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 ...

Regardless of political affiliation, Tina Fey's grand return to Saturday Night Live to impersonate Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin has people on the floor laughing.  Professor Adler @ Volokh Conspiracy wakes up earlier than I do, and linked the 3 Fey-as-Palin sketches on this blog post with a poll (Palin - Couric is currently leading. Palin & Hillary Press Conference Palin interview with Katie Couric VP Debate - Palin/Biden I was wondering if Fey would be breaking any laws if she impersonated Palin and staged a public rally.  I know it's a crime to impersonate a police officer, so it would likely be similarly illegal to impersonate an acting governor.  But would there be a First Amendment parody exception? The real Gov. Palin

I can't take credit for the idea behind this post. My awesome civ pro / con law professor / research adviser devoted the end of a civ pro class to watching some of these crazy depositions while we were studying discovery rules. Without further adieu, I give you the Top 6 Most Amusing Depositions. 6. "Background Noise on the Phone" [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz4YBrUML-8&hl=en&fs=1] Okay, so it's debatable whether this one belongs in this collection as the hilarity comes from a source other than the deposed. But it's still amusing, right? This is why I always hate being on conference calls. Is there a polite way to tell some random guy to shut his kid up? I don't even want to consider whether there is a polite way to tell someone to stop pleasuring themselves and/or others. 5. Thank God for Rape Shield Laws [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7T3HLvRrA8&hl=en&fs=1] In this long clip, a junior associate is set up by his firm with a fake, ridiculous deposition. I don't know whether I love or hate this firm for setting up this elaborate situation. The only thing that remains certain is that this guy has some awesome frames. 4. "Would You Object if I Wear a Mask Over My Face?" [youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1FdIDGmdSU"] I'm actually really excited about this ...

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 ...

The Tech Law Prof Blog and Ars Technica have been reporting on the MIT students who were enjoined from sharing their research into the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's faulty "Charlie Card" system with hackers at Defcon. Specifically, the students were able to hack their Charlie Cards into reporting incorrect amounts of money. US District Judge Douglas Wood granted a preliminary ten-day gag order on the students on August 9th. As a result, the students were unable to present their paper as they had planned at Defcon, which took place between August 8-10. Meanwhile, MIT's student-run newspaper, The Tech, decided to publish the students' presentation (the document itself is actually a really interesting read if you can get it to load). At the hearing on Tuesday, Judge George O'Toole refused the MBTA's motion to extend the injunction by five months. Judge O'Toole did not consider the First Amendment argument presented by the Eletronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of the students. Instead, after reviewing evidence that the students did not actually abuse the system, but had simply discovered a theoretical exploit, the Judge found that the students had not violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That brings me to the one point that this ...

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.

As a research assistant, I find myself reading an insane amount of law review articles. Adding Law Review to the mix means that I'll be reading a super insane number of law review articles next year. I always read these articles and notice that they've been written in a nice outline format, but Lexis doesn't give you any kind of table of contents to quickly analyze the argument structure. Reading all of the headings can usually give you some idea of whether the article is going to be of any use, so why not have these headings given up front? LexisNexis, I'm looking at you. Anyway, I got tired of waiting for this feature, so I decided to write some python code to do it. OS X / Linux people, you're stuck downloading python and running python code linked above. If you need any assistance, feel free to ask. Windows people, you need to download and install python, and then download and install my program. After you install python, the outliner will run from your Start Menu or Desktop like any other program you've ever downloaded. It's real simple to use. Cut and paste everything from the Text Section of the law review article, and ...