A press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that a March 28 decision by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California reversed in part the court’s March 22, 2002 order against Taxes.com directing the company to change content critical of its competitor J.K. Harris that appeared prominently in search engine results. Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Patent and Trademark
USPTO Proposes Electronic Image Management System
This United States Patent and Trademark Office proposed rulemaking seeks to implement a “beginning-to-end electronic processing of patent applications.” The use of paper in the application process will be replaced by an imaging system to scan all documents and produce digital image files. Continue Reading
Legal Protection of Digital Information
Professor of Computer Science Lee A. Hollaar has made available, at no fee, virtually the entire text of his treatise, Legal Protection of Digital Information, published by BNA. The Table of Contents provides direct links to each chapter and respective sections therein, which include the following topics: Copyright Overview, Software, Copyright, Digital Copyright, Patent Overview… Continue Reading
Trademark Decision from Supreme Court Impacts Domain Names
On March 4, the Supreme Court released a unanimous decision in Moseley et al., dba v. V Secret Catalogue, Inc., et al., No. 01-1015, a trademark dilution case (Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995 (FTDA) at Section 43(c) of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. §1125(c). According to Declan McCullagh’s article on the decision, “the justices… Continue Reading
Google Obtains Patent on Search Results Ranking
Google obtained its first patent from the United States Patent Office, on February 25, for a “method of identifying documents relevant to a search query.” The patent (6,526,440), abstract states, “A search engine for searching a corpus improves the relevancy of the results by refining a standard relevancy score based on the interconnectivity of the… Continue Reading
Website on New Words and Phrases
Check out Word Spy, a resource that provides definitions of new words and phrases, as well as ones already in use that have taken on new meanings. What makes the site especially interesting is that it includes ‘example citations’ for each entry that illustrate the use of the word or phrase in context (with a… Continue Reading
Alternatives to the Blackberry
Forbes offers worried Blackberry users a review of alternative products which may come in handy in light of the current legal battle underway between Research In Motion and NTP. Continue Reading
BlackBerry Patent Fight Escalates
As noted in my January 17 posting, BlackBerry parent Research in Motion is involved in a patent infringement dispute in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia with NTP Inc., that may result in an end to Blackberry’s rein over the wireless handheld market. Today’s New York Times reports that NTP Inc.… Continue Reading
USPTO Hearing on Protection of Copyrighted Works
The USPTO held a hearing yesterday in accordance with the requirements of the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002 (known as the TEACH Act), Public Law 107-273. See my previous post here on this issue of protecting digitized copyrighted works that are used in distance education. Public comments from the Federal Register notice… Continue Reading
SBC's Web Patent Fight
This month SBC Communications Inc. launched an effort to actively protect its patents on a “structured document browser,” U.S. patent No. 5,933,841 and No. 6,442,574. SBC sent a patent infringement notice to information education products website Museum Tour indicating that “any website which has static, linked information (top banners, menus, bottom banners) which are displayed… Continue Reading
Congress and Blackberries
The House BlackBerry communication program, initiated in 2001, provided all members with the device, and paid for the associated e-mail service (to the tune of $6 million). The adoption of this wireless technology was related to the events of 9/11. However, Congress is now caught in an uncomfortable position concerning its continued use of the… Continue Reading
IBM Tops in Patent Applications
IBM announced that they now have a decade-long record for the most patents granted to one company (22,357). For 2002 alone, that number was 3,288 patents. Continue Reading
