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KinsellaLaw Web Log
• BLOG ARCHIVES
Sunday, June 30, 2002
A copyright in silence?:
London's The Independent reports that agents of "the avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage, who died in 1992" are upset that "Mike Batt, the man behind the Wombles and Vanessa Mae, has put a silent 60-second track on the album of his latest classical chart-topping protégés, the Planets." Cage's reps apparently claim that Batt's minute-of-silence infringe Cage's copyrights in Cage's song (sic), 4'33", which "contains" four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence, "composed" (sic) by Cage "in his"prime" (sic). "As [Batt's] mother said when I told her, 'which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?'." Batt's defense? "[M]y silence is original silence, not a quotation from [Cage's] silence." 
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Patent Rights Around the World:
For those interested in IP, patents, or economic freedom, the 2002 Economic Freedom of the World report may be of interest (press release). Released by the Cato and Fraser Institutes, the report also contains a separate study, Index of Patent Rights, which gives countries a ranking for their patent protection based on several objective factors, such as enforcement, etc.
Hong Kong tops the Economic Freedom list this year, followed by Singapore and the United States, which climbed from fifth to third place. The US leads all other nations in the patent rights study.
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Patent Law Discussion List:
Due to demand for it on another patent law email list I am on, I created the PatentLawPractice Yahoo group today. Click here to join.
Friday, June 14, 2002
Cool Footnote Policy:
Why I like The Greenbag (click "submissions"): "Citations should be accurate, complete, and unobtrusive. Familiar sources need no citation. Authors may use whatever citation form they prefer; we will make changes only to keep footnotes from looking like goulash."
Monday, June 10, 2002
Philosophy of Punctuation: For those who get worked up about proper use of commas, dashes, semicolons, and the like, see this fascinating article by Paul Robinson, author of Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters.
Tuesday, June 04, 2002
A War on PTO Deficiencies?: US Patent & Trademark Office Director James E. Rogan today unveiled the PTO's new restructuring proposal. Entitled "The 21st Century Strategic Plan", the plan is unintentionally amusing, and enlightening as to the essential difference between private business and government bureaucracies. When was the last time a business was so spectactularly successful at gaining new customers that it referred to it as a "crisis"? Could you imagine Pepsi getting nervous as it started gaining market share?
The government is a different animal. Drivers' license bureaus, for example, have a Stalinesque ugliness about them, combined with horrible service; they view additional "customers" as a burden. The same is apparently the case with our PTO. In the Strategic Plan, for example, Director Rogan says, "Today, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is under siege. Patent application filings have increased dramatically throughout the world. There are an estimated seven million pending applications in the world's examination pipeline, and the annual workload growth rate is in the range of 20-30 percent" (emphasis added).
This is not just isolated language. For instance, Rogan says "Europe, Japan and other industrialized nations face this same crisis. [...] This 21st Century Strategic Plan sets forth an ambitious agenda to resolve the crisis all intellectual property organizations are facing" (emphasis added). Horrible! Alert the media (uh, welll, he did)--we are UNDER SIEGE, there is an increase in business and customers are knocking down our doors! Crisis! Help!
Jeez, if you don't want the job, give me a call.
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