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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With thanks to a colleague in Australia for bringing this video to my attention, this is for everyone who thinks/writes about gender issues and copyright law (well, not so much the ‘law’ part of it – but it is very funny).  I dedicate this post to Ann Bartow – she’ll see why!
(And in case you [...]

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I ran a leadership workshop for some law students and lived to tell the tale.
And it’s a good tale, I think.
Our law school like, I suspect, many law schools, talks a lot about producing leaders for the legal profession and beyond.  But as a school, we don’t do anything to teach our students how to [...]

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I’ve argued several times that human engagement with IP culture is guided metaphorically by a spatial sense that is related to the spatial sense that guides our engagement with the physical world.  See papers here and here.  Oh, and here.   Architecture … borders … boundaries:  these are the metaphors of IP and information law as [...]

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To pick up on some earlier discussions that Jacqui Lipton and I have been having about authorship and art (and some of Bruce Boyden’s comments re: the same):  A student who is doing an externship at a local small business incubator told me about a local start-up that seeks to enable people to create art [...]

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Julie Cohen’s Configuring the Networked Self is different and signals that the next era of tech policy is upon us. The explosion of books about the Internet tracks the explosion of, well, the Internet. Could there be a bubble here too? Are most books simply restating and rehashing arguments from years ago? Probably. Cohen’s book, [...]

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Julie Cohen’s Configuring the Networked Self, now available from finer booksellers everywhere, is the subject of a just-launched online symposium over at Concurring Opinions.  Some of the invited posters are Madisonians, so this blog will link to and perhaps even mirror some of their contributions.  Plus, I may have an opinion or two to share; [...]

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Blog: What’s a fact?
Today’s NYTimes contains not one but two essays excoriating the writer John D’Agata for what trademark lawyers recognize in a different setting as the tort of counterfeiting, or passing off.  In the world of goods, this is fake iPads on the streets of lower Manhattan. In the case of John D’Agata, it [...]

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The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research will be publishing a special issue dedicated to law and virtual worlds.   Dan Hunter, Melissa de Zwart, and I will be editing the issue.  The Call for Papers and more information can be found here: http://bit.ly/CFP-lawvirtual
Here’s an excerpt from the site:
This special issue will [...]

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Blog: A new book by Madisonian Brett Frischmann is on the cusp of release. “Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources” now has its own page at Amazon.com.
Its timing couldn’t be better. Passions over the proposed SOPA (and Protect IP/PIPA, and OPEN, and related) legislation have barely cooled, but debates will certainly continue over Internet [...]

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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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