Author Archive | David Post

One of the nice things about writing a book and loosing it upon the world is discovering instances when your work stimulates people to do interesting and creative things. I stumbled across this the other day, by Ken Liu — “Chinese Characters for a New World“. It’s a new character for “moose,” formed from the […]

[I don’t think anyone has already posted on this, but apologies if I’m wrong; this seems like the sort of thing VCers would be all over/DavidP] The directors of many of the leading law libraries (Harvard, Duke, Stanford, Yale, and a number of others) have recently adopted a very important policy statement bearing on the […]

Because I like you all so much, I’ve decided to share my formula for guaranteed happiness — well, almost guaranteed. It’s quite simple (and the idea’s not original to me, though I can’t recall from whom* I got it in order to give proper attribution): 1. Buy a lottery ticket – the bigger the payoff, […]

Just wanted to drop a note and invite any of you West Coast VC-ers who might happen to be in the neighborhood this coming Monday to a talk I’ll be giving about my book over at the Stanford Law School around lunchtime (12:50 – 2). It should be interesting – I think I’ve got a […]

Amazon has modified its new Kindle 2, the subject of a somewhat over-heated copyright dispute that I commented on earlier, so that its new “text-to-speech” functionality will be enabled/disabled at the option of the publisher — i.e., that each publisher will get to decide for itself, when licensing books for Kindle sale, whether to allow […]

There are many reasons why copyright law as we know it is fundamentally ill-suited for the networked age, and why it will (if we are fortunate, and smart) look very, very different 10 or 20 years from now. I’ve commented on this many times in the past here on the VC (and will keep doing […]

There’s an interesting little copyright kerfuffle afoot in regard to the release of version 2 of Amazon’s Kindle e-book device. The Kindle 2 incorporates a “text-to-speech” function; that is, for books that you download onto your Kindle, a function is provided whereby you press a button and the device translates the text into computer-generated speech. […]

Eastern Pennsylvania has a terrible reputation for judicial corruption and venality — the stories one hears from practitioners and others around Philadelphia are truly awful, with bags full of money and all the rest. But a story in the NY Times today breaks new, and more nauseating, ground. Two judges in the Wilkes-Barre area have […]

So here’s more “crazy Internet jurisdiction stuff” – with a nice First Amendment overlay, to boot. Federal law (who knew?) makes it a crime to sell depictions of animal cruelty: 18 USC § 48. Depiction of animal cruelty (a) Creation, sale, or possession. Whoever knowingly creates, sells, or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty with […]

As pretty much everyone is surely aware by now, the Associated Press has claimed that the iconic “HOPE” image created by Shepard Fairey for the Obama campaign, and featured on everything from posters to t-shirts to mugs to buttons, is an infringement of the copyright in an AP photograph of Obama, taken by Mannie Garcia. […]

In a kind of reprise of the well-known Yahoo! case (involving a French lawsuit against Yahoo! for displaying Nazi memorabilia on its auction website in violation of French law) from a several years ago, four Google executives are facing criminal charges in an Italian court arising out of a third-party posting of a video at […]

Here’s a nice little essay by Ray Pellechia, on the “official” NY Stock Exchange blog, suggesting that Harry Markopolos, who had figured out the Madoff scam a long time ago, would have been a lot more effective had he blogged about what he found, instead of doing what he actually did in 2005 (i.e., sending […]

So all this time I’ve been in search of Jefferson’s moose, and now I find that I’d been searching for the wrong huge mammal! Jefferson’s mammoth has been unearthed, right under the soon-to-be-built Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego … Seriously. It could only have been better and more apt if they had […]

I was surprised to wake up this morning and find out that (a) Tom Daschle had withdrawn his candidacy to be Sec’y of HHS, and (b) the story was reported in the Washington Post but not yet up here on the VC!! In any event, he is gone — and I think Obama made the […]

Just a reminder to VCers that I’ll be speaking about my new book on Jefferson and the Internet tomorrow (Wednesday) at a Book Forum sponsored by the good folks at the Cato Institute. [This will be the first of a series of these book events — and I like the fact that it’s taking place […]