- Trademark infringement claims as way to silence critics: Jenzabar gets comeuppance in form of court award of more than $500,000 in attorney costs [Paul Alan Levy, earlier and more]
- Court holds Google Books project to be fair use [Matthew Sag]
- Questioning the ITC’s patent jurisdiction: “Why should we have a trade agency litigating patent disputes?” [K. William Watson, Cato, more, yet more, related]
- Courts come down hard on copyright troll Prenda Law [Popehat]
- Annals of patent trollery: New York Times et al rout Helferich [EFF, Liquid Litigation BLLawg] Monolithic Power Systems v. 02 Micros [IP for the Little Guy] Resistance by Newegg, RackSpace, Hyundai, etc. [WLF]
- Re: copyright terms, US government shouldn’t endorse view that longer always means better [Simon Lester, Cato]
- Legal tiff over use of hotel carpet patterns in costumes [Io9]
Posts Tagged ‘copyright’
Will Congress extend copyright again?
“15 years ago this Sunday, President Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended copyright protection. As a result, the great creative output of the 20th century, from Superman to ‘Gone With the Wind’ to Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ were locked down for an extra 20 years.” Expect a push for yet another extension — but this time online critics will have plenty of time to mobilize on behalf of the broader creative interest in adaptive reuse. [Timothy Lee, Washington Post]
I’m being eaten by a copyright lawyer, and I don’t like it one bit
Estate shuts down Shel Silverstein biography: given the withholding of needed permissions, we may never live to read the full complicated story of the Beat/Bohemian Playboy contributor who lived to become a beloved children’s author and popular illustrator. “I heard back from a law firm whose name seemed to come straight out of a Shel Silverstein poem: Solheim, Billing, and Grimmer.” [Joseph Thomas, Slate]
Intellectual property roundup
- Books of the faraway past more likely to be available for purchase than books of the 1950s [David Post]
- “Is It Time for a Rule 11 for the Patent Bar?” [Ralph Clifford, SSRN via John Steele, Legal Ethics Forum]
- “Courts In Patent Suits Tell Turncoat Trial Lawyers To Take A Hike — Twice” [Mark Chenoweth, WLF; congratulations to Chenoweth, an old friend of this site, for his appointment as WLF’s new general counsel]
- Federal Circuit: “Model Order Would Cut Patent Fights Down to Manageable Size” [Sheri Qualters, NLJ]
- “Copyright Terms in the TPP: Too Long, or Way Too Long?” [Simon Lester, Cato]
- High tech cy pres and the copyright wars [Roger Parloff, Fortune]
- “The smartphone wars are ending, and nobody won (but the lawyers)” [Alison Frankel, Reuters]
“Tattoos are a largely uncharted territory in copyright law”
If you pay an athlete or other celebrity for the right to depict them in a poster or videogame, do you have a right to show an accurate rendering of their tattoo without further seeking permission from the original tattoo artist? It’s widely agreed that tattoos enjoy some degree of copyright protection, most obviously so in the case where an infringer has swiped an original design for purposes of tattooing someone else. Damages, at least, would be available in such a case, though it might prove hard to persuade courts to exercise the power accorded them by 17 U.S.C. § 503 to order the “impounding and disposition of infringing articles.” [Ira Boudway, Bloomberg BusinessWeek]
IsTumblrDown.com
Users have been known to complain that Tumblr, the immensely popular microblogging site, is not always as communicative as it might be about the periodic outages it has suffered. Zach Inglis put up a site called IsTumblrDown.com which gave users a clue whether an inability to connect was just them, or the whole system being down. There was little likelihood that it would be confused with an official site, especially since it took a bit of a mocking tone toward the platform giant (and had no revenue). Lawyers representing Tumblr nonetheless fired off a nastygram demanding the site’s removal.
The story has a rare happy ending, though. Tumblr sent a second letter saying that the cease and desist letter had been sent by mistake [Daily Dot]:
We deeply apologize for our mistake. Our legal department very recently started using a third party vendor to assist us in pursuing trademark infringers and, due to an error in our new process, your domain was mistakenly caught in the cross-fire.
To paraphrase Eric Turkewitz, when you outsource your trademark enforcement, you might just find yourself outsourcing a chunk of your customer goodwill at the same time.
“Did You Know MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech is Copyrighted?”
“The speech, which won’t be in the public domain until 2038, can only be used if a commercial entity pays the King estate a hefty fee,” writes Mark Leiser at The Drum. Nick Gillespie at Reason: “[Martin Luther] King had not copyrighted the text before delivering several versions of it or before his assassination; his family secured the copyright after his death.”
Want to learn what the law is? There’ll be a charge.
Should private standards organizations be entitled to retain copyright over building and fire codes when those codes have been adopted into public law? “On August 3, the National Fire Protection Association, ASTM International and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers filed a lawsuit with a federal court in Washington, D.C., alleging ‘massive copyright infringement’ by Public.Resource.Org for publishing codes and standards that have been incorporated into law.” [EFF]
When news clips embarrass broadcasters…
…many of them too readily employ DMCA takedown requests to keep the public from perusing the offending clips. [Kristin Bergman, Digital Media Law Project]
Other federal agencies want in to the Panopticon
Yes, “copyright infringement”:
Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the [National Security Agency’s] vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say. …
“It’s a very common complaint about N.S.A.,” said Timothy H. Edgar, a former senior intelligence official at the White House and at the office of the director of national intelligence. “They collect all this information, but it’s difficult for the other agencies to get access to what they want.”
“The other agencies feel they should be bigger players,” said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. “They view the N.S.A. — incorrectly, I think — as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of them.”
Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) speaks out on NSA bulk surveillance in this new Cato video with Caleb Brown. Earlier on surveillance here, here, and here; earlier on panopticons here. For the use of “money laundering” laws to pursue financial flows having nothing to do with terrorism or drug smuggling, see our reports here, here, here, here, etc.