the intersection of code and law

The chapter I found most interesting in Lessig's Code is the one on intellectual property. I'm currently taking a class in the law school on intellectual property and I'm afraid I can't go anywhere right now without thinking about the way that I'm implicated in advertisements, contracts, trademarks and copyrights. Lessig's legal expertise is particularly useful when he describes the conflict between IP rights and contracts law in EULA agreements. What we get through fair use and other rights are (at least partially) contracted away when we agree to the Terms of Service. But just how defensible are these agreements in court? Certainly, there are some things they cannot legally embed in those terms and bind us to them, even if we're negligent and don't read them. Imagine yourself signing your first-born child away to Microsoft, for instance. A dark future, indeed! But it probably wouldn't hold up in court.
My boyfriend and I were talking about intellectual property rights, based on the Lessig readings and what I'm learning about trademark law, and we came up with some interesting thoughts and anecdotes, both real and imagined:

• What if you were to program a game that ran on the internet and used, as art assets, certain images from the New York Times archives online? These images are all copyrighted, of course, but if you didn't actually embed the images in the game--if you just linked to them--then what recourse does the NYTimes have?
  
• In 2004 GEICO sued Google because Google was selling its trademark to advertisers as a search term. In other words, if you typed "Geico" in Google, you'd get some related stuff in your results that certain companies had paid to put there. The courts found that Google didn't have the right to sell another company's trademark in that way.
  
• When students are forced to turn their papers in to a service such as turnitin.com, what rights do they have to their IP? Student IP in general is poorly protected, perhaps because the demand for it is low, but what if turnitin.com decided to sell some papers out the back end to those dodgy $10 term paper websites? What rights does a student have to his work produced for a class? Or what rights does he have to protest the publication of his material? For instance, writing on our blogs is a significant portion of our grade for this class, such that it would be difficult to do well in it if we were to refuse to publish our thoughts online. Now, supposing Greg were an evil tyrant professor and didn't allow us an alternative assignment (if we had good reason, like say, we were in the federal witness protection program or something). Would we be able to sue the University, or him, for forcing us to publish and punishing us if we didn't? What rights do we sign away when we matriculate at the University? Or what rights get contracted away when we sign up for a class?
  

Just some brief thoughts for now, but these ideas are a-buzzin' in me noggin!