Intellectual Property Law

More on Trademarks, Ambush Marketing, and International Soccer

Posted on August 07, 2009
As Ann reports below, Mark Lemley and Mark McKenna are sharing a new paper on the overbreadth of “likelihood of confusion” analysis in contemporary trademark law. These thesis of the paper seems incontrovertible to me, but the paper frames its argument with an initial anecdote that bears a little exploration...

A Trademark/Antitrust Intersection

Posted on August 07, 2009
Major League Baseball has signed a deal with Topps, the baseball card company now controlled by Michael Eisner, that will give Topps exclusive rights to produce trading cards using images of major league ballplayers and marks of MLB teams. The deal may be questionable under antitrust law...

IPSC 2009

Posted on August 07, 2009
It’s Day Two of IPSC, an annual work in progress conference for Intellectual Property Law scholars. It’s great to see so many friends in one place, and to learn about all of the interesting research going on. I sat in on Copyright sessions yesterday, but am starting off today in a Trademark track, which [...

Pittsburgh Reels as Women Suffer

Posted on August 06, 2009
The Pittsburgh region is reeling this week after three women were murdered and nine others wounded in a mass shooting at a suburban LA Fitness facility by a man who is being described by local media as someone whose self-professed hatred of women resulted from isolation that can be traced to … wait for it [...

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ESPN, Google, and Me

Posted on August 05, 2009
Like Deven, I’ve been mostly AWOL on the blog for much of the last several weeks (it’s been an unusually busy travel summer for me), and easing back into the swing of blogging things after a hiatus always requires some delicacy.  There’s a lot going on in the IP and Internet law and policy world; [...

Image Protection at Universities

Posted on August 03, 2009

Where Is Deven?

Posted on August 03, 2009
I know I have not posted in a little bit. Some explanation is in order. As previous posts noted, through the good graces of Peter Yu, the University of Hong Kong, and the South China University of Technology, Intellectual Property School & Law School, Guangzhou, I was in Hong Kong and China until mid-June...

Valuation and Virtue in the New Economy

Posted on July 18, 2009
Tyler Cowen’s “Good and Plenty” promotes the use of market mechanisms to fund culture. He’s recently turned his attention to valuation problems raised by time spent on the web: Much of the Web’s value is experienced at the personal level and does not show up in productivity numbers...

Harlan Ellison ? ?Pay the Writer?

Posted on July 14, 2009
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Michael Jackson Tribute

Posted on July 14, 2009
I’d resolved to ease up on the YouTube clips but I couldn’t let this one pass unblogged: No Tags

Mannie Garcia enters the Hope Fray

Posted on July 13, 2009
Personally, I’m pleased about this, though I suppose some people might find it odd to be pleased about adding new parties to litigation.  Still, if this turns out to be a significant opinion on fair use, which it will probably be, I really think that the artist should be heard...

How to open bananas like a monkey.

Posted on July 12, 2009
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Judge rules that a burrito is not a sandwich.

Posted on July 10, 2009
From here: … [The] Panera [Bread Co. bakery-and-cafe chain] has a clause in its lease that prevents the White City Shopping Center in Shrewsbury from renting to another sandwich shop. Panera tried to invoke that clause to stop the opening of an Qdoba Mexican Grill...

?United [Airlines] Breaks Guitars?

Posted on July 08, 2009
The company pummels the crud out of suitcases, too. Via. No Tags

How much of this do you think is copyrightable?

Posted on July 08, 2009
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Our future as ?parasitic aggregators? is in jeopardy!

Posted on July 08, 2009
This article, which I couldn’t resist reposting in its entirety, is from Daily Finance: A push to tweak existing copyright laws to help newspapers profit from the content they produce has attracted some very vocal opposition in a short span of time, but the idea continues to gain currency nevertheless...

Stunning Ignorance

Posted on July 07, 2009
Slate Pundit and law school graduate Mickey Kaus has just discovered Section 230 but he doesn’t think it “will hold up.” No Tags

Irony (Updated)

Posted on July 07, 2009
Wired editor Chris Anderson, in a book entitled Free, in passages defining “free lunch” and the “TANSTAAFL” acronym, decides to get his authorial words for free from Wikipedia and to include them in Free without attribution. Guess what? Turns out that when it comes to lifting other people’s writing, there’s no such thing [...

Patented Humor

Posted on July 06, 2009
From here: I went to the Patent Office trying to register some of my inventions. I went to the main desk to sign in and the lady at the desk had a form that had to be filled out. She wrote down my personal info and then asked me what I had invented. I said, “A folding [...

?One Sentence?

Posted on July 05, 2009
Stories told in a single sentence. From here: When I was 5 or so my mom would tell me to lie down before she tied my tie and I just now realized at the age of 19 that she did this because she’s a funeral director. As you were breaking up with me, all I could think [...

Happy 4th!

Posted on July 04, 2009
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Salinger Takes Another Round

Posted on July 02, 2009
Prequel:  A Sequel in the Rye J.D. Salinger has persuaded a district court judge to elevate a temporary restraining order to a preliminary injunction in his effort to prevent American audiences from reading 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which uses an aged Holden Caulfield in a narrative sequel to - or parody of — [...

A Machine Would Never Be Bitter

Posted on July 01, 2009
I sometimes wonder if the flipside of the AI campaign to make machines more humanlike is a pharmacological campaign to make humans as quiescent as machines. As global competition increases the value of productivity, an underground world of neuro-enhancing drugs is a growing part of campus life...

Copyright and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Posted on June 30, 2009
Matthew B. Crawford’s new book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” gives IP lawyers quite a lot to think about.  (An excerpt appeared recently in the New York Times magazine, and the book as a whole originated as an essay at The New Atlantis...

New Developments in Cryptography and Privacy

Posted on June 30, 2009

A copyright radio ad

Posted on June 30, 2009
I never thought this would happen, but today I heard my first radio ad directed specifically towards copyright. The ad, airing here in Boston, criticized attempts in Congress to add a performance right for recording artists, and it encouraged listeners to fight the “tax” on radio stations...

IP and Children, in the Wilderness

Posted on June 30, 2009
Michael Chabon has an elegiac  essay in the New York Review of Books (”Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood”) on what is denied to our children: This is the kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived to provide for our children...

Vuvuzelas

Posted on June 29, 2009
The gang at Language Log provides a thorough overview of the meaning and function of the vuvuzela, the device that provided the soundtrack to the just-concluded Confederations Cup soccer tournament in South Africa (the result in yesterday’s final:  Brazil 3 - USA 2, more or less as I predicted last week)...

Netflix Prize Won?

Posted on June 29, 2009
It appears that the Netflix Prize has been won.  Thet Netflix Prize is a $1 million prize being offered by Netflix for development of a “movie recommendation system” that is 10% better than Netflix’s own Cinematch system as predicting the movie preferences of Netflix subscribers...

Irony

Posted on June 28, 2009
Wired editor Chris Anderson, in a book entitled Free, in passages defining “free lunch” and the “TANSTAAFL” acronym, decides to get his authorial words for free from Wikipedia and to include them in Free without attribution. Guess what? Turn out that when it comes to lifting other people’s writing, there’s no such thing [...

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