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Good law schools should really take advantage of this opportunity. I think schools could be judged by this for how up to date they are and how much they really care about their lawyers getting real experience in the classroom.

I agree, and Franklin Pierce happens to be one of those institutions that really cares about getting its students real-world, law-practice, experience.

dont these people have a site they take donations for the effort, or we just donate to eff.org ?

Yes you can! Go here to donate to the Franklin Pierce Law Center. Let them know why you're doing it, too, because you appreciate the courageous work that their law clinic is doing on behalf of Mavis Roy.

A PhD doesn't make a good teacher. It is much more likely to make a really bad teacher.

Citation? I had a lot of great university teachers. 8.5 years (4 BS, 4.5 MS/PhD) at the university level insured that I saw many of them. Nearly every class was taught by the professor themself. It was very rare a TA lectured. The vast majority of professors (all PhDs) were good to great - 75%. What may be true about a PhD is that they are no more likely than average to be good teachers. However, they will have many preresiquites a good teacher needs that a person of average to below average intelligence may lack. For this reason, I doubt your statement is true but I will read your citation when posted.

I've yet to see a law firm give a job to a person who doesn't pass the bar. Should we start blasting lawyers, too?

Law firms hire paralegals, legal secretaries, custodians, and many others without law degrees. Many law students get hired on the basis of passing the bar exam. Do you HONESTLY think (or, "do you honestly THINK"?) that headhunters are going to wait for a formality like that? No fucking way. Hire then worry about that shit. Their employment contract will spell out whether and when a bar exam has to be passed. This link suggests Michelle Obama (!) had a job lined up prior to passing the bar. It still meets your criteria - sort of. She had the job but had to pass the bar exam but the offer was not extending on the basis of having but on the basis of getting in the future.

http://www.lawfirmstaff.com/articles/index.php?id=50100&cat=75
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/10/03/a-call-out-for-jds-no-bar-passage-required/

NH: Eh, we don't need the bar exam:
http://www.piercelaw.edu/news/posts/2008-06-23-chronicle-on-daniel-webster-scholar-honors-program.php

WI: Sort of the same deal:
"It's the same way nearly every year, thanks to one of the first legalities that students at both schools commit to memory: Wisconsin is the only state in the country to maintain a "diploma privilege" that exempts most graduates of the state's law schools from taking the bar exam."

I am curious. Upon what do you base your statements?

There's a great journal out there I would recommend to anyone interested in some of the deeper issues with copyright, patents, intellectual property, etc. I found it the other day when skimming through the school library's periodicals. I went and found the website for the journal. While the articles on the website are years out of date, they are still certainly interesting and applicable considering how slowly legislation slugs along anyhow. The more recent additions are available for subscription for a quite reasonable price of 25 odd dollars/year if you're a student, $70 if not.

IDEA - The Intellectual Property Law Review.

Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342 (1841), is the earliest US case I've found that establishes Fair Use in the US. It's cited as such, both on a couple informal websites and at least in one later decision. Folsom does not cite the First Amendment. Folsom does not cite the "Progress of Science and useful Arts" clause (properly done it would also require the 10th Amendment). In fact, Folsom doesn't cite The Constitution at all.

However, Folsom DOES cite Dodsley v. Kinnersley, Whittingham v. Wooler, and Tonson v. Walker, three British cases that established Fair Use within English Common law.

Sorry, but you are wrong. Back in the mid eighties, NY State decided to site a low level nuclear dump (mostly medical radiological waste) in a low lying swamp on an active fault line in the southern tier of the state (Alleghany County). Why did they pick that site? Low population and low income. They figured they could do it quietly and that the local population did not have the money for a legal fight and that they could be bought with 'jobs'.

The siting commision was wrong, and they were received by armed locals. Luckily the state police running escort were all senior officers and kept a level head. It could have turned into a real fiasco but ended as a minor disturbance. There were a few legal battles after that, then the whole issue faded. The siting commission regrouped and did a fairly extensive analysis of the process. (The last link)

Speak not of that which you do not know.

http://www.piercelaw.edu/risk/vol7/spring/vari.htm
http://herrick.alfred.edu/special/collections/LLRW .asp
http://www.nap.edu/execsumm/0309055393.html

No, trespass is a property crime-- perhaps the most basic. It's an expression of territory. Even dogs understand trespass.

