Patent, Copyright and Trademark Issues

Patents

• 2010-Nov-27: Looks like IBM has been patenting other people's existing technology, they are even citing the previous work in the patent so they must be claiming some subtle advancement. [9436]
• 2010-Oct-20: The US Patent Office is trying to deal with their backlog by speeding up the rate of patent approval (not rejection). Looks like we can look forward to more suits over obvious or trivial ideas that should not have been patented in the first place. [9402]
• 2010-Oct-20: It has been suggested that Apple may be mining their App Store for patent ideas - talk about prior art... [9401]
• 2010-Sep-26: Oracle is suing Google over Java patents that are being used in Android. Of course this is all baseless. [9391] [1]
• 2010-Sep-24: Most litigated patents tend to lose nearly 90% of the time, so patent trolls need to get their victims to settle before going to court. [9390]
• 2010-Jun-30: The Bilski patent case could be going to the Supreme Court. Red hat has filed a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court on this case. In Nov'09 the Supreme Court started holding oral arguments on this and appears rather skeptical of business method patents (imagine if someone patented "buy low, sell high"). The Supreme Court has decided to throw out Bilski patents. [7533]
• 2010-Jun-22: Amazon is at it again, now they are patenting social networking. [9233]
• 2010-Jun-11: Google will be helping the patent office make data available to the public. [9193] [1]
• 2010-Jun-08: One venture capitalist is lobbying against software patents. [9187]
• 2010-Jun-06: Nero has filed an anti-trust complaint against the MPEG Licensing Association. [9167]
• 2010-May-21: Google released their VP8 and WebM video system in May'10 and within days there was discussion of patent issues. [9123] [1]
• 2010-May-05: With HTML 5 the question of patent encumbrances of H.264 video suddenly became more important, Engadget explains and Slashdot rants and how this relates to IE9. [9099]
• 2009-Nov-20: Microsoft has applied for a patent on sparklines. That's not going to last long. [8770]
• 2009-Nov-20: Podcasting has now been patented, and the EFF wants to fight this. [8769]
• 2009-Nov-05: Nokia wants a piece of the iPhone pie, and they are suing Apple for patent infringement to get it. Engadget takes a closer look at what may be happening here. [8642]
• 2009-Oct-22: While the world's networking companies might not like CSIRO's recent patent victories, at least they are putting their winnings to good (research) use, unlike the usual patent trolls. [8640]
• 2009-Sep-12: A $358 million patent judgment against Microsoft has been overturned, though its not yet over as Microsoft was still found to be infringing but the damages were too large. [8513]
• 2009-Sep-10: Using a patent claim to gain access to Facebook's source code through the court system. I wonder if anyone has tried this on Microsoft? [8507]
• 2009-Sep-09: Microsoft is letting some of its patents (that might apply to Linux) move to the Open Invention Network. That's probably a lot better than selling them to a patent troll like Intellectual Ventures. [8494]
• 2009-Sep-05: More patent madness, this time the US patent office has granted a patent on an e-book reader. [8480]
• 2009-Sep-05: Microsoft wants a global patent system, imagine how messed up that will be. [8478]
• 2009-Sep-04: When with the USPTO silliness end? Now Google has been granted a patent on it's home page design. I guess we won't be able to link to Google's home page soon... [8471] [1]
• 2009-Aug-08: A patent has been issued for podcasting. [8388]
• 2009-Aug-07: Microsoft now has a patent on storing a word processing document in a single XML file. Ah, the patent office. [8376]
• 2009-Aug-06: Now Twitter is facing a lawsuit over a patent for a system to provide distributed notification messages. [8372]
• 2009-Jul-30: Blackboard may have lost their patent on learning management systems. [8351]
• 2009-Jul-24: The medical community is starting to fight against certain types of medical patents. [8316]
• 2009-Jul-10: It is thought that the recent Bilski decision may have rendered many software and business process type patents invalid. This decision appears to have invalidated a set of pharmaceutical patents related to improving the safety of immunization schedules. In July'09 it was used to invalidate a patent on a credit application processing system. [7255]
• 2009-Jul-03: A patch for Linux to avoid the Microsoft patent on the short/long file names in the FAT file system has been added to the kernel. [8222]
• 2009-Jun-19: The EFF has got the USPTO to revoke an illegitimate patent on automatically assigning subdomains. [8172]
• 2009-Jun-15: Microsoft attempts to patent Hot or Not by using it as the core of a "shopping process". I wonder if this will be trivially rejected because shopping is a business process? Perhaps companies should be penalized for each rejected patent, maybe by rejecting all their other pending applications and forcing them to resubmit or by shortening the expiry date of some other valid patent they already hold. [8146]
• 2009-Jun-11: Canada has rejected the idea of business method patents, I wonder what the US will have to say about that through the NAFTA agreement? [8122]
• 2009-Jun-03: The US Supreme Court is going to take a look at Business-Method Patents. [8072]
• 2009-May-13: Someone has patented bits of two genes that are associated with higher risks of breast and ovarian cancers. This patent is now being fought. [7967] [1]
• 2009-May-08: Network DRM has just been invented and patented by Lala. Seems pretty obvious to me and what about prior art? [7955]
• 2009-Apr-30: Turns out the problems with the modern patent system (trolls, litigation...) are not new, all this happened over a century ago during the early days of the sewing machine. [7919]
• 2009-Apr-17: The case of Jacobsen versus Katzer could have repercussions on the commercial use or open source software. [7880]
• 2009-Mar-30: Microsoft is starting to try to collect on some of its patents, first target is TomTom. This looks like it might be an attack on Linux as well, more details here. More theories on this, including that this might actually be an attempt to force TomTom to stop using Linux by forcing them to violate the GPL license's terms. It appears there should be a simple resolution to this one: TomTom should be able to license FAT without violating the GPL. It had to happen: TomTom has returned fire and it is counter suing Microsoft for patent infringement. Possibly it is just a coincidence, but while this has been going on TomTom has become a Linux licensee. This case came to a close quite quickly and TomTom has now settled with Microsoft, though TomTom still must remove some functionality to comply. [7647]
• 2009-Mar-24: An outfit called MONEC Holding Ltd. is now suing Apple over the iPhone infringing their patent on an e-book reading device. [7784]
• 2009-Mar-18: Amazon is now getting the taste of annoying patents, they are getting sued by Discovery Communications over a DRM for e-books patent. [7738]
• 2009-Mar-11: A pair of economists are claiming patent and copyright laws kill innovation and are costing the economy. But they keep so many lawyers employed... [7715]
• 2009-Feb-24: Kodak started it by suing LG and Samsung, now counter suits are being filed. [7635]
• 2009-Feb-15: The famed patent troll, IP Innovation, are trying to collect from Red Hat and Novell over a multiple workspace patent they obtained from Xerox/PARC. This sounds rather like the old Amiga's multiple screens system, where applications could open their own independent display surfaces and the operating system provided navigational aids (both keyboard shortcuts and optional graphical gadgets) for the user to switch between workspaces as he needed. [7589]
• 2009-Feb-10: Apple's monster (358 page) patent of the iPhone interface has been approved. Just in time for the Palm Pre and Android wars to start. Engadget gets some legal input on this - looks like Apple has already been violating some of Palm's patents, so there might be some negotiating to do... Do I hear "cross licensing agreement"? Apple may also have neglected to mention some prior art by one of the inventors of this idea. [7489]
• 2009-Feb-10: The Linux Defenders Network is a new organization formed to help in the fight against patent trolls. [7547]
• 2009-Jan-10: Universities in the US are patenting student ideas. [7427]
