UPDATE:Bill Richardson**Judd Gregg** will be the next Secretary of Commerce...Not!

Third time is a charm. Your next Secretary of Commerce is...Gary Locke.

Bill Richardson **Judd Gregg** is President-Elect Barack Obama's choice for big cheese at the Department of Commerce, under which the Patent and Trademark Office falls. **Update: As of Sunday, Jan. 4, Richardson has removed his name from the nomination process because of an investigation of a company that has done business with the state of New Mexico.** Richardson's resume includes stints in congress, as an ambassador to the United Nations, as Secretary of Energy, and, most recently as Governor of New Mexico. If you're interested, there's an excellent short biography of Richardson in Biography Resource Center, accessible through our Articles and Databases page (library card required).

Position changes aren't limited to top cabinet jobs. Every four years, just after the election, the Federal government (specifically, alternating committees in both houses of Congress) publishes a book of appointments that are open to noncompetitive appointment by the incoming administration. The official title of the book is the "United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions," but you can call it the Plum Book. (Fun fact: unlike most funny names associated with the government, plum is not an acronym, but rather a reference to the purply color of the book's cover.) Follow this link and scroll to the bottom of the page to see which positions in the USPTO will be subject to change with the incoming administration.

Speaking of the incoming administration, it doesn't look like there have been many developments in President-Elect Obama's plans for intellectual property policy since we took a look at them during the campaign. Here is an excerpt from the change.gov section on the incoming administration's technology agenda:

• Protect American Intellectual Property at Home: Update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation, and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.
• Reform the Patent System: Ensure that our patent laws protect legitimate rights while not stifling innovation and collaboration. Give the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) the resources to improve patent quality and open up the patent process to citizen review to help foster an environment that encourages innovation. Reduce uncertainty and wasteful litigation that is currently a significant drag on innovation.

The intellectual property behind Cher, T-Pain

Whether or not you know it, you're probably familiar with a technology called vocoder, or at least one of its aural descendants. Remember Cher's 1998 smash Believe? Or how about Peter Frampton's trippy talking guitar antics from the '70's? If you're younger, you may be familiar with T-Pain, whose claim to fame is being on pretty much every other Top 40 song in 2007. It seems musicians from Joe Meek to Kanye West have long embraced some sort of electronic vocal manipulation in both studio and live performances.

According to this month's Wired, all of these artists are indebted to one Homer Dudley who, working for Bell Labs in 1931 filed a patent for a "Carrier Wave Transmission System." You should check out the article; it turns out that the same technology that enabled Kraftwerk to become the darlings of 1970's music geeks also enabled Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt to secretly communicate during WWII.

Inventors, like high school students, continue to use Wikipedia despite stern warnings

Have a look at blogger and patent librarian extraordinaire Michael White's post about the patent examining process and applicants' use of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's open editorial policy means that its content changes constantly. This makes it a great source for, say, trivia about an episode of the Simpsons. For a legal citation, however, permanence and authority are pretty important. White notes in his post that despite its questionable reliability, the number of patents citing the venerable Wiki has grown steadily over the past five years.

In other news, I sometimes use Google News Search to scan the Web for intellectual property news. Sometimes I get gems like this.

Facebook copyright uproar

These technology legal problems come and go so quickly; it's a good thing I'm a librarian and not a blogger.

The latest copyright news that I'm reporting on a few days after it's fresh is the latest privacy concern coming from users of (very) popular social networking site Facebook. It seems that Facebook recently changed its terms of use to retain ownership of pretty much anything and everything that users post, from the moment it's posted until forever. (Maybe Colbert was right about copyright.) Previously, Facebook retained rights only until the content was deleted.

According to the NY Times, the changes were made a couple of weeks ago but went largely unnoticed until popular consumer-issues blog Consumerist published the new language this weekend.

Amidst widespread protests from Facebook users, chairman Mark Zuckerman announced today that the company will revert to the old version of the terms of use until they can come up with a new agreement that will satisfy users' demands for less invasive terms of use.

New in the PTC: Eddie Van Halen, aluminum can grips, and a rant about "provisional patents"

The latest issue of Inventor's Digest arrived a few days ago bringing word of a new invention called the can grip, a simple device that "eliminates the need for a coaster." Unfortunately, I just learned about this on the last day of San Francisco Beer Week. Oh, well, I'll be ready for next year.

Also included in this month's issue, an image from Eddie Van Halen's "musical instrument support" (I'm beginning to see a guitar shredder trend developing in this blog), a story about some snazzy bicycle helmets, a profile of a former Microsoft executive who is now testing his inventing chops in the kitchen, and a prickly rant about how provisional patents don't exist.

This content is not yet available on their website, but you can always find the latest issue of Inventor's Digest in the Patent and Trademark Center.

Shepard Fairey linkage and a copyright case to melt your face

There's no real news to report in the Shepard Fairey/Hope poster/Associated Press case that I wrote about last week, but that hasn't stopped the journalists from continuing to cover it. That said, some of the commentary has been pretty interesting.

First, the primary sources:

Stanford Center for Internet and Society's Anthony Falzone has a blog.

The Associate Press communicates through press releases, available here.

Also:

Here's a nice long article from the New York Times.

Our own Chronicle chimed in with a nice long piece as well.

Finally, a taste of the hubbub surrounding Fairey's graffiti-related arrest in Boston last week, courtesy of LA Weekly.

In other copyright news, guitar-shredding-god Joe Satriani filed suit against soft-rock-gods Coldplay in December, claiming that the British band ripped off his 2004 instrumental "If I Could Fly." According to this Indian showbiz blog (I can't find a scoop in any more reputable sources), Coldplay's crack legal team has managed to fend off what is the second high-profile lawsuit against the band for this summer's hit "Viva la Vida."

Early evidence that every possible melody has in fact been recorded? You be the judge.

Fair(ey) use?

Unless you've been under a rock for the last several months, you may have noticed a poster depicting Barack Obama in shades of red, white, and blue with the caption "HOPE."

The Associated Press claims that the artist, one Shepard Fairey, used an image of Barack Obama without permission. AP is seeking compensation for the use of the image, which became wildly popular during last year's Presidential campaign.

Fairey is being represented in the case by Stanford Fair Use Project director Anthony Falzone. Falzone argues that Fairey's use of the photo, originally taken in 2006 by AP photographer Mannie Garcia, qualifies as a fair use, presumably because of the changes that the artist made to the image before printing the poster.

Interesting case, and one that we'll keep an eye on.

When I read this, I remembered hearing Fairey interviewed on Fresh Air a couple of weeks ago. He talked about the possibility of getting dinged for using a photo without permission. All around it was an interesting interview, which you can listen to here.