NYLS Launches Google Book Settlement Wiki

James Grimmelmann and a team of students at New York Law School have launched an elaborate web site called “The Public Index” to facilitate conversation about the proposed settlement of the Google Book litigation. As the site’s home page explains:

Here, you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section. … In addition, you can:

Study our [...]

Zittrain Warns of the Cloud

Jonathan Zittrain expands on the themes in his must-read book this morning in a must-read New York Times op-ed about the shift toward cloud computing. A taste of the main point:
[T]he most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial [...]

Bradford and Hautzinger on Digital Statutory Supplements for Legal Education

One of the many interesting presentations I attended at the just-concluded 2009 CALI Conference was a tag-team primer on creating digital statute books and casebooks.  Now, I see that one of the presenters, Professor Steve Bradford of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has posted on SSRN the paper he discussed at CALI.  Here’s the pithy abstract:
Law students [...]

Kindle Owners of the World, Unite!

Roy Blount Jr., writer and president of the Author’s Guild, has a jeremiad in the New York Times about Amazon’s Kindle, and its ability to read books aloud. Blount thinks that is a violation of authors’ rights. After giving some thought to his argument, I can only conclude that Blount should stick to sports, because [...]

Like Voldemort, Potter-Lexicon Suit Rises Again

RDR Books, which lost in a copyright lawsuit filed by Warner Bros. and J.K. Rowling against its planned Harry Potter Lexicon book, has filed a notice of appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (Hat tip: Slashdot, Ray Beckerman; coverage: Stanford’s Copyright & Fair Use blog, P2PNet; list of documents [...]

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

Several acquaintances have mentioned, or e-mailed, or (appropriately enough) posted on Facebook this New York Times Magazine article from Sunday about Facebook, Twitter, and “ambient awareness.” A lot of it will be fairly old news to many readers here, and ground that I am sure will be covered more completely by John Palfrey and [...]

Rowling 1, Lexicon 0

J.K. Rowling has won her copyright lawsuit against RDR Books, the (now former) publisher of the Harry Potter Lexicon book. The decision is 68 pages long and is available courtesy of the Wall Street Journal. I thought Rowling would, and should, win, but I’m not impressed by the court’s reasoning, especially on the key question [...]

There Goes My Summer Home

The New York state legislature passed, and Governor David Patterson signed, a bill dealing with textbook pricing (the Textbook Access Act) that incidentally bans faculty members from selling “complimentary” copies of textbooks. This sounded bad at first, because I’ve got a nice little side business on eBay with the books I randomly receive for courses [...]

Harry Potter and the Lexicon of Fair Use

No, it’s not the eighth installment of the Rowling series – rather, it’s the latest installment of the ongoing legal fistfight over RDR Books and Steven Vander Ark’s attempt to publish a book version of the on-line guide to the Harry Potter wizarding world. (I posted briefly on this earlier, when I was annoyed by [...]

NYT Fouls Up Fair Use

I start most mornings, especially on weekends, by reading the New York Times. In my household, I get made fun of for reading the Business section first (that’s where the tech stories reside). Sometimes that can be a bad idea, like today, when I read the story on the Harry Potter lawsuit and began yelling [...]

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