Posted on August 30th, 2007 by William McGeveran
I’ve talked before about how front-line health care workers withhold information because they misunderstand privacy law (or sometimes use it as an excuse). Now it appears the same problem helped bring about the horrific Virginia Tech shootings earlier this year. The state panel investigating the incident has released its final report, which blames university officials [...]
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Filed under: Health Law, Privacy
Posted on August 29th, 2007 by William McGeveran
There has been extensive commentary and derision around the legal blogosphere about a preposterous corporate song commissioned by the law firm of Nixon Peabody, and then the firm’s subsequent efforts to threaten those who mocked it with IP saber-rattling. David Lat first posted the song, and here he summarizes the ensuing flapdoodle. A very funny [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Digital Media, Internet & Society, Music, Uncategorized, Video
Posted on August 28th, 2007 by William McGeveran
Those of us who enjoy extensive access to the very expensive Lexis and Westlaw services may not appreciate how lucky we are compared to anyone trying to research legal issues without that luxury. There are some important sites out there, particularly the Legal Information Institute run by Cornell Law School. But their search functions have [...]
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Filed under: Court Decisions, Digital Media, Internet & Society, Law School, Open Access, Scholarship, Search Engines
Posted on August 17th, 2007 by William McGeveran
Earlier this summer I spoke at the Institute for Computer Policy and Law, a workshop for professionals responsible for IT infrastructure in higher education. They were all abuzz about a campaign this spring and summer by the RIAA to target colleges and universities and demand that they take more actions to curb illegal downloading by [...]
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Filed under: Digital Media, Education & Copyright, Filtering, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Law School, Music, RIAA
Posted on August 15th, 2007 by William McGeveran
Mike Madison has an excellent thoughtful post at Madisonian, which in turn triggered excellent thoughtful comments, about the virtues and vices of the “working paper” conference in legal academia, specifically intellectual property law. As a very junior scholar preparing to attend my first of these, I found it all very enlightening.
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Filed under: Copyright, Law School, Patents, Scholarship, Trademarks
Posted on August 15th, 2007 by William McGeveran
I chuckled when I saw the headline on this AP story in my local St. Paul newspaper last week: Red Cross Sued for Using Red Cross. It’s often pretty easy to make trademark law look silly. (I know because I’ve spent all summer writing an article about it — coming soon to an articles editor [...]
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Filed under: civil procedure, Media, Scholarship, Trademarks
Posted on August 10th, 2007 by Tim Armstrong
Bill wrote here recently about his experiences teaching cyber and IP law to non-lawyers, many of whom might come to the table with erroneous preconceptions about how the law in this area works. Indeed, even lawyers and law professors sometimes find the rules on IP to be confusing and counterintuitive, in part because the underlying [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Education & Copyright, Internet & Society, RIAA
Posted on August 7th, 2007 by William McGeveran
I live in the Twin Cities, and the Law School where I teach is just a few blocks from the I-35W bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River last week. (It’s so nearby, in fact, that some of the investigators are using the school building as a temporary headquarters). I am fine and so is [...]
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Filed under: Internet & Society, Minnesota
Posted on August 2nd, 2007 by William McGeveran
In a comment responding to my recent observations about due process in the world of Harry Potter, Jennifer Hendricks drew my attention to a paper by her colleague, Ben Barton (see Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy, 104 Mich. L.R. 1523 (2006)). The paper is pretty good (and a great read!) although I think he [...]
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Filed under: Copyright, Law School, Scholarship
Posted on August 2nd, 2007 by Tim Armstrong
Via Boing Boing, here’s an interesting inside look at the technology inside Sir Richard Branson‘s new airline, Virgin America. It sounds like one of the most thorough attempts yet to create a technologically immersive travel experience — there are personal entertainment systems at every seat (not so uncommon any more on long-haul flights), but in [...]
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Filed under: Media, Open Standards, Peer Production