Some IPSC 2009 Highlights

I am at the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference at Cardozo Law School in New York City. If you don’t have the good fortune to be here with me, the agenda and paper abstracts are on line.
A couple of idiosyncratic highlights for me so far include:
Tom Lee’s empirical analysis of how consumers perceive the semantic or [...]

A Madness to its Method: Cert Petition Filed in Bilski

In re Bilski set the patent world aflutter when the Federal Circuit held that business methods, as exemplified in Bilski, fail to qualify as patentable subject matter under Section 101 of the Patent Act. Now, there is a cert petition to the Supreme Court to hear Bilski’s appeal. I’m rapidly reading the petition and will [...]

Why Tax Patents Are Not Evil

Today, Linda Beale, Kristen Osenga, Andrew Schwartz, and I had a great discussion with attendees at the session on tax patents at the AALS conference at the San Diego Marriott. Most of the audience was composed of tax experts, which means they were highly courteous as they planned their march on the PTO with torches [...]

Tax Patents, Surf, and Sun

If you’re enjoying the AALS meeting, why not stop by the Open Source session on Friday morning on tax patents? It starts at 8:30AM, finishes at 10:15, and is in Torrance (South Tower Level 4). I’m presenting with (= being bailed out by) Linda Beale (our moderator), Kristen Osenga, and Andrew Schwartz. Here’s the abstract:
The subject [...]

Congressman From Hollywood to Yield His Chair

Ars Technica has reported that a chain reaction resulting from the death of Congressman Tom Lantos may mark a significant improvement in the line-up of chairmanships influential on Info/Law issues. (It may seem a bit ghoulish to speculate on the spoils right after the death of a great legislator like Lantos, a towering figure [...]

Amazon’s On-Again, Off-Again “One-Click” Patent Off Again

nbsp;Amazon.com’s controversial patent for “one-click shopping” has failed the latest test in its ongoing reexamination proceeding. Responding to the BPAI’s request for a more definite statement of reasons for rejecting the patent, a USPTO examiner last week issued a new order rejecting the patent for want of novelty. You can read more here, here, [...]

On WIPIP 2007

I spent Friday and Saturday at this year’s Works in Progress in Intellectual Property Colloquium, graciously and efficiently hosted at American University’s Washington College of Law. (Next year it will move on to Tulane Law). The number of papers was somewhat bewildering, and the conference was organized on three concurrent tracks to cram [...]

“Working Papers” Conferences

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.

Peer-Produced Journalism About Peer Production

There is so much exciting activity in the general space that some call “citizen media” that I can’t keep track of it all. It ranges from Minnesota Public Radio’s vision of “public insight journalism” to YouTube’s YouChoose 08 initiative to the international aggregation of blogs at Global Voices and many, many other examples [...]

“What Ifs” Conference

Derek and I spent the weekend at a great conference organized by Professor Peter Yu at Michigan State University College of Law, entitled “What Ifs and Other Alternative Intellectual Property and Cyberlaw Stories.” The conference consisted of numerous panelists spinning counterfactual sceanarios, which turned out to be an excellent way to evaluate underlying assumptions [...]

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