November 13, 2013
The US Supreme Court has declined to hear Patrick Cariou’s appeal requesting a rehearing of his case against Richard Prince. The decision came one week after district court Judge Deborah Batts* accepted amicus briefs from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Rauschenberg Foundation encouraging consideration of the opinions of art historians and the broader art community when deciding whether Prince’s “Canal Zone” series infringed on Cariou’s copyright.
It’s not over until it’s over. Read More »
November 6, 2013
“My food is more natural than your food” lawsuits have been bountiful in the last few years. Following this trend is a “food advertising modernization” bill, HR 3147, introduced by U.S. Representatives Pallone and DeLauro, that would require advertisers who claim their products are ‘All Natural’ to prove that the food does not contain synthesized artificial ingredients that mimic natural ingredients, unless such artificial ingredients result from traditional methods of processing food to make food food edible, to preserve food, or to make food safe for human consumption (such as smoking, roasting, freezing, drying and fermenting processes).
Presently, ’natural’ can refer only to food products s that can show that no artifical ingredient was added to the product, including food coloring from any source.
While the FDA and Congress sort out the definitions, the Wall Street Journal reports that food advertisers are quietly dropping the ‘All Natural’ claim as ambiguous and prone to law suits.
November 6, 2013
Joyce McKinney allegedly kidnapped and raped a Morman missionary dubbed the Morman Sex Slave by the Daily Mirror. McKinney was the Diaper Wearing Astronaut of her time. Tabloid media’s entertainment value comes from invading the personal lives of notable and notorious people. Invasion of privacy laws protect people from injury from unwanted attention. Public figures like elected officials and celebrities who seek public attention seldom win lawsuits for invasion of privacy. The First Amendment protects newsworthy stories. Sensational stories may transform a private person into a limited public figure because she is related to a newsworthy event like the Manacled Morman story. When the story fades into history, does its newsworthy status evaporate? Do limited public figures like Joyce McKinney have a right to keep their notorious acts in the past? Read More »
October 22, 2013
Or perhaps the notices are a hoax virus– spread by friends bullying friends to spam others to show respect for the poster’s privacy and copyrights. Posting and re posting the Facebook Privacy Notice will not change Facebook’s policies. If privacy is a concern, adjust privacy settings or avoid using Facebook for private communications. If controlling content is a concern, avoid posting images or register copyright in important materials before posting. To use Facebook, users give it a limited right to “share” their user content. This right does not place user content in the public domain. Read More »
October 10, 2013
Banksy on branding. The elusive street artist is seemingly frustrated with his own commercial success. To him great street artists need to remain criminal to keep their art pure. Most appropriation art could violate commercial law but is not criminal, unless it involves a violation of Copyright law’s DMCA. The image above is not a copyright infringement, but is potentially trademark infringement and dilution of Coca Cola’s famous trademarks in the shape of the bottle and the coca-cola script.
If Banksy’s use of Coca Cola’s trademarks are a fair use there would not be an infringment. The test for trademark fair use is different from copyright fair use. In fact there are a few trademark fair use tests. Read More »
June 14, 2013
“Happy Birthday to You” is protected by copyright? The song is based on the tune from “Good Morning to All,” written in the late 1800′s. Over the years families adapted the tune for singing birthday greetings. Vexed with paying synch fees for use of the song in a film, producer Jennifer Nelson of Good Morning Productions asked a court to determine that “Happy Birthday to You” is in the public domain. Read her story at the NY Times. The case is great news! The “Happy Birthday to You” copyright claim begs several important public domain questions. Read More »
April 25, 2013
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a lower court opinion today in the case of Cariou v. Prince and handed another victory to the perhaps surprisingly robust world of contemporary collage artistry and appropriation art generally.
