Captain Copyright - A Canadian Creation. So I'm thinking about whether it is legal and/or advisable to sell my old 1L outlines to the hoard of current 1Ls that would undoubtedly pay dollars for a customized outline.  There was a service called TakeNote @ Cornell that produced custom class notes on red paper, designed to foil would-be photocopiers.  (They hired TAs to take notes during that class that you undoubtedly skipped because of your subscription to Takenote Example of Intro to Wines TakeNote). So I ask - Would be infringing upon a professor's copyright? The concept of copyrighting a lecture (technically, a live performance) was briefly addressed in my copyright class.  Additionally, an excellent law review titled "Note: 'Profiting At My Expense': An Analysis of the Commercialization of Professors' Lecture Notes" by Ashley T. Barnett - 9 J. Intell. Prop. L. 137 (Fall 2001) discusses the issue of commercial note-taking services, advocating that additional protections should be adopted. Does federal copyright law prevent a commercial note service from copying a lecture delivered by a professor? The answer is: it depends. The legality of buying and selling lecture notes or of posting lecture notes on the Internet seems to be a gray area of the ...

Legal Geekery contributor Kim told me about the entertaining website of Marque Lawyers, who seek to revolutionize the legal industry. MARQUE exists!  We are Australia’s newest law firm, and we have the single ambition of completely changing the way that law is practised. We do not charge by the hour. We do not charge you when we pick up the phone or send you an email. We do not charge you for photocopying or travel time or any of that kind of stuff. We invest in long term relationships with our clients, and we measure the value of our services in the same way that you do. We have a lot to offer, and we provide it in a way that doesn’t hurt. There’s a lot more, but that’ll do for starters. So I laughed for a bit, but then recognized that the firm has a pretty sweet address for a non-traditional fee structure.  Granted they're up-and-coming, but that section of Sydney is somewhere I'd like to practice. And because of the the ongoing job search, I've been visiting a ton of firm sites recently, and have stumbled across some pretty great designs. Gibson Dunn - traditional styling, motivational text & artistic lawyer photos Cravath - ...

Wired Blog has this great story about the cartoon above that was distributed to 50,000 students to teach them that file sharing was illegal.  It seems to me that cartoons would be the best way to get substantive legal information across. [The cartoons were] produced by the National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit describing itself as an "organization dedicated to improving the administration of justice by providing leadership and service to court systems in the United States." But the story line here is a miscarriage of justice at best -- even erroneously describing file sharing as a city crime punishable by up to two years in prison. . . . . "The Case of Internet Piracy," however, reads like the Recording Industry Association of America's public relations playbook: Download some songs, go to jail and lose your scholarship. Along the way, musicians will file onto the bread lines. "The purpose is basically to educate kids -- middle school and high school-aged about how the justice system operates and about what really goes on in the courtroom as opposed to what you see on television," said Lorri Montgomery, the center's communications director. During my freshman year (2001) at Cornell, around fifty students were busted for downloading ...

Interesting article in Saturday's Washington Post about how Pandora internet radio is facing heightened fees that might force them to shut down the site.  A good summary is provided here and quoted in part below. 1. The royalty payments at stake are supposed to compensate performers (and their record labels) for the use of their music, much as songwriters have long received a small royalty payment for the use of their work. 2. But unlike royalties paid to songwriters, these "performance royalties" don't apply to FM or AM -- whether analog or digital HD Radio broadcasts -- but do cover satellite, cable and Internet broadcasts. 3. Cable and satellite broadcasts pay a simple percentage of their revenues. 4. The proposals cooked up by the Copyright Royalty Board (a panel of judges appointed by the Librarian of Congress to settle certain intellectual-property disputes) and backed by SoundExchange, the theoretically nonpartisan group charged with collecting these royalties, would impose a per-song, per-listener fee that many Webcasters say would put them out of business. Tip of the hat to overlawyered.

Let's talk about internet gambling for a moment. You do know that it's illegal in the US, right? I only ask because apparently a significant number of people that gamble online don't realize that it is against the law (my ex-roommate, who was a compulsive online gambler, for instance).1 I sat through my cyberlaw class the other day where several students put forth the argument that online gambling should be legal because the user is "virtually sitting in" the jurisdiction where gambling is legal.  That argument really baffles me. Anybody that has been to a casino recently knows that a significant portion of the gambling is done on computers. Essentially, when you execute the code on your computer, you're sitting in front of the exact same type of terminal that you would be sitting in front of in a casino. In essence, it's tantamount to renting a "gambling terminal" from a casino, taking it home, and expecting to legally be able to cash in on your winnings by bringing it back to the casino when you're done gambling. Thoughts? 1 "Vince" brought to my attention 31 USCS § 5362(10), which definitely allows for some legal internet gambling. See my professor's comments on this entry ...