Copyright Protection and Fonts
A friend of mine is working on a children’s book and wanted to use some highly stylized fonts for the story. She asked me if she had to worry about copyright protection and fonts she might use, but I couldn’t…
Patent Dashboard Displays a Clear, but Sad, View of Patent Pendency
The Patent Office has taken a number of steps in the last year or so toward transparency, approachability, and clarity. It recently released the Patent Dashboard, or “Data Visualization Center.” The Dashboard is a simple display of the average time…
Copyright Infringement on the Web – DMCA Takedown Notices
Congress created a procedure that content owners can use to ask websites to remove content protected by their copyright. The mechanism creates an incentive for webhosts, internet services providers, and search engines to remove (or at least investigate removing) material…
What is an effective filing date?
What is an effective filing date? If you”ve done some reading about patents, you may have seen references to an “effective filing date.” For instance, while patent attorneys will often shorthand an explanation of patents by saying they offer protection…
TED Talk: Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion’s free culture
In this video, Johanna Blakley provides a good overview of the interaction between copyright and fashion. There are some slight inaccuracies in what she presents, but overall it is an excellent talk. And her remarks in the last few minutes…
Can a slogan be a trademark?
A trademark can be many things: a word, a symbol, a logo, a name, and even a slogan. A trademark can really be anything that signifies the source of the product or service and that also distinguishes it from others. …
A Lesson in Copyrights and Licensing from The Verve
Do you remember the song Bittersweet Symphony? It was a huge hit around the world in 1997, used in movies, TV shows, and commercials. It has been sampled many times for re-use in other songs. The hit was written and performed…
Is Web Scraping Legal?
I had a friend get in touch with me a while back about the legalities of web scraping. He found, and I’m finding too, a tremendous lack of information about web scraping. I think this is a result of there being so many strange ramifications depending on the many variables in the facts of each situation. I got interested in the legal issues involved in web scraping, and so I put together a hypothetical to test some of them out.
How to Patent an Idea
Sorry, you can’t. You can’t patent just “an idea.” It isn’t allowed by the law. Patents are granted only for things, processes, machines, manufactured articles, inventions. Abstract ideas and theories, alone, cannot be patented. Recent Supreme Court law just…
Job-Creating Patents
In an Op-Ed piece at the New York Times I came across via Patently-O, Paul Michel and Henry Nothhaft argue for the infusion of $1 billion into the Patent Office. What I noticed most in this article was their citation that…