Bruce E. Boyden – Page 41 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

The Housing Crisis From the Air

Post author:Bruce E. Boyden
Post published:August 11, 2009
Post category:Uncategorized

New Homes Construction Last week, I flew down to West Palm Beach, Florida for the Southeastern Association of Law Schools’ (SEALS) annual conference, which was a lot of fun. (Marquette just joined SEALS as an affiliate member.) On the way down, I flew out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport in mid-morning, over Atlanta’s outer suburbs.

I was amazed as we flew over miles and miles of half-finished subdivisions, carved haphazardly out of the wooded hills. Some were little more than cleared lots; others had houses in various states of completion, forming tenuous neighborhoods. The geographic impact of the housing bubble will be with us for quite some time.

As we continued to pass over these monuments to irrational exuberance, I was reminded of the closing lines of one of my favorite poems:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Future Imperfect

Post author:Bruce E. Boyden
Post published:July 27, 2009
Post category:Computer Law Intellectual Property Law

Urban Factory A couple of weeks ago Amazon remotely deleted two e-books off of its customers’ Kindle readers—and in one of those too-good-to-be-true moments, the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. Ars Technica and the New York Times explain what happened; the Times ran a follow-up story today. Commentary on the incident has ranged from the fervid to the apocalyptic. (An exception is Chicago’s Randy Picker.) Jack Balkin argues that “Amazon threatens many of the basic freedoms to read we have come to expect in a physical world;” Jonathan Zittrain worries that “tethered appliances” like the Kindle “are gifts to regulators,” who will exercise a “line-item veto” over passages in books they don’t like; Farhad Manjoo at Slate concludes that “Now we know what the future of book banning looks like.”

What I find intriguing about these responses is that they are all based on analogizing Kindle e-books to physical books located in your house.

IP Colloquium Tackles Fairey v. AP

Post author:Bruce E. Boyden
Post published:July 22, 2009
Post category:Intellectual Property Law

Doug Lichtman at UCLA is producing a fantastic series of monthly podcasts on IP issues, called the Intellectual Property Colloquium. This month’s episode is on fair use in the Shepard Fairey case, and features a terrific line-up of guests: Mark Lemley, attorney for Fairey; Dale Cendali, attorney for AP; and Ken Richieri, General Counsel at the New York Times, who adds the view of someone on both sides of the issue. Doug asks some pretty good questions, particularly about the notoriously circular fourth fair use factor (the effect on the potential market). It’s worth a listen, and you can also use it for CLE credit in six states, “and any state that accepts any of those through reciprocity,” which I believe includes Wisconsin (do not rely on me for this).