February 2007 Quick Links

By Eric Goldman * The California Highway Patrol (which, for reasons unclear to me, has investigatory power here) has concluded that the Angelides campaign did not break any laws when they reverse-guessed URLs on Schwarzenegger’s website and found an unrestricted…

Top Cyberlaw Developments for 2006 – Part 2

By John Ottaviani (Eric Goldman is away until the New Year. He left me the keys to the blog. I warned him that this may be like leaving the teenagers the keys to the house when the parents go away…

Nov. 2006 Quick Links

By Eric Goldman My monthly roundup of noteworthy tidbits: * Yesmail, an email outsource vendor, was busted by the FTC under CAN-SPAM for failing to honor opt-out requests because Yesmail’s incoming email filters blocked those opt-out requests as spam. This…

Patent Policy in the Supreme Court and Congress–October 27, 2006

By Eric Goldman The High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law is co-sponsoring, with the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, a conference on Patent Policy in the Supreme Court and Congress. This event will bring…

Sept. 2006 Quick Links

By Eric Goldman Some stories that caught my eye in September: * Digg users are gaming the Digg algorithm. Greg Linden’s take. Naturally, Digg is fighting back by tweaking its algorithm to reduce the effect of gaming and preserve some…

Blackboard Patent Suit Stirs Up Academic and Open Source Hornet’s Nests–Blackboard v. Desire2Learn

By John Ottaviani Blackboard, Inc. v. Desire2Learn Inc., No. 9:06-cv-00155-RHC (complaint filed July 26, 2006) Although this story does not seem to have hit the mainstream press yet, there has been a firestorm in the academic and open source communities…

Employee Blogging Risks

By Eric Goldman A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at the North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology’s symposium called “Attack of the Blog: Legal Horrors in the Workplace.” (I definitely did not pick the name!) In the morning,…

Animal-Related Patent Trends

By Eric Goldman Wired runs an article on Patently Silly, one of the blogs tracking goofy patents. The article notes the implicit contradiction in the trends for patenting pet pampering products and patenting new and more effective ways of producing…

Top Cyberspace IP Cases of 2005

By John Ottaviani (with help from Eric) Cyberspace continues to present fascinating and novel intellectual property issues. What follows is our attempt at identifying some of the more significant “Cyberspace Intellectual Property” decisions of 2005. Once again, it was quite…

Wheel PTO Examiner Profiled

By Eric Goldman Washington Post runs an amusing but surprisingly insightful story about the PTO’s chief examiner of wheel and axle patents, Russell Stormer. One would think that after 5,500 years, there would be few new inventions in the world…