WITH AMICI LIKE THIS, WHO NEEDS HOSTIS?
Could a university chemistry department routinely scan copyrighted scientific journals in their entirety to create an electronic, searchable database that puts their contents at the fingertips of professors and students, so they could use the data compiled by others in perfectly appropriate ways in their own scholarship? I think the answer is clearly “no.” As a result, most…
Read MoreTHE 2001 DEFENSE
The epic Apple-Samsung patent dispute is now on trial and, justly, generating headlines in the popular press. In particular, it has been widely reported that the Court has prevented Samsung from introducing clips from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey in which astronauts Frank Poole and Dave Bowman are looking at tablets that have an…
Read MoreTALK RADIO
I had the great pleasure of being interviewed last night by Milt Rosenberg, WGN-Chicago, about my book, Unfair to Genius. The audio file, in which we talk radio, music, and copyright law, is here.
Read MoreTHE BIG GAMES IS UPON US
With the opening ceremonies of the Games of the XXX Olympiad just a few days away, the media are awash in stories about the U.S. Olympic Committee’s trademark bullying. (Olympic Gyro, a mainstay of Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, it is reported, has been pressured into changing its name to Olympia Gyro.) The Committee’s aggressive tactics are…
Read MoreBOOK REPORT: "RETHINKING PATENT LAW"
For more than a generation, learned monographs have poured forth from constitutional theorists who bring insights from such diverse realms as literary criticism, philosophy, linguistics, and political economy to bear on the problem of finding consistent principles for deciding constitutional disputes. In Rethinking Patent Law, Professor Robin Feldman of the University of California’s Hastings College of Law applies similar analytic tools to patent law. …
Read MoreHERSHEY BAR GETS ITS ®
As a kid I was partial to the simple bas-relief design of the classic Nestlé’ bar. Once the raised border that surrounded the entire confection had been breached, the size of the next bite was limited only by the size of my mouth. I preferred to eat one letter at a time, beginning with the…
Read MoreCOURT: THE PITCH IS THE THING
In a ruling that may make it even harder to get face time with TV and movie studio executives to pitch an idea (“it’s like Sunrise at Campobello meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer“), the Second Circuit has ruled that claims for theft of idea arising out of such encounters are not pre-empted by the Copyright…
Read MoreCOURT: ICE GUM NOT REALLY THAT COOL
After chewing on a dispute between Wrigley and Cadbury over patents covering their competing “ice” gum products for more than eight years, the courts have declared a draw.
Read MoreGOOGLE LIBRARY PROJECT CASE NOW A REAL LAWSUIT
It has been seven years since The Authors Guild and some of its individual members first filed suit against Google, charging that its Library Project—to the extent it posted “snippets” of works still in copyright—constituted a massive copyright infringement. Initially, Google welcomed the class action as a vehicle for negotiating a global settlement of such claims that would have,…
Read MoreSWITCHED-ON SEARCH
I should, and will, be posting on Google’s mounting antitrust problems and on the status of its attempt to corner the book search market, but today I am utterly transfixed by the functional Moog Synthesizer that Google has placed on its home page, in honor of what would have been Robert Moog’s 78th birthday. (What’s so special about…
Read More