Elizabeth Rader's blog

Kudos to my old friends from my New York days, Russ Falconer, Steve Gustavson and Paul Reilly, who just won a trademark case and successfully proved "smart card" is generic. According to the New York Law Journal the Court found that MasterCard's use of ONESMART for smart cards does not infringe a trademark in SMARTONE for smart cards, as the marks are used.

Ernest Miller has annotated the RIAA's letter to the senators supporting the INDUCE act. The letter's on the long side and the comments- some astute, some snarky, make it longer, so there's already an abridged annotated RIAA letter here. I'm still mulling over whether this kind of annotation is an effective form of argument.

This is where the problem is with movable type.

where you don't care about something you have nothing to say.

Fish ginger has some funny looking streaks on his skin. checking robyn's page for information.

I'm puzzled by the coverage of the Councilman case, for example, today's story in Wired News. The news spin seems to be that the Court found it completely legal for an ISP owner to read his customers' e-mails because they were on his system. But that's not what the Court decided. The Court simply held that the defendant was not criminally liable of a very specific federal criminal charge- wiretapping because he didn't "intercept" anything as that term is properly construed in the wiretap statute.

An ocean of motions! This week the Cyberlaw clinic received motions from Attorney General John Ashcroft and his lawyers in both Golan v. Ashcroft (challenging copyright restoration) and Kahle v. Ashcroft (challenging the effectively perpetual term of copyright).

On June 23, 2004, the Government responded to the suit by filing a Motion to Dismiss. Download file The Government relies heavily on the Supreme Court's decision in Eldred and the recently-decided Luck's Music Library case in the D.C. District.

I went to the en banc argument in the 9th Circuit yesterday. I've been thinking of this as an Internet jurisdiction case, but now I'm thinking of it more as a declaratory judgment jurisdiction case. Of course, it is both.

Tiffany & Co. has sued eBay for allowing "fake" Tiffany jewelry to be sold via its auctions. Here's the Complaint filed in the Southern District of New York. Download file. eBay has programs rights owners can use to report infringing activities, but these put some burden on the rights owner to police the site and find the bad actors.

Today the Government filed a Motion for Summary Judgment. (sorry about formatting glitches in the PDF- this is how the Govt. sent it to us in a courtesy e-mail). The Government argues that the Court can decide the case as a matter of law, without the need to hear any testimony or decide any issues of fact.

Cancel my trip to Los Angeles for defendant's deposition, we've just learned that Manatt Phelps & Phillips, right here in Palo Alto, will be Bikram Choudhury's fourth law firm in the past 2 years. Susan Hollander, Laura Franco and Ryan Hilbert will be the new lawyers working on Bikram's behalf.

Lawrence Lessig and his legal team are asking for your help. Kahle v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit that challenges changes to U.S. copyright law that have created a large class of "orphan works" -- creative works which are out of print and no longer commercially available, but which are still regulated by copyright.

From Dan Ravicher at Public Patent Foundation

No joke, this ad is running on lawjobs.com:

Now casting lawyers for new legal show. Real lawyers arguing real cases. Please E-mail resume/picture ASAP to nbclawseries@mail.com.

Trial experience A MUST.

LARGE CASH PRIZE.

Attorney

News in OSYU v. Choudhury, the yoga copyright case.
Bikram's current lawyer, Robert Ungar, has informed us that Bikram has decided to substitute in new new counsel (early this year he substituted Mr. Ungar for lawyers at Akin Gump) in the litigation. I'll post again when we learn who the new lawyer(s) will be.

From Natalia Kennedy at the Brennan Center at New York University: