The EFF has released the wonderful resource “Legal Guide for Bloggers.” It successfully strikes a delicate balance between being comprehensive, accurate and accessible to lay readers. If you’re wondering about the law of blogging, this guide will most likely answer…
If you’re a cybersquatter, one of the dumbest things you can do is issue a press release describing how you plan to make a lot of money on 23,000 different domain names that are variations of famous trademarks. Apparently subscribing…
By John Ottaviani Now for something NOT related to Grokster. Earlier this month, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen released an article discussing their plans to update the GNU General Public License (“GPL”). Version 2 of the GPL was released in…
The Copyright Office has announced that it will have public roundtables to discuss orphan works in DC July 26-27 and Berkeley August 2. This is interesting because, after receiving almost 900 submissions regarding orphan works already, I would have thought…
The Grokster media frenzy has reached a fever pitch. Not only is the war of words taking over the mainstream press, but we’re seeing a bubble of activity in the press release databases. A couple of examples. Orrick’s Press Release…
I’m catching up on back reading, and I came across this December 2004 Wired News article by Michelle Delio called “Spyware on My Machine? So What?” [see update below about questions about the article] Anti-spyware advocates are wedded to the…
Alaska’s legislature has passed SB 140 (to be codified at Sec. 45.45.792, 45.45.794 and 45.45.798), which is awaiting the governor’s signature. This statute contains some anti-Internet porn provisions (probably unconstitutional under the First Amendment and Dormant Commerce Clause), but I’m…
I spoke yesterday about the initial interest confusion doctrine at the Intellectual Property Law Association of Chicago. My slides. I also updated my summarized list of initial interest confusion cases.
The Grokster Watch continues–no opinion today. This releases the anxiety for today, but the anxiety hardly has gone away. My prediction on Grokster (if you came from the NY Times, this link leads to the referenced post). NY Times article…
Last week I applauded the FTC for arguing against the mandatory labeling of commerical emails. In that post, I argued that the labels would increase the rate of erroneous judgments by recipients, because the recipients would mistakenly believe that the…