The edition of The Economist on the newstands (Oct. 22 – 28, 2005) has an extensive section — 18 pp. of the print version — on patents and technology, written by Kenneth Cukier. Must-reading for anyone interested in the future of information technologies, open source, licensing, and intellectual property law. Cukier tracks the growth of … Read more
Lawsuit filed today on the Google libraries project, with extraordinary counsel (no doubt) on both sides. The publishers assert copyright violation by Google for re-publishing digital versions of their copyrighted works that are kept in libraries such as the University of Michigan’s.
CC needs you to donate — and not just your time, this time. Jamie Boyle writes: “We have had incredible success, both in the number of our licenses being used (Yahoo reports 50 million link backs, though that is an imprecise measure ) and in the quality and importance of the material licensed. (From MIT’s … Read more
How many hard-drives of reporters and bloggers this morning contain variants of the following, pre-written, anticipating: “Today, the United States Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited ruling in the Grokster case, holding that… This opinion marks a watershed in the epic battle over peer-to-peer file-sharing. Its effects on innovation will be far-reaching. Experts said they … Read more
Denise Howell, fortunately, caught and reported in on the settlement of the extraordinary Bikram Yoga intellectual property lawsuit over the rights to “hot yoga.” (It is always best of course that matters settle, but I can’t help but think that this outrageous dispute would have made for a fabulous trial.) From the Hindustan Times … Read more
On Wednesday night, HLS feted Prof. William W. (“Terry”) Fisher III as he received the Hale and Dorr Intellectual Property chair. It was an exceptional event: a standing-room-only crowd in Austin East and a lecture, prompted by Dean Elena Kagan’s inauguration of a new-to-HLS-but-nonetheless-venerable tradition, on the state of the field of the freshly-chaired professor. The … Read more