• 2009-Jan-01: Cygnus has patented file preview with an iconic representation. This was filed for in 2001 which is rather late, as many applications did some form of this long before that. In fact my own VBBS TERM (later called IceTERM) had a preview function that allowed users to preview reduced size images of photos to help them decide on spending the time to download the full image. That function was in use before May 1992 and at the time it was not new (though this might have been the first BBS-Terminal system to support it). [7405]
• 2008-Dec-25: EEStor has been granted a patent for their supercapacitor design, this system packs 52kWh of energy into a 281 pound package, which means that it is a competitive (unless it ends up being too expensive) system to current battery technology. [7394] [1]
• 2008-Dec-09: Linux Defenders will be recording and publishing potentially patentable ideas to make sure they can be used to establish prior art for free software in the future. [7322]
• 2008-Nov-25: McDonalds is trying to patent the Making of a Sandwich, I wonder if there is any prior art for this? [7253]
• 2008-Nov-25: RPX Corp has been formed to buy up patents and keep them out of the hands of trolls. [7254]
• 2008-Oct-08: Apple has finally been granted a patent for The Dock, or at least some particular aspect of their implementation. [6998]
• 2008-Sep-28: One company actually has a patent-incentive scheme to try and get its employees to inform them about potential patent ideas. This is pretty unusual, the norm seems to be all your ideas belong to us and you must identify them to us and assist us in claiming them. [6937]
• 2008-Sep-20: From the evil ways to abuse the patent system department steps Apple, from a recent application it looks like they are trying to get a patent on an idea that is already used by a company they would like to see disappear. The strategy might be to get the bogus patent then get an injunction against the annoying competitor, effectively weakening or killing them off. It might even be possible to seek the injunction before the patent is actually granted (which might take a couple of years) thus attacking the target much earlier. Perhaps Apple should apply for a business methods patent on this process to protect themselves? [6891]
• 2008-Sep-16: The US Patent Office has been running a limited trial program called Peer-to-Patent that allows outsiders (perhaps the general public in the future) to co-review patent applications and point out prior art. [6864]
• 2008-Aug-31: How could Microsoft have been granted a patent for "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys? [6774]
• 2008-Aug-29: The SiRF GPS chip which seems to be used in every modern GPS device has been found to be violating patents held by Broadcom. [6762]
• 2008-Aug-10: A discussion of The Invisible Cost of IP Law. Where progress stalls in certain fields because of key patents acting as road blocks. This happened to some extent with the RSA cryptography patent, though its effect was largely restricted to the USA and it was further diminished because the patent was granted too early - before computer technology and applications were really ready for it. Another example is probably the touch screen display issue, not a lot happened with touch screen displays until the Apple iPhone popularized them in 2007, but I recall reading something that suggested that a key patent on touch screen technology had expired around then and with this expiry an economic obstacle to implementing touch screen based systems was lifted. This topic might well be worth a thesis in Economics. [6659]
• 2008-Jul-24: Perhaps the end is nigh for the dominion of software patents. Oh, what will the Trolls of Texas do now? [6574]
• 2008-Jul-03: A number of large companies are pooling their patents through a new organization called Allied Security Trust to help prevent patent trolling. [6482]
• 2008-Jun-24: It appears that some prior are for doing gateway-based virus scanning has been found. [6417]
• 2008-Jun-24: Typhoon Touch Technologies has some patents in the area of touch screens and are now embarking on a program to sue everyone in sight, should be interesting. [6418]
• 2008-Jun-10: The US Supreme Court has finally ruled against patent royalty double dipping. Further discussion of this is on Slashdot. [6309]
• 2008-Jun-09: Monster Cables fires a warning shot across Blue Jeans Cable's bows and gets a exocet missile in return. Oddly enough this started on April Fools' Day... [5814]
• 2008-May-27: A Singapore company tries to patent the web (and succeeds), specifically they have patented the idea of a search engine that returns images of or from the target sites. Which is pretty much the idea of Google's image search function. So the legal battle is likely to be short lived and amusing. [6244]
• 2008-May-18: Could the recent success of touch screen devices be partially attributable to the expiry of patents? Another example of this is the changes in computer security that followed the expiry of the patents on the RSA public key cryptograpy system. [6182]
• 2008-May-15: A patent troll has won a judgment from Nintendo. [6167]
• 2008-May-10: A patent attorney talks about why we need to rethink intellectual property. [6088]
• 2008-May-09: Intellectual Ventures is a think-tank type company that creates patents, discussed here on Slashdot. [6078]
• 2008-Apr-30: The US patent system is being challenged on a constitutional basis. [6003]
• 2008-Apr-22: In early 2008 Microsoft began publishing information about its various protocols, as well it started to identify what features are patented. Centrify has done some investigation of this data to come up with a preliminary map of what patents apply to what protocols and finds that about 80% of the protocols have no patent coverage. There is some more analysis of this here and further discussion here on Slashdot. [5949]
• 2008-Apr-15: Seagate is starting to sue other SSD makers, so we're going to find out if Seagates patent claims are valid. [5813]
• 2008-Apr-13: Ultra is suing a number of power supply manufactures over making power supplies with detachable cables. This is a good example of a patent that should never have been granted because it was "obvious to a practitioner of the art". The only reason people were not building "modular" supplies would have been cost - the cost of two extra connectors per cable would have made the supplies more expensive and thus less competitive in a very cut-throat market. In fact, for many years all power supplies did already have one such "modular" cable: the AC power cable. This has been detachable for pretty much the whole history of the modern personal computer to allow a single power supply to be used in different countries by changing the AC cable. Thus, the "prior art" that should invalidate this patent is even built into the device, and even a blind patent examiner should have spotted that art. [5788]
• 2008-Apr-13: Tivo has won another round in its battle with the Dish Network over DVR technology. Could this be the beginning of more disputes? Will Tivo go after other DVR vendors? [5785]
• 2008-Apr-02: Slashdot discusses what to do with your new patentable idea if you just want to release it to the world at large. [5372]
• 2008-Apr-01: Rambus has won its patent case, which means that it will now go on to attack a number of other memory manufacturers. [5367]
• 2008-Mar-29: All 44 Blackboard patent claims have been invalidated, as usual this is not final and probably will be contested, but it is a start. [5343]
• 2008-Mar-06: The Bilski case may put an end to business methods patents. [5234]
• 2008-Mar-03: Akamai has won a lawsuit to protect its obvious web content delivery patent. [5208]
• 2008-Mar-01: More calls for the abolition of software patents, discussed here on Slashdot. [5196]
• 2008-Mar-01: This patent, for a handheld device with sliding keyboard, proves that the patent examiners are kept on a prison island and denied all access to modern technology and news. [5197]
• 2008-Feb-26: The Patent Troll Tracker blog. [5168]
• 2008-Feb-24: Microsoft has announced a new strategy to embrace the open source world - and smother it to death under 30000 pages of useful documentation! Plus they are going to let people use their patents for reasonable fees (or even nil if its being used in a non-commercial way). One response to this calls it: don't compete and Microsoft won't sue and points out that it is unclear what is meant by "non-commercial distribution". [5130] [1]
• 2008-Feb-20: A gravity driven floor lamp, this is so much like an old grandfather clock that one wonders how it could possibly get patented.

