I was re-reading Perfect 10 v Google last night (and Perfect 10 v Visa) in preparaton for a cyberlaw class today and I was struck (again) by the 9th Circuit’s desire to maintain a clear distinction between contributory and vicarious liability in the ISP context.  While noting that the lines between contributory and vicarious liability [...]

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I am just finishing a marvelous book about cartography and the discovery and naming of America, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name (by Toby Lester, Simon & Schuster, 2009).  The Fourth Part of the World [...]

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Posted at the request of Prof Giuseppina D’Agostino, Director, IP Osgoode, Intellectual Property, Law and Technology Program, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada:
“(1) We have posted a call for applications for the summer 2010 IPilogue
team and we would be very pleased to hear from students at your own
institution.  The call for editors has [...]

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A while back I blogged about the stated preferences of Stephenie Meyer (author of the Twilight series of books) with respect to online uses of her unpublished manuscripts.  While trolling various authors’ official websites, I found another interesting comment by a vampire book writer about unauthorized uses of her work, this time with direct reference [...]

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While broadening my literary horizons, but still remaining firmly in the pre-teen science fantasy camp, I’ve recently discovered a series of books by Cassandra Clare – the Moral Instruments trilogy (soon to be many more books than a trilogy).  She writes for pretty much the same audience as Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame so I [...]

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With thanks to Roberto Colon for passing this along to me, a federal court judge in Australia has held that an ISP is not liable for copyright infringements of its users.  Full story here and here.  The Australian copyright test for secondary liability is different from that in the U.S. and relies on a concept [...]

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Many may know about the fight between Amazon and Macmillan publishing. Yes it is about e-books and pricing, and the death of an industry, the death of print, and heck throw in Death in Venice if you like. But the real move may have been to highlight something else Amazon is quite worried about: Google [...]

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With thanks for one of my students for fowarding this to me, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court has today cleared Chinese search engine Baidu on claims of copyright infringement for deep-linking to music downloads that infringe copyrights.  Reuters story here.
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Naturally, I’m still thinking about copyright law in the context of the Twilight franchise – what else would I be doing on a Tuesday morning?  I was looking again at some of the press coverage surrounding the young woman who was detained in custody for several days for making a three minute video-recording in an [...]

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Much is made of the fact that copyright attaches at the time expression is fixed in a tangible medium. To bring us (partially) in line with the Berne Convention, which convention the US joined in 1989, “formalities” of copyright protection — the requirement to give notice by putting the © symbol on the work [...]

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For anyone who couldn’t make it to the domain name/online TM symposium at CWRU in the fall, the webcast is now available online.  Some additional web resources on areas associated with the symposium topics (along with speaker bios) are available on the bottom of this webpage.
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With gratitude to Eric Goldman for drawing my attention to more opportunities to blog about the Twilight franchise, the U.S. District Court in California on January 12 granted a preliminary injunction to Summit Entertainment (the movie studio that produces the Twilight movies) for copyright and trademark infringement in relation to the unauthorized activities of a [...]

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The following is a first cut at a list of Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law – Patent.
For background and explanation of the Lost Classics series, read this earlier post.
(Ordered alpha by author)
Donald W. Banner, Innovation, Patents and the National Interest, 12 Intell. Prop. L. Rev. 37 (1980)
Ward S. Bowman, Jr., Patent and Antitrust: A [...]

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The following is a first cut at a list of Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law – Trademark.
For background and explanation of the Lost Classics series, read this earlier post.
(Ordered alpha by author)
Ralph S. Brown, Jr., Advertising and the Public Interest: Legal Protection of Trade Symbols, 57 Yale L.J. 1165 (1948)
Rudolf Callmann, The Law of [...]

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I always find fair use in the United States trickier than fair dealing in the U.K. and Australia (where I first studied IP law), so I’m often surprised at the confusions about what is and what isn’t fair use in the U.S. because it doesn’t necessarily comport with what I expect.  And I know that [...]

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The following is a first cut at a list of Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law – Copyright.
For background and explanation of the Lost Classics series, read this earlier post.
(Ordered alpha by author)
Horace G. Ball, The Law of Copyright and Literary Property (1944)
Augustine Birrell, Seven Lectures on the Law and History of Copyright in Books [...]

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Some time ago on this blog, I ranted a bit about how younger IP scholars either have lost the knack of knowing something about the history of the discipline – or never acquired it in the first place.
Off and on over the last year, I assembled lists of key pieces of scholarship and key [...]

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I’ve been reading up on Wikipedia’s copyright policies lately and found some interesting items tucked away in the Wikipedia copyright policy guidelines and copyright FAQ.  This is not to criticize the people at Wikipedia as they are working to do something really unique and original with little in the way of financial backing.  But as [...]

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According to today’s NY Times, the most pirated movie of 2009 was the popular Star Trek prequel.
The award for “most notorious film piracy”, however, goes to X-Men Origins:  Wolverine which made it to illegal file-sharing avenues on the Internet one month before being released in the theaters.
Other movies that made 2009’s “most pirated” list included [...]

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Here’s just a little free association for what I hope are ongoing happy holidays for everyone. Sherlock Holmes opens on Christmas Day and is a front runner for holiday films I want to see. I happen to think that Robert Downey Jr. is in a great groove. I loved his acting in Chaplin and am [...]

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