I always learn from Cory Doctorow.

Here’s his Cambridge Business Lecture, entitled “Life in the Information Economy.”

Give it a listen!

Bill Patry has closed his blog.

We’ve lost a strong, scholarly, and sane voice.

New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann has written a wonderful, much-needed online essay entitled “Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer.”  It’s available here.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

Recently, the state of Oregon has used copyright law to threaten people who were publishing its laws online. Can they really do that? More to the point, why would they? This essay will put the Oregon fracas in historical context, and explain the public policies at stake. Ultimately, it’ll try to convince you that Oregon’s demands, while wrong, aren’t unprecedented. People have been claiming copyright in “the law” for a long time, and at times they’ve been able to make a halfway convincing case for it. While there are good answers to these arguments, they’re not always the first ones that come to hand. It’s really only the arrival of the Internet that genuinely puts the long-standing goal of free and unencumbered access to the law within our grasp.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing!

Yesterday, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of promotional CD reseller Troy Augusto on his copyright exhaustion claim.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing Augusto, has posted a pdf of the opinion here.

Those who wonder whether purported licenses on tangibles (”Not for resale,” etc.) can negate the exhaustion principle, in copyright or in patent, need to take a close look at Judge Otero’s analysis

Today’s New York Times has a delightful story about British t-shirt company Last Exit To Nowhere. Its shirts feature logos made famous by works of fiction.

A bit from the story:

Consider the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It’s part of the fictional universe depicted in the 1979 film “Alien” and its sequels; Nostromo, the spaceship freighter in the first movie, is a Weyland-Yutani vessel. The company doesn’t do much in the way of branding in, you know, reality. But as it turns out, it’s possible to buy yourself a Weyland-Yutani T-shirt, or even a Nostromo T. It also turns out many people have.

LastExitToNowhere.com specializes in designs relating to “some of the most memorable places, corporations and companies in 20th-century fiction.” Other popular T-shirts on the site, which went up in June, include one for Tyrell (“More Human Than Human” is its motto), maker of genetic replicants in “Blade Runner,” and Polymer Records, a music label in “This Is Spinal Tap.” The site’s founder is Mike Ford, a 34-year-old graphic designer and movie fan based in Nottingham, England. Thanks to attention from blogs and, more recently, publicity from the British magazine Empire, Ford says he has shipped about 4,000 shirts to customers in Europe, the U.S., even New Zealand, and imaginary brands are now his full-time job. (With shipping, the T’s cost around $45 for the U.S. shopper.)

Putting aside the intellectual property law questions (e.g., is the matter better analyzed as a trademark matter, or a copyright matter?), the story highlights the fun some experience in wearing their hearts on their chests (rather than their sleeves).

The author, Rob Walker, blogs at http://www.murketing.com/journal/.

Here.

Here’s yesterday’s New York Times story on the right-of-publicity suit arising from the commercial use of a Creative Commons-licensed photo found at Flickr.  I agree with Mike Madison: there are some deep questions here about Creative Commons.

Lawprofs Matt Sag and Mark Schultz have launched a new blog about fair use and copyright law, called Fairly Useful.

Check it out!

I refer, of course, to Universal Music Group v. Augusto.

Augusto resold a UMG free promotional music CD on eBay. UMG alleges it’s copyright infringement.

EFF is on the case for Augusto, along with Keker & Van Nest.

Here’s the web page for pleadings, at EFF.

Tim Lee has written about the case, at both Ars Technica and The American.

A question I have … is the Bobbs-Merrill Co. case, the fountainhead of the first sale doctrine, any weaker now that the Supreme Court has, in the Leegin case, overturned the Dr. Miles case (which had held that resale price maintenance was a per se antitrust violation)? After all, the sale condition the book publisher purported to impose in Bobbs-Merrill was a resale price maintenance condition …

In today’s New York Times, there’s a fine article about multiple efforts to create on-line repositories of federal and state caselaw.  Many courts now regularly post their decisions on line.  But these resources don’t extend very far back in time.  The efforts the Times describes take on that latter task.  Check out the story, as well as the two websites discussed in the story: public.resource.org; and altlaw.org.