Intellectual Property Law Internet Law IT Law Computer Law

In the era of the Internet and processing of documents in digital form, Tomasz Rychlicki must go to the Supreme Court, to buy stamps for the sum of 12 Polish złoty. He has to stick these stamps on the sheet of paper on which he has to include and write down the signature of the judgment of the Supreme Court of 11 March 2008 (act signature II, CSK 539/07), which he knows about only from information made available in the Bulletin No. 7/08 of 8 August 2008, PDF file, it only says that:

Username (nickname) which is used by a person in Internet services is a subject to legal protection on the same grounds as the protection of personal name, pseudonym or company.

Tomasz Rychlicki has to write his e-mail address on the same sheet of paper together with judgement’s act signature and stuck and cross out (sic) stamps. When he sends this sheet of paper by fax, Tomasz Rychlicki receives the ruling via e-mail sent to the specified e-mail address. Nice ladies are working in the Supreme Court, who are really willing to help, but some procedures are set out by ******** (autocensorship). Piotr Waglowski has also wrote some comments about this judgement. After our brief conversation I was “elected” to get the text of this judgment.

The below citation is taken from the article available at www.slashdot.org website. I think it will perfectly fit into legal research category.

“The politicization of Bush’s Justice Department, which this week was officially determined to be illegal, has a funny side too. Sometime in 2005-2006, White House Liaison Jan Williams attended a seminar on LexisNexis searches, and wrote one herself. When she left, she passed it on to her successor Monica Goodling in an email. Justin Mason, author of SpamAssassin, is skeptical about its accuracy:

[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican!
or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton
or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat!
or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron
or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur!
or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!

Needless to say, when asked about it, Williams first said she didn’t remember ever seeing it, then said she’d used an edited version just once. LexisNexis records show she used it, as shown, 25 times.” Note that ’sex!’ appears twice in the query. Must be VERY important.

Today is the official “premiere” of the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market’s website and beginning July 1, 2008, the US Copyright Office is offering online registration of claims to copyright through the electronic Copyright Office (eCO) website.

I started an academic platform called www.lawinit.com together with dr Wojciech Wiewiórowski and thanks to great help of Marcin Sochacki and Marcin Czerwiński. We think about English version too so if you are interested in such academic cooperation then you are warmly welcomed. Meanwhile, among other things there are great translations of German courts judgments provided by Justyna Kurek.

I found it in the post available at www.boingboing.net website.

The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.

We’ve sent Oregon back two letters. The first reviews the law and explains to the Legislative Counsel why their assertion of copyright over the state statutes is particularly weak, from both a common law perspective and from their own enabling legislation.

The position of the Legislative Counsel is that their public access obligations have been fulfilled by their web site. However, their web site has over 500,000 HTML errors, does not meet Section 508 accessibility requirements, has no metadata, as our second letter points out.

Particularly galling is the fact that Thomson West has also made a copy of these statutes and has done so without a commercial license, but the Legislative Counsel explicitly told Tim Stanley of Justia that they weren’t going to send cease and desist letters to West. Evidently, it is much easier to pick on the little guys.

Oregon is not unique in asserting copyright over state law, but they are definitely one of the more aggressive in this kind of FUD campaign. Justia and Public.Resource.Org have decided this is an important issue to resolve and we’re going to hold firm on this. Anybody else who is making a mirror of the Oregon law should drop me a line and let me know.

The original letter can be found at www.scribd.com website. Would you like to know how it looks in Poland? In short. The Polish Act on Authors rights and Neighboring Rights of 4 February 1994 (Dziennik Ustaw No 24, pos. 83), consolidated text of 16 May 2006 (Dziennik Ustaw No 90, pos. 631), with later changes.

Art. 4. The following shall not be protected by copyright:
1) normative texts and the drafts thereof,
2) official documents, documentary material, devices and symbols,
3) descriptions of patents and other protection titles,
4) simple press news.

You can perform the legal interpretation for yourself.

From time to time you ask me about websites of Polish lawyers writing about IP i IT law. I’d like to write about some really good ones I wish they were written in English language. Piotr Waglowski website - www.prawo.vagla.pl is simply one of the best yet. Grzegorz Pacek wrote many interesting posts at ip.pacek.name website and I wish I could write like he does. I also like what Tomasz Klecor thinks and publish on his www.pingwinarium.pl website and I am always impressed by Krzysztof Siewicz opinions and articles about FLOSS which he puts on www.ksiewicz.net.

