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What is the status of the patent misuse defense after the en banc decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Princo Corp. v. Intl Trade Commn? On this edition of IP Counsel, host Attorney Peter Lando, partner at the firm of Lando & Anastasi, LLP, welcomes Dmitry Milikovsky, Senior Intellectual Property Rights Counsel at Qualcomm Technology Licensing, Qualcomm Incorporated, to discuss the evolution of the patent misuse doctrine, the recent Princo decision and its procedural history, as well as the relevance of the doctrine and the Princo decision to technology transfer agreements and related collaborations.

Shelfreading is like dusting–no one wants to do it, but it has to be done. Now, however, a new Android app may make shelfreading a breeze. The brainchild of the Miami University Augmented Reality Research Group, the app “‘reads’ a bookshelf, and with an AR overlay, quickly flags those books that are misplaced. It will also point to the correct place on the bookshelf so the book can easily be re-shelved correctly.” This description comes from Audrey Watters’ post on the ReadWriteWeb blog. The post includes a video of Professor William “Bo” Brinkman demonstrating how shelfreading would work using the app. Professor Brinkman makes the point that the app won’t work well for thin books as they would be difficult to tag. In addition, at the moment the “prototype only uses 16 bits on the tag, but Brinkman says the group is working on a version that would allow them to put around 72 bits on a tag, allowing the system to scale up to work with any library collection.” Professor Brinkman says the app would also facilitate doing inventories of library collections. The app will be demonstrated at the ACRL conference on Saturday, April 2. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an ongoing debate in the legal community about whether the iPhone or the Android is best for attorneys and their practices. Attorneys and co-hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams welcome Attorney Richard M. Georges, blogger for FutureLawyer and Attorney Jeff Richardson, from Adams and Reese LLP and blogger for iPhone J.D., to take the gloves off on Lawyer2Lawyer about the pros and cons of each, look at the best applications for attorneys and security issues surrounding smartphones.

Professor Brandon L. Garrett’s sobering article, “Getting guilty right,” published in the Boston Globe on March 28, presents the results of his study of 250 erroneous convictions using court records and archives housed at the Innocence Project. Garrett’s book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, will be published in April, and expands on the conclusions he reaches in his Globe article.

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Suffolk Law Professor and IP Concentration Co-Director Andrew Beckerman-Rodau discusses his Yale Journal of Law and Technology article The Problem with Intellectual Property Rights: Subject Matter Expansion. Read the article at http://bit.ly/hnkIvV.

In a blog post last December, I discussed the University College London’s Transcribe Bentham Project, an experiment in crowdsourcing whose goal was transcription of the unpublished manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham. All the work was going to be done by volunteers, with their submissions being vetted by paid research associates. Now it looks as if the future of the project is in doubt. According to a post in the Wired Campus blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, lack of funding is going to cause “scholars to scale back [the] groundbreaking project …” The government grant that paid for computer programmers, photography, and research associates is coming to an end, and private money needs to be found to keep the project going. The research associates were a vital link between the project and the volunteers, and once they are gone, the links will begin to break down. The director of the project, Philip Schofield, acknowledged that relying on volunteers was risky; some were put off by the difficulty of the undertaking, and bailed out after transcribing one or two documents. Mr. Schofield thinks that “one way to overcome that problem might be to use the crowdsourcing model in an entity like a museum … which would already have an established community interested in its work.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that HathiTrust has made its large library of digital texts searchable by signing an agreement with Summon, a library-specific search engine produced by Serials Solutions. Indeed, if you click on the HathiTrust link, you will see that they now offer catalog and full text searches, as well as browsing on their site.

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As the world anxiously watches the nuclear crisis unfold in Japan, there are growing concerns about the safety of nuclear power plants right here in the United States. Attorneys and co-hosts Bob Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams welcome Attorney Martin G. Malsch, a partner with Egan, Fitzpatrick, Malsch & Lawrence, PLLC and Geoffrey H. Fettus, a senior project attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC’s) nuclear program, to discuss the aftermath of the nuclear crisis in Japan and the safety of nuclear plants here in the States. Marty and Geoff question if American plants are safe, who would be held legally responsible in case of a nuclear accident in America and how this recent disaster has affected the environment. Later in the program, Bob and Craig visit the great debate over the iPhone v. Android.

Suffolk Law Professor Marc Greenbaum, http://bit.ly/exfV4d, discusses the latest development in the NFL labor dispute in this podcast.

The Court has handed down its final order, and here is the short answer:
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