Disclosure, Coding, and Click-Through
By Thomas P. Wolf
Under most circumstances, music writer Johnny Oxbridge would be exhilarated to open his MySpace inbox and find a message from DJ Showtime, a Los Angeles-based producer-rapper whose off-kilter beats—built on some of music’s most obscure sonic scraps—are the object of envy, scrutiny, and emulation by legions of independent hip-hop fans.1 A hip-hop enthusiast with a particular interest in production techniques and digital sampling, Oxbridge was the founder, editor- in-chief, and staff of Oxbeats.com, a website dedicated to cataloging, analyzing, and discussing the work of the genre’s leading producers. In addition to regular blog entries, Oxbridge’s site featured a wide variety of “sample sets”—compilations of digital versions of the songs sampled by his favorite producers to build their beats. In early March 2008, Oxbridge posted one of his more difficult-to- compile sets, which contained the samples from 2004’s Showbiz. The critically acclaimed product of a collaboration between Showtime and rapper Big Biz, Showbiz was different from many of the other albums Oxbridge had researched before; while the album’s liner notes featured elaborate artwork and extensive lyric sheets, they did not reveal its samples. So, Oxbridge had to start digging, resorting to his own knowledge and hints from his fellow fans to piece together the album’s sources. Continued…
Posted in Notes.
March 28, 2011 – Cite: 2011 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. N1
Time for Japan to Embrace Online Campaigning
By Matthew J. Wilson
Communication and social networks play a vital role in the modern world. The role and importance of social networks has been heightened by the advent of the Internet and the new “information age” in which modern society operates. The Internet has had a profound impact upon nearly every society, and it has increasingly assumed indispensable functions. Not only has the Internet changed the way that people communicate and network, but it is also one of the most powerful and far-reaching technological developments known to the world with respect to information exchange, education, business, and entertainment. Continued…
Posted in Articles.
February 19, 2011 – Cite: 2011 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 4
The Problem of Simultaneity
By Eric M. Fraser
Google Books represents the latest attempt at the centuries-old goal to build a universal library. In 2004, Google started scanning books from libraries around the world. Although it made copyright licensing agreements with some publishers, it did not obtain permission from each rightsholder before scanning, indexing, and displaying portions of books from the stacks of libraries. Unsurprisingly, authors and publishers sued for copyright violations. Google settled the class action lawsuit in a sweeping agreement that has raised suspicion from librarians, users, and the government. In this paper, I analyze the antitrust and competition issues in the original and amended settlement agreements. I find that the simultaneous aspects of agreements and pricing pose serious antitrust problems. The settlement effectively gives Google simultaneous agreements with virtually all the rightsholders to in-copyright American books. The original agreement also would have required Google to set prices for books simultaneously. In a competitive market, both agreements and pricing would occur independently. Under current law, however, no potential competitor can make agreements with the rightsholders to orphan works. The simultaneity, therefore, concentrates pricing power, leading to cartel pricing (a problem under § 1 of the Sherman Act) and monopolization (a § 2 problem).
Posted in Articles.
September 24, 2010 – Cite: 2010 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 4
A Fifteen-Year Revisiting of Barton Beebe’s Empirical Analysis of Multifactor Tests for Trademark Infringement
By Kevin Blum, Ariel Fox, Christina J. Hayes and James (Hanjun) Xu
In a typical case of trademark infringement, a plaintiff must show, among other things, that potential consumers would be confused as to the source of a good or service, due to the defendant’s use of a mark (or in the case of trade dress infringement, the same or similar product packaging, design, labeling, etc.) that creates confusion as to source, sponsorship, or affiliation. This inquiry into the likelihood of confusion is most often governed by multifactor tests, the most prominent of which is the test articulated in Polaroid Corp. v. Polarad Electronics Corp. by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The Second Circuit is of particular interest to those who study trademark law as it generates the greatest number of trademark infringement opinions. In the Polaroid test, eight factors are considered, including: the strength of the original user’s mark, similarity of the marks, proximity of the products, the likelihood that the original user would enter into the alleged infringer’s market (thus, “bridging the gap” between the two markets), evidence of actual confusion, the alleged infringer’s intent, the relative quality of the products bearing the marks in question, and sophistication of the consumers of the products. Continued…
Posted in Articles.
August 11, 2010 – Cite: 2010 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 3
Situating Quanta v. LGE in the Context of Supreme Court Jurisprudence
By Yina Dong
The Supreme Court decided Quanta v. LGE on June 9, 2008, marking the first time the Court had addressed the topic of patent exhaustion in sixty-six years. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the law of patent exhaustion and analyzes the holding in Quanta in the context of past Supreme Court jurisprudence. In determining when a patent may be exhausted by the sale of a component embodying that patent, Quanta merely followed the test first enunciated by the Court decades ago. Although the Supreme Court in Quanta did determine for the first time that process patents can be exhausted, that conclusion also followed directly from the test for components. Continued…
Posted in Notes.
April 30, 2010 – Cite: 2010 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. N2
From Gene Patents to Biomedical Materials
By Lisa Larrimore Ouellette
Patents claiming DNA sequences have been subject to extensive public and scholarly criticism due to their potential to impede innovation and to restrict access to affordable healthcare. Recent empirical studies, however, indicate that access to materials is a much more serious problem than patents are for basic biomedical researchers, and access to materials is also a critical problem for producers of biomedical end products like biopharmaceuticals. This Note argues that these physical research tools should be included in a more expansive concept of “bio-knowledge,” and that solving the access to materials problem is critical for increasing biomedical innovation. This problem has been caused in part by changing norms among basic researchers, but fully undoing the commercialization of university research is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, partial solutions may be found within the patent system, both through reducing the transaction costs associated with material transfers and through increased use of official material depositories by both basic and industrial researchers.
Posted in Notes.
March 12, 2010 – Cite: 2010 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. N1
Recent Comments