There is no protection from copying designs in the fashion industry, so how can police crackdown on knock-offs?
Jul 222010
The California Bar Exam begins next Tuesday. After a month+ of studying, I feel sort of ready. Unlike some recent law grads, I had a life pulling at me during my bar study time, so I simply wasn’t able to sign up to a service like Barbri that required hours of in-class lectures (often in front of a video screen, too, which certainly wasn’t appealing). So instead I turned to alternative approaches. The two I settled on were MicroMash (initially) and BarMax (finally).
Jul 062010
So, the AP has in the past made a big deal about holding on to the rights to every tiny little bit of what they right (essentially denying that fair use even exists). Who better than those snarky peeps at Woot to call them on the implications of such a scheme?
Jun 252010
Intellectual property, despite the name, doesn’t quite work like regular property. A look at intellectual property markets highlight problems with a pure free-market approach that aren’t necessarily visible with other markets.
It’s finally possible–although still hardly likely–to skip the traditional publishers altogether, publishing yourself (via Amazon, for example), and get discovered by fans directly.
May 222010
Randy Picker has a fascinating post on the Faculty Blog of the University of Chicago’s law school of the copyright status of scans (by Google, for example) of public domain works. Does the effort of digitizing the work qualify as enough original effort to create a new copyright?
May 092010
The still-in-draft Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, beloved of some, is hated by many–including Google, apparently.
May 052010
Last month, Comcast won its appeal in a federal appeals court in D.C. against the FCC’s attempt to require network neutrality. As predicted by some, the FCC is proceeding with plans to reclassify broadband providers, and thus escape the ruling entirely.
There has been increasing discussion around the concept of the “splinternet”: that proprietary devices like the iPad or proprietary sites like Facebook are acting to splinter the old, connected Web into discrete, fragmented, and self-contained units. But the “golden age” was hardly golden, and today’s Web is, if anything, better than it used to be in terms of interconnectivity. Certainly it’s important to recognize fragmentation issues today, but let’s not pretend it’s a new problem.
300 years ago Saturday, the Statute of Anne created the first modern system of copyright.
Mar 312010
A Greenpeace investigation has identified a little-known, privately owned US oil company as the paymaster of global warming sceptics in the US and Europe.
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