/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2013-05-01T13:50:29-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/05/01/eff_challenges_bad_patent_filings_but_theres_a_bigger_issue.php Boingboing pointed to the EFF's Julie Samuels posting about their ongoing efforts to stop half a dozen bad 3D printing patent applications from being granted. This is great, but it's like putting a band-aid on an arterial wound. If, as the column notes, the EFF found relevant prior art that wasn't previously found that means two upstream failures have already occurred. First, the patent office (examiner) should be finding this prior art. Why that's not happening is complex, but a first approximation would be that the examiner isn't well enough trained, doesn't have enough time to examine each application thoroughly,... 76383@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2013-05-01T13:50:29-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/04/09/wheres_my_jaws_theme_music.php Joe Mullin at ars has a fantastic piece up this week on MPHJ Technologies and the swarm-cloud of shell entites and legal firms that surround them. These guys appear to be everything that is wrong with NPEs - patent trolls - and they appear to be among the most pervasive and organized such shiver I've ever seen. They're sufficiently bad that they got mentioned in Congress. Unfortunately, bad as they are, they appear to be at least surface-level legitimate, though Mullin has some fascinating background about just exactly who these guys are that have been hired to carry out the... 76334@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2013-04-09T11:20:15-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/02/06/games_workshop_manages_to_make_a_whole_passel_of_new_enemies.php This is all over my blogroll today: Games Workshop is coming down absurdly, wrongly, overreachingly hard on a small author over its fantasy of having a trademark on the phrase "Space Marines" that prevents others from using that phrase. The most direct victim at this time is author M.C.A. Hogarth. Hogarth reports on a disheartening, but all-too-familiar, situation in which the big company pulls out the big lawyer guns and picks on the small (mostly self-published) individual who doesn't have the money to fight protracted legal struggles. One of the people who has responded is John Scalzi whose blog entry... 76194@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2013-02-06T13:35:46-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/01/30/android_app_developers_being_targeted_by_patent_troll.php In a case with remarkable parallels to the recently settled "shopping cart" patent case a friend in the game-development world pointed me to a campaign being waged against app developers by an NPE called Uniloc. See for example this page by the developer of the app called "X-Plane", a flight simulator. So far there hasn't been a lot of reporting on this - the Wikipedia page on Uniloc is actually a good summary as of this writing. The basic issue is that if you want to make an Android-licensed app then there are certain procedures Google advises you to follow... 76175@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2013-01-30T11:56:12-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2013/01/02/why_people_hate_patent_trolls.php Joe Mullin in today's ars technica has an appropriately illustrated example of some of the worst misbehaviors of patent trolls. (I won't even try to copy that picture - go see it for yourselves.) The specific case he discusses involves a shell entity that had its law firm send around "pay up or else" letters accusing IT service providers of violating patents by doing normal business things - in this case scanning a document and mailing a PDF. The troll claimed to have a patent on this process, a ludicrous claim in the first place, and then wanted to enforce... 76106@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2013-01-02T14:31:14-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/12/21/apple_v_samsung_surprises_and_less_at_issue.php I don't know what to make of this pair of news items this week in the infamous USD 1 billion case. First, Judge Koh denied Samsung's request for a new trial. That's surprising to me since I was under the impression that lying during voir dire was pretty typical grounds for a new trial. Judge Koh appears to have reasoned that Samsung's lawyers were informed about the juror's potential conflicts and it was their own fault for not doing enough homework. I have no idea if that decision can be appealed. What can (and will) be appealed is the second... 76096@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-12-21T15:51:08-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/12/10/sega_using_copyright_claims_to_restrict_fan_discussion.php Someone representing Sega Japan has been going hog-wild with DMCA claims against fans on YouTube. If you aren't familiar with gaming and YouTube, let me give you a bit of background. People who game love to make videos. They make response videos, they make trash-talk videos, they make commentaries. There are also millions of helpful videos - everything from "see this cool mod for this game" to "here's a walkthrough of that tricky bit in Act 2." One of the best ways to judge the vibrancy of a game is to search for it on YouTube. A game with a... 76060@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-12-10T10:30:55-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/10/26/who_needs_threestrikes_laws_when_you_have_overenthusiastic_isps.php It's generally hard these days to be a Safe Harbor defender. The key provision of the DMCA that permits high-volume sites to operate more or less freely - without pre-approval - requires that