Posts Tagged: "copyright law"

GROSSMAN: “A report released by the Global Intellectual Property Center found that IP-intensive industries employ 55.7 million Americans across dozens of sectors of the economy. In every state of this nation, millions of jobs hinge on the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights and supply wages 30% higher than non IP jobs. I think that increasingly reports such as these, will demonstrate, with hard facts and figures, to public policymakers the importance of intellectual property rights in promoting creativity and innovation in the U.S. economy, and thereby counter the popular and trendy notion that consumers should get everything they want instantaneously and for free.”

GROSSMAN: “I think that we will see some form of patent litigation reform passed by the Senate and then ultimately by Congress. Currently, there are very few things on which the Republicans and the Democrats can come together. However, patents and other types of intellectual property seem to be one area in which joint action is possible. I think that ultimately both parties are going to want to do something that shows that they can work together and get something important accomplished. Enacting the appropriate type of patent litigation reform would foster innovation and create jobs and thereby demonstrate to the American people that they still have a functioning Congress. The House has already passed a bill, and the President urged Congress to pass a bill in his State of the Union address. I think the momentum is there.”

The meeting will now be held on December 12, 2013 from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. ET at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, VA and the period for post-meeting comments has been extended. The deadline for filing pre-meeting comments is November 13, 2013.

The meeting will be held on October 30, 2013, in Washington, D.C. The IPTF intends to hold the public meeting in the Amphitheatre of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. The Green Paper, the IPTF proposes five copyright policy issues to address, and the meeting will provide an opportunity for discussion that will be used to formulate the IPTF’s views and recommendations regarding copyright policy. The five issues include: (1) establishing a multistakeholder dialogue on improving the operation of the notice and takedown system for removing infringing content from the Internet under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); (2) the legal framework for the creation of remixes; (3) the relevance and scope of the first sale doctrine in the digital environment; (4) the application of statutory damages in the contexts of individual file sharers and of secondary liability for large-scale infringement; and (5) the appropriate role for the government, if any, to help improve the online licensing environment, including access to comprehensive databases of rights information.

Recently I was driving around between appointments and flipping through radio stations on Sirius XM. I came across a song that at first I thought was the summer hit by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams – Blurred Lines. But that wasn’t the song at all, rather is was Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give it Up. I knew it would only be time before reading about some kind of settlement between Marvin Gaye’s family and Thicke/Williams, but Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams suing the family of Marvin Gaye asserting that they are not infringing the copyright in Got to Give it Up would be hilarious if it weren’t so utterly ridiculous.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Commerce today released a green paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy (Green Paper) to advance discussion on a set of policy issues critical to economic growth. The Green Paper discusses the goals of maintaining an appropriate balance between rights and exceptions as the law continues to be updated; ensuring…

Doctors and researchers are quietly acquiescing to the demands of those asserting copyright in medical tests, for fear of becoming entwined in lengthy and expensive legal proceedings that could result in a costly judgment. Such fear could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it prompts the creation of an industry norm for licensing medical tests. Courts and legislators have been known to defer to industry custom, even when they harbor some doubts about the wisdom of the underlying logic. The challenging thread running through all of this is that medical tests of this kind stand at the boundary between patent and copyright, raising the mind-bending question of how to conceptualize a process, which is the purview of patent, when that process consists of nothing more than words, which is normally the purview of copyright.

On May 6, 2013, I sat down with Steve Kunin and we discussed a wide range of patent issues. In Part 1 of the interview we discussed the new post grant procedures for challenging issued patents, and started discussing the estoppel provisions. In Part 2 we conclude our discussion of estoppel and move into discussing secret prior art, the Economic Espionage Act, the algorithm line of cases from the Federal Circuit and the erosion of patent rights that started with eBay v. MercExchange.

