-
Recent Posts
- September Changes to Estates Practice: Enduring Powers of Attorney and Representation Agreements
- Patent Assignment: Distinguishing Trolls from Legitimate Assignees, Part 2
- Patent Assignment: Distinguishing Trolls from Legitimate Assignees, Part 1
- Patent Assignment: Trolling the Gap between Potential and Actual Usefulness
- Privacy between Private Parties and the Disclosure of Information
- IP Litigation as a(n Illegal) Business Model
- Music for a Pound, or a Pound of Flesh?
- Lawyers and iPhones (and iPads) Shouldn’t Mix
- RoB Magazine declares victory on the Smartphone Plains of Abraham
- Research in Motion’s Opportunity to Promulgate Freedom
- Bill C-32: The Latest Attempt to Amend the Copyright Act
- Interpreting the NHL and the disallowed Sedin goal
- The Speciation of Web Sites
- Library Manifesto
- Technology (law) is everywhere!
- How to save a drowning business
- Information is the Good, the Currency, and the Era
- Opening the Scope of Employee Contribution
- On Virtual Travel
- Who carries your Web 2.0 banner?
Recent Comments
- Jeremy Costin's weblawg.net Patent Assignment: Distinguishing Trolls from Legitimate Assignees, Part 1 on Patent Assignment: Trolling the Gap between Potential and Actual Usefulness
- Ben Gornall on IP Litigation as a(n Illegal) Business Model
- Nimda Sys on Information is the Good, the Currency, and the Era
- Francina Kocaj on Information is the Good, the Currency, and the Era
- David T Michaels on IP Litigation as a(n Illegal) Business Model
Tags
art blackberry Business C-61 Canadian DMCA Civil Liberties Communications contract copyfight copyleft copyright copyright reform DMCA ethics EULA fair use Info Dynamics Intelligence Information Technology Intellectual Property interration lex mercatoria licensing mercantile law MPAA music nhl nietzsche patent patent troll pop culture positive duty Privacy private copying reverse engineering RIAA shelley shysters be gone social networking software Tazzu user rights Video Games virtual world Virtual Worlds web 2.0
Category Archives: Information Technology
Who carries your Web 2.0 banner?
What’s at stake when you let others step in your online footprint? Goodwill has to do with the perception of your enterprise, and liability has to do with getting into real legal trouble. How are they connected by this Web 2.0 stuff? … Being obnoxious, opinionated, or siding with one side of a contentious debate will not likely create more than a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. Being wrong, when you carry a banner of knowing better, can create a problem. Continue reading
Richard Stallman came to Vancouver, and I upset him
Richard Stallman was in Vancouver two weeks ago. He performed, if I may describe his lectures like that, three times; I caught the first. I asked Stallman a question after it was over, and thoroughly annoyed him. I know that I annoyed him because he grew flustered, stamped his feet, turned away from me to the rest of the crowd and yelled at me. Continue reading
Does WOM or Social Network Marketing Create Agency?
With WOM and social network marketing, we move from getting people to wear branded clothing to transforming them into fans banding together to pontificate, not on the merits of your product, but on the social imperative of being a fan of the brand. … We do have something that looks a lot like agency… Once you let someone use the stuff you’re supposed to be protecting, and you let them use it to an extent that gives them a fair bit of potential power because of the near-instantaneous and viral nature of the networks used, you’re actually handing over some pretty hefty reins. Continue reading
What would you call open-source marketing?
Instead of tightening your grip on intellectual property (mostly trade-mark with a healthy dose of copyright and some neighbouring rights) and then hoping for royalties, the group doing the marketing attempts to engineer a type of personality cult for the brand. … What I’m talking about is tying differences (real or created) to cultural phenomena, and then grabbing hold of those phenomena and driving from that end; the product becomes a tag-along to those cultural memes. Continue reading
EU suggests reason and logic behind ACTA
According to the EU, ACTA will ignore “infringing goods [that] are not part of large scale traffic.” ACTA will also not force already taxed enforcement officers “to look for a couple of pirated songs on an i-Pod music player…” Continue reading
Posted in Civil Liberties, Information Technology, Intellectual Property
Tagged ACTA, Civil Liberties, copyfight, copyright, MPAA, RIAA
Leave a comment
New ways of looking at video game IP
This is where we tread the line between copyright and patent – between creative work and invention – that has plagued software intellectual property protection for a very long time. The game bears enough in common with its paper-and-dice ancestors to merit some form of patent consideration; yet the invention here is in fact a platform for storytelling – a tool to inspire and facilitate the creation of content by its users. Continue reading
Software IP and Games – which model applies?
At the moment, video games, because they are software, are covered by copyright. But traditionally, games were covered by patent. Hmm. I’ve argued before that software should be sui generis, governed by a hybrid model of patent and copyright: The … Continue reading
Alternatives to C-61, part II
Here’s the rest of that post: GOALS The goal of any legislation is to balance concerns of interested but competing parties, and to approach this balance, as much as possible, with a public interest bias. The concerns were these:
