All posts by: Lawrence Husick

About Lawrence Husick

Dear Doc: A magazine editor has told me that if a magazine releases an issue before its copyright date, the magazine will lose its rights. I can’t believe that this is the law. Please tell me who’s right. Signed, Confused Author Dear Confused: You’re less confused than your editor! Under international copyright law, known as […]

Dear Doc: Last month, you promised that you’d continue your explanation of patents and copyrights with a rant about patents and trolls. So…? What, exactly, do you have against trolls, other than the fact that they live under bridges and threaten goats? Signed, Been Waiting a Month Dear BWaM: OK. So as not to disappoint, […]

Dear Doc: Well, 2013 has come and gone! Did anything happen in copyright law this year? Signed, Way too much time on my hands. Dear Sir: How DARE you! Have you not been reading the “Doc” every issue of this wonderful and scholarly newsletter? So much happened this year that the “Doc” has scarcely had […]

Dear Doc: While searching online, I came across thousands of books – not on Amazon.com, but on Google! I could actually read the pages of those books because the words matched what I had searched, and most of the books were scanned right from the library. That’s cool – and really useful, but I thought […]

Dear Doc: I know you’ve explained the legal concept of “fair use” before, but I have a question about that. Does it infringe an author’s copyright in a book to paraphrase one sentence from the book in a movie, if you give credit to the author, or is it fair use? Sincerely, Absolom Absolom,  Mississippi […]

The past 15 years have seen an unprecedented attack on patents and patent-owners in the United States. Orchestrated by foreign nations, multinational corporations, and a variety of other groups, largely funded by similar vested interests, this attack has reduced much of the value formerly associated with patented innovations. In past issues of our newsletter we […]