  Of course there is just the slight problem that this light must be violating the laws of physics. Consider the claim that it provides about 4W of light via the LEDs for 4 hours per "charge up". This means that the energy used would be 4W * 4 hr * 3600s/hr = 57600J. Now since the formula for potential energy is just mass*gravity*height, and the height of the device is roughly 1m this means 57600 = mass * 9.81 * 1m so the mass required is 5871kg. Of course, the mass will need to be larger than this to overcome conversion efficiencies, friction etc. Looking at the design pictures it appears that the mass they are intending to use is probably in the range of about 25kg (it cannot be much larger for practical health reasons - not to mention the risk of tipping the light over when the mass is near the top), so someone has made a serious error as a mass of that size would only produce 4W of power for about 60 seconds.

  And this won second prize in a contest and they (a university by the looks of it) are patenting it! So much for peer review. [5126] [1]

• 2008-Feb-19: Someone managed to patent the idea of scanning checks and storing the images rather than the originals, now they want billions from the banks in the USA. [5117]
• 2008-Feb-19: One of the key software patent court cases in the US may be revisited. [5118]
• 2008-Feb-18: A patent troll is now attacking cable and digital TV standards [5110]
• 2008-Feb-15: Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the waters, the SCO patent zombie has been resurrected by The Carlyle Group with a $100M business plan to pursue SCO's legal claims. [5099]
• 2008-Feb-05: Linus figures that Microsoft is only bluffing about using its patents against Linux. [5042]
• 2008-Feb-05: Back in 2004 the idea of online tournament-style games (using black jack as an example) was patented (though the original filing dates to 1996), and now the patent holder is using this as the basis to sue a number of companies. The EFF is going to fight this patent, one of their counter examples will be Netrek. [4584]
• 2008-Jan-27: Let the law suits begin: a company has patented the idea of combining mobile entertainment and communications into one device. How hard can it be for the patent office to look in their pockets and say - hey that covers my cell phone. [4996]
• 2008-Jan-11: One of the posters from CES'08, the porcupine girl, is a pretty funny way of getting the intellectual property protection message across. [4645] [1]
• 2007-Dec-27: Was Alexander Graham Bell a patent thief? Perhaps the telephone was not his invention at all? [4524]
• 2007-Oct-26: Microsoft has had to pledge that it will not assert software patents in Europe as part of its anti-trust settlement in Europe. [3511]
• 2007-Oct-25: SanDisk has launched a patent lawsuit against 25 companies relating to flash memory patents. [3508]
• 2007-Oct-23: Amazon's applying for yet another obvious patent, this time the idea that you can put a search string into a URL. [3503]
• 2007-Oct-19: The US Patent Office appears to be rather overloaded with work and patent examiners must process a patent a day or be fired. [3470]
• 2007-Oct-17: The USPTO has finally invalidated the Amazon One-Click patent. [3458]
• 2007-Oct-12: A problem with patents on hard drives has arisen, this might lead to a ban on the importation of drives into the USA. [3101]
• 2007-Oct-05: A court decision has limited the scope of what is patenable - by stating that just adding electronics to some existing system is not enough to get over the obvious test threshold. [2602]
• 2007-Sep-30: The US Supreme Court is taking on another important patent law case. The question here is if a patent holder can sue not only the manufacturer of a component that directly infringes the patent, but all the other people who indirectly infringe by making products that happen to contain the infringing component. [2404]
• BountyQuest is offering prizes for prior art that can invalidate some patents (although BountyQuest may be disappearing some day soon). BustPatents.com is also watching and reporting on this mess. Scientific American ran this article on four very bad patents (imagine patenting the "training manual"!). Here is a claim that may invalidate the BritishTelecom patent on the web. There may be a way around all gene based patents. [1898]
• patent law [1899]
• US Patent Office has a web site offering searchable patents [1900]
• the patent on software downloads , I would think there is at least a million examples of prior art out there (consider the BBS world and FidoNet which surely predated this, also even older is UUCP) [1901]
• KPMG is trying to prevent "unauthorized links" to its site. Of course the only way they can really enforce this is to remove their web site from the internet... There is also some information on related case law in the US where this idea was tested on the basis of being a copyright infringement, but was thrown out since the Judge found that it was "akin to a card cataglogue index system in a library". Here is a similar decison based on a lawsuit that Ford brought against 2600. This article talks about the legality (US Law) of thumbnails and linking to images on other sites. [1902]
• Can you copyright an FAQ page? [1903]
• I wonder if anyone tried to copyright the classic Nigerian 419 scam? Here's a few more sites that exploit the scammers for some fun. Here's another attempt at scammer baiting, and another. Now Amsterdam is home to an updated unclaimed lottery winnings form of this scam. Finally someone's been arrested for this garbage, oddly enough this happend in Australia. A Canadian nearly got arrested for doing this to an American, but the charges were dropped. Here's a site dedicated to baiting these scammers. Sometimes someone gets taken by these scammers. Now it looks like you don't even need to travel to Nigeria to collect, just head on over to Scottland... In July '04 the scammers decided to switch to a form of extortion (almost sounds like something from Thieves' World). Some 419 scammers have finally be brought to justice. The state of Utah got taken for $2.5M on a classic Nigerian scam. It looks like the UK justice secretary may have been phished. After many years late 2009 saw some progress in actual attempts at shutting down some scammers. [1904]
• Looks like the British Telecom "We invented the web" patent has been thrown out in its first court test. At last some sanity in the land of patents. [1905]
• The fight the Wright Brothers had with Patents [1906]
• Now someone claims to have patents that cover what EBay does [1907]
• The US patent office is proposing reform, or does it just want a bigger budget to do the blatantly obvious [1908]
• IBM has flushed a patent on queuing for the bathroom, now what will airline passengers do after dinner has been served? [1909]
• More bad patents being enforced by PanIP LLC [1910]
• The wacky world of the British Patent Office [1911]
• Provisional Patent application from InventNet [1912]
• InventHelp - The Invent Help People, want to submit your patent [1913]
• Litman Law wants to submit your patent [1914]
• The Half-Bakery of Ideas [1915]
• A Wiki site that is collecting information on the infamous SCO versus Linux lawsuit. [1916]
