Congratulations to Professor Alison Julien, who was recently elected to serve on the board of directors of the Legal Writing Institute.
The Legal Writing Institute (LWI) is the largest organization of legal writing professors and the second largest U.S. organization of law school professors. LWI has over 2,100 members from 38 countries.
After three intense preliminary rounds of competition, four teams have advanced to the semifinal rounds of the 2010 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition. Please congratulate the following teams:
Margaret Delain and Tiffany Winter
Gabe Johnson-Karp and Alexandra Grimley
Ashley Roth and Emily Lonergan
Nathaniel Wojan and Nicole Kowalski
The semifinal rounds will take place on Wednesday, March 31 at 6:00 p.m., followed by a reception in Eisenberg Hall. All members of the Law School community are invited to attend both the semifinal and final rounds of competition.
The final round will take place on Tuesday, April 6 at 6:00 p.m. at the Federal Courthouse, with a reception immediately following at the Milwaukee Club.
Congratulations to all the participants of this year’s Jenkins Competition:
I’ve long been interested in copyright and games—an interest that began with copyright and video games, but worked its way backwards to consider games generally. Games exist at the boundary of copyright law: they seem to include much that is protectable, and yet there is a general rule in copyright doctrine that games are not copyrightable. (For more, see my four–part series on PrawfsBlawg in 2008, in particular Part III and Part IV; also this post).
I’ve now uploaded a new paper to SSRN, Games and Other Uncopyrightable Systems, that explains the purpose and argues for the continued vitality of that rule. Some may recognize the paper as what used to be Part I—the “background” section—of my long-awaited video games paper. The questions surrounding the copyrightability of games proved to be so intricate that it required a separate paper just to address them. In short, games are uncopyrightable because they are systems—a conclusion that is only moderately helpful, because systems themselves are not well understood. I therefore tackle that issue as well. Here is the abstract: