March 5th 2009
Sokolove Law: Both Entrance and Exit In January the Law Office of James Sokolove turned the media spotlight on itself. It issued a press release that Mr. Sokolove was making media appearances on a local rock station and PBS. Then there was the long-format feature in Boston Magazine, with the tag line “They’ve also created […]
September 3rd 2008
A recent Supreme Court ruling has emboldened manufacturers of goods ranging from baby food to clothing to set minimum pricing requirements of their distributors. The case has inspired protest from most states’ attorneys general, as well as economists who identify such agreements as a cause of inflation. The Wall Street Journal‘s political blog reports: Attorneys […]
August 7th 2008
Both Joe Camel and JC Penney have tried to reverse their fortunes by attempting to look like other brands that have seen greater success in recent years. But there’s a gossamer-thin line between imitation, homage and infringement. Few cartoon mascots are more hated than Joe Camel, who Reason online named the “most vilified cartoon character in history.” (This […]
August 6th 2008
Search pundit Danny Sullivan often jokes that he remembers when “Google used to be a search engine.” They’ve become an advertising business, a cell-phone operating system maker, a blog platform, and now a venture capital firm. But at their core, Google is about search. And Knol, their “answer to Wikipedia,” creates a screaming conflict of […]
July 23rd 2008
Do You Own What You Buy? Increasingly, it seems that we no longer own our own stuff. Is Your Website Yours? Are we getting used to governments seeking to regulate websites? If I own or rent a server, and pay to connect it to a private network so that other users can access my private […]
July 23rd 2008
James Boyd White is a distinguished professor of Law and English at the University of Michigan. In the spirit of Erazim Kohak, his recent talk on Law, Economics and Torture admonishes us against reducing life, democracy or law to mere economics, and to resist this trend when it is presented as inevitable. Long ago I […]
July 3rd 2008
There has been commentary, criticism, and even worry about ICANN’s proposed laissez-faire policy to allow a broad range of top-level domains. Our friends at Circle ID try to calm the waters by reminding us that ICANN’s byzantine committee structure, and its tendency to avoid both conflict and even the clearest paths of action, can make […]
May 27th 2008
Boing Boing has a linking policy: “After years of making fun of ‘linking policies’ that set out the terms under which a website can be linked to, BoingBoing has decided to create a linking policy of our own. Here it is — now, abide by it!
May 24th 2008
I’m struck by the visible and creative use of the Internet by people in China responding to the Sichuan earthquake. Then again, so are Western technophiles, who seem overheated about how their favorite application was used in response to this disaster. Rather than attempt to synthesize something that’s as yet unfinished, I’d like to share […]
May 9th 2008
The way your competitors acquire, protect, and promote their intellectual assets can inadvertently signal their next moves. Increasingly savvy marketers are following how competitors manage their intellectual assets to get a sense of what they’re preparing to do next. The intellectual assets we’re discussing here include the rights conferred by intellectual property, human knowledge secured […]
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