Recent News
April 17, 2012
Once again, after a hiatus last year (because of the Register interregnum), the Copyright Office is returning to Music City. This year’s program will be on April 26 and will last all day. It’s good for 7.75 CLE credits (.5 more than last time), but the tuition remains at $250 for CLE credit, $100 for those who don’t want CLE or need CLE credit. Once again, the First Amendment Center is hosting the program.
As in the past, members of the Copyright Office will discuss the doings and business of the Copyright Office, provide an update on registration procedures and regulations, and review the year in copyright legislation and litigation. Our luncheon speaker will be Judge Gil Merritt, Senior Judge of the Sixth Circuit. Our afternoon panel will be on developing new business models for the music industry in a post-file-sharing era. Further details may be downloaded here.
Be sure to register soon (here)!
Oh, and Rick is one of the producers.
March 24, 2012
Rick will be presenting on cloud computing and internet privacy at TennBarU’s Scary Things in Intellectual Property, an all-day CLE course on April 13. The other presenters are pretty much an all-star cast of Nashville legal thinkers: Wayne Beavers, Casey Del Casino, Doug Johnson, Nancy Jones, Mark Plotkin, Geoffrey Vickers and Stephen Zralek. The program is good for 5 hours of general credit and at least 1 hour of dual credit*. Sign up here.
*We’re seeing if part of my presentation can be good for dual credit as well.
March 7, 2012
Aaron | Sanders is the March sponsor of the popular Nashcocktail event at the Greenhouse Bar in Green Hills in Nashville. We are proud to support a night of hanging out with some of the brightest entrepreneurs, developers, social media experts, and all-around geeks in Nashville, and having a cocktail or two with them! We hope to see you there on March 27th – there will be swag!
February 16, 2012
It’s a busy week for Rick and Tara, speaking at the Arts and Business Council on Monday, and at the Tennessee Bar Association ‘s Law Tech 2012 un-conference today. Tara is headed downtown to join a group of lawyers discussing the newest technological gadgets and how lawyers can use them best, but her talk is going to be a bit different, focusing on the well-known SOPA and PIPA bills that kept us all so busy last month. We haven’t really sat down and talked them through with lawyers, so it will be interesting to get their thoughts. Tara will report back soon!
February 15, 2012
We had a great time speaking to Nashville-area artists on Monday! The Arts & Business Council set up the one-hour seminar at the Country Music Hall of Fame. We were delighted by the sheer numbers–the place was packed–and diversity of the audience. There were painters, songwriters, musicians, photographers, even a novelist. Thanks to everyone who attended, and thanks to the Arts & Business Council! We’d love to do it again!
February 1, 2012
Tara’s article Appealing IP on intellectual property and privacy issues in app development appears in this month’s issue of InForma’s Intellectual Property Magazine. The article looks at the IP issues that are likely be faced by a company taking a brick-and-mortar concept and turning it into a smartphone application, including how new trademark issues may arise in this new category of services, what steps the company should take to be sure that it owns the software in its application, how to discuss whether or not a patent is appropriate, and what to do about all that personal data that is being collected.
Tara is of course respecting the terms of her copyright agreement with InForma, and can not therefore share the full article on the Aaron Sanders Law website, but you may email her and request a copy. 
January 31, 2012
JDCLE is a distance-learning service for lawyers. You find a video that you’re interested in, and learn about interesting legal stuff, and earn CLE credit if you’re in one of the listed jurisdictions. (Ironically, Tennessee doesn’t allow distance-learning.) I lectured on online music services–basically the material covered by Parts 1-15 of the Online Music Services Series. I’m working on getting a short clip of the lecture to put on our website here. You can learn more about my particular program here. Right now, there are three other programs: the use of technology in the courtroom, insider trading and ethics issues unique to inside counsel. I’m told there’ll be more, so keep checking, or follow @JDCLE.
