I almost got trapped in a parking lot by a sudden snowstorm — the special snowflakes drifted up to my chest! These particular special snowflakes were driving SUVs (and a couple minivans and pickups). Well, not exactly driving, but parking. Hint: When a space says "Compact," it might really mean it… and "compact SUV" is very much like "friendly fire" (neither one really is, no matter how pervasive the marketingspeak), and taking up two spots in a crowded lot doesn't help anyone. Except that it might save those special snowflakes a few steps while they're preventing other customers from getting in their way in the store.
In any event, lots of interesting IP and related news items even since the last platter.
- Consider the (difficult) issue of copyright in fictional universes. One wonders how much farther the reasoning might extend when considering a completely invented fictional universe, like the United Federation of Planets (Star Trek™, instead of the slightly fictionalized Peckham that played home to Del Boy. Or is the way I identified the Federation a hint, reaching toward the inner operation of (and communicative distinction between) copyright and trademark?
- The purple haze still lingers around the copyright estate of J. Marshall Hendrix, Sony (the successor to Hendrix's label) has found out to its chagrin. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of plantation overseers, could it? Not all transferees actively mistreat the actual creators, but the economic model remains very much the same…
- A couple contrasting, and probably fundamentally incompatible, visions of "fair use" and "training sets for large language model generative systems" have hit the news of late. On the one hand, authors in the UK are (rightly) complaining that a "consultation" on copyright's proper treatment neglected authors' (and other creators') interests. Conversely, WestLaw got the opposite result regarding purportedly factual (and definitely lacking originality by design) case headnotes. Comparison to the last paragraph might bear some consideration of its own.
- One might instead ponder the Advocate General's attempt to leave weasel room around Dastar when applied to European patents. Which is just as bizarrely strange as it sounds. Dastar held that, under US law, a trademarked title (or, more broadly, a Lanham Act claim) cannot be used to protect a thin, compilation only, dubiously expired copyright. The pending CeramTec matter concerns something quite parallel: Marks being used to at least as to commerce extend an expired patent.
- One could just consider that the Doge of Venice Beach has ensured that some of his minions have extracted quite a bit of data tracing back to specific individuals from government computers. Not that any intelligence-collection methods might use this now dubiously or completely unsecured material residing on Baby Techbros' laptops (n.b. cited as a basic open-source explanation, without comment upon or endorsement of its precision or accuracy). That, after all, would be considering potential collateral damage — something that the individuals at the top in the executive branch since 20 January have clearly demonstrated is not within their weltanschauung.