EFF Deeplinks
May 17, 6:29 PM PDT
An upcoming treaty renegotiation process could prove to be the next great threat to online freedom in the international realm. As we have explained , the World Conference on International Telecommunications – “WCIT” for short, pronounced “wicket” by insiders – will be held in Dubai...
IP Watch
May 17, 5:25 PM PDT
An open letter was sent yesterday from 50 American legal academics encouraging members of the United States Senate Finance Committee to exercise their Constitutional responsibility to ensure that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is treated as a binding international...
The IPKat has read with fascination of the agreement which the European Patent Office (EPO) and its Russian counterpart Rospatent have signed in order to "facilitate innovation" by cooperating in the mechanical translation of patents. The EPO press-release (presumably there is a...
EFF.org Updates
May 17, 1:56 PM PDT
Under a new policy announced today , Twitter will be suggesting accounts for Twitter users to follow based on data collected from an individual’s browsing habits on websites that have embedded Twitter buttons. While this is sure to garner scrutiny from the press and public, Twitter...
Copyfight - The Politics of IP
May 17, 10:12 AM PDT
A friend pointed me to Unglue.it, a project that is raising money to buy the various and patchwork copyrights that are held in what was originally oral literature from Africa . The money raised will be used to buy copyrights in toto so that the work can be (re)released without restrictions (via...
There is a short report in English at the website of the Mongolia Economic Forum about a conference on renewable energy that will run today and tomorrow in Ulan Bator. The article has this to say about President Elbegdorj’s opinion on these matters: In his greetings...
IP Watch
May 17, 4:28 AM PDT
The tiny island state of Singapore has begun to ramp up its capacity for patent search and examination ahead of a bold move to adopt a new patent system, one of the proposed major amendments to its Patents Act. The Southeast Asian economic high-flyer is pressing for changes to its laws to...
Patent Docs
May 16, 10:58 PM PDT
By Donald Zuhn -- A survey on consumer perceptions regarding food technology indicates that many U.S. consumers have favorable opinions concerning the benefits offered by plant and animal biotechnology. The survey, which was commissioned by the International Food...
Patently-O
May 16, 8:14 PM PDT
I’m sorry that I can’t make it to Thursday’s Federal Circuit Judicial Conference at the Grand Hyatt in DC. The program looks excellent, including discussions from most of the Federal Circuit Judges, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts...
EFF.org Updates
May 16, 1:07 PM PDT
Fifty leading U.S. legal scholars cast fresh doubt on the constitutionality of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in an open letter to the Senate Finance Committee today. ( Press Release ). At issue is whether the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) had authority...
Technology & Marketing Law
May 16, 9:48 AM PDT
By Eric Goldman Groupion, LLC v. Groupon, Inc., 2012 WL 1655728 (N.D. Cal. May 8, 2012). Groupion makes CRM software....
Copyfight - The Politics of IP
May 16, 7:59 AM PDT
Elsevier took another shot to the face today, with the very public resignation of an associate editor of its journal Genomics . Winston Hide, the now-former editor, is a teacher at Harvard School of Public Health, and his resignation reasoning centered around his feeling that...
I just learned from this tweet by Kevin Meyerson that the public comment for the feed-in tariff Ordinance in Japan has started. Here is a link to the relevant page . Comments are possible until June first. I am looking forward to write a couple of things and blogging about it here.
IP Watch
May 16, 4:53 AM PDT
After the thirteenth quadrennial session of the United Nations body focusing on trade and development, which was to set its mandate for the next four years, delegates reached consensus and avoided major pitfalls, according to several developed and developing country sources...
Dogs, bears -- and cats: a word from the Wyse. The IPKat raised this question on Monday when considering the relative positions of PUDSEY BEAR (already registered in the UK) and Pudsey the dancing dog (for which a claim to trade mark protection has been asserted). He has now...
EFF Deeplinks
May 15, 5:27 PM PDT
Iran Continues March Towards “Halal Internet” This past weekend, Iran’s minister of telecommunications announced that domestic institutions including banks, telecom companies, insurance firms, and universities are now prohibited from dealing with emails that do not come from...
Technology & Marketing Law
May 15, 3:07 PM PDT
By guest-blogger Jennifer Granick (with comments from Eric) [Eric's introduction: Some guest visitors to the blog need no introduction, and...
