Reuters via New York Times;
"A U.S. judge ordered Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] to promptly return any files that had been downloaded and taken from Alphabet Inc's Waymo self-driving car unit but said the ride-services company could continue work on its autonomous car technology.
The latest court ruling in a high-profile trade secrets case from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco, made public on Monday, granted a partial injunction against Uber, which Waymo has accused of using stolen information to accelerate the building of its autonomous cars.
Alsup said in the ruling that Uber "likely knew" or should have known that the former Waymo engineer, Anthony Levandowski, who now works at Uber, took Waymo materials.
The case hinges on more than 14,000 confidential files that Waymo alleges Levandowski stole before he left the company."
Jonathan Taplin, Los Angeles Times; The tech industry is eroding copyright law. Here's how to stop it
"The only way to get Internet companies to honor the widely accepted understanding of fair use is to make it law. Although the current legal definition makes one thing crystal clear — you cannot use a work in its entirety and still claim fair use — it leaves many aspects of the doctrine open to interpretation. The Registrar of Copyrights should codify a 30-second time limit for audio and video clips and require that content be used in a transformative or interpretive way.
With concrete guidelines in place, regulation would have to be built in. For instance, when a user asserts fair use for a work that YouTube identifies as being blocked by the copyright holder, the clip would have to be sent to a human screener for evaluation. If it is longer than 30 seconds or does not appear in a transformative work, the clip would remain blocked. YouTube already has this process in place for screening pornography, ISIS videos and the like.
The ambiguous definition of fair use allows for its continued abuse, and this abuse has become a gateway for the further eroding of copyright law. By now it is well understood that the rise of tech monopolies such as YouTube and Google has hastened the decline of publishing industries. If we don’t move to safeguard copyright law now, there will be no new content to remix."
Due.com, Small Business Trends;
"Throughout history, ingenious and innovative ideas have been copied, or outright stolen. Guglielmo Marconi is credited with inventing the radio, even though it originated from Nikola Tesla. Nowadays it’s easy for a business owner to patent a great idea.
Robert Fulton took the idea for the steamboat engine from John Fitch. Lizzie Magie invented the board game “Monopoly” in 1903, but it was patented by Clarence B. Darrow in the 1930s. Even Apple has been accused of stealing ideas from Google, Microsoft, and Samsung.
Instead of letting another party run away with your great ideas and make a fortune, you need to protect your ideas from the get-go."
Barbara Goldberg, Reuters;
"From President Donald Trump's dash to own "Keep America Great" for his 2020 re-election campaign even before he took office to a rush by a foundation for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks to claim "Let's Roll" just days after New York's Twin Towers were reduced to rubble, Americans [sic] rushing to trademark catchy phrases.
There were 391,837 trademark applications filed last year, with the number growing an average of 5 percent annually, government reports show. The USPTO does not break out how many of those applications were for phrases.
The upsurge is the result of headline-grabbing cases like socialite Paris Hilton's winning settlement of a lawsuit over her trademarked catch-phrase "That's Hot" from her former television reality show, said trademark attorney Howard Hogan of Washington."
Robert Burack, Government Technology;
[Kip Currier: 2017 marks the 10th year of this blog. This post is the 3,000th: an illustrative "lessons-learned" case study of "grassroots" Open Data sharing between City of Pittsburgh data analysts and neighborhood residents.]
"This story was originally published by Data-Smart City Solutions.
When Pittsburgh developed Burgh’s Eye View, the city’s recently-launched open data application, the city’s Analytics & Strategy team visited 26 community meetings in early 2017 to gather actionable feedback and share the application with the community...
The team of analysts offered short presentations focused on how residents might use the application to understand what’s happening in their neighborhood, solicited suggestions for improvements and additional data to include in future updates, and engaged in one-on-one conversations to gain a better understanding of individual residents’ needs.
The team had to thoughtfully consider how to “filter out the tech speak” and present in an accessible and digestible way. The resulting takeaways from the team outline pathways for transforming city analysts into user advocates, show the value of building a broad constituency and taking iterative action based on resident feedback, and provide insight into why cities should pursue open data civic engagement in addition to user research."
Karin Wulf, The Scholarly Kitchen; Intellectual Property, Long Story Short
"Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, and the author of books including Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry). Amazon helpfully reminded me that I bought the latter just shortly after it was published in 2011, thereby underscoring one of its broader points. Googlization wasn’t about, as one review asked, whether Google “turned evil,” but about the impact of information aggregation and dissemination organized by algorithms designed for market rather than knowledge development. Awareness about the business models driving services we have welcomed into our daily practices has been a key part of recent discussions in scholarly communications, though I sometimes wonder whether we have fully digested the import of this insight or if it’s still a lump in the middle of the python. Debates about the character of search engines, analysis of scholarly research through citation and other metrics, and for-profit networks such as Academia.edu are all part of a growing comprehension that the structures around us were not built for the uses to which we put them; we search for information online, and as we do so those search engines are compiling a lot more information about us.
Vaidhyanathan has now written a book with the premise that understanding the basics, and by extension, some of the subtleties involved in how intellectual property law and practice has evolved, really matters. It’s clearly part of his larger interest in revealing, if not as dramatically as Neo taking the red pill to reveal The Matrix, the structures to which we’ve become so accustomed and the contours of which are now so indistinct that even resistance to them can be misdirected. Vaidhyanathan has chosen to (or rather, was encouraged by an editor) write this in a slightly unusual format, the Oxford University Press Very Short Introductions (VSI) series. Launched in 1995, the series of now over 500 titles offers “concise and original” treatment of a vast array of topics."
Associated Press via New York Times;
"De Joux said she sought and received assurances from music and advertising experts that using "Eminem Esque" would be acceptable because it was part of a licensed music library and was free from any copyright issue...
Under cross-examination, de Joux said she had not sought legal advice on using the song nor approached Eminem's representatives to get approval."
