Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Volokh Ponders the Trojan Doctrine

Posted on February 6, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

In trademark law, a mark that is deceptively misdescriptive is not registerable. But what if the mark (falsely?) imputes bad qualities to the goods? Eugene Volokh argues we need a Trojan Doctrine to cope with that one.

Posted in Completely Different, Law: Trademark Law | Comments Off on Volokh Ponders the Trojan Doctrine

Now This Is Seriously Cool

Posted on February 6, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I just stumbled on what looks like a seriously cool blog: John Battelle's Searchblog (“Thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology, and more. Beta”).

Lots of very interesting stuff on searching and search engines. In what may be ironic, or just sensible, he's writing a book about it all, too.

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on Now This Is Seriously Cool

Brad DeLong Attempts Open Source Journalism

Posted on February 5, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Brad DeLong is asking people what questions Tim Russert should ask GW Bush. And he's primed the pump with a few zingers of his own. My reactions in order:

  1. This is exactly how to harness that famous “power of the Internet”
  2. In Britain, they actually do ask Ministers questions like this on Radio 4 and on Newsnight
  3. Anyone who asked a President questions like that in this country would be pilloried as “disrespectful”.
  4. So it won't work. Even if a journalist had the guts, the shill media would turn on him.
  5. This is so very, very sad….
  6. Oh, hell, can't hurt to try. If nothing else we can compare the actual to the hypothetical and maybe some day…
Posted in Blogs | 1 Comment

Isolation to Continue Pending Review

Posted on February 5, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

The full Supreme Court today endorsed the earlier one-Justice stay of the 9th Circuit's order in Bush v. Gherebi. That means that the detainees will not be informed that the Supreme Court, or anyone, is considering their situation. They can rot in limbo some more.

While it's in no way surprising that the Supreme Court should preserve the status quo pending its decision—indeed it's the only thing it could do given the government's claim of irreparable harm to national security—it is a little surprising that Solicitor General Olson is prepared to sign a brief stating (according to AP) that national security would be damaged by notice that the Supreme Court granted cert.

Communication with the prisoner would “interfere with the military's efforts to obtain intelligence from Gherebi and other Guantanamo detainees related to the ongoing war against terrorism,” Olson wrote in an emergency filing last week.

Seems somewhat implausible that these mid- and low- and very low-level folks have anything of value to say after this long, doesn't it?

Posted in Guantanamo | Comments Off on Isolation to Continue Pending Review

Hackergate Claims Its First Scalp

Posted on February 5, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

The Senate Republicans will throw a senior aide to the wolves this week, in hopes of heading off inquiries into their personal complicity into Hackergate: Leak staffer ousted. Will it work? Much probably depends on what the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms reports when he concludes his investigation.

Wouldn't it be nicer to live in a world where the Senate's forms of civility were reflected in some reality?

Posted in Politics: US | 1 Comment

Demotion

Posted on February 5, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

I'm not going to keep writing about this, but having noted Discourse.net's promotion to Marsupial in the TLB Ecosystem, I feel honor-bound to also note the near-instant demotion to “Adorable Little Rodent”. It seems that rather than spurring legions of readers to add links to this blog, the effect of my post was to motivate almost 10% of the existing linkers to delete their links. Link numbers do fluctuate, but this drop was much larger than usual.

Rats.

Posted in Discourse.net | 1 Comment