Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Thursday August 19th, the NYLJ has this article about Tiffany's suit against eBay for direct and contributory trademark infringement over using its name as a keyword for links that send Internet customers to eBay auctions and failing to prevent auctions of counterfeit Tiffany products. New York is a town that knows its knockoffs, and that lots of shoppers want a bag they can afford that says "Louis Vuitton" and don't care a fig where it comes from or how it's made. The article points out that high-end art and antiques auction houses undertake significant efforts to avoid selling forgeries and falsely attributed works, but also observes that eBay is not only an art gallery but a flea market and many other things as well, selling new and used items on an enormous scale.

IPKat

More grassroots online organizing. Filmmaker Jack Cushman has launched Realprotest.org, a website about protesting the Republican National Convention. The site urges that rather than attend the controversial, well-off-site protest, you go to your job instead, but donate your wages for the time you would have spent demonstrating to MoveOn for their "Leave no voter behind" campaign, which concentrates on swing states.
I like a good protest, but this makes sense to me, especially if you were going to spend money on transportation to a demonstration, and then buy a pretzel and a soda because it's hot and humid and your throat is parched from singing and your feet are sore from marching.

From Creative Commons, this announcement of a discussion group led by Marshall Van Alstyne of MIT, concerning creative commons licenses specifically for software. There are already multiple off-the-shelf licenses meant to express "some rights reserved" for software, but these tend to be one-size-fits-all, and, in the case of the GPL, even intentionally ambiguous. Even some experienced software licensing attorneys to locate "open" license at the far edge of the map, where it says "Here there be Dragons" and try to avoid the issue of their scope altogether by just saying "no." The beauty of a creative commons license is that humans, even lawyers, can understand its scope instantly. The discussion group's goals are lofty. "More than just a set of interesting debates,

From Politech, this odd notice of a Chamber of Commerce "Intellectual Property Roundtable" earlier this morning. Members of the press are expressly unwelcome. Very few details are provided.
At first blush, early in the morning, it escaped me what IP could have to do with Homeland Security, but googling for Nancy Sherman-Katzer brought up several articles like this . Counterfeiting products like printer cartridges is widespread, and it is suspected that the ill-gotten gains support terrorism.

Today I went to the post office to take care of renewing my passport. This is a sad day, because I actually liked my old passport photograph, taken with good lighting so that it actually looks like me, wearing my old leather jacket that's been everywhere and still looks the same. My old passport is also green, an artifact from a very short period in 1993-94 when the US issued green passports. They were not a success, I guess. Just luck that I got one, but I liked my green passport . That's ok. On my new passport picture my hair looks sort of green.
So in the post-9/11 environment, I expected some kind of elaborate identity screening, maybe involving fingerprints, skin samples, blood work, a cavity search, literacy test, what have you, all because your passport is the key to getting back into the US of A from foreign lands.

Mark V.B. Partridge of Chicago's Pattishall McAuliffe has a new intellectual property blawg called Guiding Rights. Looks like he has a book about IP by the same name. A quick look reveals good, sensible discussion of domain name and keyword cases, among other things. I'm looking forward to reading this on a regular basis.

Yesterday the American Civil Liberties Union released its report on how the government uses corporations to collect information about the American people on an unprecedented scale. OK, so the concept is not front page news, but this does a good job of documenting and quantifying the problem.
There's very little legislation in our country governing what companies can and cannot collect from customers (and that term is very very loose), with or without their knowledge. Like it or not, most lawsuits over misuse or security of consumer data are based on a company's breach of its own, voluntarily assumed policies.

From IP Watchdog comes this discussion of a strange patent for a "yoga support system" including gloves and slippers. Probably invalid, but at least this inventor understood that patents, not copyrights, protect useful methods.

Today's Recorder has an article by Brenda Sandburg about the California Court of Appeals' decision in Grace v. Ebay, a suit seeking to hold eBay liable for defamatory feedback left about the plaintiff, an eBay seller. The Court upheld a provision in eBay's user agreement protecting eBay from liability for feedback, but rejected a defense based on the California Decency Act. Good news for eBay, bad news for many other entities that merely enable information, which may or may not be defamatory, to be shared.