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…)
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, “Copyright Basics,” copyrights give their owners a bundle of exclusive rights — to copy, distribute and perform. Owners can voluntarily transfer any or all of these rights in a variety of unique ways, including by transferring them all together, breaking them up and transferring them individually, or even further dividing them by, for instance, permitting any of the rights to be exercised at certain times and locations. An example would be a publisher who enters into an agreement allowing a distributor to sell a magazine only in Portland for the month of December. Owners can also transfer their rights on a exclusive or non-exclusive basis, giving even more flexibility to parties in negotiating over who gets what.
A copyright is extremely easy to obtain. Under federal law, an author need only come up with an original work and then “fix it in a tangible medium of expression.” That’s it — you’ve automatically got a copyright in your new work, and the copyright lasts for your life plus seventy years. But still, the definition is a bit hard to grasp without an example. Take this blog entry: I, the author, wrote this entry (the original work) and then put it into our blog page and clicked publish (fixing it in this tangible medium of expression). I now enjoy (more…)
Trademarks are often one of the most valuable pieces of intellectual property a business can own since they identify and set apart a business from its competitors. Many businesses view trademarks simply as a label or emblem (think McDonald’s golden arches), but in reality they can come in all sorts of forms. Federal law defines trademarks as “any word, name, symbol or device or any combination thereof….” Over time that definition has been found to even include color: in 1985 a federal court found that Owens-Corning’s color pink for insulation had obtained trademark status.