Earlier this month, I wrote about the first part of the of the trial between Oracle and Google. I predicted that the Court would eventually rule that the elements of Java that were copied were functional, and thus not infringed. There’s been no ruling on that point, but the show went on, with a trial [...]

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Hey! Bing is innovating! It has added social to search based on its relationship with Facebook. Oh wait, Google did that with Google+. So is this innovation or keeping up with the Joneses, err Pages and Brins? I thought this move by MS would happen faster given that FB and MS have been in bed [...]

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This follows my recent post about Oracle v. Google. At the behest of commenters, both online and offline, I decided to dig a bit deeper to see exactly what level of abstraction is at issue in this case. The reason is simple: I made some assumptions in the last post about [...]

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The jury came back today with its verdict in round one of the epic trial between two giants: Oracle v. Google. This first phase was for copyright infringement. In many ways, this was a run of the mill case, but the stakes are something we haven’t seen in a technology copyright trial in quite some [...]

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Take a look at this cover.

Now compare

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What is it with Brits and busts? Bentham asked that his head be preserved (and his body) as part of the auto-icon. I was listening to Wendy Brown’s lecture on Bentham and she reminded me of this oddity. As she explained, Bentham seemed to think that statues were less utile than a preserve body. The [...]

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Laura Heymann has a fun post on cease and desist letters here. It combines a little trademark fun, parental humor about commands to behave and eat certain foods (think greens). It’s a fun read for your weekend.

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The days of stopping someone from watching show X on a large T.V. but through and Internet device should be numbered. Google TV crashed. Fine, things fail. But the general blocking of content based on medium is a dying strategy. We are in stage 2 of the death of T.V., as we know it. [...]

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I am excited to announce that Oxford University Press has published my book, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources. I owe a huge debt to my Madisonian colleagues for their support along the way. I will post more about the book in the next few weeks, but here are some links and a short [...]

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The song “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye has been getting a ton of play on the radio around here (yeah I know, radio, how quaint, to which I say Radio is a sound salvation Radio is cleaning up the nation They say you’d better listen to the voice of reason … You [...]

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Most law professors hold citation by the Supreme Court as a lofty goal. The best result would be adoption of a proposal made in an article, but most academics would settle for square consideration of a proposal, even if rejected. And then there’s the middle ground, when you can’t really tell if you’ve been accepted [...]

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Calling China Mieville and Perdido Street Station fans. TechCrunch reports on Jarno Smeets, a man who wants to fly with wings, and he has done it! Apparently Wii and HTC devices are part of the invention. He had a test flight in January. And, as the video below shows, he flapped and took flight. I [...]

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Print is Dead. Long Live the Word. Britannica Stops the Presses. Welcome to the Henry Blake cliche festival. CNN Money reports that after 244 years the print edition of Britannica will no longer be offered. As many may recall, one study indicated the Wikipedia was more close to as accurate than Britannica. It may come [...]

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Cross-posted at Concurring Opinions for a symposium on Julie Cohen’s important new book, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press 2012).
Julie Cohen’s book is fantastic. Unfortunately, I am late to join the symposium, but it has been a pleasure playing catch up with [...]

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A few weeks ago, I posted here that if you attach a picture from movie posters on your product as a hang-tag, you will be found liable for trademark infringement every time. I later posted that it was a mistake for the props folks in the Hangover II movie to keep calling a knock-off a Louis [...]

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RIAA:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/opinion/what-wikipedia-wont-tell-you.html
Mike Masnick’s line-by-line reply:  http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120208/01453517694/riaa-totally-out-touch-lashes-out-google-wikipedia-everyone-who-protested-sopapipa.shtml
 
Hat tip to Lauren Gelman.

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There is an interesting blog symposium at Concurring Opinions about Marvin Ammori’s Free Speech Architecture article.  I am participating in the symposium this week, and here is my first post:
Thank you to Marvin for an excellent article to read and discuss, and thank you Concurring Opinions for providing a public forum for our discussion.
In the article, [...]

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As reported originally here in Texas Monthly, and most recently here by the TM Daily Post, Robert Earl Keen has taken a creative approach to settling a score (not a lawsuit) with Toby Keith.  (Additional interviews with Keen here and here.)
In an interview with Texas Monthly, Robert Earl Keen discussed the release of his new album, [...]

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On behalf of the editors of JOLTI at Case Western Reserve, some readers may be interested in the following:
Call For Submissions
Case Western Reserve’s Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet is searching for a final article to publish in its spring edition. Any scholarly work related to cyber law, intellectual property law [...]

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A few years ago I tried to express some anxieties about the rise of a remix culture that valued technology and novelty over timeless content. Those worries resurfaced while I was reading Rob Horning’s recent reflections on his own defensively reactionary tastes:
[T]he key issue is to think about why we choose novelty over immersion. [...]

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