BC Law IPTF Blog

Treehugger has a post of a picture from the great book, “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction,” from 1970-80s rural China.

The premise is there are thatch, roadside huts for passers-by to use as toilets. The free deposits then fertilize nearby agriculture.

I thought that human excrement was not useful for fertilization. Something to do with too many fats and sugars in our diet? I would also think that people in undeveloped, rural contexts don’t drink as much water, so the water content of our waste would not be worth the trouble of, “shoveling shit,” so to speak.

Add to that the diseases carried in human excrement and the foreign bodies that enjoy revelling in it possibly covering your harvested food, and the typically elegant ideas that Alexander, et. al., in “A Pattern Language” propose house at least one flawed one.

Sometimes I anally use Bluebook citation in my school notes. So when I pulled a quote from Wikipedia regarding a case, I needed to cite it. Wikipedia provides guidance on this:

Bluebook Citation to Wikipedia

Wikipedia cites the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology for this template:

[Signal] Wikipedia, [article], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[article] [(optional other parenthetical)] (as of [date], [time] GMT).

The citation for this entry would be:

See Wikipedia, Bluebook, http://en.wikipeida.org/wiki/Bluebook (as of Aug. 30, 2006, 12:22 GMT).

To get the timestamp, you should use the latest revision date and time, obtainable by clicking on the “History” tab at the top of the entry’s web page. The first timestamp is the latest, and therefore the one you should use.

(I just anonymously edited the Bluebook entry, fixing some typos in the citation. )

I found this recently on Bill Heinze’s IP Updates Weekly:

In Amgen, Inc. v. Hoechst Marion Roussel, Inc. (August 8, 2006) the Federal Circuit disagreed with the district court’s construction of “therapeutically effective amount” in claim 1 of the patent …

According to Circuit Judge Schall:

Based on a reading of the claims in light of the specification, it appears that the patentee used the words “therapeutically effective” in order to broadly claim a pharmaceutical composition with a wide range of effects. Those effects do not necessarily include curing disease in humans. … the patentee noted that recombinant EPO, like that found in the claimed invention, “is the first therapeutic product which can be used to effectively treat hundreds of thousands of patients who suffer from anemia and other disorders involving low red blood cell counts.” In our view, this statement merely lists some of the uses of the invention, without restricting the scope of the invention. . . .

The dissenter wrote:

Significantly, I note that the words “therapeutically effective” are conventionally employed in the pharmaceutical arts to indicate that the claimed pharmaceutical product has utility in the treatment of a human disease where such treatment tends to cause the “healing” or “curing” of the disease.

He went on to say that the patent should reference the particular classes of patients for whom the drug would be “therapeutically effective.”

I agree with the majority here, to the extent that they define “therapeutically effective” as not necessarily including “curing.” In my experience in basic science research and its involvement in medicine, “therapeutically effective” generally describes an effect that can be contrasted with treatment with placebo – ie, the amount of the drug that has beneficial effects that proves to be significantly different from effects in patients treated with placebo (an inactive substance).

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This past weekend, my buddy Adam and I attended Wikimania 2006 at Harvard Law School. We mostly went to sessions on education and wikis because we are working with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and their librarians on integrating new technology into the library and the curriculum. But we also caught Brewster Kahle’s plenary presentation on the work he’s been up to.

Kahle founded, among other things, the Internet Archive. His goal these days is “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Part of his platform engages U.S. Attorney General Albert Gonzalez, in a suit seeking declaratory judgment, particularly against the Copyright Term Extension Act (”CTEA”).

Kahle is working on building digital libraries of all available human knowledge. In his way is the CTEA that is blocking his publishing of books written between 1964 and 1978. Prior to the CTEA, these books would be public domain in 2004. But the CTEA extended their copyright, regardless of the will of the copyright owners, for “effectually perpetual” terms. Civil Complaint for Declaratory Judgment, Kahle v. Gonzalez (Civil Case No. 04-1127).

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Working on a corporate memo, where I’m citing to online resources, I had the problem of URLs stretching too long in the cite–and overall just looking way too ugly.

For example:

http://www.barometersurveys.com/production/barsurv.nsf/vwAllNewsByDocID/F5482EED2EBEE435852570F1006D236F

Too long. And too ugly. So I wondered about URL shortening services, that would change that behemoth into something like this:

http://thnlnk.com/barometersurveys/080406/0000002145

Or perhaps better:

http://thnlnk.com/barometersurveys/SOX.and.Private.Companies/StE

Here, we have a URL that will permanently locate the underlying document, “citing” the domain name of the document (barometersurveys), as well as the date accessed (080406) or a description of what the link contains (”SOX and Private Companies”).

Has anyone else run into situations where URL shortening services were used and accepted or rejected?

Note: I wrote ThnLnk, and while there are other URL shortening services out there, ThnLnk is the best for many reasons besides being from my intellectual loins.