Nicholas DeLeon of The Daily quotes Rick on the nascent copyright issues that will arise as 3D printing becomes more commonplace. You can read the whole article here.
January 23, 2012
Ars Technica’s Law & Disorder column quoted Rick at length in an article about EMI’s lawsuit against ReDigi, which re-sells iTunes tracks. EMI thinks this infringes its copyrights, but ReDigi has a number of intriguing defenses. See for yourself here.
January 17, 2012
Following on her contribution to the soon-to-be-published “Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights” from Oxford University Press, Tara has been asked to contribute blog posts to the London-based IP blog IPKat during the first part of 2012. ”Launched in 2003 as a teaching aid for Intellectual Property Law students in London, the IPKat’s weblog has become a popular source of material, comment and amusement for IP owners, practitioners, judges, students and administrators.”
The plan is that this will not delay Tara’s foray into blogging for Aaron Sanders, but for now, her debut IP blog can be viewed here. (Warning, if you’ve had enough talk about SOPA for the time being, you might want to wait for the next one).
Catching up with SOPA (and Hello, IPKat Readers!)
Greetings, readers! I greatly appreciate IPKat’s invitation to come and guest blog for the first half of 2012. I hope to show that the gracious invitation was well-bestowed, and I look forward to lively (but polite) discussions with many of you on U.S. IP issues.
On the eve of the day that some of the most important websites in the United States (Google and Wikipedia, for starters) demonstrate their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act that is lurching its way through the halls of Congress, this guest Kat thought it would be apropos to use her debut blog on this illustrious site to guide readers through the twisted course that this bill has taken so far. (If you only read English, you can’t look at Wikipedia today anyway, so you might as well spend your time with us). IP Kat has posted on its views on the responses to SOPA recently - I hope to just give you a few more bits into the background). Read More.
December 19, 2011
Rick will be presenting at The Internet & the Law 2011, which takes place all day Friday, December 30, at the Nashville School of Law. The tuition is $280, and it’s good for 5 hours of General CLE credit, plus 1 hour of Dual CLE credit. Rick will be presenting on two topics: (1) “Internet 101″: Defining the Internet and its Legal Environment; and (2) Constitutional Issues Arising out of the Internet. Rick hopes to see you there!
December 5, 2011
Tara will be attending the International Trademark Association’s conferences this week, first on European Trademark Reforms and then on Trademarks and the Internet, following up on her own recent presentation on that same topic. We are thrilled that Tara has the chance to network with many of our European colleagues, learn valuable and current information of use to our clients, and and at the same time fulfill a decade-and-a-half old dream to return to the mother country, Ireland.
Learn more about the conference here:
October 25, 2011
Rick is giving a lecture on online music services and copyright law, entitled “Will Consumers Ever Get What They Want from Online Music Services? How Copyright Law Creates and Impedes Five Types of Online Music Services,” tomorrow, October 26, 2011, at Colorado University Law School in Boulder. It’s been a few years since Rick gave a proper classroom lecture, but we know he’ll shake off the rust. It’s supposed to be snowing in Boulder tomorrow!
October 18, 2011
Tara was thrilled to participate as a speaker at a gathering of copyright, trademark, and technology lawyers at the German Patent and Trademark Office in Berlin, Germany on October 10, 2011 to talk about “Trademarks and Copyrighted Content in Social Media.” The presentation, fortunately for Tara, was intended to be delivered in English. Afterwards, the panelists enjoyed a lovely Italian dinner in Berlin.
Tara is fully available for additional international speaking engagements on IP law, or really any topic which needs to be covered and will get her the job.
