Novalawcity

Letters and Law Practice: A Cautionary Tale

ThinkGeek, http://www.thinkgeek.com, is an Internet-order company for, well, geeks. ThinkGeek carries... interesting(?) products for geeks: lightsabers, titanium sporks, no end of bacon products (they seem to think that bacon is cool), and The Big Bang Theory t-shirts (Bazinga!). At the beginning of April, they introduced a new product: Canned unicorn meat. The ad said "Pâté is passé. Unicorn - the new white meat." (http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/unicorn-meat.shtml).

Unicorn. "The new white meat," huh? Sounds like someone else's slogan, doesn't it--"The Other White Meat"?

Can you guess what happened? ThinkGeek received a cease and desist letter from lawyers from the National Pork Board (even though the Board is thinking of retiring the slogan). As ThinkGeek wrote of the letter, "First, it's 12 pages long and very well-researched (except on one point); it even includes screengrabs of the offending item from our site. And we know they're not messing around because they invested in the best and brightest legal minds." (The letter was from Faegre & Benson, a well-known and -respected international firm.)

See that "on one point" parenthetical in the ThinkGeek post? Faegre & Benson missed out on one thing: This alleged infringement of the National Pork Board's trademark is (probably) protected by fair use... as parody.

Remember when the product was introduced? Early April. April 1st, in fact. The new product was an April Fool's joke. As ThinkGeek's webpage for the new "product" said, "Not yet approved by the USDA or FDA, but the nuns have eaten it for centuries and they're healthy as horses."

Moral of the story: Think before you draft documents or bill clients.

Public Knowledge's Copyright Reform Proposal

The group Public Knowledge, "a Washington DC based public interest group working to defend your rights in the emerging digital culture," (see http://www.publicknowledge.org/about) has made a bold (but not so new) proposal for the reform of copyright law.

According to their Web site (http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2906), their Copyright Reform Act, which has five sections, is proposing to strengthen fair use, reform the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), so that circumvention of anti-copying technology is explicitly legal for lawful purposes, update copyright law to better fit with how digital technology functions, reform the anti-takedown provisions of the DMCA, and make music licensing easier for users of that content.

Copyfighter Cory Doctorow has an essay on his Web site (http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=188055) that speaks to this issue. There is a rather secretive copyright treaty, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), under development, and reform to the Copyright Act is especially important in view of this treaty. Cory's essay is a call to action about ACTA.

George Mason University Law School teaches a seminar in multinational IP, (also covering so-called "hard IP"--patents) which is located at: http://www.law.gmu.edu/assets/files/academics/schedule/2010/spring/HOUSEL_MultinationalIP-Syllabus.pdf. The PDF of the syllabus is full of links to materials and also references primary materials.

For some information from the other side of the intellectual property debate:

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has some information about intellectual property: http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/, with links to additional material.

WIPO also has a collection of international copyright laws, at http://www.wipo.int/clea/en/, the WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook, at http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/iprm/index.html, and an e-booklet, Understanding Copyright and Related Rights, at http://www.wipo.int/freepublications/en/intproperty/909/wipo_pub_909.html#intro.

Summary of Google Books Settlement Filings To Date

Looking for a source to help you make sense of the multitude of filings related to the Google Books settlement proceedings? ARL (Association of Research Libraries) Law and Policy Fellow Brandon Butler has compiled a very helpful chart of these filings. Entitled The Google Books Settlement : Who is Filing and What Are They Saying?, "this document ... summarize[s] in a few pages of charts some key information about the hundreds of filings that have been submitted to the federal district court presiding over the Google Books litigation." Thanks to Karen Malenfant of ACRL Insider for the heads-up!