It must have been waking to this view of my driveway that led me in search of a better snow shovel.

With that my goal, I managed to end up at Delphion’s Gallery of Obscure Patents, where I found the potentially useful method and apparatus for directing a stream of pressurized fluid at…

I have posted the full text of my recent column, IP Blogs: Pocket Parts for a Digital Age. Here is a sample:

For lawyers in many fields, blogs are becoming the new pocket part. With their immediacy and focus, they provide up-to-the-minute news and analysis of judicial, legislative and regulatory developments.

More than in

Researchers at Cranfield University are warning that “evil twin” hot spots, networks set up by hackers to resemble legitimate Wi-Fi hot spots, present the latest security threat to Web users.…

The U.S. Department of Justice has developed an extensive and extremely useful library of Internet legal research materials, including a research blog, according to Michael Ravnitzky, a lawyer and former colleague of mine at American Lawyer Media. But while DOJ created the library at taxpayer expense, it keeps it closed to public view.

Ravnitzky,…

Online dispute resolution has proved successful in e-commerce and IP disputes, but can it be adapted to help resolve labor-management disputes? Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are about to delve into that question.

Under a three-year, $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, faculty from two UMass research centers, the

I wrote recently about the free, searchable versions of the Intelligence Reform Act, The Patriot Act and other government documents offered for download by askSam. This week, they added the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in a version that alows you to search or browse the act’s text.…

It is a question much debated: How do copyright law and digital media square up? In Send ‘free’ to work: Creative Commons brings copyrights into the digital age, Rocky Mountain News columnist Linda Seebach surveys Creative Commons and other alternatives to statutory copyright and challenges intellectual property owners “to make ‘free’ work…

Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is host today and tomorrow to Blogging, Journalism & Credibility, an invitation-only conference of bloggers, reporters and academics focusing on ethics and credibility in blogging. The program is being webcast, supposedly, although it is not working for me just now. Alternatively, you can…

Did we need a survey to tell us this?

“Despite long hours at the office, many attorneys continue to burn the midnight oil once they leave, according to a new survey. Attorneys polled said they give themselves homework assignments an average of nine days per month, or more than twice a week.”…

beSpacific calls it “an amazing legislative tracking service,” and for good reason. Developed by Joshua Tauberer, a graduate student in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, GovTrack recently won the grand prize in the Technorati Developer’s Contest for developing a way to show what bloggers are saying about bills as they…

Copyright lawyers who represent photographers and image suppliers may soon have a new tool for enforcing their clients’ rights. An Israeli company that specializes in advanced image recognition software is making it easier to police infringements of copyrighted photographs on the Internet, according to the blog The Stock Photo Industry. The company, PicScout,…

Is it possible a client of yours is entitled to a pension that remains unclaimed? The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is looking for some 15,000 people who are owed pensions after their companies went out of business or closed their pension plans. To help locate them, it provides PBGC Pension Search, a tool…