BC Law IPTF Blog

I’ve recently been using del.icio.us a lot in keeping track of bookmarks for my legal research at work. When you’re doing Google searches all over the place, the bookmarking in-browser isn’t sufficient. Yes, you can put bookmarks into folders. But you don’t get the snapshot view that you can create with the description and tags in something like del.icio.us.

So, for example, I have a list of bookmarks I’ve saving for the corporate work I’ve been doing lately.  Pretty nice, if you ask me.

I’m not sure, though, if del.icio.us is the best bookmark manager. I think the code is a bit clunky, and it’s made to be a social bookmarking tool—and I’m doing nothing social with this. I use edtags.org for my law school and education-related tags, for bookmark managing and for the social aspect, but I don’t think that bookmarks on corporate and real estate law would be of interest to teachers.

It seems like a lot of law school students come to the IPTF thinking that they want to be “intellectual property lawyers.” But the concepts of IP bleed over into a lot of areas. For example, I’m helping a partner write a presentation on trade secrets; but neither of us are IP lawyers. And then what I’ve learned about trade secrets has helped me in writing up a non-competition agreement within a corporate acquisition.

So I think that when folks come in with an interest in IP they shouldn’t limit themselves to pure patent practice, but just leverage those interests into making an informed impact in broader areas that overlap with IP. It opens a lot more options for jobs, too.

While researching the exceptions to non-competition agreements in California, I came across this exception:

16603. Every person who, as a condition to a sale or consignment of any magazine, book, or other publication requires that the purchaser or consignee purchase or receive for sale any horror comic book, is guilty of a misdemeanor, punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both.

This section is not intended to prohibit an agreement requiring a person to purchase or accept on consignment a minimum number of copies of a single edition or issue of a magazine or of a particular book or other particular publication.

As used in this section “person” includes a corporation, partnership, or other association.

As used in this section “horror comic book” means any book or booklet in which an account of the commission or attempted commission of the crime of arson, assault with caustic chemicals, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, kidnapping, mayhem, murder, rape, robbery, theft, or voluntary manslaughter is set forth by means of a series of five or more drawings or photographs in sequence, which are accompanied by either narrative writing or words represented as spoken by a pictured character, whether such narrative words appear in balloons, captions or on or immediately adjacent to the photograph or drawing.

This definition of “horror comic book” would probably include most comic books out there, at least not the ones written specifically for children. I wonder what the history of this Code provision is.