LuminousVoid

So posting has been light as the semester finishes. Ambivalent Imbroglio was asking what was up with the blogging so I figured I’d update the world.

I just handed in my note for the AIPLA Quarterly Journal. Its a look at a debate that Easterbrook and Lessig had about the role of cyberlaw. I look at the debate and apply its lessons to give some policy issues in how to handle the Grokster case. Not too polished, but I don’t think the Grokster decision will really solve the problem of contributory liability. It was a bit of a selfish pick of a topic: I educated myself in contributory infringement and its issues while writing a limited paper on it, so I could be in a position to write up more when the decision came out.

I’ve got to write about 30 pages for Multinational IP. I’m writing about our treaty commitments in Berne, and TRIPS, and the limits these place on the solutions to the orphan works problem. Orphan works are copyrighted works where the copyright owner is impossible or difficult to find. The problem is that no-one can use those works, even if you are willing to pay for it. This makes all sorts of compilations and derivative works risky.

I took a class in “Art of Lawyering” that was corequisite with my internship. Now I have to write a 10-15 page paper for it. A while ago, I wrote a short memo to myself about how our schools new schedule was a socialization of cost and a privatization of benefit. Basically we increased class time and the amount of work in a week and shortened the number of weeks in the term. We did this so that the people in the fall interview program didn’t have to miss class with their 15 or so interviews in a week. We all pay the price so those few can go to 15 interviews for the 1 job they will eventually get. I think I’m gonna formalize that rant in a 10-15 page paper.

I have exams in Privacy and Trademarks. Privacy has been a wonderful class. We have touched on wide areas of the law: media, consumer protection, employment and criminal procedure. I highly recommend you take an informational privacy class in your school. Its going to be a growth industry for corporate compliance practicioners. I just hope we get some nice class action torts out of any anti-Choicepoint legislation that gets written. I doubt that would pass this congress though.

Trademarks has also been really neat. There aren’t too many concepts in it, and my professor was great. Funny guy who was very witty in his analysis. There’s an amazing amount of trademarks that’s unsettled. Specially in the whole idea of diluton, which to me sounds like a crock and a giveway to people with big advertising budgets: in short, we protect people with unique marks not because we want to prevent consumer confusion (the traditional source of trademark infrigement) but because, well we ought to protect the power of marks. The main problem is the exam is going to be closed book. Thats just not me.

I just realized both classes I took this term had texts written by the profs who taught the class. Wow. That’s got to be part of the reason the term was so interesting.