Tracking Trademark Scholarship

If you follow trademark law you must bookmark this invaluable web site at the University of Texas at Austin Law Library. It lists every new trademark law article weekly. Fabulous (though I wish it linked to online versions of the articles too).

An Open Access Success Story, Just in Time for CALI

I’m traveling to Baltimore tomorrow, where I’ll be speaking later this week at UMD, one of the few law schools that can claim to be older than my own. The occasion is this year’s CALI Conference for Law School Computing, and I’ll be delivering an updated version of my talk on the open access movement.
As […]

Round 2: Time Warner Gets It Wrong, and the French Follow the Model

Update: I should have read more carefully: Time Warner and Verizon confirmed they’re not going to block any Web sites. I’ve changed text below to reflect that.
Yesterday, I posted a quick analysis of the new policy (using the methodology I propose in a new draft paper) undertaken by Sprint, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable at […]

Filtering, American-Style: Verizon, Sprint, Time Warner Cable to Block Child Porn

Filtering: it’s not just for China anymore. (Or Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea…) Internet censorship via technological means is a growing trend, and now it’s surfaced in the U.S. Three major ISPs have agreed, under pressure from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, to block access to Usenet groups and Web […]

Public records, one JPEG at a time?

To its credit, the U.S. government has placed a tremendous quantity of legal information online. You can look up any patent ever issued at the USPTO’s web site and see either the full text (since 1976) or a scanned image (since 1790) of the issued patent. Pending legislation can be downloaded from THOMAS, […]

Tech Companies Called on The Carpet in DC. Again.

Google, Yahoo!, and Cisco faced questions from the subcommittee on human rights (part of the Senate Judiciary Committee) about their role in China’s Internet censorship system. Cisco was in particularly hot water after an internal document surfaced - it discusses how Cisco technology can “Combat ‘Falun Gong’ evil religion and other hostiles.” Senator Dick Durbin […]

Hannah Montana Bill Advances

The Minnesota State House has passed the “Hannah Montana bill”, 119-12. The proposed legislation, which I discussed last month, bans software that jumps the queue at Ticketmaster and other sites that sell event tickets. The state Senate passed a slightly different version of the bill easrlier this month, and now must consider the […]

Challenge to Facebook’s Trademark

Most readers probably know about the bitter lawsuit against Mark Zuckerburg, the controversial founder of Facebook, alleging that he stole the idea for the wildly successful social-networking site from other Harvard students who had hired the young geek to write code for a similar site, eventually unveiled as ConnectU. I never knew whom to […]

Can States Copyright Their Statutes?

Via Boing Boing comes a story about the State of Oregon asserting copyright over its official codification of state laws, the Oregon Revised Statutes. The state’s Office of Legislative Counsel has been sending out C&Ds to groups like Justia and public.resource.org, demanding that they take down their copies of the state laws. The groups are […]

More Congressional Staff Financial Data Online

Back in September 2006 I expressed skepticism about the posting of all congressional staff salaries by a web site called LegiStorm. At the time I said:
It might be different if this were the members of Congress themselves (whose salaries are set by statute) or perhaps their most senior aides. Can it really matter to […]

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