Saturday, May 24, 2008

Register Your Copyright Online

The U.S. Copyright Office has begun beta testing of an online copyright registration system that will enable people to file what they're calling "basic registration claims" for literary works, visual arts works, performing arts works, sound recordings, and single serials. I've always thought that the Copyright Office should try harder to keep up with the USPTO, both in terms of their web presence and in the amount of acronyms they employ.

They're doing both with their "electronic Copyright Office" or eCO. Like the USPTO's TEAS (Trademark Electronic Application System) and EFS-Web (Electronic Filing System, uh, Web) , the Copyright Office's eCO will allow some users to forgo mailing documents by submitting works to be registered entirely online; others will be able to file the forms and pay fees online, but will have to send in a hard copy of the work to be registered.

Copyright registration is similar to patent registration in that both parties (the registrant and the general public, represented by the Government) benefit from the registration. When a person registers a patent, the general public benefits from the disclosure of a new invention; the registrant benefits by retaining the exclusive right to bring that invention to market.

Copyright registration offers concrete and public proof of ownership, and though registration is not required for a work to be protected, owners of registered copyrights have an easier time bringing suit against infringers. In exchange for this, they pay a small fee and deposit a copy of their work with the Library of Congress.

This is all my long-winded way of explaining why it will probably be a long time before all copyright registrations will be done entirely online. The Library of Congress holds over 138 million items in its collection; copyright deposits represent a massive amount of this collection.

That said, it's nice to see that the Copyright Office is taking steps to streamline the process, especially for items that are born digital. There's also a discount for people who file electronically. Check it out here.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

The '08 Candidates and IP


It looks like the the Patent Reform Act (House version and Senate version) is stalled in the Senate, so we may not get to see how the 2008 Presidential Candidates will vote on it. Still, all of us IP loving folks may wonder if the candidates have publicly taken any positions on intellectual property.

Of the remaining major candidates, (Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama by my estimation) Obama seems to me to be the only one to have a neat, focus set of intellectual property positions posted on his website. Fortunately for us, CNET sent a questionnaire to all of the candidates in order to create their Technology Voter's Guide, and included in that questionnaire is a question about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. None of the candidates really provided a stellar answer, but I think their attitudes towards this hot-button issue may provide a little insight.

Here's the DMCA question:

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act's section restricting the "circumvention" of copy protection measures is supported by many copyright holders but has been criticized by some technologists as hindering innovation. Would you support changing the DMCA to permit Americans to make a single backup copy of a DVD, Blu-ray Disc DVD, HD DVD, or video game disc they have legally purchased?
And here are the responses, alphabetically by candidate's last name:

Hillary Clinton's response:
Strong copyright protections and efforts to stem piracy are critical to ensuring that our technology industries remain competitive in the global market. As we go forward, I would support a review of a range of issues related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act insofar as it did not concern degrading copyright protections or encourage copyright infringement.
John McCain's response:
The Internet and digital technology have provided widespread access to enormous quantities of information. This, in turn, made it necessary to update our copyright laws in 1998 to protect the rights of copyright holders to keep pace with the technological advances that characterize the Information Age.

As digitization of commerce, education, entertainment, and a host of other online applications proceeds, international copyright agreements have to be maintained and updated while protecting the rights of copyright owners.

I believe now, as I did then, that knowledge and ideas are central parts of what make the U.S. economy productive and competitive. It is vital that this intellectual property be protected and defended. However, we must ensure that such protections are never so onerous as to stifle the very innovation they strive to safeguard.
Barack Obama's response:
I would support, in concept, allowing Americans to make a single backup copy of a digital product they have purchased. And I think the market is moving in the direction of greater consumer freedom.

As policymakers, we are in a constant process of examining our laws to ensure that the protections we place on intellectual property are sufficient to encourage invention without hindering innovation that builds on previous work or unfairly limiting consumers from using the goods they purchase in a way that is fair to creators.

