Contemporary Intellectual Property, Licensing & Information Law

Several months ago the Supreme Court insulated arbitration clauses in consumer and other small claims settings from the most frequent challenge to their enforceability – the allegation that they are unconscionable unless they allow class action proceedings. The decision presents businesses with a choice – many will use mandatory arbitration clauses in licensing, online, services, and other contracts.

Licensing Law Issues
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Trademark law gives the mark owner a right to protect against conduct that is likely to create confusion about sources or sponsorship of a product or service. But trademark law does not give the mark owner control over all use of the image, word, or phrase that constitutes its mark. Volumes of reported cases and billions of dollars of litigation have gone into drawing the distinction and the amounts have increased in the digital information age. There are many doctrines used. Now, apparently, the Ninth Circuit has reincarnated another – functional use of a mark.

Intellectual Property
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I and others had been wondering when the political frenzy to protect pseudo privacy (actually, personal data protection) laws and regulations restricting a person or a corporation’s use of non-sensitive, personal information about another individual lawfully obtained outside a traditionally confidential relationship would encounter the First Amendment. There have been a few skirmishes with mixed results. But finally, a direct encounter occurred and the pseudo privacy concepts lost as they should.

Privacy, Data Protection and Security
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When the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) was being debated nationally in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, it became part of a wildly intense debate about the nature of contract law that ultimately led to the rejection of two misguided efforts to revise ancient UCC Article 2. UCITA barely survived vitriolic and often dishonest attacks. It was enacted in two commercially major states and the concepts it set out have become mainstream judicial analyses, referred to in a number of legal treatises. 

Licensing Law Issues
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While many companies that write apps or develop parallel platforms grounded in open source willingly disclose code and comply with copyleft rules (e.g., some transferees to also disclose their code), others prefer to protect (e.g., not disclose) some of their code and not force customers who resell products to disclose their code. The issue for these companies has always been how can they approach an open source platform or program without being caught in the copyleft “license” with a duty to disclose if they retransfer their products. The answer has never been certain, but the stakes today have never been higher.

Licensing Law Issues
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In 2004, in the Chamberlain case, the Federal Circuit unaccountably grafted a non-statutory element on the access control provisions of the DMCA, requiring that there be some connection to preventing infringement for there to be protection against circumvention of a technology control on access to a copyrighted work. The Ninth Circuit, in the MDY case, expressly rejects Chamberlain, returning the statute to its intended purpose – creating a right to protect controls on access to works in digital contexts.

Intellectual Property
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The Ninth Circuit revisited the ownership question involved in copyright first sale in Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., 2010 WL 3516435 (9^th Cir. 2010) and got it right, adopting a variation of the Federal Circuit’s DSC decision and the approach taken by all other Circuit Courts that have looked at the question.  The terms of the contract control whether the transferee becomes the owner of the copy.

Intellectual Property , Licensing Law Issues
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Millions of dollars and thousands of hours have been spent during the last decade worrying about how to deal with free and open source software licenses. This leads me to ask ‘what makes these licenses different in a way that attracts all of this attention, both negative and positive?’

Licensing Law Issues
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A while ago, I commented about the misreading that courts were doing with respect to fair use, especially with respect to so-called “transformative use.” Maybe they heard, but at least they have begun to figure it out. The worm may have begun to turn.

Intellectual Property
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Online aggregators, site operators and search engines are in a seemingly endless conflict with content providers and rights owners. This extends to trademark law. The confrontation relates to deciding what obligations aggregators (and others) have to police and prevent advertising and sale of counterfeit products or services through their systems. A recent Second Circuit case leaves one pondering the answer where at least some of the advertised products or services from third parties are counterfeits.

Intellectual Property
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