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    Category: Intellectual property and its discontents

    • Federal Circuit on Disparaging Trademarks: “The Slants”

      by Gordon Hull An important trademark and First Amendment case was decided in the Federal Circuit yesterday. In it, the Court ruled in favor of Simon Tam, who named his band “The Slants.” When he attempted to register the band name as a trademark, the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) rejected the mark as “disparaging,”…

    • Permissions Culture: Copyright and complete subsumption

      Publishing in general, and for the visual arts in particular, has moved to what’s called a “permission culture,” which basically means that nobody will publish your work unless you get explicit permission from the rights owner.  This is often an arduous process, since art often includes many copyrighted images or other materials.  A documentary film…

    • Taylor Swift’s Platonism

      By Gordon Hull Over on Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James has a post up about Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album.  James focuses on two moments in that promotion: on the one hand, Swift has removed her music from the free streaming part of Spotify, on the grounds that it insufficiently compensates her (and…

    • Health Informatics, Negative Spaces, and Corporate Privacy

      by Gordon Hull Judge Richard Posner’s well-known application of law and economics to privacy yields results that appear, well, ideological.  First, he considers what individuals do with informational privacy. What is an interest in privacy of information, he asks?  Well, it’s an interest in enforcing an information asymmetry in markets.  Information asymmetry is presumptively bad…

    • Once More: ‘Intellectual Property’ Breeds Confusion; Drop it

      By: Samir Chopra Rarely, if ever, does the term 'intellectual property' add clarity to any debate of substance–very often, this is because it includes the term 'property' and thus offers an invitation to some dubious theorizing. This post by Alex Rosenberg at Daily Nous is a good example of this claim: Locke famously offered an account of the justification of private…

    • RFID Tags and Commodification

      by Gordon Hull In a recent post, and by way of an important paper by Katherine Hayles, I suggested that “insofar as RFID chips negotiate the boundary between informatics and objects, and transitions between those, they should be studied as sites for the primitive accumulation of capital.  That is, they are places where objects can…

    • Aereo, Cable TV, and the Privatization of the Public Sphere

      In the most anticipated Copyright decision this term, the Supreme Court today ruled, 6-3 (opinion by Breyer, dissent Scalia) that Aereo’s service for watching broadcast TV online violates the Copyright Act.  Briefly:  Aero operates a large number of tiny antennas.  Subscribers pick a program they want to watch, and get exclusive access to an antenna. …

    • Washington Redskins Lose off the Field

      In case you hadn’t heard, it’s been a big week in intellectual property.  The biggest news item in the non-legal press was the Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to cancel several of the NFL’s Washington Redskins trademarks because they were “disparaging.”  This review and cancellation is required by statute, and the decision is generating a…

    • Copy this Sheep!

      A few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeals issued a decision denying patentability to Dolly the Sheep.  Dolly, as one will recall, was the first successful mammalian clone from an adult somatic cell.  Essentially, researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh took an unfertilized donor egg, replaced the nucleus with one taken from a…