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 …

A fantastic! post today from Carl Christensen, at PropertyProf Blog, about the Rule of Capture as applied to whales.  Check it out!

How should the law handle, e.g., a dispute about who owns a pet dog or a cat? Should I have used “own” or “pet” in the previous sentence? I’m teaching Property Law for the first time this Fall, and I’m quite interested in property law and theory. (After all, the “p” in “i.p.” is property …) So, I wonder about such questions.

The St. Petersburg Times offers an engaging article about a series of disputes about companion animal custody, including some that have arisen in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Some argue that a “best interest of the animal” standard is more appropriate than a pure property analysis (as if a companion animal were a toaster). [ Hat tip to Howard Bashman's How Appealing. ] Back in May, Miriam Cherry offered a challenging hypothetical animal care question in a post at Concurring Opinions. It sparked many comments, and it’s worth checking out too.

And if you’re interested to learn more about Animal Law, check out this web page about the Animal Law offerings at Lewis & Clark Law School.

A BNA Electronic Commerce & Law report sparked my interest in a recent suit a subscriber filed against online virtual world provider Second Life. (Wikipedia offers this on Second Life.) I tracked down two stories about the suit, here and here. The case may raise interesting questions about who (game developer, or subscriber?) owns what (virtual property, intellectual property?) in the massively multiplayer online game context. Given that subscribers are quitting their meatspace jobs for Second Life careers, the questions are not as trivial as they might at first appear.

Of course, because Second Life’s clients are, in the end, human beings, much of its subscriber-created content is about sex:

Produced by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, Second Life is already something of an online Gomorrah, with adult activity so prevalent that in August the company created an alternative Teen Second Life with strict rules against sexual content.

In any event, we’ll watch with interest as the new suit against Linden Lab progresses.

UPDATE: To explore a law professor’s take on questions about virtual property, take a look at Prof. Joshua Fairfield’s Virtual Property (at SSRN).  You can download the final, published version of Prof. Fairfield’s article in the Boston University Law Review here.

Two days ago, Prof. Miriam Cherry posted a wonderful hypothetical about a sick dog, cured and kept (rather than euthanized) by the vet without the former owner’s knowledge.  It’s based on this news story.  The comment thread, more than 30 strong, is especially rich.  Give it a look …