they also be willing to respond to take-down notices. And this is where the trouble begins: takedown notices get seriously abused; people file takedown notices for material they don't even own the rights to. The DMCA provides no sanction or penalties that might curtail this abuse; someone can spam DMCA notices like they would spam Viagra ads and nobody is likely to stop them. Still, I find... 75967@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-10-26T13:12:24-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/10/08/how_companies_get_to_censor_the_internet.php Following up on the previous post about official (government) censorship, Boingboing pointed me to a TorrentFreak story on the mass-mailing of DMCA takedown notices. As I noted, you don't have a free speech right when facing private entities, but likewise private entities ought not to be able to block large chunks of public speech they don't like. In this case the villain is Microsoft, but you can find hundreds of similar instancse going back to the earliest days of the DMCA, and the story is always the same: $player sends thousands of takedown notices for material in which it claims... 75918@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-10-08T11:23:21-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/08/07/when_its_201_against_what_do_you_do.php Well, if you're the MPAA, lie. Cheat. Astroturf. In the matter of the wholly bogus extradition of Richard O'Dwyer for not breaking any laws, the MPAA has found itself facing the hostility of 95% of the population. Therefore, lie. TorrentFreak reports on leaked MPAA internal memos that highlight the problems the Cartel is having with trying to buffalo the UK's law enforcement into joining its private army, where the US DOJ is already captive - namely, people think it's not right. In fact, so many sane people, even in the media, think it's not right that the MPAA can't get... 75796@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-08-07T10:08:44-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/06/25/stop_the_extradition_of_richard_odwyer.php Not quite a six-year-old story, but about six months ago I noted that copyright cases in the UK seemed to have gone off the rails, including the pending extradition of Richard O'Dwyer to the US for doing something that was legal in the UK. In specific, O'Dwyer ran a site that linked to online television programs. You know, the kinds of things you can find via a Google, Yahoo, or Bing search. But nevermind that, his site (which was never on US soil either) apparently violates the law in some way that those search engines don't. Mostly by being run... 75719@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-06-25T09:37:56-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/02/28/notice_the_system_not_working.php Today's blogroll brought me two stories of situations where takedowns aren't working. In one case an actual DMCA takedown notice was abused; in the other, someone failed to make a Reality Check and really needs to get a notice. First up, John Scalzi put up a "Whatever" blod entry expanding on a story from Metafilter about Cudo. Cudo is an Australian bargain seller, which is offering an AUD 99 package for an e-reader complete with a CD-ROM full of books to load onto it. Great, except they probably don't own the rights to distribute those e-books. We're not talking about... 75485@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-02-28T11:30:20-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/26/uspto_and_prior_art.php Tim O'Reilly pointed to this PDF from the US Patent and Trademark Office regarding Fair Use. It seems that various scientific and technical publishers are raising objections to the USPTO using their publications for prior-art searching. The PDF lays out the Office's position and policies around fair use. It's actually somewhat complicated but the document does a good job of describing things: In some cases, the Office has subscriptions and other forms of paid access. In others it's making use of public sources, or submissions by applicants. In some cases, the Office is providing copies of this material to applicants... 75406@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2012-01-26T10:13:41-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/08/why_is_anyone_even_vaguely_surprised_by_this_shit_anymore.php News flash: the government is incompetent. It is manipulated by ignorant selfish thugs from the RIAA into using extra-legal proceedings to shut down speech (blogs, in this case) that the Cartel doesn't like. I mean, seriously, we're in roughly the 12th or so year of the Copyright Wars and this is not even vaguely news. I should go back in the Copyfight archives and dig up my old postings like the first time the RIAA used the cops (L.A. at that time) or the first time I noted that the Cartel had taken over DOJ more or less wholesale. But... 75318@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2011-12-08T13:42:53-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/07/14/monkeying_with_copyright.php Having discovered how the porn industry is like the Cartel, we now visit the equally vital question of why a news organization would claim copyright in images taken by monkeys. No, I'm not making this up. I can't make up stuff this good. The real participants in this affair are the blog Techdirt, the award-winning nature photographer David Slater, and Caters News which claims to be the authorized syndicator for Mr. Slater's photographic work. However, the work in question here is a set of pictures that were taken by monkeys, who happened upon a camera that Slater had accidentally left... 75087@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ IP Abuse 2011-07-14T14:03:19-05:00