Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University October 12, 2011 In Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google, Inc.,1. the Internet search engine giant Google managed to score a victory against a company known as “Perfect 10,” a company that created and copyrighted photographic images of nude models for commercial distribution. Perfect 10 originally featured the nude photos [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School October 3, 2011 Over the last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has decided three interesting cases at the intersection of copyright, contract, and the first-sale doctrine. Last September, in Vernor v. Autodesk, the court found that the underlying software transaction [...]
Prof. Justin Hughes, Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University September 22, 2011 Patents, copyrights OR trademarks – that’s easy. Patents, copyrights, AND trademarks – that’s more difficult. Vexing issues often arise when a party claims that the same thing or same interest is protected by more than one form of intellectual property. Our general rule [...]
Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law September 15, 2011 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been around for more than a dozen years now. Some of its provisions were just weird, such as the one that established sui generis protection for boat hull designs. Others have had a skeptical reception in the [...]
Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law* August 29, 2011 My previous column, “Internet Publication and U.S. Copyright Imperialism,” criticized a recent decision of a federal district court in Florida in Kernal Records OY v. Moseley, 2011 Dist. LEXIS 60666 (S.D. Fla. June 7, 2011), for ruling that a Norwegian composer’s work “published” [...]
Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law August 22, 2011 Google’s Android operating system is under siege. Oracle has a substantial patent and copyright case underway in which it alleges that Android is illegally derivative of the Sun programming language, Java. Apple has literally dozens of patent cases underway, alleging that Samsung, HTC, and Motorola [...]
Prof. Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University August 16, 2011 It is one thing to make news, and yet another to break it. The distinction between making and breaking news recently proved critical in a fascinating intellectual property case involving the rights of Internet news aggregators to scoop the stock trade recommendations of large financial [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, The University of Chicago Law School August 8, 2011 L. Frank Baum set out to create “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.” So said Baum writing in Chicago, in April 1900, in the introduction to his book [...]
Prof. Peter S. Menell, Director Berkeley Center for Law & Technology University of California at Berkeley School of Law July 26, 2011 In the 1989 sports drama, “Field of Dreams,” struggling Iowa corn farmer Ray Kinsella hears a whisper: “If you build it, he will come.” Rebelling against his father’s lack of spontaneity and following [...]
Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law July 12, 2011 The recent agreement between big media companies and big Internet service providers (ISPs) concerning online copyright infringement has the law and technology world abuzz. ISPs like Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable have agreed to implement a system under which subscribers who repeatedly [...]