I would guess that the next administration will be dealing a lot with intellectual property, so here's hoping that the nominees will be asked some more tough questions about it during the debates leading up to the election.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Copyright, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and Libraries

A colleague here at the library recently brought to my attention a post on the Boing Boing message board regarding libraries and intellectual property and, more specifically, about libraries' use of content controlled by Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. An organization called DefectiveByDesign.org is encouraging people to write their libraries to demand that they quit buying digital material from publishers who impose DRM technology on users.

It's intellectual property, it's digital, and, judging by the message board posting, it's got people riled up. It must be complicated, right?

It sure is! But it's also interesting, if you're into this sort of thing.

DRM technology is a blanket term used to describe any software that restricts the use of something that is sold digitally but still protected by copyright.

Wonder why you can't burn a million copies of your mix CD that you made with songs you bought from iTunes? That would be DRM.

Remember the scandal that erupted a couple of years ago when Sony encrypted music CDs with some piracy-prevention software that made people's computers susceptible to viruses? Another form of DRM.

If you've ever tried to read or listen to an eBook or watch digital content from one of the major vendors that the library buys from, you have also experienced DRM. These companies generally require that you use their proprietary reader to view the book. This is so that they can restrict the amount of pages you can print, the amount of copies you can make, etc, and prevent people from illegally copying the works.

If you read the whole complaint from the anti-DRM crew, you'll find that their primary complaint is not about the clunkiness of these interfaces (having worked in libraries, I suppose I could furnish a few complaints if you want me to), but rather about the need to use certain software to access the digital material you borrow from the library. For instance, to read an eBook, you may need to have Internet Explorer. To listen to a digital audiobook, you may have to have Windows Media Player. If you want to watch streaming video content, you may have to have Windows Vista. Not all vendors have the same software requirements, but the argument seems to be that enough do that it has an effect on the software market -- if enough library users are using digital material that requires them to favor a certain brand of computer products, there is an adverse effect on the other software producers.

The companies that attach these restrictions to their materials are not doing anything illegal. What they are doing is using a contract to prevent libraries from exercising rights that they would otherwise have. Libraries have enjoyed a fair amount of wiggle room in our application of copyright law. By building restrictions into licensing contracts, the publishers are preventing what has been standard practice for decades, or at least as long as photocopiers have been around.

The professional organization that represents librarians, the ALA, recommends a compromise in the form of updated guidelines for DRM. What do you think? Is it fair for companies to exercise this level of control over their intellectual property?

Carrie Russell has written an indispensable copyright reference for librarians called Complete Copyright: An Everyday Guide for Librarians. No DRM concerns for this book; we only have it in print.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Shoe Company Discovers That Infringement Can Be Expensive

A discount shoe company lost some big money because of their use of what a Portland court determined to be a protected mark this week.

As soccer players and fans of old school rap already knew, Adidas uses three more or less vertical stripes to represent their products. Collective Brands, Inc., makers of Payless and Stride Rite learned that the hard ($305 million) way.

Read more about the case here.

Companies sue each other all the time, but it's interesting to me that these three lines cost Collective Brands so many millions of dollars. How can somebody register something as simple as a geographic figure?

Trademark law covers much more than words and pictures. Essentially, anything that helps consumers identify a specific service or product is protected. Stephen Elias talks about it in his excellent Trademark: Legal Care for Your Business & Product Name (available at SFPL):

"...[I]t's not just a clever business or product name that pulls in the customers. Equally important in the vast U.S. consumer marketplace are the logos, packaging, innovative product shapes, cartoon characters, website address names (domain names), and unique product characteristics that businesses are using to hawk their wares."

Something as simple as a big yellow "M," a big brown truck, or pink fiberglass insulation can qualify. A mark, unlike a patent or a copyright, doesn't have to be unique to the world; it simply has to be unique as a marketing device for a particular product or service.

I'm going to assume that Collective Brands, Inc., didn't innocently use the vertical stripes, that it never occurred to their designers that the design resembled Adidas'. Trademarks exist so that consumers can reliably identify goods and services from certain providers, so it seems like a legit ruling to me. Anybody else?

