Way more than an everyday interest in IP
http://ipwhiteboard.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Copyright.jpg
At IP Whiteboard we’ve developed a scoring system to help assess look-alike packaging for legal risk…whichever side you’re on. In this blog post we’ll explain the scoring system, and give you some examples to self-assess (using Aldi as our ‘base case’). read more…
A series of recent Australian cases have exposed the potential inadequacy of copyright laws to protect databases and other compilations of factual information from wholesale copying. This inadequacy is exacerbated online, where content can be scraped and reproduced easily and quickly by third parties using automated software. Whilst legislators in some foreign jurisdictions have enacted read more…
She’s been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; she’s won a Pulitzer Prize; her only novel has sold over 30 million copies and it’s been made into an Academy Award winning film. You would think that Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, would be raking in the royalties and enjoying her golden read more…
We previously posted about other legal issues which have been keeping Facebook busy lately, namely, a legal dispute over its use of the term “timeline” which settled out of Court and a claim it brought against 11 defendant typosquatters in which Facebook was awarded $2.8 million in statutory damages. On 1 May, Facebook filed a read more…
What do dusty long-forgotten prints in the British Library, your latest Instagram masterpiece and Oliver Twist have in common? Answer: There’s a fair chance they’re all orphans. The term “orphan” is used to describe copyrighted material where the rights holder is not known or cannot be found after conducting a “diligent search”. The UK has read more…
On 8 April 2013, The Motion Picture Association of America, along with the International Documentary Association and Film Independent, filed an amicus brief[1], supporting the NFL in their fight against (the very litigious!) Frederick Bouchat. Bouchat’s fight with the NFL and the Ravens (an NFL team) started many years ago in 1996, when he sent read more…
As well as being home to the world’s largest film and music companies, the US is the intellectual, entrepreneurial and technical leader of the digital age. There is an inherent tension between the media and IT industries, for it is the IT service providers, software companies and website owners whose services and infrastructure facilitate copyright read more…
The Supreme Court of the United States of America decided 6 to 3 this week that a person who owns copyright in a book subsisting under US law cannot restrict the importation and resale of legally produced foreign copies, in the landmark decision Kirtsaeng v John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 568 U.S. ___ (2013) on read more…
The High Court today heard special leave applications in two IP cases – however, in both cases Chief Justice French and Justice Gageler declined to grant special leave. The first case was Ucorp’s application for special leave to appeal from the Full Court’s decision regarding an implied licence in respect of the copyright in Material read more…