Saturday, October 25, 2003 at 6:08PM C.E. Petit sums up the dispute between Caterpillar and Disney concerning cameo appearances of the Cat's trademark in George of the Jungle 2: "[T]hey can't seem to see the deforestation for the dead trees."
Saturday, October 25, 2003 at 5:51PM Eugene Volokh posts the Authors Guild email to its members of yesterday's date, regarding Amazon's new Search Inside The Book service. A must read. Regardless of what the specific publishing contracts may provide, it's clear the Guild is philosophically opposed to the idea—even though Amazon is making only limited portions of the books available to individual users, in a format that does not readily lend itself to digital copying and reuse. Says Ernest Miller: "One thing is certain, however. Publishing house lawyers are already drafting language for the standard contracts that will ensure publishers have the right to do this for all future works." Note too the Guild recommends that authors delink their sites from Amazon because it disapproves of the site's Used Books service.
Saturday, October 25, 2003 at 11:12AM Amazon's new Search Inside feature—which allows you to full-text search some 33 million pages from 120,000 books in the Amazon catalog (and, "We plan to widely expand our Search Inside the Book offering and continue to make more books available to you")—struck me first as a super way to shop for books. Then it hit me what a nifty, free research tool this potentially is (see the Search Inside results included in searches for "trespass to chattels;" "work for hire;" "internet jurisdiction; "DMCA;" "digital rights management."). Finally, of course, there were the samoyeds (not me, though we had one when I was little).
Saturday, October 25, 2003 at 9:41AM Elaine Cassel writes Civil Liberties Watch [via Blawg.org], keeping an eye on "The War At Home." Elaine is casting a wide net, blogging about "the physical autonomy of a woman's body," "Web sites on the terrorist watch list," various civil liberties issues on deck in the Supreme Court's current term, and much more. Elaine sounds like a firebrand, I'd love to meet her some time.
Speaking of women whose company you'd be well advised to keep, a big welcome to misbehaving.net: "a celebration of women's contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women's contributions as well as point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field."
Friday, October 24, 2003 at 9:51AM Dispositive is written by a law student somewhere north of Manhattan [via Blawg.org], who ably identifies one of the high ironies of law school:
After you learn to determine the economic theory or public policy which the professor assures you lies just underneath the surface of every case (if you look just a little harder. . .), exams come. And exams only test you on the rules you stopped looking for because your professor didn't seem to think they were very soundly reasoned anyway.
As for making "the process more open and less shrouded in mystery" (see the end of that post), my sense is Dispositive's author is on the right track.