• More patent madness, this time with the net in the area of business processes (which, if you ask me, are a really daft thing to allow patents to be granted on anyway). [1917]
• The US Patent Office might finally review one of its junk patents. [1918]
• The EFF now has taken up arms against junk patents and are running a patent busting project. [1919]
• The FTC is going to investigate the US Patent approval process. Just think 95% of all applications are currently granted. [1920]
• The strategy some companies are using to exploit their weak patents [1921]
• Some success at fighting to throw out bogus patents [1922]
• The GIF graphics format finally becomes patent-free, well almost, there's apparently a duplicate patent that was granted to IBM a couple of years after the first patent - I wonder if the Patent Office will accept that as prior art? [1923]
• Even the establishment is unhappy with the current Patent system and is proposing change [1924]
• The difficulties of patent busting [1925]
• An HP memo predicted Microsoft's attacks on OpenSource [1926]
• How Forgent is exploiting the JPEG patent situation. The JPEG Patent is being challenged. Another challenge against the JPEG patent, this time from PUBPAT. [1927]
• The US is examining the copyright system again [1928]
• Someone has patented the "cyber-collar", its about time the US Patent Office started firing its examiners [1929]
• A book from a Professor at the Harvard Business School calling for Patent reform [1930]
• Why software patents are a bad thing [1931]
• Looks like Microsoft is going to loose its FAT file system patent. Given that FAT can trace its roots back to 1980 (and was based on even earlier ideas) its hard to understand how they could successfully be given a patent on it in 2004! [1932]
• SUN settles with Kodak out of court on a patent with far reaching implications about virtual machines [1933]
• Looks like Honeywell patented the idea of using a Fresnel lens to brighten an LCD [1934]
• Some states are considering seizing control of key patents under the provisions of eminent domain [1935]
• Microsoft is hiring more people to work on patent research (Mar'05) [1936]
• And now Microsoft is caught in the JPEG patent nightmare [1937]
• The US Patent Office has ruled the Fogent JPEG patent invalid, due to some prior art (which was known to the original applicants not being disclosed in the application) [1938]
• Microsoft is now patenting the Smiley, what'll they think of next [1939]
• Epicrealm, now using vague patents to sue web sites [1940]
• Mega Bloks won their trademark battle with Lego in Canada. [1941]
• Another case of a very bad patent, this time over the concept of a flip phone with a touch screen - apparently patented after commercial products already existed [1942]
• A look at the US Patent system [1943]
• The US Patent office is so disorganized they cannot even provide some basic statistics [1944]
• Looks like Toyota may have violated some patents when building their Prius, then again, you would think that there would be plenty of prior art in this area. [1945]
• A U.K. Judge calls the US Patent System and Software Patents into question [1946]
• 98% of US Patents contain mistakes (mostly minor, but still a large number of patents contain major flaws) [1947]
• The IEEE proposes a new class of patents [1948]
• Ah BlackBerry versus NTP, now it looks like NTP might loose. At the end of Feb'06 it began to look like NTP might loose their case against RIM over the Blackberry. In the end NTP won (or at least they came to a settlement and Blackberry paid out a lot of money), but in mid-April 2006 the New York Times started to bring attention to some earlier works, which apparently NTP knew about and did not disclose... sounds like time for a class action share hold lawsuit against NTP. [1949]
• Looks like there is at least one patent examiner who is awake at the office, they have actually requested a working model of the warp drive to review before granting the patent. I wonder if anyone has patented deflector shields or the transporter beam yet... [1950]
• The US Patent Office is starting to think of asking for public review of patents before they are granted. [1951]
• Aug'06 and there is talk of change to the US Patent Act [1952]
• Microsoft is promising not to assert some of its patents [1953]
• On Oct 1, 2006 the GIF patent finally expired. [1954]
• In Nov'06 NTP started to sue Palm over patents, Palm is going to fight this. NTP is getting sued by Oren Tavory who once worked with NTP's founder Thomas Campana. [1955]
• Yet another obvious patent, this time for a "digital browser phone". [1956]
• LSI has patented the doubly-linked list, how can this be? More discussion here. [1957]
• The legality of combinatory patents (those that combine previously known ideas to make something else that may or may not be obvious) is going to be examined in court [1958]
• It looks like the whole SCO patent issue may be resolved soon due to SCO not paying the license fees it owes to Novell [1959]
• IBM sets the record for the most patents granted in 2006 [1960]
• Canada may loose the fair use provisions of the current Copyright Act, this might be a result of the music lobby buying government access [1961]
• The Canadian Copyright Collective is trying to place a levey on portable music players [1962]
• In July'07 it looked like Canadian Copyright Board was going to put a levey on iPODs. [1963]
• There is worry that a promising new cancer drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), will not be approved for use because drug companies will not want to fund the saftey and effectiveness studies as the drug cannot be patented (heck a chemistry student could probably make it in his kitchen). However, what about non-commercial academic research? Perhaps its time that University Research Groups stepped forward to do the work (after all there would be the chance to write a few PhD theses and dozens of research papers on this), and then the world could have a much less costly solution? [1964]
• Microsoft actually withdrew a bad patent application [1965]
• The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review writes an article about trademarks for Engadget [1966]
• Companies are being asked to donate unused patents. Apparantly 90-95% of all patents are idle (which is not surprising since most these days seem to be for worthless or obvious ideas). [1967]
• In Mar'07 the USPTO launched a new accelerated review process - which probably means that more junk patents get issued, faster. [1968]
• Some patents on stem cells held by the University of Wisconsin (WARF) have been ruled against [1969]
• Microsoft gets sued over using XML to organize and store the structures relating to a component based .NET GUI. [1970]
• Apple gets sued over using tabs in OS X. Interesting that a 20 year old patent is still alive and kicking. [1971]
• The US Supreme Court has overturned the classic "obvious" test that is used in patent law, this weakens a lot of patents that are trivial or obvious in nature [1972]
