Posted on September 29th, 2007 by William McGeveran
Earlier this week I taught the case of DiMeo v. Max in civil procedure. As Derek explained the district court ruling last year in this space , it was both a funny opinion and also a clear explanation of the federal-law immunity that certain web sites enjoy for user-generated content that might otherwise give […]
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Filed under: Internet & Society, Court Decisions, civil procedure, ISP, Digital Media, Peer Production, Intermediaries, Law School
Posted on September 26th, 2007 by Derek Bambauer
One of my former Trademarks students, Sonja Markwart, notes that local coffee chain Beaner’s Coffee is changing its name to Biggby Coffee (does the extra G stand for “extra good”?). Why? Turns out “beaner” is a slur (though not a well-known one) that maligns Hispanics. (I didn’t know this, and I drove in Boston traffic […]
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Filed under: Trademarks, Law School
Posted on September 25th, 2007 by William McGeveran
The “star footnote” at the beginning of a law review article — also known as the “Oscar speech footnote” or sometimes the “vanity footnote” — typically includes some biographical information and a list of “thank-yous” just like the “Acknowledgments” section of a book. They can be a little silly sometimes. They also are […]
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Filed under: Scholarship, Law School
Posted on September 24th, 2007 by Derek Bambauer
On Tuesday, Sept. 25, at 12:15PM in Room 2249 at Wayne State University Law School, Prof. Jon Weinberg will debate Diane Katz, Director of Science, Environment, and Technology at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on net neutrality. The Wayne State Federalist Society is kindly sponsoring the debate, which includes free food! I’m moderating, so […]
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Filed under: Internet & Society, Network Neutrality, ISP, Intermediaries, Law School
Posted on September 20th, 2007 by Derek Bambauer
Student loans are either a monthly expense or a painful memory for most of us. I had a brief two-week interregnum between Lotus and law school where I was free from student debt. Ah, those were the days!
Education lender Sallie Mae is up for sale, and it appears that the buyers are backing out. My […]
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Filed under: Corporate Law, Law School, Media
Posted on September 18th, 2007 by William McGeveran
Until recently, it looked to me and to most others like newspaper web sites would have to stop giving away their content for free and begin charging for access. In another sign that we were wrong, the New York Times has announced that it is abandoning the “Times Select” model under which it segregated […]
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Filed under: Open Access, Internet & Society, Digital Media, Media, Search Engines, Blogging
Posted on September 17th, 2007 by William McGeveran
By now it’s basic knowledge — and grist for funny mainstream humor — that young people put overly personal stuff into their social networking pages with abandon, and that schools are flailing around trying ever harder to dissuade them.
But I think one Florida State law professor went too far, if this comment on a […]
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Filed under: Internet & Society, Virtual Worlds, Social Networking, Digital Media, Privacy, Law School, Peer Production, Blogging
Posted on September 5th, 2007 by Tim Armstrong
Discussing Washington v. Heckel (2004) with my Computer and Internet Law students earlier today, I wondered aloud whether anybody really cared about the spam issue any more.
Here at Info/Law, we’ve got our spam tag over there on the right-hand side, and if you click it, you can see the half-dozen or so posts, some of […]
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Filed under: Internet & Society, Spam, Filtering
Posted on September 5th, 2007 by Derek Bambauer
A Coke bottle, that is. I’m teaching Trademarks and Unfair Competition this fall at Wayne State, and one of the first examples I use to illustrate how consumers recognize marks is the distinctive Coca-Cola bottle design. It was trademarked in 1959 (see Registration 0696147 at the USPTO site). Now, Coke is changing the bottle, slightly, […]
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Filed under: Trademarks, Intermediaries, Blogging
Posted on September 3rd, 2007 by Derek Bambauer
There’s significant furor over a photograph (found by Dan Twohig of MonsterMaritime) of an Ohio-class missile sub that shows the boat’s “stealth” propeller (designed to generate minimal noise and hence evade detection). The photo appears on Microsoft’s Live Local (run using Virtual Earth) service (a Google Earth competitor), though credit goes to Pictometry, which uses […]
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Filed under: Security, Internet & Society, national security, Digital Media, Intermediaries, Privacy, Search Engines