Finally, after remaining anonymous for some time, I am able to present you the Class46 project website. As you may read it is an experimental site dedicated to European trade mark law and practice by friends and supporters of MARQUES. I was invited by Jeremy Phillips to join this project. You will read news presented by a very small but also super-extra-nice team. My friends are Birgit Clark, Frédéric Glaize Julia Holden, Ignacio Marqués and Gino van Roeyen. I am really happy to be a part of this group. I learn from them a lot. I hope you will also enjoy reading Class46.

In a very very near perspective of time, (I must admit that I love unspecified terms because they allow me to feel so comfortably unobligated ;) I am going to publish some compilations of materials related to the US law (US copyright law, US patent law and US trademark law, maybe some other subjects from the field of so-called intellectual property law). I will use different syllabi and casebooks as a background for this project. I am going to use my access to www.westlaw.com and www.lexis.com databases to achieve this goal. There will be a good opportunity to start with this webpage if someone of you is interested in self-studying of such topics.
There is no strict copyright protection of databases in the US legal system. Since the judgement in the case Feist Publication, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service, 499 U.S. 340, 111 S. Ct. 1282, 113 L. Ed. 2d 358, (1991) one may observe wery strong pressure being exterted (so-called lobbying ;) in the US Congress to change the law and even to adopt (often criticized) European Union’s style protection, based on sui generis right to databases, as they are provided in the Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases. Official Journal L 077 , 27/03/1996 P. 0020 - 0028.
It will take me some time to prepare those materials so I’d like to ask you to be very patient, beside, patience is a virtue. I’d like also to recommend to you a lecture of the judgement in the case Mathew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co. 158 F.3d 674 (2d Cir 1998). This case is related to issues about legal databases and copyright subject matter of pagination of judgements. It was a long dispute and was even brought before the Supreme Court of the United States, based on the writ of certoriari, but the SCOTUS denided to hear it.

Very interesting tool, search engine, i.e. www.like.com website. Check what does Marty Schwimmer write about some potential legal problems in the US. There is also Susan Scafidi’s post about this issue. I wonder if this tool could be used by Patent Offices or patent attorneys.

Another version of the title of this post could be “a short know-how to create its own IP/IT news related website”. Ok, I skip all “setting up” issues (i.e.hosting, domains, CMS software, etc.). You can treat this post as developed version of “How to get legal information from the net?” one. We could divide our sources based on the form they are published.
A. Websites (available in a browser or via ATOM/RSS, Google Alerts, Google News)
A.1. News websites - magazines, blogs, communities, online libraries etc.
A.2. Offices, societies, organizations.
A.3. Websites of courts designated to hear IP/IT releated cases.
A.4. Legislator’s websites.
B. Newsgroups.
C. Newsletters.
You may see it’s a very brief description. As I wrote before all those news will be derivatively acquired. If you want to add a value to such site you must post any good authorship comments. I wish you good luck.

I will write about some ways to get free information releated to law because I do not want to leave some of you without daily news I have published here before. If you are looking for “something” in the Net I am pretty sure that first URL you will type in your browser will be www.google.com, without any doubt. I would like to stress that this post is about freely available sources so I will not write about such professional websites, services as www.westlaw.com and www.lexis.com. If you still want actively look for any legal sources you will probably check websites found via Google or any other search engine, newsgroups and legal websites fora. There are plenty of each. I will not give you speciic URLs there is no need. I got all URLs I prefer to read bookmakred. I use Firefox browser available at www.getfirefox.com. website for my security and comfort of work. The easiest way to read all bookmarked websites is to open them using “open in tabs” option. This is how I do my daily roundup. That’s all when you “ask” about information.
There are some standards and tools available which automate access to content of many websites since some time. I use ATOM at first place (does anybody know the answer why? ;) and RSS. Those features are implemented in many legal websites, almost each blogging platform has it, many patent offices, IP law releated organizations publish its content this way. I am pretty sure you will find suitable ATOM/RSS reader for you. Google has created Google Alerts service some time ago. It is available at www.google.com/alerts website. You can use as keywords such terms as: patent, trade mark, open source, etc. You can also subscribe to all newsletters you may be interested in. It is another way that news are “pushed” to you. Well this is it in a very very brief way. Please send me an e-mail if you know any other free legal reasearch techniques. You know how to contact with me.