• Microsoft is now claiming that various free software systems violate 235 patents that they hold. Covered on Slashdot and Engadget. Still, there's probably not much of a business case to be made by trying to extract payment from free software over this - its more a matter of generation of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about open source software to try and reduce its acceptance in areas that Microsoft could provide solutions in. Linus Torvalds has responded to this. And now Microsoft says it has no immediate plans to sue anyone. [1973]
• Amazon may have finally had their One-Click patent invalidated as being obvious. But no, now it looks like its getting its scope increased! [1974]
• Some are calling for perpetual copyright. [1975]
• The company Intellectual Weapons is going to try to patent fixes to security holes in software [1976]
• Csiro holds some patents applicable to WiFi, it is now starting to sue companies in the USA over these, starting with Buffalo [1977]
• IBM is granting universal and perpetual access to some of its intellectual property that is necessary to implement standards designed to make software inter operable. [1978]
• Rufus Pollock, a PhD student at Cambridge, has written a paper examining the optimal copyright period, and found it to be about 14 years under his assumptions. Remarkable that this is so similar to patent length (17 years). [1979]
• It looks like (July'07) that the Europeans have decided to stop looking into software patents [1980]
• Some are saying that patents in some industries may no longer make economic sense (except perhaps for the law firms) [1981]
• July'07, the UK has decided not to extend music copyright beyond 50 years [1982]
• PubPat kills four key Monsanto patents [1983]
• MercExchange (a patent troll) lost one round to EBay over the "buy it now" patent. Could this be the beginning of the end of companies that acquire patents for the sole purpose of being eventually able to attack others who use the patented technology (even though the troll does not real research or development of real products based on any of its patents). [1984]
• Perhaps the US Patent Office should be informed of that little search engine called Google? They have granted a patent for generating music from a DNA sequence, something for which there is clearly prior art, such as Bio2MIDI from Algorithmic Arts. [1985]
• In Aug'07 Apple got sued over their use of a touch screen keyboard on the iPhone. There's gotta be prior art on this one! [1986]
• EchoStar has defeated Forgent's patent challenge [1987]
• It looks like SCO has finally lost their copyright fight with Novell over Unix, but this might have some bad consequences for SUN. It really looks like this is the end of the road for SCO. [1988]
• A new report has concluded that fair use contributes more to the economy than the copyright owners do. [1989]
• Slashdot discusses: TV Torrents - when piracy is easier than purchase [1990]
• Forgent Networks claims to own a patent that covers the JPEG (and probably other related compression schemes such as MPEG and MJPEG/DV) compression system. From the quick scan I did of their patent I would guess that their basis of claim will be applied to any compression scheme that can be considered "lossy". Can we say "overly broad"? [5600]
• is it possible to file your own patents at a reasonable cost? Could this be used as a for of protest against all the obvious and trivial patents that companies are filing these days? [5601]

Copyright

• 2010-Nov-21: Amazon wants to start crowd sourcing movies, Amazon Studio wants writers to submit screenplays and then it will pair them up with producers to get a test movie made. [9434] [1]
• 2010-Oct-24: Imagine that, in the feeding frenzy of Copyright attorney's fees the sharks are biting each other. You'd think the Bar would take some notice of such behavior. [9424]
• 2010-Oct-24: The stability of recordings on CD-Rs (and probably DVD-Rs) may not be sufficient for archivists (libraries) to preserve audio (and probably video) works for the future. The current copyright law makes this more difficult. [9423]
• 2010-Oct-21: Could one person download 2TB in a month? [9408]
• 2010-Oct-20: A novelist asks if, in this age of e-books, a traditional publisher is needed anymore. Discussed here on Slashdot. [9404]
• 2010-Sep-26: Engadget puts forward the case that copy protection (especially when poorly implemented) may hurt a product's sales. [9395]
• 2010-Sep-24: The same week that copyright license fees drove Pandora out of Canada brought Netflix to Canada at a price that was a dollar a month less than what Americans pay (although they can get physical VD delivery too) and saw Blockbuster file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Strange times indeed. [9388]
• 2010-Sep-24: Buy including "share this" type links on their website the Las Vegas Journal Review may have granted an implicit license to copy. [9380]
• 2010-Aug-17: The dinosaur publishing industry might be receiving a wake-up call, some authors are making deals directly with Amazon for eBook distribution. Of course that makes Amazon a publisher. [9345]
• 2010-Jul-26: A recent court case is clairifing the limits of typical DMCA battles, this time finding that a security dongle is not necessarily a "copy control" device and so tampering with it may not be a violation of the DMCA. [9324]
• 2010-Jun-22: A three-judge panel in Spain has ruled that running a BitTorrent tracker did not distribute any copyrighted material. [9236]
• 2010-Jun-20: The DMCA may be making another attempt to sneak back into Canada. [9211] [1]
• 2010-Jun-06: The fashion industry does not enjoy the protection of copyrights, yet somehow it survives. [9172]
• 2010-May-31: The US GAO is now recognizing that most media industry piracy claims are not founded in fact. Discussed here on Slashdot. [9154]
• 2010-May-27: Could Warner Brothers be pirating an anti-copy theft system? [9136]
• 2010-Apr-09: Just how long should copyrights be? An Economist article leads to the usual Slashdot discussion. [9068]
• 2010-Mar-19: YouTube versus Viacom copyright fun that'll take the courts some time to figure out who really did what to whom and for how long. Guess Google is just going to have to buy up all the copyright holders to settle this. [9028]
• 2010-Feb-26: The HD component video connection's "analog hole" may be getting closed by the end of 2010. [8985]
• 2010-Feb-22: The secrets of ACTA get more discussion. And a portion of it relating to the internet gets leaked, discussed here on Slashdot. [8940]
• 2010-Jan-20: Why Sherlock Holmes is still mired in copyright issues after more than 120 years. [8931]
• 2010-Jan-20: A member of the band "OK Go" writes about the current state of the music business. [8929] [1]
• 2009-Nov-27: Microsoft and Murdoch's News Corp are looking to take all the News Corp material off of the Google search system and bring it to Bing exclusively. Obviously News Corp is going to receive compensation from Microsoft (who want to do this to attack Google), but maybe Microsoft has other plans: perhaps the loss of search traffic will hurt News Corp even more, depressing its value and allowing Microsoft to acquire it for a song... Slashdot discusses an article about this that suggests that Murdoch may be trying to instigate a rebellion amongst publishers to get them to shut out Google as a group. Gaming theory calls this the Prisoner's Dilemma. [8795]
