The Death of Privacy Shield and The “Necessity” of Processing
Last time, we gave witness to the demise of the EU-US Privacy Shield program. I promised you I would explain who might be able to take advantage of one of the last grounds remaining to import personal data to the US from the EU. That remaining ground is...
EU Kills Privacy Shield, Stabs EU-US Data Transfers Through the Heart
If your company is one of the 5378 who have certified under U.S. #Privacy Shield, your world got rocked last night. /1 — Your CCPA "Do Not Sell" Link is Not Conspicuous (@tara_aaron) July 16, 2020 If you are a company in the U.S. that collects personal information on...
How Much Mischief Can Copyright Registrations Cause?
What Happens if Reasonable Minds Could Disagree Whether Information in a Copyright Registration Is "Inaccurate"? Last time, I wrote about an outrageous legal result, Unicolors v. H & M. Because the copyright holder made a ministerial (i.e., minor) mistake on its...
Dumb Mistake in Copyright Registration Leads to Brutal and Unjust Consequences
When American Exceptionalism Isn’t Exceptional Americans assume copyright is something you have to register for. The rest of the world assumes either registration is voluntary or honestly doesn’t know what you’re talking about. The truth about copyright registration,...
The U.S. Copyright Office’s DMCA Section 512 Study Erases a Major Stakeholder
The U.S. Copyright Office’s Section 512 Report Is “Unbalanced” After five years of work, the U.S. Copyright Office has issued its lengthy report about how the DMCA safe harbors are working. If you want to read it, you can read it here. The headline takeaway was that,...
The Case of the Haunted House Logo Nightmare
Joint Operation of a Business Leads to a Nightmare of a Case It’s fun to blog about well-publicized cases, like the recent Stairway to Heaven decision. But I pay much more attention to quotidian IP cases like this one involving a haunted house on Washington State...
Your Internet Browsing History Is as Safe as Ever
Your web browsing history is exactly as safe from surveillance by the federal government as it was yesterday. Which is to say, not wide open, but not wildly safe either. The Hype Yesterday afternoon a vote took place in the United States Senate. Headlines emerged...
You Can’t See the Derby Race This Weekend, But You Can Still Say Derby Pie
Folks in Louisville already know this, but the rest of the world might be surprised – DERBY-PIE is a registered trademark. Not only is it a registered trademark, the owner of that trademark, Mr. Alan Rupp, is known to be a vigorous enforcer of his rights. All things...
Through Thick and Thin: Range of Expression as Basic Principle of Substantial Similarity
Songwriters: The Ninth Circuit Might Actually Have Heard You When the Blurred Lines verdict was reached—and again when it was upheld, twice—there were many stories about how the decision cast a pall on songwriting. What if I, a songwriter, accidentally wrote the...
Stairway to Abstraction: Selection, Arrangement and Dissection
A Layer Cake, or a Tower of Babel? Toward a General Theory and Test for Selection and Arrangement in Copyright Law One of the most bedeviling copyright concepts is… well, it has lots of different names. In the recent “Stairway to Heaven” decision, it was called...
The Happiest Ending for the “Stairway to Heaven” Case
Wherein Some Bad Old Mistakes Are Fixed, but Led Zeppelin Need Suffer No Longer The last couple of times I blogged about the “Stairway to Heaven” case, I was defending the Ninth Circuit’s decision to send the case back down to the trial court for a re-do, even though...
STELLA ROSA Might Be Confusable with Wine, but Is BELLA ROSA Confusable with It?
There’s little doubt that STELLA ROSA wines are popular. I’ve never tried them, but I am assured by wine critic Patrick Comiskey that they “resemble wine, they’re reminiscent of wine, but no one who drinks wine regularly would mistake it for wine.” It is, however,...