Technology & Marketing Law
May 15, 11:05 AM PDT
[Post by Venkat Balasubramani] William Charron pubished a short piece for the Berkeley Journal of Entertainment and Sports Law that...
Groklaw
May 15, 7:00 AM PDT
The further we go into the this trial the heavier the paperwork has become with no fewer than 26 documents on today's list. Because of that volume we will not be able to address all of them in detail or provide them in text, at least initially, but here are the highlights: Motions for Judgment...
EFF.org Updates
May 14, 4:06 PM PDT
The U.S. content industry will try anything to preserve its profit margin and power over the creative content market at the expense of the Internet. They will use any tactic that circumvents democratic processes to make new rules for the Internet that favor their interests and not the interests of...
Patent Prospector
May 14, 3:31 PM PDT
Apple tried to get a preliminary injunction against Samsung over design and utility patents, accusing Samsung of infringing its "distinctive design." The district court was unpersuaded, finding, among other faults, that "Apple had failed to show a likelihood of success on the merits." The...
Copyfight - The Politics of IP
May 14, 12:07 PM PDT
Writing for Forbes last week, Phil Johnson profiles the modern-day re-creation of the venerable Harvard Book Store . When I moved to Cambridge in the pre-Web days it boasted more bookstores (and ice cream parlors) per square meter than any other place on earth. Awesome...
Technology & Marketing Law
May 14, 10:15 AM PDT
By Eric Goldman Scott v. WorldStarHipHop, Inc., 2012 WL 1592229 (S.D.N.Y. May 3, 2012) Copyright law wasn't designed as a...
Groklaw
May 14, 8:15 AM PDT
We've all seen the fur flying on the issue of copyright infringement damages with respect to rangeCheck and the decompiled files. It's worth stepping back and putting this into perspective, and it's also worth considering the arguments advanced. First, the perspective. The jury...
IP Watch
May 14, 4:50 AM PDT
The Republic of Korea has opened its fourth satellite copyright office, in the Philippines, in a bid to protect its copyrighted works amid the popularity of Korean entertainment in this Southeast Asian nation. Related Articles: Philippines IP Office: ‘Our Meeting Is Not...
Back from his trip to the International Trademark Association's Meeting last week in Washington DC, this Kat is wasting no time bringing readers back up to speed after what seems like an absolute age without his regular update posts. He had hoped to do plenty of reporting on the event...
Patent Docs
May 13, 8:47 PM PDT
By Sherri Oslick -- About Court Report: Each week we will report briefly on recently filed biotech and pharma cases. Esoterix Genetic Laboratories, LLC v. Life Technologies Corp. et al. 1:12-cv-00411; filed April 26, 2012 in the Middle District of North Carolina • Plaintiff: Esoterix Genetic...
Patently-O
May 13, 4:46 PM PDT
Freedom of Speech and Facebook Technology is forever changing, and with technological change there is also legal change. In a recent Virginia District Court case, the judge decided that liking a Facebook page is not protected speech. The judge stated that, "It is the court's...
Groklaw
May 13, 12:00 PM PDT
PJ has separately covered the more important filings from the weekend, namely Google's motion for summary judgment on the damages issue with respect to rangeCheck and the decompiled files and Oracle's motion to delay phase 3 of the trial until the copyright liability...
Groklaw
May 13, 6:46 AM PDT
Google has filed a motion for Summary Judgment on copyright damages, arguing that Oracle has no evidence that Google gained anything financially that can be linked to rangeCheck or the test files: Oracle has no evidence, and cannot possibly prove, that Google earned any revenue...
Another Mongolian pop music Youtube video.
Patent Prospector
May 12, 5:53 PM PDT
Sheldon Breiner tried to get a patent on networked data collation from far-flung places. With Obzilla riding shotgun, the examiner combined three far-flung references, supplying motivation to combine as "obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art." Rejection affirmed at the BPAI...
Technology & Marketing Law
May 12, 10:48 AM PDT
[Post by Venkat Balasubramani] K-Beech, Inc. v. Does 1-37, CV 11-3995 (E.D.N.Y.) Malibu Media, LLC v. Does 1-26, CV 11-1147...
