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News • IP News This Month
May, 2012
Welcome to CIPP's IP News This Month, your guide to the most important news and trends in intellectual property culled from newspaper and blog reports around the world.
Tips or comments? Send them to jeff.roberts@mcgill.ca
Top 3 Stories
Internet culture threw a wrench into copyright law for music and movies -- now it is online photos at the centre of legal scrutiny due to the popularity of new image-based social networks like Pinterest. The first lawsuit has finally arrived and the plaintiff is none other than Perfect 10, the same company that spent years suing Google for using thumbnail images in search results
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The judge presiding over the Google-Oracle trial described it as “the World Series of IP.” The case turns on whether Google infringed copyrights and patents when it used the Java programming language for smartphones. At a deeper level, it is about what types of work qualify for IP protection. The jury is hung on the copyright portion and the trial is moving to the patent portion.
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The Google Books case has rumbled to life once again as authors demand copyright royalties from Google (which has now scanned more than 20 million works). Meanwhile, Harvard is renewing efforts to have universities and Congress create the Digital Public Library of America.
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Canada
Canada Post is suing a man for offering a site that lets users search a database of postal codes
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The Star explores the 20-year court dispute over the MGM lion’s roar that lately resulted in sounds becoming trademark protected in Canada
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America has released its absurd name-and-shame IP watchlist that groups Canada with China or Russia, and now includes countries that are too poor to worry about IP in the first place
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United States
Amid rumors of a Silicon Valley tech bubble, Facebook paid $550 million for patents Microsoft acquired from AOL; Facebook may use the patents to fight dying Yahoo which claims that it is the real inventor of the social network
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In a closely-watched trademark case, an appeals court reinstated Rosetta Stone’s claim against Google over the sale of its name as a keyword for Google Ads
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The NYT profiles Trademarkia, a new search engine that gives users an easy way to search through six million marks that have been registered in the US
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Twitter is offering to sign an “innovator’s agreement” with engineers who want assurances the patents they obtain will be used only as shields not swords
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The US Supreme Court affirmed a ruling that supports generic drug makers’ ability to challenge pharma firms that expand the scope of patent descriptions
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The Supreme Court will hear an important case on grey marketing and the first sale doctrine: does the rule apply only to goods made in America or elsewhere in the world too?
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The Smithsonian in DC opens a special exhibit this month called “The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World”
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The owners of Picasso works and other 20th century masterpieces are being aggressive in stopping them from appearing in movies or digital initiatives like Google Art Project
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Europe
A court in Hamburg caused a stir by ruling that YouTube in some cases was liable for infringing material uploaded by users
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The founder of Dyson vacuums makes a plea in the FT for revamping IP norms in order to promote quality over quantity in the patent system
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ISPs in the UK are now blocking access to file-sharing site The Pirate Bay after the High Court ruled it violated copyright law
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Europe continues to make a hash out of plans for a unified patent court; the court is supposed to streamline process and lower costs but current proposals would do the opposite
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The ECJ ruled that the functionality of software (as opposed to code itself) is not eligible for copyright; the case touches on some of the same issues as the Oracle-Google mega-trial over Java
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Bavaria will finally print Hitler’s Mein Kampf shortly before its copyright expires; the government hopes the initial printing will undercut the work’s commercial appeal
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International
European trademark organizations have joined Australia and America in objecting to proposals that would require plain packaging on cigarettes
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Hong Kong filmmakers, suffering from Chinese competition, are demanding that YouTube do more to protect their films from copyright infringement
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The High Court in Australia dismissed an appeal in which studios sought to hold ISP’s liable for the illegal downloads of their customers
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China has become a “trademark free-for-all” as brands like Hermes, Apple and Chivas Regal confront Chinese merchants who bought them first
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IP News This Month is written and conceived by Jeff Roberts (jeff.roberts@mcgill.ca). Any views expressed do not necessarily reflect the diverse opinions of CIPP members