Taking fan-fic/fan-film to a new level, the creative minds behind the Emmy Award winning Star Wars Uncut have created a crowd-sourced film-making project that has recreated the first Star Wars movie (ie Episode IV:  A New Hope) in 15 second clips contributed by different amateur film-makers.   The project was the brainchild of Casey Pugh [...]

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I wanted to address and post a couple of links about the future of books and news reporting. How are they related? I think they are both about the transition from print to online format, and they both make me wonder what to do about it.
The first is the court’s rejection of the Google books [...]

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There has been a lot of discussion lately about the “Internet Kill Switch” proposal in the US (yes, I know Lieberman doesn’t want us to call it that). Lots of information, counter-information, and discussion. One thing that is missing, at least in what I’ve seen, is the question of why some of the “infrastructure” that [...]

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I’ve recently signed up for — rather hesitantly, I might add — a twitter account (@robheverly). In adding people to follow (ie, read), I’ve taken the time to read some pretty interesting stuff I probably would not have seen otherwise, and I’m starting to get the point of twitter. I’ve found a lot that I’d [...]

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Facebook has announced security changes at its site. First, it is enabling secure browsing over https for its site, including a setting in your account settings to make this your Facebook default. According to the Facebook blog post:
Facebook currently uses HTTPS whenever your password is sent to us, but today we’re expanding its usage [...]

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The LA Times Technology Blog reports that Facebook has the newest use for its users’ data, postings, and “content”: let advertisers use that content to advertise to users’ friends (Facebook calls them “sponsored stories”). According to the paper:
Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories feature will allow companies to take any user content — such as status [...]

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Facebook is the site many of us love to hate – at least privacy-wise. The reason is simple – it skirts the many lines that appear when a site is designed to share information with others, exploit large membership numbers for revenue, yet supposedly give users some control over what gets shared.
There are a lot [...]

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With thanks to one of my Canadian students for forwarding this to me, it appears that the the Supreme Court of Canada will soon be deciding a case which will determine whether hyperlinks may constitute publication for the purposes of defamation law, such that a person who publishes a hyperlink would be potentially liable in [...]

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With a tremendous debt of gratitude to all of those in IP and cyberlaw circles who have helped me along the way with this project, I wanted to let you know that my book Internet Domain Names, Trademarks, and Free Speech has come out this week in hard copy and eBook formats.  Publisher website details [...]

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Media studies experts have demonstrated that cheap copy drives local news “it bleeds/it leads” programming decisions. It’s a lot easier to send a reporter to a crime scene than it is to investigate local corruption. The same dynamic explains a surfeit of reality TV:
One of the things that I think is core [...]

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With thanks to one of my LL.M. students for sharing this video with me, this is a cute demonstration of one of the differences between rivalrous and nonrivalrous property with respect to copying.
(Nina Paley, Copying Is Not Theft)

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For those who may have missed Ben Zimmer’s article in the NY Times magazine last week about the origins of the term “world wide web”, here’s a link.
Apparently some of the other options for naming the web were “mine of information” and “the information mine”.  The article also speaks of prior literary and scientific allusions [...]

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The “Bed Intruder” phenomenon has generated a lot of commentary, plus a hit song. More recently Dobson made a commercial for the Sex Offender Tracker App, which uses GPS and your current location to pinpoint the addresses of sexual offenders in your immediate area.

As Technolog noted:
Expect another week of cultural controversy as we [...]

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Back in February, I was blogging about some of the expressed preferences of authors of supernatural fiction books in terms of fans suggesting new storylines and making other uses of characters from existing books (eg fan fiction).  Many authors in this genre (eg Stephenie Meyer, Anne Rice, and Charlaine Harris) have made comments on their [...]

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That is the title of this article, which does a great job of laying out the pitfalls of what Jonathan Zittrain calls generativity in the context of the Droid. Most people can’t take direct advantage of the generativity themselves, and without a legal framework that gives them rights as consumers they are at the mercy [...]

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See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

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If this song can reach just one person…
(Via The SprigMan)

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With thanks to one of my students for passing this along, the makers of World of Warcraft are apparently considering a requirement that users post their real names on bulletin boards about popular games in an effort to promote more civil discourse on the boards.  The move has drawn fire from many fans of Blizzard’s [...]

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From Freakonomics:
GameStation, a British computer game retailer, added an “immortal soul” clause to the contract signed by online shoppers on April 1, 2010. Thousands of customers agreed to the following stipulation: “By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you [...]

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CNN reports today on a class action lawsuit against Second Life filed on April 15 apparently debating contract and property rights in the virtual world.  Law profs James Grimmelman and Andrea Matwyshyn comment on the case and I’d love to have some more of their thoughts on this blog if they’re reading this …

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