One of the first open source copyright licenses:
This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.
Said to be Woody Guthrie’s copyright notice.
I considered tagging this under “humor,” but that wouldn’t be right. Several more of these at the author’s Youtube site
Email Received December 28, 2009:
Good day
May I use the spirit of this season to introduce myself to you and at the same time introduce my intentions to you? I am Mr. Robert Duke one of the portfolio funds managers of The Scottish Investment Trust Plc. The largest and oldest Independent self managed funds Management Company in the United Kingdom with over £450 billion Capital Investment Funds. Nevertheless, as a Scottish Investment Funds Manager, I handle all our Investor’s Direct Capital Funds and extracted 1.3% Excess Maximum Return Capital Profit (EMRCP) per annum on each of the Investor’s Magellan Capital Funds. As an expert, I have made over £45.500,000.00 million from the Investor’s EMRCP and hereby looking for someone to trust who will stand as an Investor to receive the funds as Annual Investment Proceeds from Scottish Magellan Capital Funds.
All confirmable documents to back up the claims will be made available to you accordingly. Meanwhile, I have worked out the strategies and technicalities whereby the funds can be claimed in any of our Clearing Houses without any hitches. Furthermore, 40% of the total funds will be for you as the foreign partner, 10% will go to charity organization, while 50% will be mine as the initiator of the deal. If you are interested, Please email me for discussion of this transaction in detail.
Yours sincerely
Robert
Well, sort of.
You can wait until the end of the term to hear oral argument in Bilski v. Kappos, or you can listen to Professor Doug Lichtman’s students’ impassioned reading of the transcript, on the superb Intellectual Property Colloquium. I found this reading to be very accessible – a new twist on audiobooks.
IP Colloquium is by far my favorite legal podcast. Professor Lichtman has great guests and provides thoughtful commentary. This Shakespearean treatment of an appeal hearing is inspired.
(Nice summary of the background of Bilski, and what’s at issue, on Bill Trout’s blog).
And, some nice quotes from the justices, trying to figure out the limits of patent protection. Could a patent protect –
“a great wonderful, really original method of teaching antitrust law?”
“actuarial tables and risk formulas?”
In the meantime the CAFC is applying its “machine or transformation” test from its en banc ruling in In re Bilski. A recent example of this is Prometheus Labs v. Mayo, issued on September 16, 2009, where the patentable invention was a “pro-drug that upon administration to a patient converts to 6M-P, which are used to treat inflammatory bowel diseases (“IBD”) such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.” The CAFC held, among other things, that patent law does protect the transformation of natural phenomena where a method “transform[s] an article into a different state or thing.” This case will be an important contribution to post-Bilski law as applied to life science-based method claims, assuming Bilski emerges from the USSC relatively unscathed.
Update: the recording of the actual oral argument in Bilski is here (mp3 file).
Update: Link to First Circuit’s Decision Rejecting Constitutional Grounds for Reducing Statutory Damages, issued September 16, 2011.
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Final judgment in Sony v. Tenenbaum entered by Judge Nancy Gertner today. The 30 day appeal clock starts to run. Should be interesting to see what the First Circuit does with this one, although I suspect that the betting is heavy in favor of quick affirmance.
A few choice quotes from Judge Gertner’s opinion, which is provided in full below on scribd.com.
“the Court, deeply concerned by the rash of file-sharing lawsuits, the imbalance of resources between the parties, and the upheaval of norms of behavior brought on by the Internet, did everything in its power to permit Tenebaum to make his best case for fair use.…The Court did what it could to focus the issue, notwithstanding what can only be described as a truly chaotic defense.”
…
Tenenbaum “tailor[ed] his fair use defense to suggest a modest exception to copyright protections,” he “mounted a broadside attack that would excuse all file sharing for private enjoyment. It is a version of fair use so broad that it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress created, defying both statute and precedent.”
…
“As this Court has previously noted, it is very, very concerned that there is a deep potential for injustice in the Copyright Act as it is currently written. It urges – no implores – Congress to amend the statute to reflect the realities of file sharing. There is something wrong with a law that routinely threatens teenagers and students with astronomical penalties for an activity whose implications they may not have fully understood. The injury to the copyright holder may be real, and even substantial, but, under the statute, the record companies do not even have to prove actual damage. “Repeatedly, as new developments have occurred in this country, it has been Congress that has fashioned the new rules that new technology made necessary.” … It is a responsibility that Congress should not take lightly in the face of this litigation and the thousands of suits like it.”
The full opinion, below.
And Judge Gertner’s opinion rejecting Joel Tenenbaum’s fair use defense:
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