Yes, Samsung has decided to do a game-that-shan't-be-named commercial making fun of how the NFL is overly aggressive with their trademarks. I'd call Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd's delivery "brilliant", but that'd be like referring to Natalie Portman as "mildly attractive", and even I have some damned sense, people. The NFL likes to toss around a great deal of words and pretend like they're true even when they're not, especially when it comes to trademarks. This spot uses the absurdity of it all to highlight how aggressive they are. Maybe it will even open up an eye or two to the silliness of the ever-growing permission culture.

Some may express concern that the Free Universal Construction Kit infringes such corporate prerogatives as copyright, design right, trade dress, trademarks or patents of the supported toy systems. We encourage those eager to enforce these rights to please think of the children — and we assert that the home printing of the Free Universal Construction Kit constitutes protected fair use.

Today’s manufacturers have little or no intrinsic motivation to make their products compatible with anyone else’s. Indeed—despite obvious benefits to users everywhere—the implementation of cross-brand interoperability can be nearly impossible, given the tangled restrictions of patents, design rights, and trademarks involved in doing so. So we stepped up. The Free Universal Construction Kit is the VLC of children’s playsets.

As we can see from the example above, interoperability is a question of power and market dominance. Most market leaders regard interoperability as an anti-competitive nuisance, a regulatory check on their ambition, or a concession to the whining of lesser players. Quite simply, interoperability is the request of the disenfranchised. And which end-user, in so many ways, is less enfranchised than a preliterate child?

The simple fact is that no toy company would ever make the Free Universal Construction Kit. Instead, each construction toy wants (and indeed, pretends) to be your only playset. Within this worldview, the other manufacturers’ construction sets are just so many elephants in the room, competing for your attention on the shelves of Toys-R-Us. No longer. The Free Universal Construction Kit presents what no manufacturer could: a remedy providing extensible, post-facto syntactic interoperability for construction toys. Let the fun begin!

Here, for example, is a press release from the International Trademark Association (INTA), in which it makes an extraordinary offer:

the International Trademark Association (INTA) stands ready to provide any assistance to the Court or other interested parties in order to highlight the positive effects the trade agreement will have on the EU, its economy and its citizens.

The referral provides an opportunity for interested parties to continue the discussions based on ACTA's text itself, and not the heightened sense of mistrust and misinformation that has proliferated in online conversations.

But most of all it's wrong because the referral to the ECJ is emphatically not an opportunity to have a general chat about ACTA: it's for the EU's most senior judges to consider in detail whether the treaty as negotiated is compatible with Europe's existing laws -- not something a trademark association can contribute much to.

In particular, those judges will be looking at possible incompatibilities with the EU's "fundamental rights and freedoms." But that, of course, is the last thing INTA wants the judges to think about:

INTA hopes that the European Court of Justice will make a considered and quick assessment of ACTA, acknowledge the serious threats that counterfeiting and piracy pose for the EU and provide the necessary clarity to pave the way for consent to the Treaty by the European Parliament and ratification by Member States.

Counterfeiting and piracy are on the rise and constitute serious threats to consumers, legitimate businesses and innovators. ACTA is instrumental for tackling these issues

The European Commission has put together a document explaining the rationale for ACTA that contains the following claim:

As Europe is losing billions of Euros annually through counterfeit goods flooding our markets, protecting Intellectual Property Rights [with ACTA] means protecting jobs in the EU.

Interestingly, when he announced the referral of the treaty to the ECJ, de Gucht used a slightly different argument about fake goods to justify the ratification of ACTA:

Intellectual property is Europe’s main raw material, but the problem is that we currently struggle to protect it outside the European Union. This hurts our companies, destroys jobs and harms our economies. This is where ACTA will change something for all of us - as it will help protect jobs that are currently lost because counterfeited and pirated goods worth 200 billion Euros are floating around on the world markets.

The main signatories outside the EU are Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland and the US, all of which already have relatively stringent laws against counterfeit goods. So that means that the only places where ACTA might have some effect are Mexico and Morocco, which may be obliged to tighten up their anti-counterfeiting laws. But that on its own will achieve little: as with the counterfeits "flooding" Europe, ACTA will have almost no effect on those "floating around on the world markets."

So not only is INTA misguided in trying to divert the conversation away from the key issue of the EU's fundamental rights and freedoms, its principal argument in favor of ACTA -- that it will tackle counterfeiting in Europe -- just doesn't hold up. Which leaves us with INTA's parting shot:

it is imperative that the EU continues to protect its citizens and uphold its status as a responsible trading partner by joining the other negotiating parties in the international effort to fight counterfeiting and piracy.

Yeah, that'll work...

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As the matter is currently before the Court, BAT is unable to comment other than to say that this is a further demonstration that we will take all necessary steps to protect our valuable intellectual property.

EU Health Commissioner John Dalli will face legal action if he tries to reproduce Australia's plain-packaging proposals for cigarettes in Europe, a tobacco industry representative warned this week.

One likely focus of attack is intellectual property rights, since plain packaging has a smothering effect on companies' logos and trademarks.

