gregh  2007-08-09 20:52  google  ip  Law  stoller  trademark   

The TTABlog: Court Approves Sale of Leo Stoller Trademark Assets to the Society for the Prevention of Trademark Abuse, LLC:

In an Order dated August 8, 2007, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois has approved the sale of Leo Stoller's trademark assets to the Society for the Prevention of Trademark Abuse, LLC ("SPTA"). In re Leo Stoller, Case No. 05-B-64075. The chapter 7 trustee is authorized to sell the assets for $7,500 to the SPTA, who "made the only offer for the Assets received within the time period ordered."

Among the assets involved are Stoller's alleged rights in the mark STEALTH. The USPTO recently cancelled 34 registrations for various STEALTH marks owned by Stoller's company, Central Mfg. Co., as reported here.

His financial woes made it difficult for him to defend himself against Google, who went after him in bankruptcy court, too.

If you've not read this guy's stuff, you've really been missing out.

gregh  2007-07-04 01:19  copyright  ip  secondlife  virtualworlds   

From the Reuters Second Life Desk:

SECOND LIFE, July 3 (Reuters) - Second Life entrepreneur Kevin Alderman filed a copyright infringement lawsuit on Tuesday against Second Life resident Volkov Catteneo, and Alderman’s lawyer said he plans to subpoena Linden Lab to force it to disclose Catteneo’s real-world identity.

Alderman (Second Life name: Stroker Serpentine) runs the adult-content company Eros LLC. One of the company’s most popular products is the SexGen bed, virtual furniture that contains more than 150 sex animations and retails for L$12,000 (US$45.11).

In “Eros LLC vs John Doe,” filed in the U.S. District Court in Tampa, Alderman accuses Catteneo of illicitly copying and selling the SexGen bed for as little as L$4,000, sharply cutting into Eros’ sales.

If Doe actually copied the creations of Alderman, this doesn't seem any more complicated than tracking down the Does.

This section caught my eye:

Alderman said he tried to report the copyright violation to Linden Lab in accordance with its Digital Millennium Copyright Act compliance policy, but that he was told to use the in-world “abuse reporting” system.

Here is the DMCA policy. It's clearly tailored toward real world content turning up in Second Life. It's not too surprising that Linden Lab would turn them away. Things here get a little muddled.

While users of Second Life "retain copyright and other intellectual property rights with respect to Content [they] create in Second Life," they also automatically grant to Linden Lab "a royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license to (i) use, reproduce and distribute your Content within the Service as permitted by you through your interactions on the Service, and (ii) use and reproduce (and to authorize third parties to use and reproduce) any of your Content in any or all media for marketing and/or promotional purposes in connection with the Service. . . ." Of course, it makes sense that the Linden Lab must be able to use, reproduce, and distribute the content. How else can the content exist in their world.

The question is, who is reproducing and/or distributing these sex beds? Is Linden Lab an intermediary that must take that content down? That seems unlikely. After all, as long as that content exists in Second Life, it would appear that Linden Lab has a license to copy and distribute in-world. Sending Linden Lab a DMCA notice to take down content that it has a license to copy and distribute does seem problematic.

There are some tricky ownership issues in Second Life, but I don't think this is one of them. I originally caught this on TechCrunch, where Duncan Riley overstates the importance of this case:

The case, the first of its kind for Second Life, will be interesting from a legal perspective. There is no legal precedent for the case, and as Stanford University’s Lauren Gelman said in a Four Corners report earlier this year, the concept of virtual property ownership is vexed:

“All of this is virtual bits and bytes, ones and zeros that are sitting on the servers at Second Life’s headquarters and the server farms they have around the world…how much can you own something that’s really under the control and domain of another party, this is really where the law is being tested to see how they’re going to figure that out.”

On the surface it also seems a little strange that Linden Lab has not already dealt with it; Second Life has strict rules in relation to copyright infringement and has previously acted in favor of in-world copyright owners.

I think he needs to reread that report. The confusing areas are in property ownership. The intellectual property issues are nowhere near as complex, especially seeing as Linden Lab grants ownership to in-world creators. What's more, we don't really get a good sense from the article what Second Life has done about this. It's certainly not their role to award civil damages. If the copying doesn't violate policy, maybe there was nothing for them to do.

gregh  2006-11-08 17:11  elections  Entertainment  Internet  ip  Law  Movies  patents  Politics  TV   

It will prove interesting to see the results of the election as they bubble up.

Election’s Impact on Info/Law:

In the House, it appears most likely that Rep. Howard Berman will take over the chairmanship of the subcommittee that handles intellectual property law. As National Journal’s Congress Daily noted, we can expect him to ‘protect his nearby Hollywood interests by cracking down on piracy and protecting against copyright infringement of TV, music and movie productions.’ In general terms, that means restrictive IP law that favors content producers and rightsholders and hostility toward flexibility or expansion of fair use. That’s the bad news for Info/Law. The good news is that Congressman Ed Markey, a champion of consumer-oriented telecom and internet policy (and sponsor of the network neutrality amendment in the House earlier this year) will take over the subcommittee with the most power over these issues; the full Committee on Energy & Commerce will be helmed by John Dingell, who is pretty good on telecom as well. In addition, Rick Boucher, another consistent advocate for balanced information policy, particularly fair use and library concerns, will be a very senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee (and possibly on Berman’s subcommittee). Finally, there is reason to hope education-oriented Democrats like Dale Kildee may pay attention to the serious and growing problems relating to educational uses of digital content.