Free for a Fee

By Eric Goldman

In April, Graeme Dinwoodie and Mark Janis once again convened a roundtable of trademark law scholars to geek it out on trademark law. Group photo. This year’s theme was “trademark boundaries,” i.e., how trademark law abuts against other legal doctrines (such as copyright, patent or publicity rights) or no doctrines at all (a legally unregulated zone). As usual, Mark Lemley provided a helpful recap of our discussion:

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2012/06/depaul_trademar.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

For those following the CP Productions v. John Doe BitTorrent lawsuit filed recently in the Southern District of Indiana, I thought I’d detail the first steps in the Plaintiff’s litigation strategy.

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The content in this post was found at http://indianaintellectualproperty.com/2012/06/15/cp-productions-v-john-doe-motion-to-subpoena-internet-service-providers/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

In a newly-approved patent, an economics professor hopes to bring to the academic publishing world what seems to be forthcoming in the video game industry—new restrictions that would seemingly eliminate a secondary market for digital goods and prevent legal borrowing.

Last week, the 2006 patent for a “Web-based system and method to capture and distribute royalties for access to copyrighted academic texts by preventing unauthorized access to discussion boards associated with copyrighted academic works” was approved by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patent was granted to Joseph Henry Vogel, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras.

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/patent-granted-to-encourage-purchase-of-digital-textbooks/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

The trial in the dispute between Oracle and Google over the use of Java technology in the Android operating system is over, and the greatly anticipated ruling on copyright in the Java Application Programming Interface (API) has issued. The court ruled that the elements of the Java API, including the structure, sequence and organization, are not protected by copyright. It is important to note that the court did not rule that no elements of an API may be protected by copyright. Although broad in its implications, the opinion is fact-specific to the Java API.

As appropriate to a dispute that presiding judge William Alsup referred to as “the World Series of technology litigation,” the API ruling is world-class.  The opinion will quickly make its way into technology law textbooks, not only for the clarity of the court’s discussion of how the Java programming language functions, but for its mini-treatise on software copyright law.

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The content in this post was found at http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2012/06/06/oracle-v-google-judge-writes-the-book-on-software-programming-copyright-for-now-anyway/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewMediaAndTechnologyLaw+%28New+Media+and+Technology+Law%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Megaupload

• Kim Dotcom lampoons New Zealand MP in his new rap song
• Government trying to deny Megaupload fair legal representation
• Judge not impressed with government’s arguments against preserving Megaupload data
• Carpathia blasts government for hypocrisy on Megaupload servers
• Raid of Dotcom mansion was videotaped, footage nowhere to be found

The Motion Picture Association of America filed a response on Tuesday, addressing a motion to return the Megaupload users’ files locked up in the United States v. Kim Dotcom case. In an Eastern Virginia District Court, the MPAA asked that if the court grants users the ability to retrieve their files from the locked-down servers, that no illegally downloaded copyrighted material be let free in the process.

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/the-mpaa-would-be-ok-seeing-legit-meagupload-files-restored/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Posted by Peggy Hoon on April 28, 2011

collectanea

. . .

Transformative Uses As Fair Uses

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The content in this post was found at http://www-apps.umuc.edu/blog/collectanea/2011/04/making-sense-of-derivative-wor.html and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

By Andrew Goldberg

May 10, 2011,

Google is prohibited from publishing snippets of, or even linking to, articles and photos from Belgian newspaper websites, a Belgian appeals court ruled this week.

The decision, which upholds a lower court’s 2007 copyright ruling forcing Google to remove all content and links from French-and-German-language newspapers in Belgium, is surely a setback for the search giant, but is also potentially an even bigger blow to innovation in Europe.

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The content in this post was found at http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2011/05/google-is-prohibited-from-publishing-snippets-of-or-even-linking-to-articles-and-photos-from-belgian-newspaper-websites-a.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ThePriorArt+%28The+Prior+Art%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

By Eric Goldman

This weekend I presented on “Hot Topics in Internet Law” at the San Francisco IP Law Association’s Spring Seminar in Healdsburg. My talk slides. A few photos from the trip. As I’ve mentioned before, I find “hot topics” talks unusually challenging to prepare–they take much more time than normal talks, they are hard to organize, and they have a high risk of preemption by prior speakers. In addition to quick coverage of a number of topics, I focused on 5 broader topics (I only addressed 3 in the time I had):

* intermediary deputization
* consumer reviews
* social media account disputes
* trolling
* new gTLDs

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2012/06/hot_topics_in_i.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

June 14, 2011

A Las Vegas federal judge threatened to sanction copyright troll Righthaven, calling its litigation efforts Tuesday “disingenuous, if not outright deceitful.”

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/06/judge-copyright-troll-righthaven-has-no-standing-to-sue/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

By Tyler Ochoa (see some of Tyler’s other posts) with comments from Eric

Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 3:10-cv-03561-WHA (N.D. Cal. May 31, 2012).

On Thursday, Judge William Alsup concluded the district court phase of the Oracle v. Google Java-Android trial by holding that the structure, sequence, and organization of the 37 APIs copied by Google is not protected by copyright.

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Other reactions to the ruling:

* SCU’s incoming new law professor Brian Love was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News as saying: “This is now effectively a total loss for Oracle, across the board…It’s absolutely the best possible case for Google.”

* EFF: No Copyrights on APIs: Judge Defends Interoperability and Innovation

The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2012/06/oracles_apis_ar.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.