The Second Circuit has vacated Judge Batts’s preliminary injunction in Salinger v. Colting, the “Coming Through the Rye” case. I have not read the opinion, but this snippet from the introduction seems significant:
We hold that the Supreme Court’s decision in eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C., 547 U.S. 388 (2006), which articulated a four-factor test as [...]

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The Copyright@300 conference is now available online.  (via Pam Samuelson.)  It’s a fabulous lineup of speakers and I can’t wait to listen to these presentations & discussions.  There’s something wonderfully ironic, isn’t there, about how this sort of open Web-based content “encourages learning”?

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There is a lot of discussion these days of new media and what new media mean to old media. In some cases, existing (or mainstream) media have attempted to adapt to the new technologies of distribution. Sometimes they do a good job. At other times, not so much. And sometimes, it’s just plain strange.
Case in [...]

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With thanks to one of my students for passing this along to me, it seems that some clever digital scammers have come up with a couple of interesting new kinds of online attacks.  One involves hacking an individual’s computer and publishing the person’s search history list (including any porn sites visited etc), then offering for [...]

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Take the quiz here.

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For those rankings mavens amongst us, it appears that the U.S. News Rankings for 2011 leaked yesterday.  What do people think of this year’s IP specialty rankings (assuming the list is accurate)?
1. Berkeley
2. Stanford
3. George Washington
4. Boston University
5. N.Y.U.
6. Columbia
7. U Michigan
8. Houston
9. Duke
10. Franklin Pierce

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Prior to widespread use of the Internet, someone who had a poor experience with a provider of goods or services could do little more than sue and spread word of their experience to friends and colleagues. Reports to the local Better Business Bureau or a state Attorney General’s office might also follow, but there was [...]

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If you don’t read the NYTimes Sports section, you might have missed reports that Nancy Dowd, who wrote the greatest hockey movie ever, Slap Shot (1977, with Paul Newman), is trying to shut down public appearances by the actors — Dave “Killer” Hanson, and the Carlson brothers, Steve and Jeff, who played the Hanson brothers [...]

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Late last week, a suit was filed against Google in the U.S. District for the Southern District of New York by a variety of organizations representing visual artists with respect to unauthorized scanning of visual images in Google’s Library Project and on other Google services.  The court had originally denied the plaintiffs’ request to join [...]

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I’m drowning in administrative work, travel, conferences, and the approaching end of the Spring semester, so my posting has been off.  But I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to note Steven Johnson’s essay in the New York Times this morning, writing about the iPhone and the Apple App Store:
For about a decade now, ever since [...]

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Copyright law turns 300 today.  As I regularly explain to my students, compared to the laws of property or crime, copyright is pretty darn young.  But in the space of 300 years, it sure has grown fast, as The Economist notes.  Has it grown too fast?  Will it survive to 400?  Check out these comments.  [...]

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With thanks to Michelle Jacobs for passing this on to me, the British Parliament is currently debating the Digital Economy Bill which aims to provide greater online protections for copyright holders, including provisions that suspend Internet accounts of people who download copyright material illegally.  Full story from the BBC here.

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With thanks to one of my students for passing this along, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has held that the FCC is not entitled to enforce net neutrality in a case where the FCC had ordered Comcast to stop selectively slowing down BitTorrent traffic.  Full story here.

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The New York Times reports that law clinics that take on large corporations are under pressure from private companies. The pressure has resulted in some saying that state dollars should not be used to allow clinics to take on “controversial issues.” Frankly, if educational institutions aren’t supposed to take on controversial issues, they will [...]

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Sandra Rierson, my colleague and co-author on Confronting the Genericism Conundrum, and I were emailing about the Tiffany v. eBay case the other day. She noted that the case furthers a mistake regarding contributory and vicarious liability. I asked her whether she’d like to write a special to Co-Op about the topic, and she agreed. [...]

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Following this post about the self-diluting potential the eastward expansion of the iconic West Coast burger chain In-n-Out, New York In-n-Out fans were victimized yesterday by a cruel April Fools’ prank:  the promise of an In-n-Out outlet near Union Square, complete with “coming soon” signage featuring the real In-n-Out trademark and an apparently real In-n-Out employee [...]

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Back in 2004, USA Today, and many other news organizations, reported on Tiffany’s lawsuit against eBay.  The trademark issue is fairly simple to grasp — a lot of the Tiffany jewelry sold on eBay is apparently not authentic Tiffany jewelry.  So is eBay liable for the sale of these fakes?  The district court said no.  [...]

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Some April Fool’s Day reading:
Eric Goldman is not a fan.
Larry Solum is, and managed to fool me for the third year in a row! Lots of inside baseball, but these are pretty well done.
Google makes fun of its own trademark (see esp. the handy guide for how to use the name of their company at [...]

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