the executive summary:
Nutshell: if you’re a law firm considering hiring me, and you stumble across this blog, please don’t get nervous. Instead, talk to me, and/or read the rest of this post. I’m eager to explain why I blog, and why I think it may make me a better lawyer and a good addition to [...]
Good news: I’ve been selected as Editor in Chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, 2008-2009 edition. I’m excited to be able to work with a great team to release a solid issue of the journal, and also to spend some time thinking about where journals might go next.
Bad news: Lots of work [...]
Sun has posted a new draft of their openjdk trademark license. If I read it correctly, it basically says you’re OK to use it as long as it is the ‘vast majority’ of the code is the same as the official codebase. The ‘vast majority’ language seems like a reasonable compromise, allowing the copyright license [...]
So… I spent most of last week in Redmond, on the Microsoft campus, attending the fourth ‘Microsoft Tech Summit.’ The name is sort of misleading. It does describe the subject matter fairly well- the presentations were mostly pretty technical, and they were very much about Microsoft. And it was summit-sized- maybe 40 people.
What the name [...]
The next time I hear “we’ve licensed the specification under Creative Commons so anyone can implement the spec”, I’m going to scream at someone.1
To take a list from a Microsoft license I read yesterday, implementing a spec may require (among other things) licensing of “pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark [...]
good news: a post from my journal’s blog team made it all the way to slashdot.
bad news: slashdot (more specifically, the blog we’re nominally affiliated with) called our writing ’surprisingly readable.’ It’s sad that lawyers are supposed to be excellent communicators, and yet our training typically stilts our writing so much that it is surprising [...]
Several weeks of backlog from my feed reader:
shakespeare on entrepreneurship: ‘Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we might oft win, by fearing to attempt!’ So true. Via.
I’m always on the lookout for examples that Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot, but I’m not sure this is one of them, since [...]
“The buyer has received and spent all evening setting up the computer; he is sitting in his study in International Falls in his underwear with a beer when he has to decide whether to agree to the new [contract] terms or go out in the minus 30 temperature and return the computer.” –James J. White, [...]
First off, I Am Not A Lawyer And This Is Not Legal Advice. If you go to Microsoft (or to anyone) and say ‘but this law student on a blog told me so’ then you will be laughed out of the room, or sued, or both, and you’ll deserve it. :)
Mike Shaver blogged early [...]
Two document-centric sites came across my radar last week; some quick thoughts on each:
docstoc.com: sharing-focused document site- you upload, they publish to the world so that anyone can read it. Founded by law school students, so, among other things, has lots and lots of law school outlines, which is a nice resource. Has some very [...]
