Due Process: The Georgetown Law Library Blog - Intellectual Property

USPTO Issues the Sixth Edition of the Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:10:00 -0500

On October 12, 2009 the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued the sixth edition of the Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure (TMEP). The TMEP, provides USPTO trademark examining attorneys, trademark applicants, and trademark attorneys with detailed information about the practices and procedures for prosecution of applications to register marks in the USPTO.

The sixth edition incorporates USPTO trademark practice and relevant case law reported prior to September 1, 2009. The policies states that this revision supersede any previous policies stated in prior editions, examination guides, or any other statement of USPTO policy, to the extent that there is any conflict.

The TMEP may be viewed or downloaded free of charge from the USPTO Web site at: http://tess2.uspto.gov/tmdb/tmep/.

California Lawyers challenge Westlaw's and Lexis's posting of their briefs

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:50:00 -0500

A group of lawyers in California are challenging the California Supreme Court's practice of giving briefs to Westlaw and Lexis for uploading. Lexis and Westlaw charge fees for their users to search and use the briefs, and the lawyers who write them receive no payment. This is a copyright violation, according to the California lawyers. For more information, see Legal Research Plus Blog.

MIT adopts a campus-wide open access policy

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 14:17:00 -0500

On Friday, MIT announced that its faculty has unanimously voted to make their scholarship available for free to the public. Authors will give MIT nonexclusive permission to make their articles available through DSpace@MIT, an open access platform developed by MIT Libraries and HP. Under the policy, MIT and its faculty authors may use their articles in any way other than to make a profit. They may also authorize others to use the works under the same terms. Authors may opt out of the policy on a paper-by-paper basis.

Read more about the policy:

MIT Press Release.

Blog entry from Open Access News, reprinting the resolution.

"Beyond Competition: Preparing for a Google Book Search Monopoly"...

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 12:18:56 -0500

...is the title of a posting yesterday (2/4/09) by Frank Pasquale at the Balkanization blog. It reviews the excellent piece by Harvard's Robert Darnton in the Feb. 12, 2009 New York Review of Books, "Google & the Future of Books" (accessible as e-journal for us Georgetown affiliates). Darnton's essay echoes much of what John Palfrey had to say about the settlement at the AALS in San Diego when he spoke at the Law Library section lunch. Pasquale addresses briefly some of the possible challenges to the settlement, but all three professors- Darnton, Palfrey, and Pasquale- are worried about the possiblity of changing times or the end of good will on the part of Google, and in principle, the privatization of a project that cries out to be for the public good, with equality of access to the information in perpetuity.

Google Books Lawsuit Settles

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:27:00 -0500

According to Google, a settlement has been reached in the class action lawsuit filed against Google Book Search by a series of authors and publishers, including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. For more information, click here to access Google's announcement, including information on how Google Book Search will change based on the settlement agreement. The agreement must still be approved and finalized by the Court.

You can read more about the lawsuit and the settlement in the Guardian's article "Google Settles Dispute Over Online Books" and in the Chronicle of Higher Education's article in their Wired Campus section.

New report about P2P compliance on college campuses

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:30:00 -0500

A recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article announced that the Campus Computing Project has issued a new report entitled, “The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance, ' which finds that colleges are spending money to keep students from downloading pirated music and movies, but generally are not paying for legal alternatives to peer-to-peer piracy.

On its website, The Campus Computing Project states that the paper reports the results of a summer 2008 survey designed to address the campus costs of compliance with the new P2P filesharing mandates in reauthorized Higher Education Act (HEA) that was signed into law on August 14, 2008. The report is based data from 321 colleges and universities and focuses on P2P compliance costs as reflected in expenditures (e.g., content and software licenses) and also the time that campus personnel spend on P2P filesharing issues.

This year the report finds that just 3 of 321 institutions have licenses with file sharing services, while a 2005 Educause survey found that dozens of campuses had agreements with services like Napster, Cdigix, and Ruckus. The Chronicle article discusses how the market has changed for legal downloading services.

Celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day and Promote Fair Use

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:06:00 -0500

Avast! September 19, 2008 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day around the world. Okay, it might not be a real holiday, but it's a great chance to have fun and talk like a pirate with friends and colleagues at work. To prepare for the day, consider learning How to Talk Like a Pirate, or look through a collection of more than 800 pirate-related jokes. This day is a light-hearted chance to celebrate all things related to sea-faring pirates and the images they portray from Treasure Island through the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

One thing this day isn't about is copyright piracy. Just because you might like to talk like a pirate, this doesn't mean you support pirating other's intellectual property. So today, if you chose to talk like a pirate, also consider thinking about fair use. Following is an image to promote the idea.

If you want to learn more about intellectual property in general, we have a page listing major treatises on the topic, as well as a list of intellectual property resources we provide for the Georgetown Law community. For more information specifically about Fair Use under United States Law, read the primary statute on the topic: 17 U.S.C. § 107. Then go on to check out Stanford's Fair Use Center the AALL Copyright Committee's page on the topic, or a list of fair use resources from the University of California.

For an advanced topic, check out a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, or read Bound by Law?, a great comic book examining the fine line between fair use and copyright infringement. So talk like a pirate, me hearties. Just don't assume liking fair use means you engage in piracy.

Pilot Program for Law Students to Practice Before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:25:00 -0500

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

More Digital Doings at Harvard

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:57:00 -0500

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.

Harvard A & S Faculty Voting on Open Access Scholarly Publishing

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:52:00 -0500

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."

Copyright Royalty Board Issues Notices of Proceeding, Comments, and Settlement

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:38:40 -0500

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.

Specter Introduces Bill to Allow Super Bowl Viewing in Churches

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:11:23 -0500

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.

Supreme Court Declines Orphan Works Case

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:42:09 -0500

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]

Copyright issues for course reserve

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 06:09:00 -0500

Faculty members are posting class resources online, and they may be violating copyright in the process. William Shell, associate director of academic technology and computing services at Eastern Michigan University, asks: How can a university make faculty members aware of copyright law?

Listen to the short audio program online: Tech Therapy: Setting Professors Right on Rights

-From the Chronicle of Higher Education (KPJ)