[Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions]
My post on the challenges facing the law school Research Dean contained an implicit and unexamined assumption regarding a gap between the interest of the individual faculty member in producing and distributing research and scholarship, on the one hand, and the interest of that faculty member’s law school in the research and [...]

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Time Magazine’s “World’s Most Influential Person” poll got hacked. Detailed account of same here.

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The machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait. From The Guardian:
It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than [...]

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So when I first encountered the WDL, I was excited. I did, however, have a lingering question about the intellectual property laws involved. I scanned the page and found the infamous Legal link at the bottom of the page. I clicked. And then the moment of “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” vanished. Newman!
Although the [...]

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I’ll be talking next Friday at a conference at Columbia on the effects of User-Generated Content.  Here’s the overview:
The rapid increase of user-generated content on the Internet is a source of concern for traditional media firms. Will the YouTubes, Facebooks, Flickrs, Second Lifes and the HuffPos take away significant audience segments on a sustaining basis? [...]

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From the publisher’s website:
Metaphors, moral panics, folk devils, Jack Valenti, Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Kenyes, predictable irrationality, and free market fundamentalism are a few of the topics covered in this lively, unflinching examination of the Copyright Wars: the pitched battles over new technology, business models, and most of all, consumers. In Moral Panics and the [...]

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That’s the title of this NYT article, which reports in part:
These days, however, community need reaches far beyond reference help — and in many libraries, it is turning a normally tranquil place into an emotional and stressful hotbed.
As the national economic crisis has deepened and social services have become casualties of budget cuts, libraries have [...]

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So the Rescuecom.com case was just decided.  I will have to parse it carefully, but my initial impression is that it brings the Second Circuit into harmony with the other federal circuits.  As I argued in my Google’s Law article, I think this is the right result on the doctrinal issue of trademark use (I [...]

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Six murders were linked by DNA that probably had nothing to do with the killer(s).
From the BBC:
Police in Germany have admitted that a woman they have been hunting for more than 15 years may never have existed. Dubbed the “phantom of Heilbronn”, the woman was described by police as the country’s most dangerous woman. Investigators [...]

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That’s paragraph 11. The preamble to the Licensing Agreement says “it is advisable that You print or save a soft copy of this Licensing Agreement for record purposes.” Which I might have done if I could figure out how – I couldn’t even make my Firefox browser super copy the Licensing Agreement, no less print [...]

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The Los Angeles Times reports:
… Amazon.com Inc. reversed course Friday on the device’s controversial text-to-speech feature, which reads digital books aloud in a robotic voice. The company gave rights holders the ability to disable the feature for individual titles. …
… Amazon made it clear Friday that its reversal didn’t mean it agreed with that interpretation [...]

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Those are the first two sentences from this I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-satire article, which reports:
Retired barber Joe Godlewski says that when television chefs recommended kosher salt in recipes, he wondered, “What the heck’s the matter with Christian salt?”
By next week, his trademarked Blessed Christians Salt will be available from seasonings manufacturer Ingredients Corporation of America. It’s sea salt [...]

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From here:
As of today, the following lists the 50 Most Cited Authors, which includes the # of articles which they have written and a cumulative # of times all of their articles have been cited. This analysis was run over the 1,200+ legal periodicals, 30,000+ volumes, 1,000,000+ articles, and over 19 million pages of content [...]

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Major cuss word warning! Don’t watch this in South Carolina!

See also.

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Much has been written about the role that Harvard Law School played in the development of President-Elect Obama’s personality, temperament, management style, world view, and probably (though I haven’t seen this – yet) crossover dribble.  Much of it, like this current piece in The New Republic, isn’t about Obama at all; Obama is a hook [...]

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As thousands of law professors prepare to descend on San Diego this coming weekend for the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), the lawprof blogosphere is again gurgling with advice for junior scholars.  Gordon Smith framed the conversation with a great post about scholarship from the point of view of someone [...]

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Larry Lessig was on Fresh Air yesterday talking about his new book and the Stanford -> Harvard switch.  For diehard Lessig fans and followers (like me) there wasn’t much you haven’t already heard, but then again, it’s always interesting to listen to attempts to educate the public (well, the NPR listenership at least) in the [...]

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In the National Law Journal, dated December 22, 2008, Peter Kalis, chair and global managing partner of K&L Gates offers a response by BigLaw to the USNews rankings of law schools:
The ranking sells magazines. It generates heat, not light. In the legal industry, we’re used to this art form — a magazine develops a ranking using [...]

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Over at Conglomerate, Shubha Ghosh is posting on what he calls IP 3.0, or the turn toward transactional analysis and teaching in intellectual property law. Shubha is right that teaching and studying IP in a transactional context is one of the great unexplored frontiers of IP.  Back in 2002, I taught a course that closely [...]

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