The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will begin a pilot Law School Clinical Certification Program. This program will allow law students to practice Intellectual Property Law before the agency under the strict guidance of a Law School Clinical Faculty Supervisor. The pilot will consist of both a patent program and a trademark program.

Read more about it on the PTO's Press Release

As a follow-up to the earlier post of February 12, 2008, the outcome of the Harvard A & S faculty vote on posting scholarly articles appears on the university's web page, to wit:

"In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted Tuesday (Feb. 12) to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. "

And you might want to scoot virtually over to Harvard Law, where they are posting a digitization project called "Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides Collected by the Harvard Law School Library." In those days, open access meant ...to executions, from the looks of it. Creepy.

The New York Times is reporting that the arts and sciences faculty at Harvard will vote today on an open access repository as a principal means of publishing their scholarly output, . "Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them. What distinguishes this plan from current practice, said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science who is sponsoring the faculty motion, is that it would create an opt-out system: an article would be included unless the author specifically requested it not be. Mr. Shieber was the chairman of a committee set up by Harvard's provost to investigate scholarly publishing; this proposal grew out of one of the recommendations, he said."

In three notices published Jan. 30 in the Federal Register, the Copyright Royalty Board announced the initiation of a proceeding on cable royalty distribution, requested comments related to satellite royalties, and announced a settlement regarding 2005 cable royalties (73 Fed. Reg, 5,596, 1/30/08; 73 Fed. Reg. 5,597, 1/30/08; and 73 Fed. Reg. 5,597, 1/30/08).

Quoting from BNA's Patent, Trademark & Copyright Law Daily - available through the Library's online databases.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) Feb. 4 introduced a bill (S. 2591) that would allow churches to show professional football game broadcasts such as the Super Bowl to their parishioners without infringing the National Football League's copyrights. The broadcasts would be permitted so long as the church does not charge a fee, and the broadcast is live.

Quoting from BNA's Patent, Trademark & Copyright Law Daily - available through the Library's online databases.

If libraries are to get relief regarding the orphan works on their shelves, it looks like it won't come from the courts. This week the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of Kahle v. Ashcroft, brought by Internet Archive and Open Content Alliance founders Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger in 2003, which challenged the constitutionality of the current copyright regime. Although not unexpected, the Supreme Court's refusal comes after a recent ruling by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals raised hopes of a review, and lets stand the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' rejection, effectively ending the case.

The Kahle suit was launched in the wake of the unsuccessful 2003 Eldred v. Ashcroft case, which challenged Congess' extension of copyright terms. In that ruling, the Supreme Court held that changes by Congress to the "traditional contours" of copyright law warranted a First Amendment review. Kahle v. Ashcroft contended that Congress's sweeping changes to copyright law in 1976 were enough of a change in the "contours of copyright" to require review.

Until 1976, copyright law required creators to register their works. Changes to the law, however, removed the necessity to register works and extended the basic copyright term from 28 years to "life plus 70 years." The combination of those changes has thrown many works without clear copyright owners into legal limbo, creating the so-called orphan works problem.

The Tenth Circuit, in Fall, 2007, bolstered hopes of a Supreme Court review for Kahle, with its ruling in Golan v. Gonzales, which held that a provision of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) that "restored" copyrights to some works already in the public domain was enough of a change to copyright traditions as to require review. In that ruling, Kahle's lawyers hoped the Supreme Court would see a legal point of reference and would agree that changing copyright from an opt-in system with a short protection period to an opt-out system with a lengthy protection period was also significant enough to warrant review. [source: LJ's Academic Newswire, Jan. 10, 2008]