Preparing to teach “new use” copyright licensing cases this week, over the weekend I dug into Cohen v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 845 F.2d 851 (9th Cir. 1988). The plaintiff, Herb Cohen, alleged that the defendant exceeded the scope of a license that he granted to the predecessor of Paramount in connection with the use of [...]

[Read more →]

For patent folks interested in some comparative reading, the Australian federal court just handed down a decision clarifying the “novelty” requirements in the Australian patent statute.  Full text decision can be found here.

[Read more →]

Spotted in today’s NYTimes, in a review titled “Authorship or Translation? Notes Toward Redefining Creativity,” an exhibit at The Drawing Center in New York itself titled “Drawn from Photography” and featuring drawing by artists who meticulously re-create works — or elements of works that appeared originally in photographs.
The review carefully quotes from the catalog for [...]

[Read more →]

This image is from the Swiss/French artist Corinne Vionnet, who found dozens of tourist snapshots of the same object online and edited them together to form a single image. A gallery of her work — “Photo Opportunities” — is online here.
Assume for present purposes that US copyright law were applied to this image and to its [...]

[Read more →]

The University of South Carolina School of Law is looking for visitors in the following subject areas for next academic year. Depending upon matches to needs, the visits will be either a semester or a year.
Constitutional Law (fall)
Wills, Trusts & Estates (fall)
Criminal Law (fall)
Evidence (fall)
Intellectual Property (either semester or possibly a year)
Corporate (either semester, possibly [...]

[Read more →]

Michael Risch’s post below about the norms of the cyberlaw colloquium (”The Virtues of Getting Shredded“) prompted me to revisit some thoughts that I collected during my recently-concluded term as Research Dean at Pitt.
The problem, or the issue, is the form and tone of “feedback” to give colleagues who are presenting or sharing preliminary versions [...]

[Read more →]

In an age where many argue that trademarks are getting over enforced, I thought this post was a nice reminder of why we have trademarks in the first place and what can happen when the underlying quality fades:
Six Brands that Don’t Mean What They Used To

[Read more →]

The NYTimes celebrates the five-year anniversary of the International Music Score Library Project with this feature on conflicts between music publishers and students and scholars who want to share the music that is their passion.  On the whole, the story reflects a dialogue among interested parties that is more measured than what we usually hear [...]

[Read more →]

“Source Code,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal:
is just a gussied-up (and longer—hmmm) version of “Cause and Effect.” The answer is 3.

[Read more →]

I just finished participating in and presenting at the two-day “Cyberlaw Colloquium,” an annual mid-Atlanticish conference devoted to cyberlaw scholarship (with some bleeding into IP). This year it was hosted by Madisonian’s own Greg Lastowka at Rutgers – Camden, with other Madisonians Mike Madison and Mike Carroll participating.
An hour was devoted to each paper, and [...]

[Read more →]

In recent years (and particularly since reading a lot of Bobbi Kwall’s work), I’ve been increasingly interested in motivations for why authors/artists create and in the relationship between economic incentives and creativity.  One of this year’s Oscar nominated documentaries (Exit Through the Gift Shop) is actually an interesting exploration of some of these issues.
It explores [...]

[Read more →]

I have a new post up at Prawfsblawg (and the Marquette Law Faculty Blog, if you prefer WordPress), on how the idea that contributory copyright infringement is based on enterprise liability from tort law got started. If that’s something you’ve always wondered about, it may be worth a read.
Side note: For crazy origin stories, see [...]

[Read more →]

J.C. Penney was on top of the web world last holiday season, showing up at #1 for dozens of retail search queries on Google. Type “dresses,” “area rugs,” “bedding:” you’d get Penney’s items as your first search result. Had the venerable retailer become a “Wikipedia” of online shopping, reliably providing the “people’s choice?” [...]

[Read more →]

This story in the NYT Magazine about Braddock, PA and its “revitalization” front man, John Fetterman, should be read in conjunction with this David Pogue column about page numbers in e-books. How can the future deal with the past?

[Read more →]

Our law school, like many, has begun the process of distributing offers of admission to prospective students.  Several of us faculty members are part of a typical marketing effort to persuade our admittees to pick our law school; the effort consists of the admissions staff’s sending email under our names to prospective students who have [...]

[Read more →]

Like all Jeopardy! fans, I’m looking forward to next week’s broadcast showdown between Watson, the IBM computer designed to be a Jeopardy! killer app, and two all-time Jeopardy! kingpins, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.
Here’s a NYTimes feature on a Nova TV special on Watson.  That piece concludes with the tantalizing question:  Does Watson’s lack of [...]

[Read more →]

In last weekend’s New York Times, I came across this quotation in a short piece regarding on-line education:
Wendy Brown, the Heller professor of political science at the Berkeley campus, spoke witheringly of the idea at a campus forum in October: “What is sacrificed when classrooms disappear, the place where good teachers do not merely ‘deliver [...]

[Read more →]

Two years ago, with the Pittsburgh Steelers on the cusp of winning their sixth Super Bowl title, I mused in this blog post about the validity of trademark registrations in the iconic Terrible Towel.  My takeaway:  There are substantial reasons to doubt the marks’ validity, even if it is extremely unlikely that anyone would raise a [...]

[Read more →]

Pittsburgh is all over the news this week because the Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Green Bay Packers next Sunday in the Super Bowl.  But in the IP world, two other Pittsburgh icons are about to face off.  And neither of them is Girl Talk.
In this corner:  Emerging Pittsburgh-based rap star Wiz Khalifa.  Check out the [...]

[Read more →]

With thanks to Jim Gibson for initiating a thought-provoking discussion on cyberprof about this issue, apparently Google has just caught out rival search engine Bing in a sting operation for copying Google’s search results (by inserting fake search results in the manner of the Feist case and determining that Bing was copying the fake results).  [...]

[Read more →]