Cleveland Baseball Will Share ‘Guardians’ Name With Roller Derby Team; The New York Times, November 16, 2021

Neil Vigdor, The New York Times ; Cleveland Baseball Will Share ‘Guardians’ Name With Roller Derby Team

The settlement of a federal lawsuit will allow the Major League Baseball franchise to move forward with renaming its team, amid a reckoning over symbols of racism.

"Call it a shared guardianship.

Cleveland’s Major League Baseball franchise and a local roller derby team announced on Tuesday that they had reached a settlement in a naming dispute that had escalated to a federal lawsuit. They will both be called the Guardians...

In the lawsuit, the roller derby team, which is based in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, Ohio, said it was “inconceivable” that a baseball franchise worth more than $1 billion would not have performed a Google search for the name Cleveland Guardians. If it did, the lawsuit said, it would have found the website for the roller derby team, which operates as a nonprofit organization."

Spinal Tap Creators and Universal Music Settle Copyright Dispute; Variety, November 5, 2019

Jem Aswad, Variety; Spinal Tap Creators and Universal Music Settle Copyright Dispute

"The complaint also sought a judgment in the actors’ right to reclaim their copyright to the film and elements of its intellectual property (screenplay, songs, recordings and characters). Vivendi has claimed that the film was created as a work for hire, with the studio essentially the author. This would prevent the actors from exercising their option to reclaim the rights to the film 35 years after its initial release, which is permitted by law.

“The scale and persistence of fraudulent misrepresentation by Vivendi and its agents to us is breathtaking in its audacity,” Shearer said in a statement at the time. “The thinking behind the statutory right to terminate a copyright grant after 35 years was to protect creators from exactly this type of corporate greed and mismanagement. It’s emerging that Vivendi has, over decades, utterly failed as guardian of the Spinal Tap brand – a truer case of life imitating our art would be hard to find.”"

Apple, Samsung Declare Peace in Biggest Modern Tech Patent Fight; Bloomberg, June 27, 2018

Susan Decker, Mark Gurman, Joel Rosenblatt, Bloomberg; Apple, Samsung Declare Peace in Biggest Modern Tech Patent Fight

 

"The biggest patent battle of the modern technology world has finally come to an end after seven years.

 

Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. told a judge Wednesday they’d resolved the first filed but last remaining of the legal disputes that once spanned four continents. The string of lawsuits started in 2011 after Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder who died that year, threatened to go “thermonuclear” on rivals that used the Android operating system. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the accord.

 

While the overall Smartphone Wars included every major maker of mobile devices, the fight between Apple and Samsung was the most intense. Apple accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying the iPhone design, while a Samsung lawyer once called Apple a “jihadist.” The ensuing litigation cost each company hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees, and tested their reputations as innovators."

It Took 17 Years: Freelancers Receive $9 Million in Copyright Suit; The New York Times, April 30, 2018

Jaclyn Peiser, The New York Times;It Took 17 Years: Freelancers Receive $9 Million in Copyright Suit

"Seventeen years after nearly 3,000 freelance journalists filed a class-action lawsuit claiming copyright infringement by some of the country’s biggest publishers, the checks are finally in the mail.

The 2,500 writers who made it through the tortuous legal process will start receiving their pieces of a settlement totaling $9 million this week...

The Authors Guild filed the suit — along with the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National Writers Union and 21 freelance writers named as class representatives — in 2001 after publishers licensed articles by freelancers to the electronic database Lexis/Nexis and other digital indexers without getting the writers’ approval. The publishers include The New York Times, Dow Jones, and Knight Ridder, as well as Reed Elsevier, the provider of Lexis/Nexis.

 

 “For the Authors Guild, this is our bread and butter — to make sure the authors and journalists get paid,” said Mary Rasenberger, the executive director of the Authors Guild."

Sweet settlement: Cookie shop trademark suit resolved; RichmondBizSense, March 29, 2018

Mike Platania, RichmondBizSense; Sweet settlement: Cookie shop trademark suit resolved

"Richmond-based Red Eye Cookie Co. earlier this month reached a settlement in trademark infringement case filed against it last year by Insomnia Cookies. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Insomnia, which filed suit in Charlottesville federal court in January 2017, claimed Red Eye’s business model, logo and brand were too similar to its own. Each company offers late-night cookie delivery and their logos both feature a crescent circle."

