Future Imperfect

Urban FactoryA couple of weeks ago Amazon remotely deleted two e-books off of its customers’ Kindle readers—and in one of those too-good-to-be-true moments, the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. Ars Technica and the New York Times explain what happened; the Times ran a follow-up story today. Commentary on the incident has ranged from the fervid to the apocalyptic. (An exception is Chicago’s Randy Picker.)  Jack Balkin argues that “Amazon threatens many of the basic freedoms to read we have come to expect in a physical world;” Jonathan Zittrain worries that “tethered appliances” like the Kindle “are gifts to regulators,” who will exercise a “line-item veto” over passages in books they don’t like; Farhad Manjoo at Slate concludes that “Now we know what the future of book banning looks like.”

What I find intriguing about these responses is that they are all based on analogizing Kindle e-books to physical books located in your house. 

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IP Colloquium Tackles Fairey v. AP

Intellectual Property Colloquium Doug Lichtman at UCLA is producing a fantastic series of monthly podcasts on IP issues, called the Intellectual Property Colloquium. This month’s episode is on fair use in the Shepard Fairey case, and features a terrific line-up of guests: Mark Lemley, attorney for Fairey; Dale Cendali, attorney for AP; and Ken Richieri, General Counsel at the New York Times, who adds the view of someone on both sides of the issue. Doug asks some pretty good questions, particularly about the notoriously circular fourth fair use factor (the effect on the potential market). It’s worth a listen, and you can also use it for CLE credit in six states, “and any state that accepts any of those through reciprocity,” which I believe includes Wisconsin (do not rely on me for this).

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Say, You’re a Copyright Lawyer–Can I Get a Patent on That Name?

Reading the New York Times this morning, I was intrigued by this entry in the table of contents:

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Copyrights in India? Cool! But hang on a second—what’s that about “brands”?

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Ah, I see, it’s another journalist confused about the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks. (The title of this post is the punchline of a joke told by Paul Goldstein about this problem.) It matters, to me at least, because copyright has enough of a public image problem without getting blamed for patent and trademark controversies as well.

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