Academic commentary about patent law, i.p. law, creativity, and more
posted by Joe at 6:18 am
New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann has written a wonderful, much-needed online essay entitled “Copyright, Technology, and Access to the Law: An Opinionated Primer.” It’s available here.
Here’s the opening paragraph:
Recently, the state of Oregon has used copyright law to threaten people who were publishing its laws online. Can they really do that? More to the point, why would they? This essay will put the Oregon fracas in historical context, and explain the public policies at stake. Ultimately, it’ll try to convince you that Oregon’s demands, while wrong, aren’t unprecedented. People have been claiming copyright in “the law” for a long time, and at times they’ve been able to make a halfway convincing case for it. While there are good answers to these arguments, they’re not always the first ones that come to hand. It’s really only the arrival of the Internet that genuinely puts the long-standing goal of free and unencumbered access to the law within our grasp.
As the saying goes, read the whole thing!
posted by Joe at 10:40 am
If you want to learn more about how the Federal Circuit has applied the suggestion / motivation requirement, take a look at Harold R. Brown, Finding Motivation, Teaching, or Suggestion in the Prior Art, 86 J. Pat. & Trademark Off. Soc’y 809 (2004). Brown carefully canvasses, and categorizes, the recent cases.
posted by Joe at 3:16 pm
In today’s New York Times magazine section, Kevin Kelly offers an account of what he calls “the moral imperative to scan” books into digital searchable, linkable, taggable, etc. files. The essay is called “Scan This Book!”
According to Kelly, the “chief revolution birthed by scanning books” is that “in the universal library, no book will be an island.” As Kelly explains,
Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.
Kelly makes a number of interesting points. You know the saying: Read the whole thing!
