U.S. Marshalls raid a Chinese hoverboard maker’s booth at CES; Digital Trends, 1/8/16

Ed Oswald, Digital Trends; U.S. Marshalls raid a Chinese hoverboard maker’s booth at CES:

"The company sent a cease-and-desist letter to Changzhou in December, but received no response. Future Motion’s lawyer told Bloomberg that his company again tried to reach out the day before the show opened, but failed to achieve any resolution. On Wednesday, Future Motion filed a request with a federal judge to bar Changzhou from displaying its version, which the judge approved, and the result was Thursday’s raid.

As far as we can tell, this is the first time a seizure of this magnitude has happened on the floor of CES. The show itself actually has policies intended to discourage disputes on the show floor, including prohibiting “loud” disputes, and limiting the number of company representatives (two employees, a translator, and a lawyer) who can approach another company’s booth over an intellectual property infringement claim."

The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’; Washington Post, 1/10/16

Justin Jouvenal, Washington Post; The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat ‘score’ :

"Police officials say such tools can provide critical information that can help uncover terrorists or thwart mass shootings, ensure the safety of officers and the public, find suspects, and crack open cases. They say that last year’s attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have only underscored the need for such measures.

But the powerful systems also have become flash points for civil libertarians and activists, who say they represent a troubling intrusion on privacy, have been deployed with little public oversight and have potential for abuse or error. Some say laws are needed to protect the public."

Monkey Has No Rights to Its Selfie, Federal Judge Says; New York Times, 1/8/16

Mike McPhate, New York Times; Monkey Has No Rights to Its Selfie, Federal Judge Says:

"“A monkey, an animal-rights organization and a primatologist walk into federal court to sue for infringement of the monkey’s claimed copyright. What seems like the setup for a punch line is really happening.”

Judge Orrick explained from the bench on Wednesday that he had no authority to extend such rights to animals.

“This is an issue for Congress and the president,” he said, according to Ars Technica. “If they think animals should have the right of copyright, they’re free, I think, under the Constitution, to do that.”"

‘The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet,’ by Justin Peters; New York Times Book Review, 1/8/16

Stephen Witt, New York Times Book Review; ‘The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet,’ by Justin Peters:

"By the end of “The Idealist,” Peters has dropped the pretension of neutrality and taken up Swartz’s crusade. This is fine, I think — it wouldn’t be a good biography if it didn’t have a point of view. But in the final pages, as Peters dons the sports coat of the history lecturer and draws a lame comparison between Aaron Swartz and Noah Webster, he disappoints once again. It’s the whole book in microcosm: superb when it focuses on its subject, unnecessary when it veers away."

New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive; New York Times, 1/6/16

Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times; New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive:

"But the game is what you might call a marketing teaser for a major redistribution of property, digitally speaking: the release of more than 180,000 photographs, postcards, maps and other public-domain items from the library’s special collections in downloadable high-resolution files — along with an invitation to users to grab them and do with them whatever they please.

Digitization has been all the rage over the past decade, as libraries, museums and other institutions have scanned millions of items and posted them online. But the library’s initiative (nypl.org/publicdomain), which goes live on Wednesday, goes beyond the practical questions of how and what to digitize to the deeper one of what happens next...

A growing number of institutions have been rallying under the banner of “open content.” While the library’s new initiative represents one of the largest releases of visually rich material since the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam began making more than 200,000 works available in high-quality scans free of charge in 2012, it’s notable for more than its size.

“It’s not just a data dump,” said Dan Cohen, the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, a consortium that offers one-stop access to digitized holdings from more than 1,300 institutions.

The New York Public has “really been thinking about how they can get others to use this material,” Mr. Cohen continued. “It’s a next step that I would like to see more institutions take.”

Most items in the public-domain release have already been visible at the library’s digital collections portal. The difference is that the highest-quality files will now be available for free and immediate download, along with the programming interfaces, known as APIs, that allow developers to use them more easily."

Comic Book Recalls Effort to Expose ‘Mein Kampf’; New York Times, 12/30/15

George Gene Gustines, New York Times; Comic Book Recalls Effort to Expose ‘Mein Kampf’ :

"The 70-year copyright on Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” expired on Thursday in Germany. And a comic book released last month sheds light on a legal battle over the book that occurred in America in 1939. The comic, “The Book That Hitler Didn’t Want You to Read,” tells the story of how Alan Cranston — then a journalist, and years later a California senator — produced his own version of Hitler’s book, only to be sued by Hitler.

“I was aware of the efforts of young Alan Cranston to warn the free world of the dangers that Hitler represented,” said Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, which produced the comic. “It seemed to me that Cranston’s story could be an effective vehicle to convey the new controversy over ‘Mein Kampf’ that would be starting after Dec. 31.”"

Patent Litigation Up in 2015, Despite Efforts to Rein it In; Wall Street Journal, 1/4/16

Ashby Jones, Wall Street Journal; Patent Litigation Up in 2015, Despite Efforts to Rein it In:

"According to the report, released Monday by RPX Corp., NPEs filed over 3,600 patent cases in 2015. NPEs, also referred to derisively by some as “patent trolls,” buy up patents and seek to make money from them through licensing and litigation.

NPEs filed 3,604 cases last year, a sharp increase over 2014, in which NPEs filed 2,891. The number was down slightly from 2013, in which NPEs filed 3,733 lawsuits.

The authors of the study acknowledge that the uptick is somewhat counterintuitive.

In recent years, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have all taken steps to curb litigation based on patents, especially those relating to computer software. Critics argue that many of these patents should not have been awarded in the first place.

The 2011 America Invents Act — Congress’s first overhaul of the patent laws in decades — established a new tribunal, called the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

The PTAB allows a company embroiled in a lawsuit to skip the question of whether it infringed a patent and challenge whether the patent should have been issued in the first place."