• 7 utility (i.e., hardware and software) patents

  • U.S. Patent No. 7,812,828 on an "ellipse fitting for multi-touch surfaces" (previously asserted against Motorola in an ITC complaint and a federal lawsuit)

  • U.S. Patent No. 7,669,134 on a "method and apparatus for displaying information during an instant messaging session" (a software patent, presumably infringed by the Google Talk chat client, which I also use on my Galaxy phone and on which this patent may very well read)

  • U.S. Patent No. 6,493,002 on a "method and apparatus for displaying and accessing control and status information in a computer system" (previously asserted against Motorola in a federal lawsuit)

  • U.S. Patent No. 7,469,381 on "list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display" (previously asserted against HTC in a federal lawsuit)

  • U.S. Patent No. 7,844,915 on "application programming interfaces for scrolling operations"

  • U.S. Patent No. 7,853,891 on a "method and apparatus for displaying a window for a user interface"

  • U.S. Patent No. 7,863,533 on a "cantilevered push button having multiple contacts and fulcrums" (a hardware patent)

• 3 design patents

  • U.S. Design Patent No. D627,790 on a "graphical user interface for a display screen or portion thereof"

  • U.S. Design Patent No. D602,016 on an "electronic device"

  • U.S. Design Patent No. D618,677 on an "electronic device"

  • AllThingsD displays various graphics from the complaint that relate to those design patents.

• Trade dress rights

  • Apple claims to hold "trade dress protection in the design and appearance of the iPhone, the iPod touch, and the iPad, together with their distinctive user interfaces and product packaging." (yes, in Apple's view even Samsung's packaging infringes its rights)

  • Apple asserts its registered trade dresses no. 3,470,983, no. 3,457,218 and no. 3,475,327.

• Trademarks (i.e., 6 trademarked icons)

  • U.S. Trademark No. 3,886,196 on a dial icon

  • U. S. Trademark No. 3,889,642 on a chat icon

  • U.S. Trademark No. 3,886,200 on a sunflower icon (for a collection of photos)

  • U.S. Trademark No. 3,889,685 on a settings icon

  • U.S. Trademark No. 3,886,169 on a notepad icon

  • U.S. Trademark No. 3,886,197 on a contact list icon

• This version is not final, and despite suggestions to the press to the contrary, there are still some pretty substantial differences between negotiating parties. Some of those differences are pretty big deals, as they could require changes to laws (if the countries want to be seen as complying) from countries who have insisted, repeatedly and publicly, that ACTA will require no such law changes.
• While much of the worst of the document has been removed, the process by which this happened was hardly reasonable and open. Instead, it involved secrecy, misleading statements, ignoring important stakeholders until copies were leaked and concerned stakeholders shouted loud enough to be heard. As La Quadrature Du Net points out, this whole process was a counterfeit of democracy. Furthermore, this shows why all of the ACTA supporters, who insisted that people were making too big a deal about this, were flat-out wrong. There were some really, really bad things in ACTA initially, that appear to have only been removed due to loud protests from people who, otherwise, weren't supposed to even know what was in ACTA.
• The document still has many, many problems. It's way too broad at points. It still would require changes to US law (contrary to claims by the negotiators). It also includes exports enforcement without consumer rights or protections and some troubling language with no legal basis. It's better than what was in the initial documents, but it's still pretty bad in some places, as detailed below.

The ACTA does not permit the elimination of injunctive relief in cases where there is no remuneration paid. This is contrary to the provisions in U.S. law eliminating injunctions and damages against certain health care workers, or for manufacturers of biosimiliar drugs, in cases involving patents not previously disclosed by the incumbent drug company. ACTA seems to eliminate the limitation on the TRIPS, which concerns injunctions in cases where a person does not have prior "reasonable grounds to know that dealing in such subject matter would entail the infringement of an intellectual property right." This makes the ACTA contrary to current U.S. laws concerning infringement of trademarks by newspapers and online publications, among other things.

In determining the amount of damages for infringement of intellectual property rights, its judicial authorities shall have the authority to consider, inter alia, any legitimate measure of value submitted by the right holder, which may include the lost profits, the value of the infringed good or service, measured by the market price, the suggested retail price.

The US has proposed that patents should be clearly carved out of the Civil Enforcement Chapter (fn 2). But as of now there are no other countries indicated as supporting this position. This is a major advocacy point for access to medicines groups. If the US does not carry the day, the claims of negotiators that the agreement will not limit important TRIPS tools to promote access to medicines will ring hallow.

As currently worded, and in contradiction to many public statements by the negotiators, the border measures section still extends to patents and to in-transit seizures. In fn 6 on page 9, there is proposed language carving out patents. But that language is proposed by the US and is not joined by any other party according to the text as released.

The damages section contains many provisions that will encourage the over-enforcement and excessive punishment of copyright infringers. The text requires that countries to maintain a system of "pre-established" damages, as well as "additional damages," which means damages not based on any actual proof of harm. Such a system will over-deter the making of copies of copyrighted works where the copyright owner does not adequately serve the market on reasonable terms and conditions, and therefore does not actually suffer significant damage from the copy.

The ACTA language is not limited to commercial scale infringement. So individual downloaders and copiers for personal non-commercial purposes could be subject to massive "deterrent" fines without proof of any market harm to the copyright owner.

The negotiators have failed to adequately protect the most important "fair use" and other rights of users with respect to copyright. The definition of copyright piracy does not include the reasonable suggestion to add language making clear that it "does not extend to copies that are lawfully made, without the permission of the right owners."

a play on the words batta ("locust") and battamon (slang for "knockoff"). According to the artist, the works are meant to raise questions about the relationship between authenticity and imitation in a consumer-driven society.

There once was a lawyer from the IOC,
who called us to protect "intellectual property."

"During the Olympics", she said with a sneer
"your site can't use an Olympian's name even if they use your gear."

"No pictures, no video, no blog posts can be used..."
Even if they are old? "No!", she enthused.

While Olympians chase gold the IOC pursues green.
Cough up millions, or your logo cannot be seen.

"We should be going after the Googles that are creating this problem. They're the villains." .... "If we're going to use the strength and resources of the state to go after businesses, then we ought to go after the business that is causing the harm. ... We ought to go after the Googles with the state's resources and reputation."