“Traditional Knowledge, Genetic Resources, Folklore and Gender was the subject that attracted some 100 participants, mainly women from local indigenous and rural communities, to a two-day seminar held in October in Río Hato, Panama. They came to analyze their problems and successes as producers of traditional handicrafts; to learn which intellectual property (IP) tools could help them protect and market their products; and to benefit from the experiences of other indigenous communities in exploiting IP. With cheap imitations undermining sales of traditional handicrafts, the seminar, organized by WIPO in cooperation with the Industrial Property Registry of Panama and with financing from the Inter-American Development Bank, proved to be a timely event…”

Panama: Empowering Indigenous Women Through a Better Protection and Marketing of Handicrafts

Female empowerment remains an important goal around the world. Education is essential to this goal. Without knowledge of what feats are possible, and how to accomplish those feats, women remain unaware of their potential and without the tools to realize it.

This article reminded me of my personal experiences in western Turkey, where I lived for two years during my early teens while my father worked for NATO. My family came to appreciate Turkish art, including copper and gold pieces, scarves, and carpets. My mother began to collect the carpets as individual pieces of art, as one would paintings, with the goal to represent as many Turkish villages as possible in her collection. The key was that each village incorporated signature characteristics into their carpets, making the work unmistakably identifiable to connaisseurs, or even to young American amateurs like me. These characteristics include particular colors, such as the deep red in a carpet from Yagcibedir; shapes, such as the ubiquitous octagon in rugs from Kars; and knot size, like the very tight knots in Hereke rugs.

My family bought carpets through two very different means. First, we could visit one of our trusted (male) dealers in Izmir, and sip our fresh chi with sugar cubes served as carpet after carpet was tossed on the floor in front of us for our appraisal. While this method was undoubtably the most efficient, we did not realize the value of the carpets and the stories behind them until we learned that we could visit the villages where the carpets were made.

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Also check out some of the stuff regarding Weird Al Yankovic, who I assume is no stranger to parody/copyright conflicts:

Free Weird Al Yankovic!

Weird Al’s “You’re Pitiful,” a parody of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” is being blocked by Atlantic Records.

According to Yankovic, Blunt himself gave his blessing to a song called “You’re Pitiful” (audio), which was to appear on Yankovic’s now-finished but as-yet-unreleased new album. But after Yankovic finished recording the parody, Atlantic Records, Blunt’s label, told Yankovic that he couldn’t release “You’re Pitiful.” Though Yankovic has encountered resistance from artists before — after a miscommunication involving permissions, Coolio publicly objected to a released parody of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” while Prince has always turned down Yankovic’s requests to parody his hits — he says this is the first time a label has stepped in to squash the release of one of his parodies.

. . .

“The legality in this case is somewhat moot,” Yankovic writes when contacted via e-mail. “James Blunt could still let me put it on my album if he really wanted to, but he obviously doesn’t want to alienate his own record company… and my label could release the parody without Atlantic’s blessing, but they don’t really want to go to war with another label over this. So really, it’s more of a political matter than a legal matter.”

Somewhat related, there’s a good conversation about Weird Al and an off-hand comment he made about how he gets more money from selling CDs than from iTunes downloads:

Weird Al and a Messed Up iTunes Deal

Apparently Apples takes a 34 or 35 cent cut off of every $1 download; then the record label takes its bite; and then the artist gets what’s left.

I wouldn’t take Weird Al’s experience as representative of the industry; everything is so deal-specific and confidential.

So if you don’t know the premise for ”The Shining” you should probably stop reading this and find your way back to the cave which you call “home”.

If you’re one of the more enlightened folks, however, you might appreciate Robert Ryang’s fake trailer* of Kubrick’s classic (www.ps260.com/molly) which, after some selective editing of the original film, presents the movie as a wholesome, family flick.  The clip received widespread attention last year after a close friend of my ex (and co-worker of Ryang), Dustin Stephens, posted the the “secret” link to the trailer on his blog, El Follador. 

Although lauded as a creative triumph and lesson in editing’s importance, to some in the film industry Ryang’s work represents a potential copyright infringement quagmire.

As reported in the Globe, Ryang spoke in Boston this past week on a panel at SIGGRAPH, a computer graphics conference, where he voiced his opinion on the right for amateurs to use copyrighted material without approval.  Central to Ryang’s argument is an oft used defense to trademark infringement - that material is fair game if its use does not compete with nor divert profit from the original. Hmm, interesting.

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2006/08/01/ 

Overall, the article is informative, but I do have one gripe.  Maybe I interpreted this incorrectly, but I thought it was weird that the contributor likened the video mash-ups impact on film to Napster’s effect on the music industry.  Sure, they both deal with copyright infringement, but I do believe that generating spoofs through creative inspiration is categorically distinct from the unauthorized distribution of music that has not been modified from the original.

*originally created for AICE’s 2005 Trailer Park competition

 

Law Librarian Blog is linking to Current Copyright Readings:

The blog is essentially a bibliography of current articles on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the TEACH act and other copyright issues.

I think it’s neat because it also links to some guys I know and their primer on the evils of file sharing. It reminds you: “File sharing equals you-suing.”