Making a mixtape is so 1980s. Now you can make a muxtape:
[On the site,] you can upload . . . what the kids call playlists. [The program then streams the mp3s you chose on a url you pick.] I am not sure of the legal issues, but the system is smart […]

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Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother, is technically a young adult novel, but there is something in there for anyone interested in cyberlaw, security, national security law, and oh yeah, a rather fun, although at times scary, tale. In classic Cory fashion, he has made the book available for free (yes well before law profs […]

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It is an old question (at least in Internet time): What is online privacy worth? Yet there seems to be a new wrinkle. Not just the Web sites or search companies want to track what one surfs. ISPs are now in the Web tracking game and stand to make “several dollars per month” per customer. […]

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Just watch. It is a little over ten minutes and fun. Basic premise: some birds you many not like may be rather smart.

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Jonathan Zittrain has been promoting his new book on some excellent radio programs, including On the Media and On Point (with Tom Ashbrook). On OTM, the host challenged him with the query, “We don’t want blank-slate cell phones that have to be programmed. I want to buy it, take it out of the box, […]

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Wired reports that the FBI subpoenaed the Internet Archive and demanded that Brewster Kahle (the Archive’s founder) provide records about one of the library’s registered users, asking for the user’s name, address and activity on the site. The FBI used a National Security Letter (example) to make the request. As Wired explains this type of […]

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Via Tim Armstrong at Info/Law, I learned today that the Harvard Law School faculty voted to create an online open access repository of their scholarship.
To me, the vastly more interesting and provocative part of Tim’s post is a news item that I missed 10 days ago:  Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new […]

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A U.S. District Judge has enjoined a defendant from using a term for its business. That is not an unusual result. The one part of the order that may be of note is that the defendant is not allowed to purchase ad words using the plaintiff’s mark and the defendant must use negative adwords […]

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When the national press focuses on academic questions at universities these days, the spotlight often shines on plagiarism.  But there is a genuine academic scandal brewing in Morgantown, at West Virginia University, and the national media has only barely noticed.  What’s worse, from what I can tell, outside of West Virginia itself the blogosphere has […]

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Rebecca Tushnet’s report on the recent IP Without IP Colloquium (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) is as interesting for its method as for its content. 
The Colloquium itself was a non-public affair at the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study.  It was described at the Center’s site as follows:
IP without IP
Exploratory Seminar; Humanities, Social Sciences, […]

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The Computer History Museum “is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computing history.” A current exhibit is a working version of Charles Babbage’s difference engine which is seen as a 19th Century computer design that was never built for a host of reasons from personality to claims that it could not be built with […]

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I just wanted to announce that the preliminary program for the 2008 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference (in New Haven, CT) has been announced. The theme this year is “Technology Policy ‘08,” and it includes several topical panels for the election year:

Presidential Technology Policy: Priorities for the Next Executive
States as Incubators of Change
Activism and […]

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With so many interesting information law and policy topics floating around the blogosphere, you would think that something more, well, substantial, would catch my eye.  But instead I’ve been hooked by cardboard boxes.
Out of Denver yesterday came the news that a man was threatened with a violation of federal law for recycling U.S. Postal Service […]

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Last week Thomas Jefferson had Professor James Hackney of Northeastern University School of Law as our last speaker in our colloquium series. His talk focused on his book, Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity (featured at this past year’s AALS conference) and about his next steps on this topic. […]

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Scott Hemphill has posted an excellent, thoughtful paper on network neutrality. I’ll post the abstract along with a few comments on the paper below the fold:
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CNET reports that PARC (formerly Xerox Parc) the folks who have had a large hand in “laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing” have invented vanishing ink. For those interested in the environmental side of things, it seems that making ONE SHEET of paper requires “about […]

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Shameless self-promotion alert:  I’ve just posted a short paper on SSRN, titled “Intellectual Property and Americana, or Why IP Gets the Blues.” (Download it here.) It’s just been published in a symposium issue of the Fordham Intellectual Property Media & Entertainment Law Journal, along with pieces by Mark Lemley, Dan Burk, Rob Frieden, and Tal […]

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This post is a plug for an article that I’ve recently completed with my colleague Michael Carrier at Rutgers-Camden. The article is here. It is very short (for a law review article — 36 pages) and is our best effort to decisively end to the doctrine of “cyberproperty,” a.k.a. “cybertrespass,” a.k.a. the Internet […]

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In case anyone did not catch it, Rebecca Tushnet has a very nice recap of a recent conference in Iowa on the subject of trademark use. I’m very grateful to Rebecca for all the conference blogging she’s done over the past few years — it’s been wonderful to be a virtual attendee at so […]

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A year and a half ago, I posted a brief note on a non-law, non-IP topic:  My friend John Matteson, a recovering lawyer now teaching English at John Jay College, had just published a well-received biography of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott.  It’s called “Eden’s Outcasts”; buy the book here.
The Madisonian mobblog forced me […]

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