IBM settles legal dispute with diversity officer hired by Microsoft; IBM, March 5, 2018

Jan Wolfe, Reuters; IBM settles legal dispute with diversity officer hired by Microsoft

"International Business Machines Corp on Monday said it settled a trade secrets lawsuit it brought against its former chief diversity officer who left for a similar job at Microsoft Corp.

The settlement allows Lindsay-Rae McIntyre to begin working at Microsoft in July."

James Joyce Estate Agrees to Pay Plaintiff's Fees in Fair Use Dispute; National Law Journal, via Law.com, 9/30/09

Karen Sloan, National Law Journal, via Law.com; James Joyce Estate Agrees to Pay Plaintiff's Fees in Fair Use Dispute:

"The estate of author James Joyce has agreed to pay $240,000 in legal costs incurred by a Stanford University scholar following a fair use legal battle over a book about Joyce's daughter.

The settlement ends more than a decade of wrangling over Carol Shloss' book "Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake," which was to include copyrighted material from the celebrated author. Shloss was represented by attorneys from Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project; Keker & Van Nest; and Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin.

Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project, said the latest settlement brings to a close one of the more prominent academic fair use cases in recent years, which garnered interest in part because of the Joyce estate's aggressive approach to protecting copyrighted material. Other Joyce scholars for years have clashed with the estate -- controlled by the author's grandson Stephen James Joyce and trustee Sean Sweeney -- while attempting to excerpt his writing. Falzone said Shloss' legal success should give others the confidence to pursue their fair use rights.

"It really sends a message to people in Carol's position," Falzone said of the settlement. "Often what happens is that the mere threat of legal action is enough to scare [academics] off, and it leads to self-sensorship."

In a written statement, Shloss said that literary estates need to be cautious. "If they don't pay attention to the rights of scholars, authors and researchers, they may end up paying just as the Joyce estate did," she said.

Shloss' success won't create a legal precedent, however, since her ability to publish excepts of Joyce's letters and published works and her collection of legal fees from the Joyce estate were reached through settlements. "

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202434181383&pos=ataglance

Students Reach Settlement in Turnitin Suit; Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus, 8/3/09

Erica Hendry via Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus; Students Reach Settlement in Turnitin Suit:

"A two-year battle over copyright infringement between four students and Turnitin, a commerical plagiarism-detection service, came to an apparent end last Friday in a settlement that prohibits either party from taking further legal action.

The high-school students first sued iParadigms, Turnitin's parent company, in 2007 for copyright infringement, saying the company took their papers against their will and then made a profit from them.The students' high schools required them to use the service, which scans papers for plagiarism and then adds them to its database, which students argued could easily be hacked.

But the students and their lawyers were handed two decisions against them -- first from the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., in March 2008 and again this April from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit."

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Students-Reach-Settlement-in/7569/

At Columbia Conference, Harvard’s Darnton Asks: Is Google the Elsevier of the Future?, Library Journal, 3/18/09

Via Library Journal: At Columbia Conference, Harvard’s Darnton Asks: Is Google the Elsevier of the Future?:

"Is the public’s interest in books at risk with the pending Google Book Search Settlement? That was one of many issues addressed at an all-day conference on the settlement, held on March 13 at Columbia University.

In the final panel of the day, which addressed public interest issues, Google’s Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, responded a bit pugnaciously...He suggested that “a special type of researcher,” such as automated translation experts, would also benefit enormously from the database, that “the long term effects of those researchers having access to this corpus” could even lead “to more peace in the world,” and that the database would add significantly to access to books by disabled people, citing an endorsement from the National Federation of the Blind...

“The downside has to do with the danger of monopoly,” he [Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton] said, adding that, while not all monopolies are bad, the danger comes in the abuse of power, notably via monopoly pricing. “So we have a situation where Google can really ratchet up prices, and that’s what really worries me,” he said. “There’s no real authority to enforce fair pricing… I’m worried that Google will be the Elsevier of the future, but magnified by a hundred times.” Without a mechanism to police pricing, he warned, “it’s going to ruin libraries.”...He called the provision of one terminal in public libraries “one of the weakest provisions,” and predicted chaos in a large urban public library. Google, meanwhile, has said it would consider more than one terminal in larger libraries.