• 2009-Nov-22: In the UK there are plans in parliament to allow non-commercial websites to make free use of photographs. Needless to say some professional photographers don't like this idea. This is quite a deviation from the more usual tightening of copyright laws that one wonders how this got so far. [8778]
• 2009-Nov-20: The WIPO may have some odd views of intellectual property rights. [8765]
• 2009-Oct-09: Autodesk has been successful in stopping some sales of second hand copies of its software on eBay on the basis of it not having sold the software in the first place - rather it licensed the software, possibly in a non-transferable fashion. And now a court has ruled the other way. [8587]
• 2009-Sep-29: Another twist to copyright law, computer games have been found to be expressive works which allows them to include portraits of real people from things like sports. The NFL and NASCAR are going to be upset about this. [8576]
• 2009-Sep-08: Digital Personal Property, sort of DRM for the common man? [8489]
• 2009-Sep-08: The Canadian Private Copying Collective is again pushing for a copyright levy to be collected on all iPods. [8485] [1]
• 2009-Sep-08: The first billion dollar music album may prove to be the result of Sony pirating music. [8483]
• 2009-Sep-05: How the music industry in Britain came up with their claimed figure of 11 million illegal file sharers (from a survey of 1176 households) and then got the government to cite this as an official statistic. [8474]
• 2009-Aug-04: Wolfram Research is claiming copyright to the output of their Alpha engine. I thought this issue has already been decided with photographs and fonts, such that new versions that were derived algorithmically (such as by a program or process) could not receive separate copyright protection - thus only the author of the original work could hold copyright in the work and all expressions of it. If this gets to court there will be some interesting battles to watch. [8353]
• 2009-Jul-31: The RIAA doesn't have a problem with DRM rights servers ceasing to exist and thus orphaning the content you have purchased. Again, as a consumer, you need to watch out for DRM protected content. [8352]
• 2009-Jul-27: Slashdot discusses the issue of Copyright of thermodynamic properties (data for equations of state). [8334] [1]
• 2009-Jul-27: Apparently Facebook is letting advertisers use your pictures without further permission. [8333]
• 2009-Jul-24: Amazon has messed up on the Kindle's management of content a couple of times now, which is annoying some people. Amazon has apologized for how it handled the issue of forcing the return of copies of 1984. [8322]
• 2009-Jul-17: Amazon has just demonstrated a good reason for not buying digital products that are DRM protected: they just remotely deleted every Orwell e-book that Kindle owners have purchased. [8291]
• 2009-Jul-17: The UK's National Portrait Gallery is in a copyright dispute over the rights to photographs of paintings that are old enough to be in the public domain. One way of looking at this is that a photographer has copyright over the pictures he takes, but if these are done in a "technically accurate" fashion then they would be just simple copies of the original, and hence, there would be no separate copyright on the copies. It appears that there may be some US laws that address this, but that it may not be the same in the UK. What fun! [8289]
• 2009-Jul-04: The Conference Board of Canada has been caught plagiarizing a report from US copyright lobbyists. Discussed here on Slashdot. It looks like this is the tip of the iceberg, someone has been getting (probably paying) supposedly independent bodies to write reports favoring copyright reforms in Canada to make it appear there is widespread support for changes to copyright. [8043]
• 2009-Jul-02: Of Catty Rants and Copyrights talks about the limits to republishing copyright material in a newspaper, in a strange case of a newspaper publishing a MySpace page as a letter to the editor without it having been submitted by the author. [8216]
• 2009-Jul-02: The "deep-linking" issue may be returning in a different form, a US Court of Appeals judge thinks that linking to copyrighted material without consent should be illegal. [8215]
• 2009-Jul-01: Copyfraud: stealing the public domain by claiming copyright. [8206]
• 2009-Jun-24: Opposition to the attempts to bring the DMCA to Canada is now appearing in cabinet, could this be the first signs of another federal election? [8189]
• 2009-Jun-18: Slashdot discusses a Harvard study that finds weak copyright benefits society. [8161]
• 2009-Jun-15: Could the music industry's decline of sales be caused by the rise of the gaming industry? [8144]
• 2009-Jun-08: The Swedish Pirate Party has won at least one seat to the European Parliament. [8096]
• 2009-Jun-07: What happens when the vendor of your DRM protected media goes out of business. [8092]
• 2009-Jun-03: It looks like the film industry has lost another round in the battle over Cablevision allowing its customers to keep copies of the shows they want to watch on Cablevision's servers. [8067]
• 2009-May-29: A study that shows the use of DRM encourages copyright infringement. [8053]
• 2009-May-20: The BSA Global Piracy Report gets discussed on Slashdot. [8004]
• 2009-May-14: The Authors Guild is up in arms over the text-to-speach function that the Amazon Kindle 2 includes. Amazon will be "updating" its Kindles to disable the text to speech function on a book by book basis. Slashdot discusses the remote kill flags that the Kindle has. [7657]
• 2009-Mar-27: New Zealand has stepped back from amending its copyright laws to include a "guilty upon accusation" clause. It looks like the European Parliament is also backing off. [7776]
• 2009-Mar-25: The RIAA backs down from a case in Texas. [7792]
• 2009-Mar-06: Is the data within a railway time table protected by copyright? I would have thought the data fell in the category of "facts" which cannot be copyrighted. We may find out what Australia thinks about this thanks to an iPhone train timetable app. [7691]
• 2009-Mar-03: The Canadian Government started considering open source software in early 2009, discussed here on Slashdot. The UK Government is also wanting to do this. [7584] [1]
• 2009-Feb-10: The Canadian Labour Congress is considering a reversal on its stand on copyright and IP. [7551]
• 2009-Jan-30: One of the pitfalls that can await companies that use consultants to do work on their projects without the proper copyright agreements in place. [7513]
• 2009-Jan-17: The RIAA has backed down on one of its multiple John Does attempts - where they try to get a college or ISP to give up user names. [7448]
• 2009-Jan-10: The RIAA has finally given up on the Atlantic vs. Brennan case - which was where the court decided that there was no protection against making available for distribution under the US Copyright Act. [7426]
• 2008-Dec-14: Michael Geist has produced a documentary on the fight against DMCA in Canada. [7348]
• 2008-Nov-09: The US FTC now wants to get involved in straightening out IP law. [7177]
• 2008-Nov-08: Cory Doctorow talks about Copyfight, the dynamic between culture and copyright. [7170]
• 2008-Nov-02: One user's take on the iTunes DRM and alternatives to it. [7130]
