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Copyright as Antidote to DRM
Image via Wikipedia Consider this idea: without copyright protection for digital media, we would have even more Digital Rights Management. Why? Because without it, recouping up-front investment without restricting distribution would be difficult or impossible. Since I often see a confluence of beliefs around those who hate DRM and those who hate copyright laws (I […]
April 2009 / 3 min.
Challenging the Strong Presumption of Patent Validity
Patent Law Blog (Patently-O): Challenging the Strong Presumption of Patent Validity One of the next major legal challenges to patent rights will be against the strong presumption of validity associated with the patent grant. Section 282 of the patent act says only that a patent and its claims “shall be presumed valid.” Under longstanding doctrine, […]
April 2009 / 1 min.
Social media for law students (and everyone else)
Image via CrunchBase Social media tools allow everyone, not just information technology aficionados, to create and maintain their online professional persona. They have become key tools as online research has become ubiquitous. Using Google to look up potential new hires is something that many in the tech industry have been doing for years (I’ve been […]
April 2009 / 3 min.
10 Reasons for a Law Student to Blog
Image by TW Collins via Flickr 10. Make money fast! Hardly. Blogging may pay the bills for some, but law blogging is hardly going to pay for the coffee you need to get through the semester, much less your books. So stick to free tools like Blogger.com and WordPress.com so you at least don’t lose […]
April 2009 / 4 min.
Review of Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World
Breaking the silence about Spring - RealClimate: Did you know that in 1965 the U.S. Department of Agriculture planted a particular variety of lilac in more than seventy locations around the U.S. Northeast, to detect the onset of spring - in turn to be used to determine the appropriate timing of corn planting and the […]
April 2009 / 1 min.
Information as Property from the Scholarly Kitchen
I found this interesting discussion of IP today: Information, however, has properties that make it sufficiently different from physical objects to question whether the property model is a good metaphor for information. Unlike natural resources, information is non-depletable. Overuse of information does not lead to its scarcity, nor does it attenuate its value; in fact, […]
April 2009 / 1 min.
Law, War, and the History of Time
Image by AlaskanLibrarian via Flickr Law, War, and the History of Time - Balkinization: I’ve posted a new paper on SSRN on a theme I’ve blogged about here and here: Law, War, and the History of Time. While I wrote this paper in the interest of making sense out of the 20th century history of […]
April 2009 / 1 min.
A Misguided Philosophy of Science
PrawfsBlawg: A Misguided Philosophy of Science: During my first year as a economics graduate student, I spent at most two minutes thinking about the philosophy behind empirical work. On the first day of my year-long econometrics sequence, our professor quickly reminded us that hypotheses cannot be proven, only disproven. That was it. I don’t even […]
April 2009 / 3 min.
Microsoft Gets Slammed in Yet Another Patent Suit
Image via Wikipedia Microsoft Gets Slammed in Yet Another Patent Suit - Law Blog - WSJ: In what’s being billed as the fifth-largest patent award in historyaEUR”and the second largest this yearaEUR”a federal jury in Rhode Island on Wednesday ordered Microsoft to pay $388 million to Uniloc USA Inc. and Uniloc Singapore Private Ltd. for […]
April 2009 / 2 min.
Consumers and Copyright: Thoughts about reforming the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is much maligned, but, I think, not fully understood by very many people. Today, a visitor to our Software Law class from Microsoft presented a very good explanation of the 1998 law. He explained some aspects that are not spoken about too much in the general tech community, like […]
April 2009 / 4 min.