Law.com's 2002 IP List

Law.com's survey of the The Biggest IP Cases of 2002 is up [from Slashdot - thread].

Other DMCA Exemption Comments

Seth Finkelstein reasserts the exemption for "Compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by censorware ('filtering software') applications."


The EFF proposes exemptions for copy protected CDs that incidentally restrict access, region coded DVDs, DVDs with unskippable segments and public domain works available only on DVDs.


Ed Felton asks for an exemption for legitimate research


I will add more as they are put on the web.

Split infinitives

You should not hesitate to thoroughly read Stuart Buck's summary of the split infinitive controversy. Having been nit picked by editors over this many times, overzealous infinitive reunions are a pet peeve of mine.

DMCA Comment

The Internet Archive's comment in response to the Copyright Office's DMCA Section 1201(a)(1) Rulemaking Notice of Inquiry has been submitted.

Commons Created

The Creative Commons released its Licensing Project and Founder's Copyright today! So, go ahead, create like it's 1790.


Update:Dave Winer is already building support for the licenses into his web logging tool and the RDF spec.

Broadcast Flag Comments

The FCC has just finished accepting the first round of Broadcast Flag comments (read the
read the
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
). The comments are available at the FCC site and others are available from the author's web sites. Those worth a read include:



If you find any other noteworthy submissions, please drop me a note. Reply comments are due on January 17, 2003.


See also Consensus at Lawyerpoint the EFF's blog on the subject.

Rating Systems

Glenn Fleishman (of GlennLog) posts an interesting summary of his discussion with Howard Rheingold about Intentional or Implicit Rating. This is something near and dear to my heart as well, though I dream of the type of rating by action, I think that once we have the AI required to get there (and correctly interpret my actions) we may already have the AI required to correctly guess my actions and figure out ratings from my previous (and unrelated) information dump to the AI. Of course another response is that there is a third way (what GrepMoodMusic uses) that takes intentional ratings and then uses knowledge about those ratings to make a few of them go a long way.

What if?

Jason Schultz, a fellow tech/law geek, is doing some great work (to follow up his Supreme Court amicus brief in Eldred v. Ashcroft) on the potential result of invalidating the 1976 Copyright Act's extension of copyright. [from Lessig Blog].

Cert Granted re: Model Building Codes

Southern Building Code v. Veeck will get supreme court review. It is an interesting decision and Lawmeme's comments are also worth a read.[from LawMeme].