There’s been a nagging – and potentially serious – discrepancy in copyright case law that the U.S. Supreme Court finally resolved. It involves when the owner of a copyright can sue for infringement. Some federal circuits held that a lawsuit can be filed by a copyright owner as soon as a copyright application has been…
In a previous post, we described a lawsuit filed by Rosetta Stone against competitors for “piggybacking” Rosetta Stone’s trademarks in an attempt to divert website traffic. CNet columnist Matt Asay analogizes this situation to an open source problem here. The open source software development culture thrives on access and sharing of oftentimes copyrightable source code. …
This two-part piece of legislation, enacted by President Clinton on October 28, 1998 has helped streamline the use and continued advancement of such newer technologies like the DVD and the Internet. The main goal of the DMCA was to ensure continued protection of intellectual property rights while adjusting to the beginning of the digital age.…
Database management systems giant, Oracle filed its COMPLAINT FOR PATENT AND COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT against Google alleging that Google’s development of the Android operating system infringed upon Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property. The Complaint filed August 12, 2010 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California includes a Jury Demand and seeks a judgment…
The LA Times is reporting that on November 5th NoDoubt filed suit in LA Superior Court against Activision alleging that Activision has exceeded its contractual rights by depicting the band inActivision’s Band Hero video game singing other artist’s songs. No Doubt is seeking unspecified damages as wellas a preliminary and permanent injunction. LATimes story here.
A recent decision by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has reassured members of the open source software movement by declaring that software distributed for free is still protectable by copyright. Open source software development thrives on continuous additions and improvements made by many different people, but attribution of preexisting code to the previous…
Florida corporation Psystar Corp., owned by brothers Rudy and Robert Pedraza, has been sued by Apple Inc. for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and breach of contract. Psystar builds and sells so-called “cloned” computers which run on Apple’s most recent operation system, Mac OS X “Leopard.” In the complaint, filed last month in U.S. District Court…