Most dogs are unfamiliar with "trespass to chattels". The law is full of subtleties.

Perhaps your chief objection to the conflation of copyright with simple theft is that it invites the use of criminal, rather than civil sanctions. By defining copyright as theft, the copyright holders invite the public to view it as a crime, rather than as a tort. The holders of copyright have long engaged in this practice-- the 1841 case of Folsom v Marsh contains numerous references to piracy.

The average person does not appreciate monopolies, having been conditioned by decades of progressivist thought. It may be useful, in a rhetorical sense to simultaneously admit that while copyright infringement might be considered a kind of "theft," it is a "theft" of a monopoly, albeit a legal one. Should ones opponent be amenable to monopolies, one might then proceed to deconstruct the nature of theft (although this is somewhat dangerous, as Blackstone's commentaries can result in some unwanted side effects.

Either the parent has no clue what he is talking about (Texas Instruments) ... so let's give credit when credit is due, and stop these random bashings that just make you look like a clueless fool.

I apologize; my information was indeed correct at one time, but it is currently twelve years out of date. (See page 7, as well as footnote n25 referencing Texas Instruments's $250 Million-A-Year Profit Making Center, The American Lawyer, March 1992.)

I do not have current knowledge of TI's relative earnings from its law department(s) versus sales of tangible products, nor do I have time at the moment to dig it up, so at the risk of looking like a "clueless fool" I'll admit my statement was (potentially) out of date.

Introduction, Preliminary, Inventions not Patentable clearly mentions something about e-Patents .. so that post can be easily forgotten .

Computer Programs
1. Computer program is not patentable invention as computer program is
a set of instructions for controlling a sequence of operations of a dataprocessing
system. It closely resembles a mathematical method .It
may be expressed in various forms eg. A series of verbal statements, a
flow chart, an algorithm, or other coded form and may be presented in
a format suitable for direct entry into a particular computer, or may
require transcription into a different format (or computer “language”). It
may merely be written on paper or recorded on some machine-
readable medium such as magnetic tape or disc or optically scanned
record, or it may be permanently recorded in a control store forming
part of a computer. Thus it is evident that a program may be presented
in terms of either software or firmware.

India does offer Process Patents but explicitly prevents patenting naturally occurring substances or extracts there of. However you are free to patent your form of culturing or producing an anti-biotic or vaccine. Patent infringement can be enforced in India as is with any other country in the world. Interestingly , Prior art of Foreign origin are valid in India - unlike the USPTO .

Get an OSS Loving, Nuke Missile Desgning President for your country too :)

[a] material object[] in which sounds ... are fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the sounds can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.

As for Apple's "right" to limit what you can do with a phonorecord, the fair use doctrine is judicially developed, see e.g. Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F. Cas. 342 (C.C.D. Mass. 1841) , and predates 17 U.S.C. 107 so it cannot easily be abridged by contracts attempting to arrogate rights not granted by 17 U.S.C. 106 or by the DMCA. As such, I'll violate the DMCA and unenforceable contract clauses as much as I want in exercising my fair use rights.

So they pirate "your" music and whatnot and decide not to embrace american IP law that's more and more perverted to serve just one purpose: keep the big (mostly US-) corporations on top and make it hard for anyone else to enter the market. And why shoud China play by a set of rules that only puts them at a disadvantage? The USA didn't either, if they did they'd probably still be some kind of british colony but definitly not what they are today. Neither did americans respect foreign IP when they reprinted works of foreign authors without paying royalties until 1891.

And yeah, why not send in the troops when economic interests are threatened. Like invading Iraq for example (and no, they didn't find those weapons of mass destruction, or any proof of a connection to al Quaeda, all they found out was that all official reasons for starting that war were bogus and that Bush and Blair even knew they were bogus).

Arising solely out of case law, however, an experimental use exception has been offered as a defense to patent infringement. At this point the experimental use exception can be summarized as offering a defendant an excuse to patent infringement when the use of the patented invention is for the sole purpose of gratifying curiosity or a philosophical taste, or for mere amusement.

Unless the person in your example has a "profit motive" in mowing his lawn, you're wrong.

The founders copyright predates the 1841 case Folsom v Marsh which attempted to delineate fair use. So, do 1790 definitions of infringement apply to these books?