Stanford Center for Internet and Society

I’ve just put the abstract of a new paper on my SSRN page. Temporary title is: Ontology of Information and its Lessons for Intellectual Property. The full abstract is available here (I am not yet able to make the full text available online). Here are a few lines from the abstract:

I had the pleasure of participating in the excellent Legal Futures Conference sponsored by CIS and Google last month, where I was on a panel of “lightning talkers” tasked with answering the following question in under five minutes: “What single fact or data point about the current world of content and technology tells us most about where the Information Revolution will stand in ten years?”

Just as I started to consider IP aspects of the green wave, I
stumbled upon the Eco-Patent
Commons, a repository for IP relating to sustainable growth and other ‘green technologies’ placed into the public domain.  The agency is sponsored by the World

An ongoing project reviews patent claim construction orders adding the salient features into a thesaurus of claim constructions. Additionally, I characterize the constructions according to several factors including the ‘prevailing construction’, or more simply, ‘who won.’ Presented here is a summary chart of a limited set of outcomes.

I have a short article in CIO Insight this month about the real meaning of the Writer's Guild of America strike.

The three-month strike was remarkable in that the sole issue, one the industry was willing to spend over $2 billion fighting, was when and how revenues from new and future digital channels would be allocated. What's remarkable about that is that so far there are no such revenues.

Next month Stanford CIS is hosting a conference about Legal Futures. Judging by the list of participants, the upcoming even should be nothing less than electrifying. This post is unrelated to the conference. In fact, it is not about legal “futures” at all. Rather, it is about legal “pasts.”

In the context of aspects S1145 for Patent Reform, attached is a chart that illustrates the effect of patent reexaminations and litigation on patents. This compares 4522 instances of assertion of reexamined patents in both Federal Courts and the ITC. It simply shows the number of litigations initiated before or after the filing of a reexamination.

Some time ago I did a post on the new copyright legislation in Israel. There are many interesting things about this law, and now, at the curtsey of Prof. Niva Elkin-Koren from Haifa University, there is an unofficial English translation of the new statute available.

Technology transfer, and the exchange of patents in particular, entering a phase reflecting a maturing of the practice. In the past I’ve reported about the Ocean Tomo patent auctions based on open-outcry bidding. Recently two additional efforts are starting.

Today on Slate, Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu lays out an excellent explanation of why RDR Books has the right to publish the Harry Potter Lexicon, and why J.K. Rowling's copyright claims to the contrary are misplaced. Read the article here.