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News • IP News This Month
April 2013
Welcome to CIPP's IP News This Month, your guide to the most important news and trends in intellectual property culled from news reports around the world as well as highlights from CIPP's action-packed events calendar.
Tips or comments? Send them to jeff.roberts@mcgill.ca
Top 3 Stories
Patentable subject matter is front and center in debates from the US to India. At SCOTUS, the justices again wrestled with the scope of genetic patents in the Myriad Genetics case. The issue turns on what is necessary to make something more than a natural law or existing feature of invention. As the New York Times explains, the case also relied heavily on analogies to baking, medicine and healing plants.
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The TV is industry is trembling over Aereo, a new device that retransmits signals but that was designed to comply with copyright. A divided New York appeals court this month found the technology to comply with exemptions that permit private transmissions. In the bigger picture, the situation is a familiar story of analog-era copyright law proving ill-suited for a digital age.
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Old news? Hardly. Nearly a century after its seminal victory in INS v. AP, the Associated Press won a major US ruling that affirms its property rights in news summaries. The court sided with the AP and the New York Times in restricting the amount internet scraping services can take from their stories. Similar disputes are taking place in the UK, France and Germany.
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Canada
A copyright collection agency is rejecting university fair dealing practices and is suing them instead; librarians, academics and students are not impressed
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Mounties who caught food inspectors trying to sell vials of bacteria to China accuse them of “unlawful efforts to commercialize intellectual property”
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United States
A federal court granted summary judgment – again -- in the latest setback for Viacom in its $1 billion copyright case over the early days of YouTube; the case turns on “red flag” knowledge and safe harbours
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As patent trolls expand their rampage to target small businesses, the debate over how to stop them is focusing increasingly on economics and fee shifting
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Meanwhile, cloud company Rackspace is trying to bash in the brains of the trolls in a PR and legal campaign
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The Google-Apple mobile patent mess drags on and on and on; a Miami judge said he would not “mop up a mess they made” and the companies' fight was “not a proper use of this court”
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Google and BlackBerry asked regulators to investigate “patent privateering,” in which big firms give patents to a shell company for the purpose of suing competitors
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Google made a non-aggression pledge to protect cloud computing from the patent woes that befell the smartphone industry; it is donating patents for common use but it’s unclear if the unilateral promise is enforceable
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Stay classy, America: Texas restaurant gets trademark for “breastaurant” to compete with rivals Hooters and Twin Peaks
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Copyright owners and New York City are cracking down on costumed characters in Times Square after Cookie Monster shoved a toddler and Elmo made anti-Semitic remarks
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Sony won an injunction against a start-up that lets people sell “used iTunes” songs and videos
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A judge is accusing porn trolls of attorney misconduct; the lawyers have been collecting $3000 settlements from those who don’t want have their names made public in suits over Illegal Ass 2
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Twitter’s 6-second video tool has received a DMCA takedown from Prince; an IP writer looks to hip-hop copyright cases to see if such a short video violates copyright
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Believing it was a TV show, Fox issued a takedown notice for copyright activist Cory Doctorow’s book Homeland
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Two Massachusetts men had the good taste to wait almost an entire week to file for trademarks on "Boston Strong"
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Europe
The UK Supreme Court has found that the cached copies any user creates while web browsing don’t violate copyright; the closely-watched case now goes to the CJEU
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A charity for Kate, William and Prince Harry is filing for trademarks to protect the royal names; the marks will cover the “clothing, footwear and headgear” category
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France's HADOPI is back in full-swing six after the new Socialist government promised it would amend or end the copyright warning system
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International
China issued a judicial directive creating “grassroots courts” to hear a soaring number of patent disputes in the country
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In another pro-generics ruling, India’s Supreme Court ruled that a major cancer drug couldn’t be patented; brand name pharma companies decried “deteriorating innovation” while MSF applauded the decision
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As hundreds of new top-level domain names are set to go live, ICANN has created a “trademark clearinghouse” that notifies companies if someone registers their name.
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It’s World IP Day on April 26 -- this year’s theme is “Creativity: the next generation” – and everyone’s invited. Don’t party too hard
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