As briefly discussed above, Peteski brought this action against Deadspin because Deadspin copied the Dr. Phil show that had an exclusive interview with Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Tuiasosopo is the brains (and voice) behind the hoax that was played on Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o. What was the hoax? A fake online girlfriend for the football player. On the first part of Dr. Phil’s two-part show, Tuiasosopo talked about how the hoax worked, and toward the end of the show, Dr. Phil asked Tuiasosopo to demonstrate the telephone voice that he used. Tuiasosopo acted like he didn’t want to do it; so the end of that first episode was “the cliffhanger”–can Dr. Phil get Tuiasosopo to “do the voice” on the next episode?

Firefly was a briefly lived television show that aired on Fox in 2002. It only lasted for a few months before Fox yanked the plug (a most egregious decision that I shall never EVER forgive them for). In the years that followed, Firefly – the best space western you didn’t watch – gained a cult following that gives Trekkies a run for their money. In one of the episodes, the character Jayne Cobb receives a care package from his mother containing a homemade orange and yellow poofball hat. The hat wasn’t a focal point of the episode but fans of the show, known as Browncoats, can easily be identified at conventions by wearing this most cunning hat. Now FOX wants unauthorized sellers to cease and desist.

The Copyright Office has told Congress that the copyright laws are showing their age and need Congressional attention. With the prospect of comprehensive copyright reform on the horizon the familiar battle lines are being drawn between those who absolutely need copyright protection to survive and create versus those who are a part of the infringement culture. Without a solution to the growing culture of infringement original creation of copyrightable works will continue to experience downward pressure, which will ultimately curtail original creation by all those other than corporate conglomerates that have the resources to police and enforce. Do we really want to see the market squeeze out independent content creators due to copyright laws that don’t function given the new age technological realities?

Opponents of effective copyright laws are attempting to leverage the success of the petition into a wide-ranging assault on section 1201 of the DMCA — and, no doubt eventually, on copyright law itself. Along with Khanna, a coalition consisting of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Mozilla, Reddit, and others have launched fixthedmca.org, the ultimate goal of which is to repeal section 1201 in its entirety. These efforts are misguided. Section 1201 is not only required by international obligations, it has also enabled a variety of successful business models — from DVDs to Netflix to Pandora — that have benefited consumers and creators alike in a digital age.

White dropped his class certification request in an amended complaint and sought to receive an unspecified amount in damages on the basis that his copyrighted legal briefs had been included in both Westlaw’s “Litigator” database and LexisNexis’s “Briefs, Pleadings and Motions” database. In particular, White’s Motion for Summary Judgment argued that law firms and lawyers own the copyright to their own materials and “a court’s docket is not a lawless, copyright-free zone.” However, Westlaw and LexisNexis countered that argument, stating that they were entitled to use the documents under the Fair Use Doctrine on the basis that the documents were publicly available in the PACER filing system. The companies also claimed that they actually “enhanced and transformed” the documents by making them searchable for practitioners.

The parties and amici have filed over 25 briefs in this case, almost none of which address or even consider whether the actual right granted under Section 109(a)—to “sell or otherwise dispose of” copies—applies outside the United States; instead, they have focused almost exclusively on Section 109(a)’s “lawfully made under this title” preamble, resulting in unsatisfactory readings of the Copyright Act as a whole. As the American Intellectual Property Law Association has urged the Supreme Court in its amicus filing, applying long-standing extra-territoriality principles to the actual right created by Section 109(a) handily harmonizes both Sections 109(a) and 602(a)(1). It also avoids damage to the rest of the Act caused by undue emphasis on the prefatory “lawfully made under this title” language.

For some time I have known that we have been experiencing what seemed to be a rather large copyright infringement problem. For example, I know of very large entities that routinely would copy and paste our articles, remove links and any advertisement and then mass distribute just the text of our articles. This is obvious, blatant and willful copyright infringement. What was particularly disheartening was that this was going on within the intellectual property community. Disappointing because if those who are in the industry and working with content creators and inventors on a daily basis are all to willing to engage in that type of copyright infringement what hope do we have as content creators? Those whose livelihoods depend upon content creators and inventors should be the ones who most understand the damage that is caused by widespread copyright infringement.