Sunday, May 4, 2008

CASSIS - Not Just a Resort Town in the South of France

It's pretty remarkable how quickly the folks at the Patent and Trademark Office have moved the tools for patent searching from print to the Web. Less than ten years ago, most people would work with microfiche, CD ROMs, and usually some dusty old books for patent searching. The Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries were often only place people could get access to patent drawings and specifications, and the full patents often only went back to the 70's. For older patents, people needed to rely on the Official Gazette, which is still published, and shows only an abbreviated description of the invention with a few drawings. That solution proved pretty effective for people who could get to the libraries, but geography posed a pretty major obstacle for many people who didn't live anywhere near one of the 90 or so Depository libraries. (Most states only have one!)

Remote access was quite a boon for independent inventors. An electronic image of every patent is available over the internet; users can search the full text of patents from 1976 onward. And that's only using the tools created by the USPTO. PAT2PDF is a free web-based application that will retrieve patents by number and serve up a printer-friendly PDF. Google is in the process of making the entire set of patents searchable using their proprietary algorithms; what they have accomplished so far is pretty impressive.

This material didn't jump directly from books and fiche to the Internet, though. Like many early digital publishing ventures, there was a transition in which material was sent on discs, in this case DVD ROMs.

This system, called CASSIS (for Computer Aided Something Something Including Something), was a welcome arrival. Once we were set up, we had discs in our cabinets that gave us a 200 year back catalog of full text patents. We could keyword search, we could view the international classification orders, we could print images. With the CASSIS DVD-ROM set and the accompanying software, we finally had a complete set of patent drawings and specifications.

As I mentioned above, though, the images available through CASSIS became, shortly after CASSIS was released, available online. However, we still get the DVD ROMS: 4 discs of registered patents, 4 of patent applications, 4 Official Gazettes, and a handful of others relating to classification orders, trademarks, and other USPTO-related documents.

Is this CASSIS system a relic? This question comes up from time to time on both sides of the reference desk. Librarians, for our part, could use the space that's taken up by the DVD cases. We also have to make sure that everyone in the department knows how to help people use this sort of specialized computer system, or at least make sure that someone who knows how to use it is around. And library patrons sometimes wonder why all of the patent search books and websites insist that they physically come to the library to do a patent search. Isn't it all online? Shouldn't we dump the discs?

Yes to the former, no to the latter. Actually, canning the discs is not an option. As long as the USPTO considers the DVD's to be the official version of patents and applications sent to depository libraries, we have a legal requirement to keep them and make them available to everyone. Patents are an important legal and historical record, and the DVD's are a reliable and stable way, at least for now, for us to maintain an archive. All of the Web-based patent collections have some shortcomings, too -- the USPTO database, for instance, uses an unusual format for patent images. There's also very limited bibliographic data for patents issued before 1976. I wrote a post recently where I discuss Google Patent's problems. PAT2PDF is simply a retrieval tool with no search capabilities.

The shortcomings of these Internet-based patent collections speaks to the former question, as well. Technically speaking, every patent that is available on CASSIS is also available on the Internet. But there are still instances when physically coming into the library is still the best bet for a patent search.

One thing I often use CASSIS for is retrieving a list of patents. When you're doing a preliminary patent search, you often want to take a look at several patents. With the Web-based tools, you can retrieve one at a time. With CASSIS, you can create a list and retrieve them as a batch.

Another thing that CASSIS has going for it is that it's nearly devoid of typographical mistakes. Google is improving, but when correctness and comprehensiveness are important, as they often are in patent searching, it's useful to know that you're using the officially endorsed search tool.

I'll concede that CASSIS probably isn't necessary for most people. I know that I often warn readers about the dangers of a lot of the patent searching techniques that that make the process easier. I don't dislike the technology, and probably 90% of the people I help find patents could do just fine using Google or the USPTO website. I also realize, however, that reliable, accurate information is often more important than convenient access to information, and I'd like to make sure people know how find it, or at least know how to ask me how to find it.

If you would like to take your patent search to the next level, I'll be happy to demonstrate CASSIS here in the Government Information Center. And you don't have to hurry -- I think it'll be around for a while.