Elizabeth Rader's blog

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

The Information Commons, a report just published by the Free Expression
Policy Project, documents the fast-growing movement to create online
information-sharing communities.
The Information Commons is a groundbreaking report that links the
vitality of 21st century democracy to the creation of online communities

Not to be outdone by our busy docket here at Stanford CIS Cyberlaw Clinic, our big sister, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has announced a big expansion of their clinical program, bringing in 500 pound gorillas Bruce Keller and Jeffrey Cunard from Debevoise & Plimpton as senior fellows to help direct the clinic and teach a lawyering seminar. Reliable sources say a third will soon join them. I was actually adverse to these lawyers on a trademark dispute a few years back, and greatly respect their work.

Via Siva's blog, I see there's an interesting conference on fair use coming up soon in Philadelphia. If I were in the city of brotherly love I'd definitely check it out.

Bruce Perens is advocating a legal defense fund for open source users. Interesting idea. We need the first law on these cases to be good law, which is best achieved with good lawyers on both sides.

Filmmaker and Professor at Cal Arts Thom Andersen has made a documentary about the way his home town, Los Angeles, is portrayed in the movies, in the process using hundreds of clips of Hollywood's efforts, good, bad and indifferent, from film noir to comedy to science fiction. It's a fascinating exercise, whether you like Los Angeles or movies or architecture in general. Los Angeles Plays Itself will be screened at Yerba Buena Center Friday, June 4 at 7. Details here.

This morning the Register of Copyrights addressed the House SubCommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property for an annual oversight hearing. I find these reports interesting, having quoted previous years' testimony in briefs only to have the government move to strike it as outside the record!

The cyberlaw clinic over at the Berkman Center at Harvard is in the news this week with an amicus brief helping the court understand the nuts and bolts of file-sharing. It seems unusual to submit a brief in the context of a preliminary hearing, but hey, that's why we call it practice. Learn something new every day. Judge Gertner, a civil rights lawyer hero, is clearly concerned about the disparate resources available to plaintiffs and defendants in this suit.

Here we go again- The RIAA has sued another round of John Does for file sharing, this time 493 of them. Seems like they should have been able to find another 7 to make it an even 500. I wonder how many children and grannies they inadvertently sued this time? Or soldiers...or senators' kids. They've also refiled against 24 individuals previously sued as Does, who refused to settle when the RIAA finally tracked them down. Strange days.

Dan Ravicher of Public Patent Foundation provided testimony in a hearing before the National Institute of Health on whether the government should invoke a rare public policy exception and allow competitors of Abbott to make generic versions of Abbott's patented drug Norvir, which improves the efficacy of various AIDS drugs.

The use of trademarks as keywords to serve up competitive advertising when someone uses the trademark as a search term is a hot topic. Recently Google sued American Blind for declaratory judgment that using keywords in this way is kosher. Presumably Google sought to take on the claim that selling keywords is trademark infringement and get it resolved in a convenient, friendly forum. Now GEICO has sued Google on the same kind of claim, in the Rocket Docket, aka the Eastern District of Virginia.

Thanks to the excellent work of lawyers at Wheeler, Trigg & Kennedy, we’ve now convinced the court of the importance of discovery to demonstrate the actual harms caused by “restored” copyrights. The task before us now is to gather and develop facts about how people used the works affected by copyright restoration before Congress passed the URAA and how they are harmed by the inability to use these works now. To help us collect these stories, we've launched a wiki-style tool.

Kudos to William Gallagher at Townsend for stepping up to defend the makers of Arnold Schwartzenegger bobble-head dolls, pro bono publico. Press Release.

How did I miss this? Obnoxious rapper Eminem has sued Apple for using his composition "Lose Yourself" in a commercial for iPod. In the Apple commercial, a ten year old boy performs the song. So I hear this and I am thinking, what's the problem? Covers of original musical compositions are legal under a compulsory license.

The Fund for Animals runs a website using the domain names neimancarcass.com, neimancarcass.org and, of course, neimancarcass.net. As the domain name suggests, the site reviles the upscale department store for selling couture made from the skins of cruelly-dispatched critters. Neiman Marcus, thinking something stinks, submitted a complaint to the National Arbitration Forum seeking that the "carcass" domain names be transferred to it on the grounds that they were infringing or diluting its valuable trademark.

LL Bean sued 4 companies in Portland, Maine today claiming that the companies deployment of pop-up ads using "LL Bean" as a trigger infringed its trademark by causing customer confusion. (Actually, when I visited the Bean site I did not experience this annoyance).