Intellectual Property

In late 2010, on the eve of the Arab Spring uprisings, a Tunisian blogger asked Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah what democratic nations should do to help cyber­activists in the Middle East. Abdel Fattah, who had spent time in jail under Hosni Mubarak’s regime, argued that if Western democracies wanted to support the region’s Internet activists, they should put their own houses in order. He called on the world’s democracies to “fight the troubling trends emerging in your own backyards” that “give our own regimes great excuses for their own actions.”

A shopkeeper in Italy placed an order with a Chinese sneaker factory in Putian for 3,000 pairs of white Nike Tiempo indoor soccer shoes. It was early February, and the shopkeeper wanted the Tiempos pronto. Neither he nor Lin, the factory manager, were authorized to make Nikes. They would have no blueprints or instructions to follow. But Lin didn’t mind. He was used to working from scratch.

In 1971, the New York Times got a hold of a secret Defense Department report on the Vietnam War and began to publish excerpts. The Nixon administration promptly sought to enjoin the Times and stop publication. The leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, was subject to a CIA-aided effort to gain access to his medical files and was also prosecuted for espionage, theft, and other crimes.

I few days ago I posted the following reflection on the Nieman Journalism Lab, and I thought folks here would appreciate it as well. Unknown to me at the time, a court decision had just come down from the, Barclays vs Flyonthewall.com which further advanced discussion of the hot news doctrine. There are major policy questions about copyright and journalism currently bouncing around the FTC and FCC, and those of us in D.C. should be paying close attention. On April 9, Berkman will be hosting a symposium, "Journalism's Digital Transition: Unique Legal Challenges and Opportunities," which will include a discussion of these issues.

Remember all the way back to March 2009? Somali pirates roamed the ocean. The just-inaugurated President Barack Obamanominated Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Tiger Woods was happily married. Closer to the world of journalism, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was still a printed newspaper. In that vein, a look back at the Nieman Journalism Lab archives reminds us that March 2009 was still a time of innocence in the world of online news. Aggregation was good, linking was easy, and paywalls were a crazy idea. Google was still a search engine, not a six-letter word for “intestinal parasite of the Internet.”

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been taking a lot of people to court--basically, harassing folks in an attempt to curb file-sharing. The $220,000 verdict against Jammy Thomas got a lot of news (and probably worried a lot of folks). However, on appeal (i.e., after a new court not cherry-picked by the RIAA to try the case looked things over), the RIAA lost… again. ZDnet covered the verdict.

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 started out with the best of intentions. By clearing away the thicket of conflicting rules and regulations at various federal agencies, it set out to encourage universities to patent and license results of federally financed research. For the first time, academicians were able to profit personally from the market transfer of their work. For the first time, academia could be powered as much by a profit motive as by the psychic reward of new discovery...

The easy knock on Tarleton Gillespie's Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture is that it seems dated. In walking the reader through the many issues and arguments of digital copyright, Gillespie focuses on three seminal attempts at Digital Rights Management -- the Recording Industry Association of America's failed Secure Digital Music Initiative, moviemakers' somewhat more successful efforts to lock down DVDs, and the major television networks' push to require "broadcast flags" on digital television signals.

What would you do if a bully -- let's call him "Joey Giggles" -- kept snatching your ice-cream cone? OK, now what if Joey Giggles then told you, "If you pay me five bucks a month, I'll stop snatching your ice cream." Depending on how much you hate getting beaten up, and how much you love ice-cream cones, you might decide that caving in is the way to go. This is what's called a protection racket. It's also potentially the new model for how we'll buy and listen to music.

The latest brouhaha over alleged copyright infringement on the Internet has pitted some of the biggest names in corporate America against each other: Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone versus Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt.

But you’d be wise to keep your eyes on two other guys who, in a small way, are helping to transform the media landscape: Christopher Allan Smith and Ryan Neisz.

California's $3-billion stem cell program has encountered repeated setbacks since it was approved by voters 17 months ago. Now it faces an entirely new and potentially even more worrisome challenge arising from two powerful patents -- patents No. 5,843,780 and No. 6,200,806, to be exact -- which cover all human embryonic stem cells and the method by which they're made.