From the monthly archives:

August 2008

Jacobsen v. Katzer

August 22, 2008

“Trust me, this is huge.” Larry Lessig My partner Andy Updegrove has written a post discussing Jacobsen v. Katzer. In a nutshell, theCAFC upheld an open source copyright license, pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. As Andy discusses, this is an important decision for the open source movement. Update: Here is a

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Charlie Could Not Get Off That Train ….

August 21, 2008

Let me tell you the story Of a man named Charlie On a tragic and fateful day He put ten cents in his pocket, Kissed his wife and family Went to ride on the MTA Charlie on the MTA (Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes, 1949) _____________________ U.S. District Judge O’Toole has his hands full

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Study: If You Go to Trial, Odds Are You're Making a Mistake

August 7, 2008

Litigation takes the place of sex in middle age. Gore Vidal I wrote in some detail almost two years ago about how trials can be very bad for clients. In the linked article I wrote: Sadly, too many lawyers (you hear their ads on the radio and see them in the legal journals – “courtroom

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Andy Updegrove on Appeals in the OOXML Standards Battle

August 6, 2008

If my partner Andy Updegrove (he’s the one on the right) is not the most knowledgeable lawyer on the planet about ODF/OOXML standard adoption issues (1,2,3), I would be more than a little surprised. Here is a Q & A with Andy that Redmond Developer News has published, where he discusses the ongoing appeals process

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Bill Patry: End of Blog

August 5, 2008

In January 2007 I wrote: Bill Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel at Google (how’s that for a great job), emailed me and asked me to mention the publication of his new copyright treatise, Patry on Copyright. I like the fact that Mr. Patry said this about his 5,800-plus page, $1500 treatise: “ The book is also

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"Honey, I'm Going to Whole Paycheck, Has Our Home Equity Loan Come Through Yet?"

August 4, 2008

“[Wild Oats] is the only existing company that has the brand and number of stores to be a meaningful springboard for another player to get into this space. Eliminating them means eliminating this threat forever, or almost forever.” – John P. Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods, in 2007 email to Whole Foods

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Exploring Google Book Search

August 1, 2008

In November 2005 I wrote an article about Google Book Search and the legal efforts of copyright owners to stop Google from achieving its goal of digitizing the world’s books and making them searchable on Google. The lawsuit filed by the Author’s Guild described there has dragged on with little visible activity and no apparent

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