Patent filings relating to 3D printing have increased 23-fold over the last five years, and trademark filings for businesses involved in 3D printing have increased 300 percent over the same time. Obviously, there is great excitement over the promise of 3D printing, but there is also concern about how 3D printing could make it too easy to copy a patented product with a push of a button… Traditionally, it is more important to have patent claims that protect products, components of products, arrangements of products, etc. Future IP will weigh more heavily on ideas and designs, rather than methods, which will be increasingly become difficult to police. These files will serve as proof of an owners’ pre-established rights, and could prove to be a major profit-making source in the future. And while copyrights are susceptible to fair use claims in a way patents are not, copyrights last for an extremely long time (e.g., 70 years beyond the death of the author).
“I am not a robot. My intonation is always different.” — “Donald Trump” “I am not a robot. My intonation is always different.” —”Barack Obama” Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama never actually uttered the line, or at least those 10 words in that order. But over at the website Lyrebird.ai, you can play recordings […]
[ed note to students: use the BU lib subscription to WSJ to access this article.]
The current extraterritorial reach of U.S. trade secret law may seem ironic given trade secret law’s “local” roots. In the United States, common law trade secret principles emerged through a diverse patchwork of state court decisions addressing local commercial disputes. These local common law principles were first distilled in the Restatement of Torts and the Restatement of Unfair Competition and then codified in the Uniform Trade Secrets Act in 1979. Underscoring the local prerogative of trade secret law, state legislatures modified and tailored the Uniform Trade Secrets Act to reflect their state-specific concerns and needs. For many years, despite a push for national uniformity, a number of states chose not to adopt a statutory scheme at all (some still haven’t).
If you’ve read our coverage of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Stupid Patent of the Month” series, you know America has a patent quality problem. People apply for patents on ideas that are obvious, vague, or were invented years earlier. Too often, applications get approved and low-quality patents fall into the hands of patent trolls, creating headaches for real innovators.
Why don’t more low-quality patents get rejected? A recent paper published by the Brookings Institution offers fascinating insights into this question. Written by legal scholars Michael Frakes and Melissa Wasserman, the paper identifies three ways the patent process encourages approval of low-quality patents:
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is funded by fees—and the agency gets more fees if it approves an application.
Unlimited opportunities to refile rejected applications means sometimes granting a patent is the only way to get rid of a persistent applicant.
Patent examiners are given less time to review patent applications as they gain seniority, leading to less thorough reviews.
None of these observations is entirely new. For example, we have covered the problems created by unlimited re-applications in the past. But what sets Frakes and Wasserman’s work apart is that they have convincing empirical evidence for all three theories.
Congress has spent much of the past year grappling with a heartbreakingly difficult issue: victims who are prohibited by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act from suing the websites where they were sex-trafficked.
Unfortunately, some of the debate has been sidetracked by a misunderstanding of how the statute works and a recent court case that interpreted it. Section 230 is one of the most important laws in the history of the Internet, and before we amend the statute to fix problems, we need to understand precisely what the problems are.
Twenty-six words within Section 230 shield websites from many types of claims arising from user content: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” For example, if a newspaper publishes a defamatory article, the subject can sue the newspaper publisher for defamation. But under Section 230, if a user posts a defamatory comment on Twitter, the subject cannot successfully sue Twitter for defamation (but can sue the tweeter).
It is that time once again when we look back on the previous year in preparation to close the final chapter on 2016 and to look ahead toward 2017. With patent reform surprisingly stalled, the biggest news stories of the year may have been the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)… As 2016 started and through at least the first half of 2016 it seemed as if the PTAB had become rather all-powerful and completely unsusceptible to judicial restraints. As we close 2016 and look forward to 2017 a decidedly different picture seems like it is emerging… The other big news story of 2016 was with respect to patent eligibility…
Since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became law in 1998, it has been a federal crime to copy a DVD or do anything else that subverts digital copy-protection schemes.
Soon, government lawyers will have to show up in court to defend those rules. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit (PDF) claiming the parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that deal with copy protection and digital locks are unconstitutional.
Under the DMCA, any hacking or breaking of digital locks, often referred to as digital rights management or DRM, is a criminal act. That means modding a game console, hacking a car’s software, and copying a DVD are all acts that violate the law, no matter what the purpose. Those rules are encapsulated in Section 1201 of the DMCA, which was lobbied for by the entertainment industry and some large tech companies.
A US Department of Commerce task force recommended Thursday that Congress alter the Copyright Act in a bid that likely would reduce financial damages for file sharing copyright scofflaws.
The recommendations from the agency’s Internet Policy Task Force don’t call for doing away with the maximum $150,000 in damages available to rights holders per infringement. But if Congress adopts the task force’s recommendations, it’s doubtful there would be large awards, as one of the recommendations would require juries to consider a file sharer’s ability to pay and, among other things, the actual value of the works that were infringed.
“We believe that litigants and courts would be well-served by requiring consideration of a uniform set of factors designed to result in an appropriate award based upon the facts of each case,” said the report from the task force, which included members from the US Patent and Trademark Office, The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and other Commerce Department entities.
Earlier today the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a report titled White Paper on Remixes, First Sale, and Statutory Damages, which recommends amendments to U.S. copyright law that would provide more guidance and greater flexibility to courts in awarding statutory damages. However, the Task Force has found insufficient evidence to show that there is a change in circumstance in the markets or technology that requires action on amending the first sale doctrine.
The Copyright Office has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) regarding a new electronic submission process for websites and online services to designate agents to receive 512(c)(3) copyright takedown notices. The agent designation process is crucial to the 17 USC 512 safe harbors because the formality of designating an agent is required to qualify for the 512(c) safe harbor. See, e.g., BWP v. Hollywood Fan Sites. As part of rolling out the electronic submission process, the NPRM proposes reducing the filing fee from $105 (or more) to $6, reflecting that an electronic filing system would reduce the Copyright Office’s operating costs.
