Intellectual property
The internet as a commons
Since the beginning of the “information revolution” there has built up a tension between the rights of the owners of information and other intellectual property and the practical ability and desire of others to exploit that property using the developing technologies. This tension heightened considerably with the popularisation of the internet and the web as […]
Internet law (copyright in particular)
Reblogged from Legal Web Watch April 2014. April 26 was World IP Day. I didn’t notice too many people getting excited by this. But one who did was Graham Smith. Graham is a partner at Bird and Bird and the leading expert in internet law, central to which is IP law and, in particular, copyright […]
Crown Commons
With the launch of the data.gov.uk beta website – providing access to over 2,500 central government datasets – comes a new licensing model for government information which it is intended will be launched government-wide by the end of May 2010 to replace the existing “Click-Use” licence. The new licence is interoperable with the Creative Commons […]
Free Culture – the extended Remix
Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy (published in the UK by Bloomsbury Academic) is the latest in Lawrence Lessig‘s series on regulation of cyberspace. Lessig is undeniably the leading thinker on copyright in the digital age and, though many label him a radical, his arguments derive from those of earlier leading […]
Moral panics
Last night in London the SCL welcomed William Patry – inter alia long-time author of 6,000 pages of Patry on Copyright, past Copyright Counsel to the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and currently Copyright Counsel to Google inc – to deliver its the annual lecture, “Crafting an effective Copyright Law”. His central thesis […]
Pirates, criminals or would-be honest consumers?
The SCL has published 11 articles arising from its forum entitled ‘Legislating for Web 2.0 – Preparing for the Communications Act?’. I was rather taken with Andrew Adams and Ian Brown’s presentation on the futility of seeking technological solutions to enforcing copyright, entitled Keep Looking: The Answer to the Machine is Elsewhere, from which: On […]
drm, drm, drm drm drm drm drmmmmm
Hey, who said markets don’t work? Ironically, the music companies are now abandoning DRM because it worked too well. Apple wouldn’t license its version to rivals – so the best-selling iPod drove the iTunes store to its present position, where it is the third-largest music retailer in any form in the US. Rosenblatt says that […]
Corruption 2.0
Corruption 2.0: The Next Problem Technology Must Solve was the title of Larry Lessig’s SCL 2008 Lecture last night. But, not to disappoint the largely IT/IP law-interested audience, in the event it was a distillation of his arguments about regulation and specifically copyright regulation in Code, The Future of Ideas and Free Culture with Corruption […]
IPITevents
Jordan Hatcher has set up IPITevents to “fill a problem” – how to easily keep track of upcoming intellectual property and information technology conferences, events, and CPDs in the UK. As a busy academic lawyer, I found that while there were a few UK blogs and sites that regularly posted interesting events, I either had […]
DIG it
Further to my last post, here’s a Proposed Compromise in respect of Digital Rights vs. Copyright Enforcement based on “a little education, a little guilt, and a little fear”. The proposer, K Krasnow Waterman, is an independent consultant, advising or providing interim leadership to corporations, government, start-ups and a project building new web technologies at […]
The Future of Ideas
A little bit of a stir erupts as Lawrence Lessig persuades Random House to release his (2001) The Future of Ideas, in which he explores “the fate of the commons in a connected world”, under a Creative Commons licence. But don’t get too excited just yet. It’s currently available only as a single, dumb, 350-page […]
An optimal copyright term
Victor Keegan in How long should copyright last? covers the arguments for a shorter copyright term in the digital age. To exemplfy the absurdity of a strict application of copyrights, he points to Nate Andersen who reports that John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, totted up all the infringements he might […]
IP law wiki off the starting blocks
Jeremy Phillips has posted on the IPKat about the exciting proposed development of an IP Law Wiki which has already gained some traction with the proposal for funding a feasibility study already under way. Most interesting for me is the comment that: if – as seems likely – [the feasibility study is successful], it will […]
Long tails, short change
John Lanchester in the Guardian writes a lengthy article on the copyright issues surrounding books in the digital age. He concludes with an interesting proposal: let copyright endure for only a reasonably short period but guarantee the creator a percentage from further sales for a lengthier period – a lesser “royalty right”. Makes sense to […]
Lawyers are necessary shock
Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe for pointing us to the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision that Martindale-Hubbell’s lawyers.com domain name is not sufficiently distinctive to qualify as a trade mark, saying: For better or worse, lawyers are necessarily an integral part of the information exchange about legal services. See TTABlog for details.