Left: Patrick Cariou, Photo from Yes Rasta, p. 118; Right: Richard Prince, Graduation
The story of the case is relatively straight forward. In 2000, Patrick Cariou published a book titled Yes Rasta of classical portraits and landscape photographs of Rastafarians that he took over the course of six years while living in Jamaica. Despite its limited print run, well-known appropriation artist Richard Prince happened across a copy in a bookstore on St. Barth’s in 2005 Read More »
April 22, 2013
If you read IP blogs with any regularity you no doubt know that patent reform has come courtesy of the America Invents Act (“AIA”), although the “old” patent law hasn’t really left us and won’t for quite some time. The most blogged about change brought on by the AIA has undoubtedly been the change from the previous “first-to-invent” system to the current “first inventor to file” system. The AIA accomplished this switch by revising the language of 35 USC §§102 and 103 to redefine what constitutes prior art that can serve as a basis on which to reject an application to patent an invention. Section 102 does the heavy lifting in this regard and the changes to its language are significant. Exactly how significant though is difficult to say in some regards because new statutes come with something of a clean slate in as much as there is no judicial history of interpretation to serve as a lens through which to interpret the language. The “old” §102 has a long history of interpretation by the courts and BPAI and just how clean the slate is on which it was written is itself not clear since there is much similarity between the current and former language. But similarity in form or structure does not necessarily require the same outcome and we lawyers, being what we are, will certainly argue for interpretations beneficial to our clients in the absence of binding precedent from the bench. This post, or more likely a series of posts, will compare the definitions of prior art under the AIA and under the older, first-to-invent regime. Read More »
April 12, 2013
The Supreme Court recently ruled in the case of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (Docket No. 11-697) that the copyright “first-sale” doctrine trumps a copyright holder’s right to control distribution of products embodying copyright protected material. The decision has received a fair amount of attention in the legal sphere but less so in the broader media, which is unfortunate considering how much copyright law impacts the every day lives of everyday people. The impact of copyright law on our content driven, 24/7 media culture is fairly obvious in many ways, but most people don’t realize that copyright law can be and is used to control the flow of physical goods that don’t fit the traditional copyright paradigm. Recall that the Kirtsaeng decision resolves a question the Supreme Court first considered (but did not definitively decide) in the case Omega S.A. v. Costco Wholesale Corp. in which Omega sought to exclude wristwatches lawfully purchased in Europe from resale in the U.S. by asserting a copyright claim in a design on the back of each watch. Copyright protection is available for (among other things) literary, pictorial and graphical works such as the instruction and training manuals and packaging materials that accompany physical goods. Excluding the copyrighted packaging has the effect of excluding the packaged product as well.
So how does the Kirtsaeng decision change this? Some background first: Wiley, is of course a publisher of global reach and a more than 200 year history which includes the works of Baltimore favorite Edgar Allan Poe but which more recently focuses on academic, technical and professional publishing including many textbooks. Wiley publishes considerably less expensive but very similar editions of its textbooks in overseas markets. Read More »
April 2, 2013
Did you hear the roar? Opening Day is not until Friday in Baltimore, but Maryland’s film and television crew base and hundreds of small businesses are cheering the General Assembly for extending the film production the tax credit, and approving an additional $17.5 million in tax credits for eligible televison and film projects in 2014. The story was different in 2009 when the then-existing film incentive program had all but lost its funding. Maryland’s storied crew base scattered to jobs on productions in Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio and other states with active incentive programs because no film or television projects came to Maryland. The Maryland Film Production Employment Act of 2011 converted Maryland’s incentive program from a grant program to a better-funded tax credit program, with special incentives to attract television series. The new program was immediately successful, bringing Maryland’s film and television crew members home to work on great projects like HBO’s VEEP and Netflix’s House of Cards. Senate Bill 183, sponsored by Senator Ed Kasemeyer and passed today in Maryland’s General Assembly, maintains the current program of up to $7.5 million annually in film tax credits through 2016 and increases the ceiling to $25 million for 2014. OberIPwatch contributor and Maryland Film Industry Coalition chair, E. Scott Johnson, quoted in yesterday’s Business Monthly, said that the increase is
“really a testament” to how successful the previous bill, the Maryland Film Production Employment Act of 2011, has been.” How successful is that? “It’s worked so well that it tapped out,” said Johnson, “and we had to borrow some funding from future years to keep ‘VEEP’ and ‘House of Cards’ shooting here this year.”
Not everyone is a fan. The Sun reports that some legislators like Baltimore County Del. Kathy Szeliga felt Read More »
