The Economist has a fun story in this week’s issue, celebrating the IBM pc’s 25th birthday.From the article: “The PC has created wealth on a massive scale. The combined stockmarket values of PC hardware and software firms exceed half a trillion dollars. Cheap computers have boosted the productivity of individual workers. And hundreds of millions of people have benefited from access to word-processing, spreadsheets, e-mail, file-sharing and cheap phone calls—to say nothing of the riches of the web.”

Read the whole thing …

Billy Bragg, it appears.

According to this story in today’s New York Times, Bragg was displeased at the seeming overbreadth of the MySpace.com “terms of service” about songs a user posted.  In May, he removed his songs; now, some are back.  MySpace changed the terms of service.  From the story:

About a month later, without referencing Mr. Bragg’s concerns, MySpace.com clarified its terms of service, which now explain who retains what rights. A sample line: “The license you grant to MySpace.com is nonexclusive (meaning you are free to license your content to anyone else in addition to MySpace.com).�

As they say, read the whole thing.  And, if you want to read MySpace.com’s current Terms of Use Agreement, it’s just a click away.

On May 1, 2006, the Federal Circuit ruled on a mandamus petition challenging a trial court’s ruling on the scope of a waiver of attorney-client privilege and work product immunity (a waiver made to use the advice of counsel to rebut a charge that the infringement in the case was willful). The case is In re EchoStar Communications Corp., 448 F.3d 1294 (Fed. Cir. 2006). I’ve blogged it before, focusing on the Federal Circuit’s ” recogniz[ing] at least three categories of work product that are potentially relevant to the advice-of-counsel defense … includ[ing]: (1) documents that embody a communication between the attorney and client concerning the subject matter of the case, such as a traditional opinion letter; (2) documents analyzing the law, facts, trial strategy, and so forth that reflect the attorney’s mental impressions but were not given to the client; and (3) documents that discuss a communication between attorney and client concerning the subject matter of the case but are not themselves communications to or from the client.” Id. at 1302. The first and third categories must, after a waiver, be produced, whereas the second need not be. Id. at 1302-04.

In my earlier post, I did not discuss EchoStar’s slumbering dicta giant — whether a waiver, once made, extends to trial counsel (not simply to pre-suit opinion counsel, or to separate post-suit opinion counsel). The giant is waking.

First, here’s what the Federal Circuit said in EchoStar’s fateful footnote 4:

EchoStar contends that waiver of opinions does not extend to advice and work product given after litigation began. While this may be true when the work product is never communicated to the client, it is not the case when the advice is relevant to ongoing willful infringement, so long as that ongoing infringement is at issue in the litigation. See Akeva LLC, 243 F.Supp.2d at 423 (”[O]nce a party asserts the defense of advice of counsel, this opens to inspection the advice received during the entire course of the alleged infringement.”); see also Crystal Semiconductor Corp. v. TriTech Microelectronics Int’l, Inc., 246 F.3d 1336, 1351-1353 (Fed. Cir. 2001) (noting that an infringer may continue its infringement after notification of the patent by filing suit and that the infringer has a duty of due care to avoid infringement after such notification).

448 F.3d at 1302 n.4.

Second, the district courts, in the space of three days in mid-July, used three different approaches to the trial counsel waiver question while nominally applying EchoStar’s teaching. The three approaches are (1) extend the waiver fully to communications with trial counsel, (2) deny the waiver to communications with trial counsel, and (3) extend the waiver to communications with trial counsel that call into doubt the opinion counsel’s opinion about infringement liability. Below the fold, I provide more details about these district court decisions. An accused infringer will no doubt take this up soon with the Federal Circuit, by way of a mandamus petition challenging an order compelling production of attorney-client communications.
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The New York Times has the story:

The Justice Department is investigating whether a deal involving two big pharmaceutical companies and a generic drug maker thwarted a potentially lower-priced competitor for the blood thinner Plavix, one of the world’s top-selling drugs. …

Initially, Sanofi and Bristol had sued to block Apotex’s version on the ground that it violated their patent, and a trial had been scheduled to begin last month in New York. But the companies announced in March that the patent lawsuit had been settled under terms that would have involved a payment to Apotex and an agreement that the company not sell its generic version until September 2011, eight months before the United States patent for Plavix was set to expire.

This is just two paragraphs from a detailed article.  As they saying goes, read the whole thing …

There’s also a story on the same topic at the Globe & Mail.

Yesterday, the Federal Circuit rendered a nonprecedential decision in Wireless Agents LLC v. Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, No. 06-1054.  The court affirmed the trial court’s decision to deny plaintiff-patentee Wireless Agents’s motion for a preliminary injunction.  It is mildly interesting that the court does not so much as mention the eBay case.  Why not?  Well, the denial of the preliminary injunction appears to have turned entirely on the fact that Wireless Agents is almost certain to fail on the merits of its infringement claim because of the claim construction that the trial judge adopted, and that the Federal Circuit has now affirmed.

Patent Hawk, at Patent Prospector, excerpts just the right portions in his excellent post on the case.

According to the Supreme Court’s official docket system, the briefing schedule for KSR v. Teleflex (the nonobviousness case) has been modified as follows:

Petitioner KSR’s main brief is due on or before August 22, 2006. Any amicus brief in support of KSR, or in support of neither party, is due the same day. (S. Ct. Rule 37.3(a).)

Respondent Teleflex’s main brief is due on or before October 16, 2006. Any amicus brief in support of Teleflex is due the same day. (S. Ct. Rule 37.3(a).)

[My post on the Supreme Court’s grant of review in this case is here. It includes links to some additional materials.]

If you haven’t seen this bit on net neutrality, you should give it a watch.  It’s somewhat informative, and very funny.

The link is to the video at YouTube.

Stacy Schiff profiles Wikipedia in The New Yorker. The profile is richly detailed.  [Hat tip to How Appealing.]

According to Wikipedia, Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov).

On March 10, 2006, the Lewis & Clark Law Review sponsored a day-long symposium entitled Open Access Publishing and the Future of Legal Scholarship. That gathering led to eight papers that are forthcoming in Volume 10, Issue No. 4, of the Lewis & Clark Law Review. In a short Foreward to that issue of the Review, I offer some thoughts about why all law professors should take an interest in the movement promoting open access to scholarship. The principal reason, based in current circumstances, is the way that using an open access platform extends one’s reach. The aspirational reason is that open access platforms enable us to create a new social layer of networked semantic tags that improve our grasp of scholarship by organizing and commenting on that scholarship. I’ve posted the Foreword at SSRN, and I encourage you to download it there if you’re genuinely interested in the topic.

A mighty interesting story from law.com, dateline July 14, 2006: Stanford Law School is leading the creation of a comprehensive database on i.p. litigation. It will be called the Stanford Law School IP Litigation Clearinghouse. The goal is as worthy as it is difficult to achieve.

From the story:

Stanford hopes to build the first database of all intellectual property litigation in the country. Organizers and financial backers of the project say it will help lawyers track ongoing cases and settlement trends. It should encourage academics to do more empirical research based on the data collected. And finally, it could help lawmakers and policymakers craft IP laws and regulations. …

A brainchild of Stanford patent law professor Mark Lemley, the IP clearinghouse is modeled after the school’s successful online securities litigation database. Started in 1996 by law professor Joseph Grundfest to monitor the effect of the 1995 Private Securities Reform Act, the database has since become a handy resource for legal scholars, journalists and lawyers.

But unlike the securities database, the IP litigation clearinghouse will cover more than one type of litigation. Walker said the plan is to initially track patent, copyright and trademark actions

I hope they succeed!