Aarti Kohli Disagrees with Arizona Gov.’s Comments on Illegal Immigrants

St. Petersburg News, PolitiFact.com, June 25, 2010 by Jan Brewer
http://bit.ly/dD56XC

Kohli and others draw a clear distinction with Brewer’s suggestion that the majority of illegal border crossers are “drug mules.” “If caught along the southwest border, the vast majority of migrants are prosecuted in federal district court, often 70 at a time, for misdemeanor illegal entry,” Kohli said. “If they are caught smuggling drugs, they would not be prosecuted” in this way.

Stanley Lubman Says Labor Strikes Challenge Chinese Communist Party

The Wall Street Journal, China Real Time Report, June 25, 2010 by Stanley Lubman
http://bit.ly/ddUYrI

The recent wave of strikes in foreign-owned enterprises in China may surprise many foreigners, but it is really another chapter in the history of the struggle by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1949 to define its role in the organization and control of the labor force.

John Yoo Blames Democrats for McChrystal Fiasco

The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2010 by John Yoo
http://bit.ly/aM01HV (requires registration; go to G:\Law School in the News\News Clips for article)

Mr. Obama may have had little choice but to fire the general to restore civilian control over the military. And for this no-win situation, he has only his partisan allies in Congress to blame. It directly and predictably arose not from the war in Afghanistan, but from congressional efforts to undermine the Iraq war and the war on terrorism during the Bush years.

Richard Frank Analyzes Ninth Circuit’s Superfund Decision

The Daily Journal, June 24, 2010 by Richard M. Frank
http://www.dailyjournal.com/ (requires registration; go to G:\Law School in the News\News Clips for article)

The 9th Circuit’s Aerojet decision underscores a significant criticism of CERCLA that many commentators have voiced ever since Congress first enacted the statute three decades ago: by relying on a fault-based system to assess legal and financial responsibility for hazardous waste pollution and clean-up, CERCLA guarantees a process under which complex, costly and time-consuming litigation is the norm.

Jennifer Urban Examines Ruling against Viacom in YouTube Copyright Suit

-Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2010 by Alex Pham and Meg James
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-viacom-20100623,0,4842580.story

“If the decision had gone the other way, that would have likely been very damaging” to a whole host of technology companies that depend on the activities of its users, not just Google, said Jennifer Urban.

-San Francisco Chronicle, June 24, 2010 by James Temple
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/24/MNK71E3TPD.DTL

“In the main, it’s a victory for innovation,” said Jennifer Urban, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley. “It’s a victory for the companies that are creating new kinds of technologies … that allow people to speak and create on the Internet.”

Pamela Samuelson and Robert Merges Find Patents Low Priority for Software Start-Ups

-San Francisco Chronicle, June 23, 2010 by Tom Abate
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/23/BU6J1E37U0.DTL

“More than 80 percent of the biotech, medical device and hardware firms we surveyed have or have applied for patents,” said study co-author Pamela Samuelson, a law professor at UC Berkeley. “About two-thirds of software firms have no patents and have not applied for any.”

Study co-author Robert Merges, a UC Berkeley law professor, said the next step in the research would be to establish how patents and other intellectual property strategies affected business outcomes and job creation.

-KCBS-AM, June 23, 2010 Host Patti Reising
http://www.kcbs.com/

“We didn’t know really how important intellectual property rights and in particular patents were to entrepreneurs. We thought they would be pretty important to biotech companies and less important to software companies—and we did find that. But the findings were more striking than we had expected because even biotech firms really only reported that patents were a moderate incentive to invest in innovation, whereas software companies said that patents were the least important among many strategies for attaining competitive advantage. And that was a surprising finding.”

-Patently-O Blog, June 29, 2010 by Ted Sichelman
http://bit.ly/bykJg4

In a recent survey of startup firms, the Berkeley Patent Survey—which I conducted with Robert Merges and Pamela Samuelson of UC Berkeley School of Law and Stuart Graham (now Chief Economist at the PTO)—startup executives reported that nearly 70% of venture capital firms and 50% of angel investors said that patents were important to their investment decisions.

Richard Frank Thinks Obama’s Drilling Moratorium Will Hold

The Christian Science Monitor, June 22, 2010 by Mark Guarino
http://bit.ly/a6eqg2

Courts “generally give the executive branch of government a fair amount of deference when responding to emergency events” and it is likely that the next judge will give the administration “a more favorable response. I wouldn’t think the Obama administration would have to work too hard to justify the need for this type of moratorium it imposed here based on the record,” Frank says.

Alan Auerbach Predicts Fiscal Crisis Unless Reforms Enacted

ABC Radio, PM (Australia), June 21, 2010 Host Mark Colvin
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2010/s2932964.htm

The problem is that the economies in the US and Europe are so weak as a result of the recession and there’s a general view among economists that withdrawing stimulus could be dangerous…. The best of all possible worlds would be to maintain fiscal stimulus in the short run while simultaneously making credible policy actions now that will make fiscal adjustments occur in the not-too-distant future.