Do lawyers have either a sense of humor or of proportion? In the latest example (NY Times link here), two employees did a private performance taking off on a U2 song, “One”, celebrating the merger of two banks. It turned up as a humorous (or awful) video on a website, Stereogum.com. The Universal Music Publishing Group had its lawyer post a cease and desist letter on the site for copyright violation.

One wonders if it would ever have been noticed after a few days.

VoiceSignal Technologies has sued Nuance, maker of Dragon Naturally Speaking voice to computer screen software for patent infringement, as well as major retailers of the program. The suit alleges that Nuance violated VoiceSignal's patent covering the methodology for correcting errors in dictation software. (link here)

This case has the characteristic scent of a patent troll, seeking a payoff to settle out of court. Otherwise, why include the retailers in the suit. All that does is frighten them from selling the software and thus pressing Nuance to settle quickly.

The University of Alabama has sued a local artist for making a nice business from painting pictures of the university football team from photographs and selling them as paintings, photos thereof, and as logos on coffee mugs and other things. The university claims he violated the university's trademark rights, particularly its “famous crimson and white color scheme.” (link to article here)

The Times article (front page, yet!) makes clear how cloudy the law is here. Some courts have “tried to balance the rights of the owners of intellectual property against that of free expression. The cases, which involve a variety of legal theories, generally turn on whether consumers are apt to be confused about who produced the works in question and on whether artists managed to add something meaningful to the bare facts.”

Read the rest. Here we go again.

Via Bill Zame, there is an article in the New Republic about the role of intellectual property in assuring that you don't own your digital camera

While you might own the plastic, glass, and metal in the camera, you don't actually own the software that makes it run--you only have a license to it. And that license is pretty restrictive. If you let anyone outside your immediate family use the camera--if you lend it to a friend for the weekend or even ask a stranger to take a picture of you and your wife--Canon could technically sue you for breach of contract.

The article is here, but unless you have a subscription (I don't) you won't be able to read beyond the first paragraph. [Correction: Scate points out I was too hasty here - you just need to register to read the article...]

Over at research on innovation the current issue of their newsletter is out. A nice article about the hot topic of user innovation.

Techdirt reports that a court will review the constitutionality of fines levied in civil suits for downloading or sharing copyrighted material. The case was brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the defendants questioned the size of the compensation asked. The court ruled that the issue is germane. You can read the whole piece here. It is worth looking at the comments as well, as they discuss what is a reasonable fine and discriminate between a criminal and a civil case.

In a move parallel to that of YouTube, MySpace expands the effort against posting copyrighted material on its website. It has licensed a technology to compare member uploads of music against the licensor's music database and block any that are copyrighted (link here).

It says it has always been willing to take down material at the copyright-owner's request, but now the material won't ever see the webwaves. Apparently, the move is motivated by MySpace plans to sell music downloads and doesn't want free competition.

NTP, the company which extracted $612.5 million in its patent infringement lawsuit against BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, is now going after Palm, maker of Treo smart phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) that can send and receive e-mail by way of radio frequency to mobile processors, capabilities that NTP has patented, according to its complaint (link here).

NTPs patent claims continue to be questioned, but the litigation is costly and prolonged.

RIM folded because the threat of losing cast doubt over its continued existence and potential customers decided to buy a different product. Will Treo face the same fate?

Charles Lane writes in the Washington Post on who makes patent law (Washington Post link here). He gives pride of place to the Solicitor General, representing the Patent and Trademark Office, who is invited by the Supreme Court, feeling its own lack of expertise. The competition is the specialty court for patent and trademark law established by Congress in 1982, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In the 10 Supreme Court patent cases in which the solicitor general has participated since 1995, he always won.

Lane provides a current example, KSR International v. Teleflex, where the issue is the proper meaning of "obvious" in patent law, e.g., an extension on a vehicle's accerator to accomodate short people. Read the article for the details. Lane opines that the Solicitor General leans toward limiting the meaning of new and non-obvious.

Not exactly earth shaking.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) representing five record companies sued a woman for downloading and sharing music. She denied the charge and fought the suit. The plantiffs lacked proof but then turned around and sued her two children. The RIAA claims one of them admitted downloading, but their lawyer, present at the hearing, denied that an admission was made. It also charged them with sharing recordings (link here).

I wonder if it is possible to fight back by organizing a boycott of those five record companies. One can dream.