• 2008-Oct-28: Google has settled with the Authors Guild over a copyright lawsuit relating to Google's scanning of library books. This sounds like it might lead to some changes in the way old (and especially out of print books) are made available. [7105] [1]
• 2008-Oct-18: The RIAA has settled in one case for only $200 per song instead of the $9250 they usually demand. [7049]
• 2008-Oct-10: Now Walmart is ending its support of DRM protected music sold from its store, joining Microsoft and Yahoo this year. It appears that Walmart has listened to customer complaints and will not be turning off its DRM servers (at least, not right away). [6938]
• 2008-Oct-10: ArsTechnica tries to find the basis for the common claims that piracy costs the US economy 750K jobs and about $200G a year. Further discussion of this is here on Slashdot. [7001]
• 2008-Sep-25: The infamous RIAA versus Jammie Thomas trial that resulted in a $222K award may be going into mistrial. In late Sept'08 a District Court Judge dismissed this verdict. So what's next in this saga? [6629]
• 2008-Sep-24: The RIAA has settled with the internet web broadcasters on the net radio royalty issue, they are going to get a 10.5% cut of yearly revenue. [6905]
• 2008-Sep-14: Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) is a new attempt at creating a copy protection system that would allow a purchaser of DECE protected media to use the media on any equipment that he owns, or remotely via a browser. Engadget has more information here. [6850]
• 2008-Sep-06: The Canadian Privacy Commissioner is also unhappy with the proposed Canadian DMCA legislation. This proposed act is still being delayed and opposition to it appears to be growing. It looks like the new election will cause Bill C-61 to die on the order table. [4978]
• 2008-Sep-04: Carl Malamud has been successfully challenging those who attempt to copyright the law and other government produced works. [6791]
• 2008-Aug-25: PC Hardware manufacturers love piracy, and what about component manufacturers (like hard drives, CD/DVD burners...) and come to think about it - what about all those high speed DSL and Cable providers, without piracy who would need so much bandwidth? [6732]
• 2008-Jul-26: Following Microsoft's lead the Yahoo! Music service will be closing for good in Sept'08, another DRM controlled music service that is about to leave its customers with junk bits instead of tunes. Discussed here on Engadget. It looks like Yahoo intends to compensate those who purchased songs through this system in some way. [6576]
• 2008-Jun-22: A US court has found that digital models (such as a wire frame model) do not infringe on any copyright of the original object they represent, which is a logical analogy of how photographs of copyright objects are treated. But if those models do not add to or extend the underlying original then the model might not be given copyright protection. [6405]
• 2008-Jun-19: Microsoft is abandoning its "plays for sure" customers, this article points out that if Microsoft cannot afford to keep the DRM servers going then who could? Microsoft has extended the demise of its DRM servers for MSN Music, until 2011. [6030]
• 2008-Jun-13: A US District Court has found that the first sale doctrine applies to software. So now there should be a way to buy old Windows licenses to fill in the gaps when Microsoft stops selling new copies. Another court has found that the doctrine of first sale applies in the case of promotional CDs, which might also mean this can be extended to promotional and review copies of text books. [6212]
• 2008-Jun-13: The RIAA has given up on one of its Making Available cases. Buy they haven't really given up... [6321]
• 2008-Jun-12: The Canadian government is trying to introduce new changes to Copyright law that are similar to, and perhaps more restrictive than, the USA's DMCA. This continues to progress through Parliament and appears more restrictive than the US version. [4211]
• 2008-Jun-06: Point counterpoint on the (non)-issue of e-book piracy with discussion on Slashdot. [6290]
• 2008-May-29: MediaDefender has been caught launching a prologued denial of service attack against Revision3 who are a legitimate user of BitTorrent; in addition, they appear to have admitted that they have been using Revision3's servers for their own purposes for months prior to this without any authorization. [6258]
• 2008-May-06: The US Congress is considering reform on orphaned works. I bet some of the book publishing and film studios would like this to go through so that they can remake old titles easier. Looks like the Stock Artists Alliance, who represent photographers who shoot stock photographs that get resold don't like this. [5982]
• 2008-May-03: Debating the RIAA and the $9250 per song verdict. [6037]
• 2008-May-02: The Harry Potter Lexicon is being sued by J.K. Rowling. [6026]
• 2008-May-02: Michael Geist gives a talk on Copyright Myths. [6025]
• 2008-Apr-30: Another blow against the RIAA. [6005]
• 2008-Apr-28: The publishing and motion picture industry keeps working behind the scenes to make sure Canadian copyright policy is shaped to their taste, this time someone has canceled Howard Knopf's invitation to be a part of the Public Policy Forum Symposium on intellectual property reform. [5981]
• 2008-Apr-05: Could taking lecture notes be considered an infringement of copyright? [5604]
• 2008-Mar-14: The whole process the RIAA has been using to track, trap and extort money from the P2P file sharing public in the USA is finally about to be examined in court. [5272]
• 2008-Feb-25: In the US the RIAA just lost a case when the judge rejected the making available theory. [5160]
• 2008-Feb-16: Discussion about what makes somthing better than free - how can one make money selling free copies? [5102]
• 2008-Feb-05: The RIAA wants songwriter royalties to be reduced. [5039]
• 2008-Feb-05: Time-Warner who controls a lot of cable internet service is looking at charging for bandwidth used, though this looks a lot like a pre-emptive strike against Apple's attempts to distribute high-definition media (which would eat into their DVD type sales). [5040]
• 2008-Feb-05: For some reason Microsoft is spreading misinformation about the Canadian Copyright system. [5041]
• 2008-Jan-28: Canadian songwriters are looking to cut out the middle man (i.e. record companies) altogether and just want $5/month from all high speed internet subscribers to fully legalize file sharing without financial gain. [5008]
• 2008-Jan-27: A judge in the US has decided that a cease and desist letter can be placed under copyright. [4994]
• 2008-Jan-21: Canadian law professor Michael Geist is organizing the fight for fair copyright laws in Canada, in part through a Facebook group. [4972]
• 2008-Jan-16: Hasbro is using the DMCA to attempt to stop some online games modeled after some of its board games. According to the US Copyright Office there is not much about games that can be placed under copyright protection. [4714]
• 2008-Jan-15: Is Copy Protection Needed or Futile, a debate on the use of copy protection control copying, this also contains some side links to support the observation that the man on the street really does not understand what copyrights are all about anyway. [4701]
