Jon Stewart took on MERS on Tuesday night’s episode of the Daily Show; watch it below. As I’ve noted in earlier posts, there is a good deal of recent ongoing litigation against MERS, and it’s not only in the mortgage-registration business, it also markets tools to local governments for vacant property registration. The Daily Show …
Detroit netted the first 3 spots on NeighborhoodScout’s recent list of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in America. The Midwest sadly dominates this list. Chicago is on there four times. Overall, the Midwest takes 14 of the top 25 (if you include St. Louis). In the top two neighborhoods in Detroit (W Chicago / Livernois …
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A local paper in Ohio ran a story today hailing Conneaut, Ohio’s new vacant property registration ordinance as a success. The article, unlike most I’ve seen announcing new VPR ordinances, actually gives some statistics. The bottom line is that, for smaller cities, it doesn’t take much to call a VPR program a success. Conneaut’s program …
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Sorry for the overdose of IP law recently, I plan to return to local-government topics ASAP. But my recent article discussing criminal enforcement of copyright caused me to wonder about why patent infringement is not a crime in the United States (aside from falsely asserting a product is patented or forging the seldom-used “letters patent”). …
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My perspicacious coauthor and I recently accepted an offer from the North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology to publish our article “Criminal Copyright Enforcement Against Filesharing Services,” which I mentioned here last week. In honor of that, I’d like to share the introduction of the article, sans footnotes: In January 2012 an elite squad …
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“Big Data”— the business-world buzzword for the collection and analysis of massive amounts of data—has caught on with local government officials in the past few years as many cities have developed extensive data portals providing citizens access to heaps of public information like data from 311 calls. And its not only local governments getting involved, …
There’s news today of two new bills that may provide funding to cities. First, as reported by Craig Chester at Atlantic Cities, is the Brownfields Utilization, Investment and Local Development Act of 2013, the “BUILD Act,” aimed at assisting local governments “clean up and revitalize brownfield sites.” Chester sums up the proposal, and its bipartisan …
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Along with a coauthor, I’ve written an article about criminal enforcement actions against filesharing services, including the ongoing prosecution of the operators of Megaupload. The article also touches on the actions against the Pirate Bay and NinjaVideo. This area of law is important in defining how the federal government protects creators of copyrighted content without …
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I want to flag a recent report by Brooking’s Metropolitan Policy Program about rail ridership in the United States. Perhaps the best part is that they have created an interactive map using the data collected, so it’s fun to poke around and look at their findings. I encourage you to check out the full report, …
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There’s a good article in the New York Times about Michigan Governor Snyder appointing an emergency manager for Detroit at the start of this past weekend. The article has garnered more than 300 comments, and what’s interesting to me is how divergent these responses are. They reflect the polarized opinions on this controversial issue, which …
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