Facebook Personalized Usernames

If you or one of your companies has had a Facebook account since before June 9, you can register, e.g., http://www.facebook.com/[companyname] as a Facebook username starting tonight at 10:01 p.m. MDT. See http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=897. If you qualify, you may wish to register that (those) username(s) with Facebook to prevent third parties from doing so. If you did not have an account before June 9, the window opens for a company or person to register personalized usernames on June 28.

To be clear, anyone who had an account before June 9 can register a personalized username starting tonight, so you personally could go in and register, e.g., http://www.facebook.com/[companyname] if you wished and if you had an account before June 9 and if you meet Facebook's other qualifications for a personalized username.

All trademark owners will likely also want to complete the form here: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights to stop third parties from registering one or more of their trademarks as usernames. You may do this even if you do not have a Facebook account.

Update on Using Proxies as Evidence of Sophistication in Crimes

Not today, apparently . . .

http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12152466?nclick_check=1

Use of Proxies to Show "Sophistication" in Crimes?

The Washington Post reports on a key vote on new US federal sentencing guidelines that would classify the use of Internet proxies in crimes as evidence of "sophistication," increasing sentences by about 25 percent, which could mean years or even decades longer behind bars, depending on the crime. Digital-rights advocates are worried, complaining that the proposal is so broad it could lead to unnecessarily harsh sentences for tech neophytes who did not know they were using proxies in the first place or who were simply engaging in a practice often encouraged as a safer way of using the Internet. http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/view.php?id=1158409&da=y

Do you proxy at work to hide from the boss? If so, watch out?

ISPs and Piracy

Should ISPs be responsible for monitoring and policing possibly infringing content on their networks?

Digital Car Models Not Sufficiently Creative? I Disagree.

A recent 10th Circuit case, Meshwerks v. Toyota (see case here: http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/view.php?id=785238&da=y) held that digital models of Toyota cars and trucks were not sufficiently original or creative to warrant copyright protection. The appeals panel agreed with the trial court's conclusion that the digital wire-frame models were merely copies of Toyota products. The appeals court acknowledged that digital modeling is used to create copyrightable expressions but held that the evidence in this case demonstrated that Meshwerks merely provided completely unadorned digital replicas.

My friend BobMcKain, who is a digital modeling hobbyist and is involved with Foundation3d (see http://www.foundation3d.com/) e-mailed me this response to the Meshwerks case:

"We’ve been mulling this one on the forums. I can absolutely see why the design is not copyrightable but the work should be. Even though you are following a real life design no two models will ever be the same unless one person copied another person work verbatim. The reason is that pushing and pulling points and polys is an art in itself. A good example is the movie version of the StarTrek 1701-A Enterprise. There are at least a few dozen models of it out there and I have most of them. While they all represent the same ship they are all different. Each modeler has a different approach to tackling difficult transitions and shapes. So while the design is certainly copyright Paramount Pictures the work is uniquely that of the modeler. The argument is that modeling is not an art form and I think I could prove otherwise. We have many an argument on the forums over poly and point efficiencies and clean up. Some think its not important but to those of us who see it as an art form it is, in our mind, what makes it an art and not just a matter of copying what you see before you.

I hope this gets challenged because there was no effort to defend it as an art form and therefore copyrightable as such. It was merely challenged as a design issue."

I agree with Bob. A lot of creativity goes into those models, and under Feist, that should be enough. Thoughts?

New Open Source Opinion has People Talking. Why?

There's a new opinion from the Federal Circuit that lots of people are talking about called Jacobsen v. Katzer, et al. (opinion here:
http://www.keepandshare.com/doc/view.php?id=749026&da=y), saying that it is a "victory for supporters of free software." See, e.g., http://www.pcworld.com/article/149796/2008/08/.html?tk=rss_news.

I am not sure what all the fuss here is about, frankly. "Open source" has never meant "abandoned and contributed to the public domain" from a copyright law perspective. "Open source" was and is a licensing philosophy. Of course the underlying authors still own the copyrights and, assuming they registered them timely, can still sue and enforce those copyrights and get statutory damages, even if the code is "open source." As I read the opinion, all the court is really saying is that this particular license was such that the copyright owner could sue for copyright infringement as well as breach of contract because the license contained "conditions" and not just "covenants." This is more of a contract case than a copyright case, in my opinion.

"Cuil it?" I Don't Think So.

When I teach trademark law classes, I always advise that students select strong protectable marks, and the class invariably balks because they want to select marks that suggest or connote something about the goods or services at issue. That, I tell them, is the touchstone of a weak mark, and for examples I look to the Internet space: Google, Yahoo!, Zillow, and so on are perfect trademarks because they say nothing about the goods or services with which they are associated.

And now along comes cuil.com (pronounced "cool"), the much-ballyhooed Google-killer. Great mark, right? "Cuil" says nothing about "Internet search engine," and is in fact apparently an old Irish or Gaelic word for "knowledge." But here's the rub: "Google" is becoming a verb in the lexicon very quickly, which is typically anathema to a trademark, but there's not much Google can do to stop everyone from saying, e.g., "Go Google that." But can you say, e.g., "I am going to 'cuil' it?" You could, but people would hear you say, "I am going to cool it," and the meaning is lost.

Moral--a great trademark has to be both non-descriptive AND sound cool (pun intended) and distinctive. Now let's just see if Google goes the way of "escalator" and becomes generic for Internet search services . . .