From the Berkman Center we learn that "James Boyle, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School, has won this year's World Technology Award in Law" James' book Shamans Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society is one of the most enlightening works on intellectual property and information economics I've ever read and this award is thoroughly deserved. The elite list of nominees he was up against gives you an indication of how important his work is:
Prof. Martin Adelman - George Washington University Law School
Mr. Hisamitsu Arai - Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters,Cabinet Secretariat
Prof. Yochai Benkler - New York University School of Law
Prof. Robert Bohrer - California Western School of Law
Prof. James Boyle - Duke Law School
Mr. Stuart Brotman - Stuart N. Brotman Communications
Prof. Paul Goldstein - Stanford Law School
Dr. Thomas Hoeren - University of Muenster
Dr. Kamil Idris - World Intellectual Property Organization
Mr. Michael Kirk - American Intellectual Property Law Association
Prof. Edmund Kitch - University of Virginia
Prof. Lawrence Lessig - Stanford University
Judge Richard Linn - U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
Prof. Daniel Poulin, Mr. Ernst Perpignand and Mr. Marc-Andre Morissette - LexUM, Faculty of Law, University of Montreal
Prof. Pamela Samuelson - UC Berkeley
Dr. Barbara Simons - Association for Computing Machinery

A fair few things of note around but I'm limited for time today, so check out the usual suspects like Donna Wenthworth but one thing I would like to point you to is David Post's short note at the Volokh Conspiracy -
"Copyright Battles, Con't: Public Library of Science, a group of scientists and physicians seeking to insure that scientific information is placed in the public domain, free of copyright or other intellectual property protection, has launched a campaign to strip copyright protection entirely from works prepared with the "substantial" financial support of the US government.....
It's an important effort, I think (full disclosure: I've been a kind of informal advisor to the PLoS people for a while now), worth keeping an eye on. The recording industry's battles over Internet "piracy" have received most of the buzz in this area, but in many ways this clash between scientists and scientific publishers is equally important for the future of copyright law. " I have a quibble - I'd have said it's more important for scientific information to be in the public domain but I guess that's the techie in me.