This is as good a place as any to note a couple of short pieces that caught my eye recently and that seem to have something to do with one another, at least to my way of thinking.  Because, in a sense, they each resonate with my ways of thinking.
First is Jonah Lehrer’s “Groupthink,” from [...]

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This is my second post over at Concurring Opinions for the symposium on Marvin Ammori’s Free Speech Architecture article.
There is one principle that I would add to the five principles that Marvin examines in the article:  nondiscrimination.  It seems to me that across public and private, physical and virtual ”space” contexts (and judicial opinions), one persistent principle [...]

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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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The Dutch Supreme Court issued its long-awaited ruling in the Runescape theft case today.  You can find the ruling here, and here’s a Google-translated version.  The ruling cites to the work of my friend Professor Arno Lodder, who has been keeping close tabs on the case, as well as to my book and to my [...]

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My attention wanders at times from the hard-nosed realities of the business of IP law to the slight soppy yet deeply resonant character of art and creation.  The wonderful website Letters of Note introduced me to a letter from the photographer Ansel Adams that includes this gem:
Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the [...]

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With thanks to Andrea Matwyshyn for bringing this to my attention, here’s an interesting article from the Seattle Times suggesting that teens are spending less time on Facebook and more on Twitter because of concerns about privacy (too many friends of friends) and the chance of unexpected communications with idols.  Interesting reading.
(URL: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017372375_tweetingteens30.html in case [...]

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Megan and I have blogged recently (me less articulately than her) about the nature of creation in various different milieus.  I was taken today by Charles Baxter’s tongue-in-cheek description of the difference between poets and prose writers, in terms of poetry involving more flashes of insight and prose requiring more perspiration.  Some of my favorite [...]

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What makes an Oreo an Oreo?
So many IP things to blog about, so much to catch up on … I’ll start with this:
If an Oreo isn’t round and black and white and crazy sweet, is it still an Oreo? What is the essence of Oreoness?
What the Chinese team at Kraft figured out is that an [...]

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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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In my Boston Review piece on SOPA, I mentioned a sad story about a drawn-out copyright lawsuit’s effect on an entrepreneur. I should have also brought up a whole book on the problem of IP overenforcement, Jason Mazzone’s Copyfraud. Important on the day it was published, it’s particularly salient now that Congress is considering expanding [...]

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America’s bias toward “negative” conceptualizations of rights is on full display in Vint Cerf’s opinion piece in the NY Times entitled “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right.” Cerf states:
[A] report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had “become an indispensable tool for realizing [...]

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The Spring semester is about to start, and in my world that means that I will be teaching Copyright Law again.  Every year, like many IP teachers, I look for one or two contemporary examples of copyright in action to prime the students’ pumps, so to speak, during the first day of class, or two. [...]

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Katharine Gelber offers a thoughtful review of The Offensive Internet in the Australian Review. (David Levine conducted an interview with the book’s editors, Martha Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, available here.) I contributed an essay to this volume, and I found both the other essays in it and the conference it was based on very [...]

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Back in October, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell explained the economics of video games as his company sees it. The Geekwire article is worth the read. For now, I’ll point out that he admits “We don’t understand what’s going on” and uses the language of co-creation of value, which I happen to believe is the current [...]

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OK, that title is a riff on a line from The Player. I loved it when the film came out and still do. It says so much of nothing, but captures a vibe that persists. Yet again it seems the film industry is in trouble, or rather doldrums. The Times reports that this year’s box [...]

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Some may remember Trading Places and the importance of the crop report on frozen concentrated orange juice to that movie. It turns out USDA commodities reports and their data are still important. For example, the Times reports that when the USDA decided to cut a program that produced “dozens of long-standing statistical reports on a [...]

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As Deano and others might say Baby, It’s Cold Outside. And, heating costs are no joke. Neither is about $250 for a thermostat. Nonetheless, data and networks are changing the way we manage heating. As Wired reports, Tony Faddell, founder of Nest Labs makes this compelling point:
Untold tons of carbon were being pumped into the [...]

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Some months ago I mentioned a textbook called Networks, Crowds, and Markets to Susan Crawford (hat tip for the book recommendation: Nicklas Lundblad). After I told her how the text helps explain the basics about networks, game theory, and more, she said that I had to tell people about the book. So now I am. [...]

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Once upon a time, I was publishing or contributing to five blogs at the same time:  madisonian.net, Pittsblog (about arts, tech, and economic development in Pittsburgh), Blog-Lebo (goings on in my Pittsburgh suburb), a faculty blog for the University of Pittsburgh School of Law (something I started and wrote when I was the Research Dean), [...]

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After being burned by an utterly unusable New Yorker archive I purchased a few years ago, I’ve been wary of magazines’ efforts to market archival access. Apparently, magazines are very careful about granting access, too: the Vogue archive will cost $1575 per year for access. A post on the archive by Joshua Gans [...]

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