An author is petitioning the Supreme Court for the second time, arguing that Texas A&M should be liable for copyright infringement after copying an important page from his book. The case raises questions that the Court has touched upon before:…
I have been in Boston the past week, and while visiting Faneuil Hall, my family noticed a storefront sign that felt familiar, shown at right. Faneuil Hall is a nearly three-hundred-year-old building that a rich merchant, Peter Faneuil, had built…
Copyright law protects a work from the time it is created in a fixed form. From the moment it is set in a print or electronic manuscript, a sound recording, a computer software program, or other such concrete medium, the…
Below I review some basic information about copyright and the creation and ownership of copyright protection. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to…
What are the issues presented by the most recent editions of Triathlete and Lava magazines? Are there any? If so, could they have been avoided? For the record, Lava issued a week or two after Triathlete.
I was recently listening to an interview of Morgan Spurlock, who is coming out with a new film called The Greatest Film Movie Ever Sold or, really, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, which explores the world of…
Did you love The Hangover and are you desperately waiting for The Hangover: Part II to come out in a few weeks? Well, a tattoo artist is trying to stymie your anticipation by preventing its release! In The Hangover: Part…
Professor Andrew Beckerman-Rodau has recently written in the Yale Journal of Law & Technology that intellectual property protection has expanded beyond its intended, or appropriate, scope. This has resulted in the lines between subject matter (and their corresponding intellectual property)…
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday released an opinion in a World-of-Warcraft case that has meaning both for the nature of software ownership and for a circuit battle ripe for review by the Supreme Court. The case is detailed…
Some law firms provide copyright searches to find out if an image or work might infringe someone’s copyright. Trademark searches are performed to see if a potential mark is likely to be registered or face obstacles during prosecution. Patent searches…