Techdirt has an interesting article up about the myth of the “original creator” - the idea that copyright and IP protects individual creators working in a vacuum come up with new, unique ideas that are not based on anything that precedes them. This is, as any author, musician, or inventor knows, not the way it works in practice.
It’s nice to see more and more people recognizing and speaking out about these things. The idea that there is a single “author” or R... Read Full Story
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A recently published law review article takes an interesting approach to testing the hypothesis that patents foster innovation:
Patent systems are often justified by an assumption that innovation will be spurred by the prospect of patent protection, leading to the accrual of greater societal benefits than would be possible under non-patent systems. However, little empirical evidence exists to support this assumption. One way to test the hypothesis that a pate... Read Full Story
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Whatever you feel about the “torture memos,” one underlying lesson is an important one for any lawyer: failure to do effective research when advising your client can be as much of a breach of ethical rules as failure to meet deadlines:
Critics say the lawyers left out important, relevant cases that would have pointed to different conclusions.
For example, in 1983, a Texas sheriff was tried for waterboarding prisoners. Justice Department prosecut... Read Full Story
Ed Kohler points us to a long, but fascinating blog post, by Stuart Shieber, a CS professor at Harvard, discussing the somewhat ridiculous copyright situation that many academics deal with in trying to promote their own works. I’ve heard similar stories from other professors I know, but this one is worth reading. Shieber points out the importance of academics getting their research published in journals, but how annoying it is that most journals require those academics to give up all so... Read Full Story
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Michael Nielsen wrote a stellar piece dealing with disruptive changes that doom old business models - specifically, newspapers and science publishers, to mention his examples. He does a particularly good job at explaining how this could happen even without anyone doing anything wrong or stupid.
The problem is that your newspaper has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists’ phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that... Read Full Story
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Judge Richard Posner has recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded to protect the news industry, including barring linking to copyrighted content or paraphrasing it. I view such protectionism as effectively enabling “rent seeking” by the established news industry. Ultimately, such acts harm society more than they help it. Certainly, at times legal intervention is important to improve markets (banning monopolies, establishing and enf... Read Full Story
The Register and Slashdot have picked up a theme from a 2006 law review article by Jason Mazzone on “copyfraud,” extending the idea to explain a new incarnation of it emerging in relation to Google Books. Mazzone wrote:
Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet’s Water Lilies, and even the U.S. Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everyt... Read Full Story
There have been several stories over the last week about issues related to digital rights management (DRM) on Amazon’s Kindle. After much confusion from Amazon customer service, the final update, as far as I can tell, is as follows:
You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.
Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices.
Unfortunately the publisher... Read Full Story
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The New York State Court of Appeals, in Stern v. Bluestone, 2009 NY Slip Op 04740 (2009), overturned a lower court ruling that ruled that a faxed newsletter dealing with attorney malpractice issues - the same area in which the author of the newsletter practiced. Lower courts thought this newsletter constituted advertising, and thus ran into rules about attorney advertising. The Court of Appeals disagreed.
Why is this important for law bloggers?
The primary purpose o... Read Full Story
Especially important to everyone in Canada - but important to everyone around the world, since copyright and IP are increasingly international issues due to attempts at harmonization (WIPO, for example) - comes this expose by Michael Geist on the undue influence pro-copyright lobbyist organizations have had on Canadian policy documents:
Although there are many groups involved in copyright lobbying, at the heart of the strategy are two organizations - the Canadian Recording Industry Associatio... Read Full Story
