How to Write a Book Review and Refute Textualism, All At Once

My blogging has been slow lately, but I’d be remiss not to point readers to Judge Richard Posner’s review of Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner’s new book, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. It is a terrific piece of writing and it is an utter evisceration of the book. In the review, Posner does [...]

Pangloss’s Copyright

Further proof that, from an IP perspective, we do not live in the best of all possible worlds… My Essay “Pangloss’s Copyright” in the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, in response to Peter Yu’s excellent “Region Codes and the Territorial Mess,” is now available. Feedback welcomed!

Censorship at Yale

The first rule of censorship conferences is… do not talk about censorship conferences. Ignoring that, I encourage you to tune in to Yale’s Global Censorship Conference – it is an awesome group of speakers and topics. You can catch the livestream here. For those of you willing to get up on Sunday morning, you can [...]

Google Books 3.0?

James Grimmelmann, the guru of all things Google Books, reported in a blog post that yesterday’s status conference in the case was relatively uneventful save for two developments. For one, it sounds like Judge Chin is irritated with the parties. He noted that the case is six years old and threatened to set a “relatively [...]

Easterbrook was wrong

There is such thing as Law of the Horse. Lessig 1, Easterbrook 0!

Palin v. Gawker: Governor Should Win, But We All Lose

I posted an article this morning in Capital New York unpacking the copyright dispute between Gawker and HarperCollins, publisher of Sarah Palin’s new book. Gawker posted digital images of 21 pages from the book last week, before its publication date (Tuesday). The publisher sued (complaint available from Marty Schwimmer here), and won a temporary restraining [...]

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: [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]