s site: “MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design has acquired the @ [...]

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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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