Legendary founder of NPR programming Bill Siemering is enjoying Zoom visiting with students so much that he's asked me to put a second call out. No honorarium necessary. Any takers?

some trademark trivia re: "the shield": apparently LAPD informed FOX that their name, badges, & iconography were protected by trademark law & threatened legal action if the show referenced them too explicitly the show was originally titled "rampart" www.tvline.com/2093931/the-...

autodesk, which has been using FLOW as a trademark for its production management & video effects software since 2022, sued google for trademark infringement over its use of FLOW for its AI-powered movie-making software targeting the same consumers www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Measles is a bellwether. Because it’s the most contagious vaccine-preventable disease, when vaccination rates drop, it’s the first to start spreading. Now we’ve got mumps rolling up. Expect more. This is just the beginning of RFK Jr.’s successful infectious disease reintroduction plan.

Strange IP scholarship question: has anyone written about TM ITU rules (intent to reserve rights is insufficient) as the opposite of prospect theory? Bob Bone has a footnote that I think I disagree with suggesting that prospect theory is compatible, for patents, with an ITU requirement

The one thing that has absolutely consistently shocked me about Trump 2.0 is how weak PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), which has a dozen offices and a team of lobbyists most orgs would kill for, actually is.

worth noting that gig apps - like Uber- use the same techniques to keep people driving. Trading apps, like Robinhood, do the same, though at least in that context there's a little regulation due to its status as a securities brokerage

Transformative work of the day:

Democracy is when voters choose their leaders. Autocracy is when leaders choose their voters.

In its ongoing war against higher ed—and law firms—the battles MAGA has won are those where the other side surrendered in advance. (The Columbia/UT Austin/Paul Weiss "strategy," vs the Harvard/UCLA/Perkins Coie/etc strategy.) Resistance is not just braver but also smarter and more effective.

I see no reason not to look at the online gambling and prediction market craze as a new opioids crisis. It will wreak havoc on lower-income Americans and leave a trail of destruction and despair in its wake. The companies are just Purdue Pharma 2.0 www.liberalcurrents.com/from-pill-mi...

Spelling Bee, embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word

Really important point about the way RFK and his pals have implemented anti-vax ideology at the FDA.

Now there is a further wrinkle, and I hope all UC researchers with federal grants read this: This injunction may need to be enforced. UC FACULTY: If you see something where the federal government violating this injunction.... say something. Tell your faculty association, who can tell the lawyers.

Excellent job @veenadubal.bsky.social and @aaup.org Don’t let up

If my publisher requires a declaration of how AI was used in my book, will I need to include my grant cancellation?

no foreign foe has ever dreamed of being able to sack and pillaging this country the way Trump admin and its congressional and scotus enablers do every day.

Shouldn’t Senate Dems introduce legislation providing full funding TSA, Coast Guard, FEMA, etc.—and no new funding for ICE and CBP? Seems like pretty good ground to fight on. Offer to come back and pass it Tuesday.

It's an anti-gerrymandering pro-gerrymandering ad; what a world we live in

"[The previous owner] said a non-disclosure agreement prevents him from disclosing the purchase price, when it was sold, and to which federal agency it was sold." Why does a government agency get to keep this info from the public? www.crainsdetroit.com/real-estate/...

Publishing as "Law Dork": 🔥 Filing in court as "Law Dork": 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

let's stay together

Vaguely recall how Biden admin emails to Twitter were the biggest attack on free speech ever. There was a whole twitter files thing about that. Curious where are Elon, Taibbi, Bari and crew on this?

This is something the Nazis used to do to Jewish children in the camps. It happened to a man I knew when he was a child in Auschwitz. The camp guards thought it was funny as hell.

Great symposium today organized by @uclalawreview.bsky.social & Xiyin Tang on Labor in the Age of Platform Capitalism, where I'm moderating a panel on antitrust & IP with @marklemley.bsky.social, Xiyin Tang, @madhavisunder.bsky.social, and @rtushnet.bsky.social www.uclalawreview.org/ucla-law-rev...

On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast. The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me. But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.

“Distrust and verify” is the obvious posture for everyone — esp. journalists — to assume in response to any promise or representation made by any official in the Trump administration.

But with lines of cocaine on toilet seats

We now have the most spectacular leadership team at Georgetown Law possible: Eduardo Peñalver as University President, and now Liz Magill as Executive Vice President and Law Dean.

Little can better encapsulate this administration's mindset: We are untouchable and must be coddled and protected at any expense. You (the masses, particularly if you're brown and non-MAGA) are expendable. Your survival, your quality of life ... it means nothing to us. Less than nothing.

Every single time a story like this is reported, we must assume that there are many many more that do not.

“Government sources & advocates for the children worry the goal is to concentrate them in TX, where abortion is banned.” This is hideous, & note that it can’t be explained *purely* in white nationalist eugenicist terms. The misogynist understanding of pregnancy as punishment shapes this policy.

Student journalists really shining a light on what the profession is for

consumer protection and authoritarianism are incompatible

In terms of what cures are being lost: - Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis - herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis - shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

one of the things that drive me the craziest is you can't get a lot of these outlets (Politico, Axios, CNN, NYT) to report candidly on the way Trump 2.0 has irreparably harmed corporate oversight and consumer protection, but they'll parrot MAGA mythologies on antitrust until they're blue in the face

"The [security] grant now requires participating organizations to cooperate with ICE operations, forbids participating organizations from engaging in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programming..."

1/ The FTC has no more business policing the editorial decisions of Apple News under the guise of "consumer protection" than it does the "fair and balanced-ness" of Fox News' coverage--as I pointed out when Ferguson went on his social media fishing expedition. www.thefire.org/news/ftc-ove...

Authoritarianism is incompatible with fair competition.

CBP didn’t give her or anyone any water; she asked 3 times accg to other reports. CBP killed a 7yr old. “8 hours after the girl & her father were taken into custody, she began having seizures & her body temperature was measured at 105.7 degrees by emergency medical technicians. shorturl.at/d2OTJ

Trump's financial regulators can't even say insider trading is bad. Most corrupt Administration in history.

"Slater, a Senate-confirmed appointee who entered office pledging robust enforcement against corporate consolidation, has been frustrated with what she viewed as persistent political interference from Bondi and those linked to her, the people said."

“I don't see any plan, any strategy, any end game,” says Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont. “I don't see anything from this administration, just fuck everything up as much as you can. You can print that.”

Someone was abducted at 10 AM by ICE on Central Ave. Their coworker says they’ve lived here for over 20 years, are documented, and have 3 kids who were born here. Don’t be fooled by headlines when they’ve been lying to us the whole time. We still need you out patrolling until every agent is gone.

Antitrust has been the one area in which the Trump administration was not uniformly awful. But that may be changing; they just fired the head of the Antitrust Division news.bloomberglaw.com/product/blaw...

This is what scares me too--I know my own (never good) map-reading skills dwindled to nothing when GPS came around, but this time it's general-purpose reasoning that I worry about.

damn you're telling me that sin taxes work to reduce consumption of socially harmful goods while keeping them legal and thus avoiding the problems of criminalization?

It's becoming clear to me that we need a Glass Steagall for news and information delivery platforms. No combination with other products or business lines.

Utterly foreseeable and deeply chilling. FTC hiring an attorney whose full time job will be to, as Chairman Ferguson put it in his leaked memo to Trump when he was trying to get the job, fight the “trans agenda.”