Property is any physical or virtual entity that is owned by an individual or jointly by a group of individuals. An owner of property has the right to consume, sell, rent, mortgage, transfer and exchange his or her property. Important widely-recognized types of property include real property (land), personal property (other physical possessions), and intellectual property (rights over artistic creations, inventions, etc.), although the latter is not always as widely recognized or enforced. A title, or a right of ownership, is associated with property that establishes the relation between the goods/services and other individuals or groups, assuring the owner the right to dispense with the property in a manner he or she sees fit. [From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]
Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information and the School of Law. She is also Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. Her principal area of expertise is intellectual property law. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies are posing for public policy and traditional legal regimes and is an advisor for the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic.
She selected several papers which are worth to be read by everyone interested in property rights issues. We report them here for our readers: Read the rest of this entry »
The Pirate Party, for the first time in history, will enter into European Parliament, having gained in Sweden 7.4 percent of the votes. A turning point which tells how nowadays the popular feeling around the topics of copyright on the Internet has changed. The main purpose of the Pirate Party is in fact to change the laws on the protection of copyright and they promit: “We’ll Defend freedom on the web”
This success is probably partially due to the process against the Swedish Pirate Bay, but there is more. It is a sign that young people want that the rooted habit to exchange music, films and games with their friends is recognized as a right and governments have to deal with that, without moving roughly against peer to peer and other forms of free distribution of knowledge.
China and Japan, in the effort to constrain the economic crisis, agreed to start a working group on protecting intellectual property rights.
“If an issue related to intellectual property rights occurs, we’d like to consider solving specific problems using this working group,” Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming said after meeting Japanese cabinet ministers at the countries’ High-Level Economic Dialogue.
Sachiko Sakamaki and Takshi Hirokawa report in an article published on Bloomberg.com on June 7, 2009, that China is Japan’s largest trading partner, and Japanese companies have complained about the mainland’s lack of copyright and patent protection.
The slump in China’s exports led to the nation’s slowest economic growth in almost a decade last quarter. China-Japan trade dropped 23 percent in the first four months from a year earlier and Japan’s direct investment in China shrank by 15 percent, according to Chinese data.
Japan is China’s third-largest trading partner after the European Union and the U.S.
BOSTON, MA — (Marketwire) — 05/08/09 — A free seminar on how to share intellectual property while preserving rights will be held by Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C., an IP law firm, on June 11 in Boston.
To generate ideas and investment, organizations need to share proprietary information internally and externally. But this can lead to loss of intellectual property exclusivity or even effectively relinquish ownership rights to others.
How does an organization disclose and leverage its intellectual property while preserving rights and keeping competitors and infringers at bay?
This seminar will detail IP communication strategies needed during the life of an invention from inception through commercialization. The panelists will cover
– Identifying and minimizing disclosure risks that can destroy IP rights
down the road
– Communicating safely with investors, universities, partners, and
consultants
– Using protection tools like attorney/client privilege, confidentiality
agreements, employee contracts, and trade secrets effectively
– Balancing the legal risks and business benefits of disclosure
“A superb offering showing how to avoid lawsuits by getting one’s hands on thousands of public domain songs, movies and manuscripts that can be used on websites or anywhere else free of charge.” — James Coates, Chicago Tribune
“How do you tell the difference between what’s copyrighted and what isn’t? A good starting point is Stephen Fishman’s The Public Domain.” — Associated Press
“The constitutional guarantee of a public domain was one of the Framers’ most important gifts to our cultural tradition. This extraordinary book makes real the value of that gift in the 21st Century.” — Laurence Lessig, author,Code & Other Laws of Cyberspace
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