No, I’m not referring to a Cubist masterpiece. Consider the following:  After long, hard work, you’ve created a great design, say, the design above.  Eureka!  Your design would go great with anything.  You can see it on chairs, on baskets, on car seats, on bridges, on tattooed biceps everywhere.  Just think of the possibilities.    But everyone else will want to use […]

Newsweek has called it the “copyright case of the decade” and it may be right.  Google and Oracle are software titans battling over whether the freely available connections between software platforms (Application Programming Interfaces, or “APIs”) can be protected by copyright law.  APIs are generally free to use, and they enable developers to build programs […]

Dear Doc: I know that you sometimes answer intellectual property questions that are not strictly about copyright, so here’s one for you… I know that folks may register just about any available word as a domain name on the Internet, using one of the many Top Level Domains (TLDs) like .com, .org, or .biz. I also […]

For the first time in over 100 years, on June 24, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case, Georgia v. Public Resource Org Inc., to decide “whether the government edicts doctrine extends to works that lack the force of law, such as annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated [OCGA].” What is the “government edicts” […]

Here’s a challenge for these modern times:  How do observant Jews follow the Biblical commandment to observe the Sabbath?  Rabbis generally agree that driving is prohibited, and that using electricity is not prohibited – but using switches to manually turn the flow of electricity on or off is prohibited.  This is why you may have […]

Mechanical inventions have been free of the uncertainty and chaos created by the Supreme Court in results-driven decisions surrounding the patentability of business methods, medical diagnoses and discoveries, and computer software.  That is, until now. The recent American Axle v Neapco decision of a three-judge panel of the Federal Circuit Court addressed a patent to a method for tuning a drive shaft to […]