Market Opportunity: Unforwardable Emails

I’ve seen a number of news items over the past few years in which internal firm or law school emails get leaked to online legal gossip sites, to the embarrassment of the originating institution. In my view, the frequency with which this occurs indicates a world in transition. Once, there were no online gossip sites worth worrying about, and firm memoranda about salaries, scandals, employment issues, or stolen lunches from the office refrigerator rarely made it past the walls of the institution. Now, there are such sites, and salacious and even mundane internal correspondence regularly leaks to them. This strikes me as a situation that can’t persist in its current form much longer. Either practices will change (i.e., no more emails about firm policies) or some sort of restrictions will be put in place. (A third option, that expectations of confidentiality concerning such matters will evaporate, strikes me as unlikely.)

The latest item to set off this thought in my head was this news item from the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog (essentially a slightly more tony version of Above the Law). As I tell my Internet Law students, there are various ways of controlling a behavior such as forwarding emails. Law is one way, but not a likely one in this case. Informal social norms are another (“Give a hoot! Don’t redistribute!”). That seems unlikely here, too. But a third is some sort of technological solution. And here, I would think a technological solution is at least conceivable: an office network that offers, as an option, blocking redistribution of the content of certain emails.

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The Indian Scrabulous Decision

Thanks to reader Apar Gupta, I have the text of the decision by the High Court of Delhi in Mattel, Inc. v. Agarwalla, a copyright and trademark action by Mattel against the Agarwalla brothers, the makers of Scrabulous. I posted a brief news item about the case earlier, and posted a four-part series on the American lawsuit against Scrabulous over on Prawfsblawg in August. (See Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.)

As the Agarwalla brothers reported a few weeks ago, the Indian decision held that Scrabulous did not likely infringe on Scrabble’s copyrights, but that the name “Scrabulous” does likely infringe on Scrabble’s trademarks. The court therefore issued an “ad interim injunction,” which I assume is the same as a preliminary injunction, against further use of the Scrabulous name. But my primary interest is copyright law, and the court’s copyright analysis, although very brief, is fascinating. Essentially, the court held that because the board and rules are necessary for game play, and game play is not copyrightable, therefore the board and rules are not copyrightable either. I think this probably goes too far, but it’s an interesting example of a court grappling with the nature of copyright in games.

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