In re: Kindle’s audio – blessing for the blind or copyright violation?

Users with disabilities are fighting back against a recent attempt by the Authors Guild to shut down the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature.
About 300 people drawn from the National Federation of the Blind and partner organizations protested outside the offices of the Authors Guild in New York Wednesday in hopes of reversing the Guild’s stance. The [...]

In re: Coldplay caught stealing notes? Arena district a boom? Bookclubs…

Headed out west for a couple days tomorrow and figured I mention a few interesting things I saw recently, so just a hodgepodge post:

Coldplay is being sued for copyright infringement for their song Viva la Vida by guitarist Joe Satriani, (see a YouTube video comparison)  check out his much lesser known song in comparison – [...]

In re: Court says copyrights apply even for free software

The free software movement had a tough choice of whether to appeal a lower court decision that held freely distributed software couldn’t be protected through the use of copyright infringement claims (only contract claims).  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. overturned the lower decision saying that despite the [...]

In re: Cablevision’s Network DVR Doesn’t Infringe Copyrights

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit just overturned a lower court’s March 2007 ruling, which found Cablevision’s Remote Storage Digital Video Recorder infringed on copyrights. The Second Circuit held that offsite DVRs were not copyright violations (could still head to Supreme Court some think), paving the way (for now) for cable companies [...]

In re: “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear”

Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns— the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control—what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the [...]

In re: Guest Blogging

So some of you may be new and not remember the itsy bitsy origins of In re: one fateful day a few summers ago while I was in Oxford for summer law classes.  If you were reading then you were one of the few, and you’ll remember that it was Prof. Edward Lee of Ohio [...]

In re: So who owns the MP3 patent anways?

Well if you check out the NY Times(“Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3’s Tangled Origins”) article over the recent fighting involving the licensing of MP3 technology you’ll learn that it isn’t quite so simple and why so many different groups and companies have partial claim to it.  Once  you get your fill of that [...]

In re: $1.52 billion verdict against Microsoft in patent dispute

The $1.52 billion verdict, the largest ever in  a patent dispute, was handed down yesterday at the US District Court in San Diego, ruling that Alcatel-Lucent’s patent on MP3 technology that was developed by Bell Labs among others.
“At issue is the way the Windows Media Player software from Microsoft plays audio files using MP3, the [...]

In re: The next front for video sharing battle

“ One of the last places you might expect to find copyright violations is on a Web site backed by Time Warner and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner.” (A new copyright battlefield: Veoh Networks)
 Veoh a privately held company backed by many entertainment insiders (suprisingly enough) has plans to distribute full length videos and has already [...]

In re: Watching the NFL in China

Interesting article about living in China and watching the NFL over the internet there. The NFL this year added for international viewer the ability to subscribe to online streaming coverage if you ponied up the cash ($250 for the season – clearly aimed at passionate expats and not the casual newcomer to the game).  The [...]