The US Copyright Office just published notice of its intent to raise registration fees, beginning August 1, 2009, pending approval by Congress. It’s not exactly earth-shattering news, but something to be aware of for businesses that intend to register copyrights in the near future. (more…)
This afternoon I diligently sat through the 2008 year in review seminar of trademark and copyright law for Oregon lawyers. (As lawyer seminars go, this one is actually slightly tolerable.) One of the most interesting subjects discussed was the ongoing proposal to expand the Internet via the creation of new top level domains (TLDs) by ICANN. (more…)
Until very recently, access to case law, legal forms, legal treatises, and other legal resources has, for the most part, been limited to those who are willing–and capable–of paying for subscriptions to private commercial databases like Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis. Things are changing. (more…)
It seems like everyone is talking about open source these days. We read many predictions at the end of 2008 that a technology theme for 2009 would be the continued growth of the open source movement. Even President Obama’s new administration is asking experts about the benefits of open source within the federal government (451 CAOS Theory writes about that here.) (more…)
ICANN, the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which coordinates the Internet’s domain addressing system, is currently working on a plan to expand the present number of domains. The Internet has 21 generic top-level domains (gTLDs), such as .com, .net, etc. ICANN’s proposed plan will expand that number significantly by creating entirely new domains (more…)
Microsoft, through its new BizSpark program, appears to be inserting itself at the center of a global startup network for software developers, including here in Oregon. Last week we read about TiE’s announcement that it’s partnering with BizSpark. Today we read that OTBC has just become a BizSpark network partner. (more…)
We just came across this post at the Law & Life: Silicon Valley Blog about a recent update in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case in the federal District Court in San Francisco, a case with connections to Portland, and which has already produced a number of important legal decisions about open source software (OSS). As the author notes, an appeal last year in the case produced a great victory for licensors of OSS, while this most recent Order by District Judge Jeffrey White is a setback for OSS licensors seeking to enjoin copyright infringement because the burden to obtain an injunction for copyright infringement has been elevated. (more…)
Over at the Wired’s Threat Level blog is this post about the recent legal “victory” for online content hosting sites like Veoh, YouTube, MySpace and others like them, which appear to have added yet another layer of copyright infringement immunity to their arsenal. As Wired explains, the victory occurred in the ongoing California federal court case UMG v. Veoh, in which (more…)
As a general rule, law is slow to keep up with business. Innovative, quickly changing businesses, like those involved in technology, sprint even faster and farther ahead of the intellectual property laws that govern those businesses. So it comes as little surprise to see this rant about source code licensing covered by and commented on by the staff at Open Source Initiative. (more…)
Occasionally we drop by the Kauffman Foundation’s site to see what’s the news at one of the centers of American entrepreneurialism (maybe an overstatement, but it’s very important). Their site is packed full of useful information for the entrepreneurial-minded. We were pleasantly surprised to see on their front page this article about the Foundation’s recent $10 million investment to cultivate innovation-friendly law, policy and legal scholarship. Investment in this area is crucial; the law is notoriously slow to catch up, especially so when applied to innovative industries and 2.0 (more…)