Archive for April, 2008

Biting Back at the Monster

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

I love reading about things like this. Monster Cable Products Inc., a maker of audio/visual cables, recently sent a cease and desist letter to a much smaller company called Blue Jeans Cables.  Monster claims that Blue Jeans' products infringe several of Monster's design patents. I'm not going to bother with legal commentary ...

Briefly This Week

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Here are some of the issues I'm following this week: A company named Psystar made headlines yesterday by offering to sell low-cost computers that are pre-loaded with the retail version of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," the next-generation operating system that Apple includes on new Macs and sells at retail as an upgrade ...

CSS3 and Secondary Liability for Unauthorized Distribution of Fonts

Monday, April 14th, 2008

The Internet has created interesting copyright law questions for many different kinds of media, from the photographs in Kelly v. Arriba Soft to the audio recordings in A&M Records v. Napster.  Typically these cases turn on whether the defendant--typically the trailblazing operator of some new Internet-based service--has distributed the plaintiff's copyrighted ...

Briefly This Week

Friday, April 4th, 2008

Here's a summary of the stories I've been following this week: Elektra v. Barker and London-Sire v. Doe:  Can merely "making available" a file on a P2P network constitute copyright infringement, or does infringement require that a plaintiff prove that the file was actually downloaded by a third party?  Maybe not.  Coincidentally, ...