Another solution?
Is Congressional intervention on the public’s behalf a possibility? Does the settlement, for example, make it harder, or perhaps easier to go to Congress for authorization to create a national digital library? “I hate to say this, I don’t think it’s possible,” Darnton said. “We’ve got this settlement, and if it’s not modified now, it’s going to shape the world of digital information for the near future, maybe the far future.”"

http://www.libraryjournal.com/CA6645344.html

Register of Copyrights Not Asked by Congress To Weigh in on Google Book Search?, Library Journal, 3/20/09

Via Library Journal: Register of Copyrights Not Asked by Congress To Weigh in on Google Book Search?:

"Out of last Friday's all-day Columbia University conference on Google Book Search came this interesting little tidbit: Register of Copyrights Mary Beth Peters had recommended against the Library of Congress participating in Google’s initial Library Partners program, because she wasn’t sure that Google’s indexing of copyrighted books was a fair use.

That in and of itself is not a shocker—a lot of experts are still torn over whether the plan was indeed a fair use. But as Cornell University’s Peter Hirtle noted, the real surprise is that Congress, well, just didn’t seem to care about the program.

“Most disturbing of all was Peters’s admission that not one member of Congress has asked the Copyright Office to comment on the settlement," Hirtle blogged “even though it may fundamentally change how Americans can access and use copyrighted information.”

Certainly, that insight has to make one wonder how much Congress cares about the promotion of progress at the bedrock of copyright law. Last year, Congress failed to pass orphan works legislation but passed a draconian bill stiffening infringement penalties. And while sitting out the potentially momentous discussion over copyright as raised by Google Book Search, Congress is agian considering the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act—controversial legislation that would bar public access to research funded by taxpayers, and would undo the NIH’s access policy, enacted last year.

Notably, Peters was also not asked to testify at a hearing on the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act during a congressional hearing last year—but, curiously, a former register of copyright, Ralph Oman was asked, and did testify. Oman told lawmakers that the public access policies, like the NIH’s, would harm publishers and gut copyright."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6645344.html

At Panel on Google Book Settlement, Support, Criticism, Contentiousness, Library Journal, 1/29/09

Via Library Journal: At Panel on Google Book Settlement, Support, Criticism, Contentiousness:

• "Pricing issues unresolved
• Is public library access “product placement”?
• Will city managers think Google is a library?
  
  In a lively, sometimes contentious discussion Saturday at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Denver, Dan Clancy, engineering director for the Google Book Search Project, diligently explicated the proposed settlement with publishers and authors over books scanned from libraries, but was unable to answer some pressing questions from librarians, noting that the settlement itself remains unresolved."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6633319.html

Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books, New York Times, 1/5/09

Via New York Times: Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books:

"Some scholars worry that Google users are more likely to search for narrow information than to read at length. “I have to say that I think pedagogically and in terms of the advancement of scholarship, I have a concern that people will be encouraged to use books in this very fragmentary way,” said Alice Prochaska, university librarian at Yale.

Others said they thought readers would continue to appreciate long texts and that Google’s book search would simply help readers find them.

“There is no short way to appreciate Jane Austen, and I hope I’m right about that,” said Paul Courant, university librarian at the University of Michigan. “But a lot of reading is going to happen on screens. One of the important things about this settlement is that it brings the literature of the 20th century back into a form that the students of the 21st century will be able to find it.”

Google’s book search has already entered the popular culture, in the film version of “Twilight,” based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire. Bella, one of the main characters, uses Google to find information about a local American Indian tribe. When the search leads her to a book, what does she do?

She goes to a bookstore and buys it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/technology/internet/05google.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=google&st=cse

Questions Raised About Google Library Project’s Impact On Knowledge Access, Intellectual Property Watch, 11/26/08

Via Intellectual Property Watch: Questions Raised About Google Library Project’s Impact On Knowledge Access:

"Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently raised concerns about Google’s new settlement with publishers allowing the search engine to continue borrowing millions of books from libraries and scanning them to make a digital library.

His remarks were made to an international library copyright event in Chisinau, Moldova on 13 November where he spoke on the subject of “copyright’s ever-expanding empire” addressing digital rights management (technologies for controlling copyrighted content), licences and the privatisation of public information.

The key concern is that the Google project, likely to go into effect in 2010, will be in the private sector, which has different implications than public libraries, which von Lohmann described...

