Prof. Randal C. Picker, University of Chicago Law School February 19, 2013 The recent tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz has again emphasized the complexities of copyright’s public domain. The Swartz case is complex and his prosecution by the U.S. federal government for an alleged violation of federal computer law is controversial, but I want to [...]
Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law February 7, 2013 Copyright lawyers well know that the First Amendment cannot be read too literally. Yes, the First Amendment tells us that Congress shall “make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.” But, as copyright lawyers also well know, copyright law is itself a law, made [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University January 29, 2013 In Effie Film, LLC v. Pomerance,1 the court grappled with a fascinating intellectual property conflict involving the peculiar free expression values that are implicated when copyright interests intersect with historic facts in the context of history fiction. Eve Pomerance owned a copyright in two screenplays about [...]
Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law January 8, 2013 In my last entry in this series, I examined three important patent law cases from 2012 – one at the Supreme Court level, one at the appellate level, and one at the trial court level. I’ll now do the same thing with regard [...]
Prof. James Gibson, University of Richmond School of Law January 3, 2013 New Year’s Day prompts us to reflect on what the last 12 months have brought, so I’ve taken the opportunity to think back on 2012’s intellectual property developments. It’s been a busy year, with patent reform, new technologies, multilateral treaties, and more. To [...]
Prof. Randal C. Picker, University of Chicago Law School December 19, 2012 Media comes in all forms these days and so does government regulation of it, as a recent Federal Trade Commission report, “Mobile Apps for Kids: Disclosures Still Not Making the Grade,” makes clear. The FTC has been on a privacy tear this year [...]
Filed a friend-of-the-court brief, joining with The Thomas Jefferson Center, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, arguing that a Virginia regulation forbidding college newspapers from running ads for alcoholic beverages is unconstitutional. The brief argues that the lower court should have applied strict scrutiny, rather than the less-stringent commercial speech [...]
Prof. Doug Lichtman, UCLA School of Law November 27, 2012 In recent years, courts have struggled with the question of exactly what types of inventions should be eligible for patent protection. On the one hand, judges consider it inappropriate to allow any single patent holder to control something so broad as a fundamental law of [...]
Rodney A. Smolla, President, Furman University November 21, 2012 Courts have generally refused to superimpose on copyright law any additional free-standing layer of immunity emanating from the First Amendment for what would otherwise be considered copyright infringement. The reasoning has been that the substantive law of copyright already has doctrinal protections built in that provide [...]
Prof. Jane C. Ginsburg, Columbia University School of Law October 29, 2012 The 1996 WIPO Treaties oblige Member States to protect authors’ and performers’ rights of “communication to the public,” “including the making available to the public of their works in such a way that members of the public may access these works from a [...]