Tag: INTELLECTUALPROPERTY

The Obama administration has put together a new set of digital copyright laws aimed at cracking down on illegal downloads and other forms of online piracy. Yesterday, intellectual property enforcement coordinator Victoria Espinel released a 92-page report (PDF), outlining the White House's copyright proposals, which will be submitted to Congress "in the very near future." Although the report ...

Score one for intellectual property and the closing of linguistic expression! Apple has been awarded a trademark for the phrase "there's an app for that" to the chagrin of unimaginative competitors and poor parodists. (Yes, we did it, too.) Just as Facebook has been trying to protect its brand from any company using either "face" or "book" in its name, Apple seems to think that anyone employing ...

Facebook has filed suit against Teachbook.com, claiming that the educators' social network has violated Facebook's trademark. At the heart of the suit are several claims, the most obvious being the latter website's use of "book" in its name. Also at issue, though, are Teachbook's attempts to trademark its own name, and its purported tendency to describe itself as "Facebook for teachers." (We ...

Google dodged a major bullet yesterday, after successfully beating back a billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. But as YouTube's proud parent celebrated the decision, Viacom insisted that this case is far from over. Arguing before a U.S. District Court in New York, Viacom had been seeking to prove that YouTube was guilty of massive copyright infringement and, in more ...

For the first time in U.S. history, the federal government has a coordinated strategy for protecting the intellectual property of American companies both here and abroad. The Department of Justice and the FBI will be working closely to enact 30 recommendations put together by the Obama administration, including closely monitoring foreign websites, especially in China, for pirated American music, ...

Quantifying the effect that online piracy has on businesses and copyright holders has always been an inexact science. For years, suspicion has been brewing over the accuracy of estimated losses claimed by software companies, the MPAA and even governmental agencies. Yesterday, though, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finally admitted to the scientific shortcomings of many common ...

For reasons we'll never totally understand, whenever Bono talks, people listen. Now, apparently bored with AIDS and world hunger, the Irish singer/humanitarian/know-it-all has turned his attention to another of the world's problems: illegal downloading. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, Bono tells the world how critical it is to better protect intellectual property online -- part of ...

The estate of C. S. Lewis, author of the 'Chronicles of Narnia,' has sued a British couple after they purchased the Narnia.mobi domain for their 11 year-old child so he could have an @Narnia e-mail address. The estate filed a formal complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), seeking to force the family to hand over the domain name. The estate had to prove that the domain ...