Intellectual Property Law

Copyright and Digital Tech Updates

Posted on January 21, 2009
The news rushes past with not enough time for comment.  Items that caught my eye in the last week include: The owners of a multiplex in Colorado claim that they foreclosed on the copyrights to Ingmar Bergman’s films in order to satisfy an unpaid judgment in their favor...

Fairey, Obama, and Fair Use

Posted on January 21, 2009
Now that the source material for the iconic Barack Obama campaign image, produced by Shepard Fairey, has been identified, the fair use fun can begin. The photographer says that he doesn’t want to make trouble. But some in the art world have been gunning for Fairey, arguing that he’s not just a bad artist, but [...

The Crucible

Posted on January 19, 2009
Much has been written about the role that Harvard Law School played in the development of President-Elect Obama’s personality, temperament, management style, world view, and probably (though I haven’t seen this - yet) crossover dribble.  Much of it, like this current piece in The New Republic, isn’t about Obama at all; Obama is a hook [...

martinlutherking.org is a hate site.

Posted on January 19, 2009
Not going to link to it. If you want to read about King or hear his voice, go here. No Tags

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Spirit Airlines Tries To Charge Cancellation Fees On Passengers It Put On Flight 1549 (yes, the one that landed in the Hudson River).

Posted on January 19, 2009
From here: Rob and Jeff Kolodjay were scheduled to fly on Spirit Airlines to a golf vacation with four other friends on Thursday out of LaGuardia in New York City. Their flight got cancelled, and they rebooked their flight to US Airways flight 1549. While the Kolodjay?s have good things to say about US Airways, they are [...

?The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy? by Jerry Bowyer

Posted on January 18, 2009
This book, published in 2003,  is apparently NOT SATIRICAL! Over at Amazon.com, the customer reviews are illuminating. Below I’ve re-published a couple: This book has a very interesting premise, which is that common sense and experienced reality are both false...

The Picture and the Paint

Posted on January 18, 2009
Over the past few days I’ve been dipping into Cory Doctorow’s Content, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, and Larry Lessig’s Remix. I like them all for different reasons; Doctorow is an irrepressible enthusiast for online openness, Weinberger connects that openness to older patterns of information storage and retrieval, and Lessig sings of the creativity [...

There are some product names and trademarks a company comes to seriously regret later.

Posted on January 18, 2009
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Yes Pecan!

Posted on January 17, 2009
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Ouch.

Posted on January 15, 2009
Via Courtoons. No Tags

Jacobsen v. Katzer Continues

Posted on January 13, 2009
Last August the Federal Circuit held in Jacobsen v. Katzer that the Artistic License, a type of open source license, could be enforced via injunction, as a form of copyright license.  Free and open source advocates mostly cheered; the holding is consistent with the idea that open source licenses should be enforceable via injunction so [...

Some recent CFAA cases

Posted on January 13, 2009
Evan Brown has a recap of some recent CFAA cases here.  I’ve been following CFAA litigation for awhile and it seems that (putting to one side the Lori Drew conviction) courts may now be getting a better handle on how to interpret a badly drafted statute...

Colbert for Law Professors

Posted on January 12, 2009
By my count, we’ve now seen three law professors “do” The Colbert Report: Neal Katyal (Georgetown), Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard), and most recently Lawrence Lessig (Stanford, but signed, sealed, and all but delivered to Harvard).  Here are the clips, in that order: For years, law professors have wondered whether blogging is a good idea in light of [...

Michael Moore v. Sanjay Gupta

Posted on January 11, 2009
On CNN: On Larry King Live: On Michael Moore’s website, here. No Tags

Search Engine Competition in China

Posted on January 05, 2009
Chi-Chu Tschang’s article on Baidu illuminates how an unscrupulous search engine can exert a great deal of power once it attains dominance. Baidu has over 60% of the market in China, and can make or break an online business: Salespeople working for Baidu drop sites from results to bully companies into buying sponsored links, [...

