Category Archives: Intellectual Property

Private: Mouldy French Apples

March 25, 2006 – 10:33 pm

Geeklawyer has said before that he is a conflicted Apple fanboy. The iPod and OSX-10 are sexy designer kit with great interfaces. OSX is Linux as it should be: full of non-geeky ‘just workingness’. But its hardware is always a tad expensive, significantly and deliberately so: Apple’s profit centre is bolts not bits. And it […]

By Geeklawyer | Also posted in copyright, p2p | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

IP Judge asks awkward policy question

January 16, 2006 – 9:28 pm

Geeklawyer doesn’t always agree with Court of Appeal judge Sir Robin Jacob’s decisions (he probably doesn’t fret too much about that, one suspects) but at a seminar for the Society for Computers and Law he spoke unadulterated good sense:
“Do we need patents for computer programs? Where is the evidence for it?”

By Geeklawyer | Also posted in patents | Comments (1)

Open Rights Group taking members

January 16, 2006 – 2:12 pm

The Open Rights Group, a collection of digital rights activists who nearly had a cool acronym but for the letter ‘y’ not starting enough words, are now taking members & money.

By Geeklawyer | Also posted in Civil liberties & human rights | Comments (0)

outsourcing in-house IP

December 16, 2005 – 9:41 pm

While something of an oxymoron, the outsourcing in-house IP work article from ipupdate also raises, for city & specialist firms, some uncomfortable future prospects.

By Geeklawyer | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Tell me again - patents help the little guy, right?

October 12, 2005 – 11:56 am

twoseventyone report that in Germany carmakers are strong-arming their small and medium sized suppliers into surrendering their IP (including patents) in order to win contracts.

By Geeklawyer | Also posted in patents | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Royal Society of Arts IP Charter

October 10, 2005 – 3:53 pm

News via John Howkins: The RSA has just launched ‘the Charter on Intellectual Property’ focused on redressing the balance between the creators of IP and its users.

By Geeklawyer | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Open Business models

October 10, 2005 – 11:27 am

Via Boing Boing: How do you make a viable business when you give your stuff away for free and don’t protect (or at least fully protect) proprietary interests with IP rights?

By Geeklawyer | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

who should own commissioned software?

September 21, 2005 – 8:26 pm

Over at Naked Law the Cambridge boys are chewing the Clearspring gristle. This is a classic contract negotiation problem to IT lawyers: who gets the code copyright?

By Geeklawyer | Also posted in copyright, licenses | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Record companies go after Chinese mp3 search engines

September 16, 2005 – 3:49 pm

Baidu the wildly successful Chinese music search engine is being sued by the Chinese arms of the Usual Suspects. Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony BMG and subsidiaries, Cinepoly, Go East and Gold Label have filed a complaint in a Beijing court that the search engine enabled users to find and download mp3 music files.

By Geeklawyer | Also posted in copyright | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Digital rights campaign group formed in the UK

September 7, 2005 – 11:20 am

Well, it’s that time of year again. Another UK digital rights organisation, the Open Rights Group, has been formed to campaign against the excesses of the government and their commercial masters.

By Geeklawyer | Also posted in Civil liberties & human rights, politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)