Another Mongolian pop music Youtube video, already at close to 400,000 views.
Patent Docs
May 11, 9:10 PM PDT
The George Washington University Law School and Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) will be holding a public roundtable entitled "Patent-Eligible Subject Matter after Mayo v. Prometheus: Exploring the Path Forward" from 2:00 - 5:00 pm on May 16, 2012 at The George...
Patent Docs
May 11, 9:04 PM PDT
The Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology and the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology will be co-sponsoring a Patent Institutions Summit on May 21, 2012 at Sanford Law School. The Summit will bring together the USPTO, Federal Circuit, District Courts, and the ITC...
EFF Deeplinks
May 11, 12:53 PM PDT
On April 18, the Global Network Initiative (GNI) released its annual report documenting third-party assessments conducted in 2011 and 2012 for GNI’s three founding corporate participants: Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. GNI was formed to bring major Internet companies together...
IP Watch
May 11, 11:23 AM PDT
Washington, DC – Wary eyes are on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which on 12 January opened a first window for applications for new generic top level domains (gTLDs), expected to be made public later this month. Related Articles: WIPO...
EFF Deeplinks
May 11, 9:32 AM PDT
Who’s playing fast and loose with your data? The Big Brother Awards , billed as the “Oscars for data leeches” by the hackers and privacy advocates who hand out the prizes, shine a high-intensity spotlight on companies and individuals with poor privacy track records. Since 1998...
The online world has so expanded the reach of authors and writers, by collapsing the publication and distribution functions into one, that we sometimes forget the challenge that the world of traditional publishing posed for certain groups who were long on literacy but short of funds. One...
Groklaw
May 11, 6:54 AM PDT
I thought you'd like to see the Oracle motion that the Hon. William Alsup denied Wednesday, after a couple of hours of oral argument. I see at least one person tweeting that the judge has ruled that APIs are not copyrightable. He hasn't ruled on that yet. This was something else. You can read...
Masayoshi Son has been at the “Clean Energy Summit” in Korea yesterday. This article at the Korea Herald website gives some background on clean energy in that country. For one, the Korean government has a “green budget” of 2 percent of GDP, with the aim of reducing the use of fossil...
Atsushi Murakami just said in this tweet that average prices for rooftop solar in Germany have dropped again massively to 1460 euro per kW. He is a Japanese journalist based in Freiburg, Germany, and knows a thing or two about renewable energy. Last time I blogged about...
As this Kat reflects a bit at 37,000 feet on her trip home from her very first INTA (while patiently waiting for the drink cart to finally make it to her seat row), she thinks this would be a good time to jot down a few of the things that crossed her mind as she networked her way through ten thousand...
IP Watch
May 10, 1:26 PM PDT
Switzerland has postponed signature of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) until it has more information from several ongoing processes in Europe, the government said yesterday. Related Articles: New “Final” ACTA Text Published, Open For Signature ACTA In...
EFF Deeplinks
May 10, 10:35 AM PDT
Copyright Office to Hear Public Testimony in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles - Experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will testify at public hearings held by the U.S. Copyright Office this month, urging officials to renew and expand the critical...
Copyfight - The Politics of IP
May 10, 9:39 AM PDT
I recently got to hear Neal Stephenson talk at MIT. As usual, he was a pleasure*, and the talk ranged over a wide variety of topics, from why America is in a massive idea deficit to why we should all stand up more and sit down less. What he didn't really discuss, to my disappointment...
IP Watch
May 10, 7:34 AM PDT
In this post, three US law professors explain a recent call by over 30 legal scholars for the US Trade Representative to increase transparency for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement intellectual property chapter, and their response to Ambassador Kirk’s response that he is “strongly...
IP Watch
May 10, 5:48 AM PDT
A World Intellectual Property Organization committee meeting this week to assess the development dimension of WIPO activities heard the progress report of the director general. Developing countries took the opportunity to claim that the mandate of the committee was not completed, in...
Patent Docs
May 9, 8:57 PM PDT
By Kevin E. Noonan -- The Federal Circuit reversed a finding of obviousness in Eurand Inc. v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. (under the caption In re Cyclobenzaprine Hydrochloride Extended-Release Capsule Patent Litigation), taking the occasion to expound...