How to Scholar

Posted on January 05, 2009
As thousands of law professors prepare to descend on San Diego this coming weekend for the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), the lawprof blogosphere is again gurgling with advice for junior scholars.  Gordon Smith framed the conversation with a great post about scholarship from the point of view of someone [...

I sort of want to try this.

Posted on January 05, 2009
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The Great Grimmelmann Rants About Copyright Formalities

Posted on January 04, 2009
Here. Technically it is an “informal” rant to feel free to make yourself comfy before you read it. No Tags

Towards Responsible Use of Cognition-Dulling Drugs

Posted on January 04, 2009
In a recent editorial in Nature entitled Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy, distinguished contributors have endorsed a “presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs...

New Paper on User-Created Content and Virtual Worlds

Posted on January 04, 2009
Mira Burri-Nenova has just posted a working paper on SSRN: “User Created Content in Virtual Worlds and Cultural Diversity ” User created content (UCC) has often been celebrated as a grassroots cultural revolution that as a genuine expression of creativity, localism and non-commercialism can arguably also cater for a sustainable culturally diverse environment...

Controversy over possible trademark registration for the phrase ?Freedom Tower: Make Love Not War? to market condoms.

Posted on January 02, 2009
The New York post has a short account of a burgeoning dispute about this entitled: September 11 Condom-Nation. Like most mass media stories about intellectual property, a lot of relevant detail is missing. Here is the entire article: A German entrepreneur has taken bad taste to new heights - applying for a federal trademark to use [...

Candidate 7: When asked about his most current writings, said, ?I have an idea for a new sort of short fiction, but I?m waiting to find out about patenting the forms before sharing it with anyone.?

Posted on January 01, 2009
Context here. No Tags

There is Art, and Then There is Art

Posted on December 31, 2008
Last Sunday’s New York Times juxtaposed two interesting and seemingly contradictory pieces on art, money, and modern culture.  The apparently decline of music for music’s sake is lamented, but few stand in the way of the evolution.  The loss of art for art’s sake is more stridently resisted...

Israel is Broadcasting Its Attacks On Hamas Via YouTube

Posted on December 31, 2008
Here is one example entitled “Israeli Air Force Strikes Terror Targets in Gaza 29 Dec. 2008″: The YouTube channel maintained by the Israel Defense Force Spokesperson’s Unit is here. Text there explains: The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit is the Israel Defense Forces’ professional body responsible for media and public relations in Israel and around the world...

Hamster Power

Posted on December 30, 2008
No, not this kind! Instead: Hamster Paper Shredder ?An energetic hamster is powering an environmentally-friendly paper shredder by running on his wheel. And he?s certainly got his work cut out for him - as he has to run flat out for 45 minutes to shred one sheet of A4 paper...

How To Counterfeit A Credit Card

Posted on December 30, 2008
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John Cage Lives

Posted on December 30, 2008
If you like aleatory music, you’ll love the new iPhone app RjDj: The application includes a set of entrancing songs that go on forever, using the iPhone?s internal microphone to ?listen? to the noises and voices heard in your proximity to dynamically create music...

Telcos Want Broadband Stimulus? Show Us the Texting Data

Posted on December 30, 2008
As the $700 billion bailout for banks falters, the US needs to be very careful about future investment programs. Though I’ve endorsed a broadband stimulus proposed by Yochai Benkler, there should be at least some window of opportunity for consumer groups and others to make demands of telcos in exchange for the money...

A Story of Fan Fiction Via Twitter: ?i am @bettydraper?

Posted on December 30, 2008
At Ad Broad. Here’s an excerpt: My life as a Mad Man began as a lark. On August 26, just after AMC lawyers changed their minds about closing down Mad Men twitter accounts (persuaded in part by bloggers and journalists who couldn’t believe AMC would toss away a brilliant promotional idea that did not cost them [...

Farewell, Polaroid; Good Riddance, VHS

Posted on December 29, 2008
Format wars buried two victims this year:  instant photographs, and VHS videotape.  Curiously, the demise of Polaroid and instant photography is accompanied by poignant farewells in The New York Times, for example, while in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, for example, just about no one is shedding tears over videotape...

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