• 2008-Jan-14: The "iPod tax" that has been proposed by the Canadian Copyright Music Tax board has been overturned in a Canadian court. [4670]
• 2008-Jan-10: Hollywood is caught using photos from the web without permission. [4629]
• 2008-Jan-04: Some people are starting to think that it is time for copyright protection times to be reduced rather than further increased. [4572]
• 2007-Dec-27: The island of Antigua has been fighting the USA over online gambling since the US pretty much banned it. Now the WTO has agreed with Antigua and awarded against the US, including as part of this an exemption to US copyrights, allowing Antiguans to copy up to $21M worth of copyright materials per year. [4523]
• 2007-Dec-25: Perhaps the DCMA and the RIAA have pushed the youth of today too far, this article claims only 2 in 500 believe in IP, which could have significant impact in 10-20 years time - remember intellectual property is only protected by laws and laws can be changed quite easily once the population decides to have them changed. I will predict that by 2028 the standard copyright term will have been reduced to 25 years and patent protection will only be granted for 10 years. [4519]
• 2007-Dec-11: It looks like the Canadian government is backing off on its plans to introduce a Canadian version of the DMCA - they've probably sensed some of the early outcry and figure they can't afford to loose that many voters. [4411]
• 2007-Nov-06: SUN and Network Appliance are fighting over NFS and ZFS. [4027]
• 2007-Oct-24: The International Music Score Library Project has been hit by a copyright cease and desist. The Project Gutenberg site may be hosting some of this material while the IMSLP sorts out the legal issues. [3479] [1]
• 2007-Oct-19: Canada's copyright board has approved a tax on muxic downloads. [3473]
• 2007-Oct-19: A law firm is claiming that you are not allowed to view the raw HTML of their web site, as it is protected by their copyright. I guess its time for them to go back to school (or crawl back under their rock), as copyright protects the copying and distribution of property - not the viewing. The really funny part of this though is that "their" copyrighted HTML was generated by a commercial program (so some of the HTML is probably encumbered by the license under which that program is used) and that it includes JavaScript that appears to be authored by someone else... [3469]
• 2007-Oct-06: SONY BMG thinks that copying a track from a CD that you purchased onto your MP3 player is piracy. At least this is what the RIAA got them to say in court. Sounds like the RIAA's lawyer's just loaded the shotgun and passed it to their witness who then promptly shot them in the foot of public opinion. But the RIAA won the case in the end. Additional coverage of this case on Slashdot and also on Engadget. [2531]
• 2007-Sep-30: A GPL based lawsuit is brewing between Monsoon Multimedia and the BusyBox project. [2399]
• 2007-Sep-26: Ah politics, I wonder how much hay the writers of the Royal Canadian Air Farce are going to make with this one: how the MPAA got close enough to the Director General of Copyright Policy to get their ideas put swiftly into law. [2257] [1]
• 2007-Sep-17: An EBay reseller of used software is suing Autodesk over Autodesk's attempt to prevent resale of licenses by using the DMCA. [2143]
• 2007-Sep-17: The RIAA finally lost, this time they got dismissed for failing to state a claim. [2142] [1]
• 2007-Sep-15: The Canadian Music Industry's levy on blank media (mainly cassettes and CDRs) has finally come full circle and the industry is realizing that they have pulled their own teeth by implementing this. Effectively they have established that it is ok (in Canada) to copy recordings that you own a copy of onto whatever media you want so long as you don't sell or further distribute them, this is fine because they have forced you to pay a fee up front to cover the expected lost revenue do to this. Its now becoming more confused, because as everyone in Canada is forced to pay this it could be argued that, as long as a fee is not charged, it is ok for individuals to exchange copies. I think that's a bit of a stretch but the Copyright Board of Canada appears to be reasoning this way:

  First, the Board has stated, in obiter dicta, on several occasions that the Private Copying regime legalizes copying for the private use of the person making the copy, regardless of whether the source is non-infringing or not. Therefore, according to the Board, downloading an infringing track from the Internet is not infringing, as long as the downloaded copy is made onto an 'audio recording medium'

  the key here would be that to be legit you need to save a copy of the song to an audio recording medium, i.e. you need to burn it onto a CDR on which you will have paid the levy. [1897] [1]

Trademarks

• 2010-Sep-24: Could Google's Android logo have its roots in an old Atari Lynx game called Gauntlet: The Third Encounter? [9383] [1]
• 2009-Sep-03: Smartbook AG is attempting to defend the term "smartbook". I guess now that Nokia has talked about making a smartbook they want to get a slice of Nokia's pie. [8449]
• 2009-Jun-03: It appears that Psion controls a trademark on the term "netbook" (discussed here on Slashdot) in a number of countries (for example in Canada) so its time to switch to some other term for this section of the computer market. How about webpads or porta-books? Dell is fighting back over this issue. Intel is also returning fire over this issue. Psion claims it really is still selling its netbook. In June'09 it appeared that Psion had relented. [7382]
• 2009-May-20: Google is getting sued over letting advertisers purchase ads that are keyed to their competitors' trademarks, thus allowing a user to search for a trademark but find some competing product instead. It sounds like this is not the first time this has happened, with previous suits being settled already. [8007]
• 2009-May-02: Google and others are getting sued over the rights to the Android trademark. What a mistake to make. [7931]
• 2008-Jul-15: Tiffany has lost a case against eBay in which it was trying to prevent eBay from allowing the sale of anything that might be fake Tiffany. [6524]
• 2008-May-29: From time to time you hear of disputes over trademarks, but T-Mobile's claim to exclusive use of the colour magenta is particularly bad. Luckily this dispute has been settled in court and the judge found it to be unfounded and T-Mobile ended up paying all costs. [6256]
• 2008-May-29: From time to time you hear of disputes over trademarks, but T-Mobile's claim to exclusive use of the colour magenta is particularly bad. Luckily this dispute has been settled in court and the judge found it to be unfounded and T-Mobile ended up paying all costs. [6255]
• 2008-Jan-22: In a fit of hubris a lawyer has trademarked the term cyberlaw. Interesting fall out to follow. Groklaw thinks this application will not get approved because the term is well used already, so should be considered generic. [4968]
• 2008-Jan-14: Ford is claiming that their trademarks are infringed by people who publish pictures of their cars. [4671]
• 2007-Nov-04: Groklaw explains trademarks in the USA. [3960]