The Google project was settled out of court, which may prevent the outcome from being a precedent, noted von Lohmann, who added, “I think it [the Google project] raises many questions that are going to be with libraries for many years.”"

http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=1332

Markets Declare Truce in Copyright Wars, Google concedes that information isn't free, Wall Street Journal, 11/17/08

Wall Street Journal: Markets Declare Truce in Copyright Wars, Google concedes that information isn't free:

"This shift by Google led Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs books, to wonder if the book settlement could have lessons for other owners of content. "Google has now conceded, with a very large payment, that information is not free," Mr. Osnos wrote for the Century Foundation. "This leads to an obvious, critical question: Why aren't newspapers and news magazines demanding payment for use of their stories on Google and other search engines? Why are they not getting a significant slice of the advertising revenues generated by use of their stories via Google?"

Alas for the troubled news media industry, so much of its news is commoditized that people won't pay for it online. But as digital media mature, we'll see more redefinitions of legal concepts such as fair use. There will also be revisions of business practices regarding who gets paid what by whom. The Google settlement is a reminder that owners of intellectual property can choose to lock it away, give it away, or, most sensibly, share it in exchange for reasonable compensation.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122688619008032339.html

Google book search deal is good news for copyright law, London Times, 11/19/08

Via London Times: Google book search deal is good news for copyright law, The search giant's settlement with publishers could be a game-changing legal event, says the MP for Intellectual Property:

"Many US libraries are intending to make out of print material available to Google on this basis. The impact on access to such works in the US is likely to be significant, enabling consumers to access works they previously would have struggled to find.

The effect of this agreement will in the most part be limited to the US. And yet the announcement is of interest to users of the copyright system worldwide. Why? Because this is an agreement that, if it works as it should, will strike a middle ground between the need for public access to works and the right of authors and publishers to control and be paid for the use of their creations.

The result, if it works, will be an evolution in the way copyright licensing for printed works is administered and a revolution in the freedom of access to harder-to-find works — all within a system that will remunerate rights holders fairly and give them control over the use of their works. "

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article5187385.ece

Harvard Slams Google Settlement; Others React with Caution - Library Journal, 10/30/08

Via Library Journal: Harvard Slams Google Settlement; Others React with Caution:

"As LJ noted in its initial report, most observers say that the success of the deal will be in the details—and, as of now, this broad, complex business arrangement, still seeking court approval, simply leaves many questions open—especially for libraries. LJ has put together a quick roundup of thoughtful opinions now circulating about what the settlement means..."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6610115.html

Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning - New York Times, 10/29/08

Via New York Times: Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning:

"Settling a legal battle, Google reached an agreement with book publishers and authors that clears the way for both sides to more easily profit from digital versions of printed books.

The agreement, under which Google would pay $125 million to settle two copyright lawsuits over its book-scanning efforts, would allow it to make millions of out-of-print books available for reading and purchasing online.

It outlines the framework for a new system that will channel payments from book sales, advertising revenue and other fees to authors and publishers, with Google collecting a cut.

The deal goes some way toward drawing a road map for a possible digital future for publishers and authors, who worried that they were losing control over how their works were used online, as the music industry has."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/technology/internet/29google.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=google&st=cse&oref=slogin

Google Settles Book-Scan Lawsuit, Everybody Wins - Wired.com , 10/28/08

Via Wired.com: Google Settles Book-Scan Lawsuit, Everybody Wins:

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/10/google-settles.html

Settlement Rumored To Be Close in Google, Publisher Lawsuit - Library Journal, 10/10/08

Settlement Rumored To Be Close in Google, Publisher Lawsuit:

"Google, meanwhile, faces a content industry that is running out of patience with companies that launch products using copyrighted content in hopes of negotiating deals later. Recent months have seen innovative services like Red Lasso and popular upstarts like Scrabble knock-off Scrabulous removed from the Internet. And, of course, Google is currently facing a massive billion-dollar infringement suit from Viacom over its YouTube service...

The Google Book Search Library Project now numbers over 30 partners worldwide, and has scanned over one million books at the University of Michigan alone. The suit, however, has affected how aggressively Google’s library scan plan has been implemented, with most new library partners scanning only public domain materials, and with most new deals not providing for “a library copy” of the scanned work, a contentious provision in Google’s early deals."
http://www.libraryjournal.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6603957