Mario Sorensen Garcia (pictured below, left), Boriana Guimberteau, Antoine Gautier-Sauvagnac, Maximillian Schenck, and Tara Aaron present on Trademarks and Copyright in Social Media at GRUR in Berlin, Germany, October 10, 2011
Mario Sorensen Garcia, Tara Aaron, Boriana Guimberteau, Antoine Gautier-Sauvagnac and Maximillian Schenck present on Trademarks and Copyrighted Content in Social Media at GRUR in Berlin, Germany, October 10, 2011
September 19, 2011
Tara reported a couple of weeks ago that I had been selected as a “Best Lawyer” in the field of Intellectual Property Litigation. Upon hearing of this outlandish claim, some of you may reasonably have demanded proof. Heck, I demanded proof. Well, here it is. (I hope the letter suffices. The plaque costs extra…)
September 17, 2011
As many of you know, Rick Sanders has been posting a series of blog entries on online music sources and their legal status (or lack thereof) under U.S. copyright law. Recently, Brad McCarty of The Next Web contacted Rick to discuss Apple’s imminent iCloud, and what might happen when the iTunes Match services discovers pirated content in a user’s library. Brad’s great article based on his conversation with Rick can be found here.
September 7, 2011
The Nashville Bar Association released its slate of twelve nominees for its Board of Directors this afternoon. The nominees include deserving attorneys from all areas of practice and size of law firm. Tara was nominated towards the end of her year chairing the IP Section of the Nashville Bar Association, and has been actively involved in the Entertainment & Sports Committee and the NBA’s pro bono activities. Elections are in six weeks. We wish Tara good luck!
September 2, 2011
Rick Sanders has been named as a “Best Lawyer” in Intellectual Property Litigation. Best Lawyers is the oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession. We here at Aaron | Sanders PLLC are not at all surprised that Rick has earned this honor, but we are pleased at the news and we congratulate him!
August 11, 2011
Aspatore Press, an imprint of Thomson/Reuters, has published Understanding Developments in Cyberspace Law: Leading Lawyers Examining Privacy Issues, Addressing Security Concerns, and Responding to Recent IT Trends(whew!), part of Aspatore’s Inside the Minds series. Rick contributed a chapter on the Stored Communications Act, “Overlapping Public and Private Spheres in Cyberspace: Fear, Exhilaration, the Internet and the Stored Communications Act.” Rick’s main thesis is that, when we consider the problem of balancing privacy and commercial interests in cyberspace, the fundamental issue is cyberspace forces us to confront the public parts of our lives that relate to our private business (e.g., where we shop, who are friends are, what products we like, where we go, and so forth), and there is no consensus how to treat that space (and the public-private dichotomy is unhelpful). This public-private space has always existed, but cyberspace–in particular its ability to track and remember details about our private business–has made this space decidedly uncomfortable. Until there is consensus on this issue, attempts produce a comprehensive set of rules to govern online privacy are doomed. Until then, we’ll have to live with outdated, highly technical statutes like the Stored Communications Act, a forward-looking, noble act of Congress that was completely blindsided by the advent of the World Wide Web within five years of its passage. Several problems with our current understanding of the statute can be solved if we can just remember the state of cyberspace as it existed at passage of the SCA, where electronic bulletin boards were really proto-ISPs, not everyone could access the internet, and email could take days to reach its destination. As technical and esoteric as the Act may be, the results of its interpretation are by no means purely academic: Rick finally recounts the struggles of a federal judge to figure out whether posts to a Facebook “wall” are covered by the Stored Communications Act and are thus not subject to civil subpoena.
The book can be purchased here, but at least check there was only one left in stock(!), and since the books are admittedly pricey, we may be able to lend one to you. And we are happy to discuss questions of online privacy and the Stored Communications Act, and what it all might mean for your business.
July 12, 2011
Aaron Sanders PLLC warrants another (though fleeting) mention in the Nashville City Paper/Nashville Post. Apparently, Rick Sanders is part of a trend, but we don’t think anyone else went and started a new law firm. Meanwhile, Rick Sanders has posted his third blog entry from the Stanford eCommerce Best Practices Conference. Now he talks about why “virtual” goods are not the same as real goods. At least not for the consumers. We’re calling this one “Why Your Kindle is Not Like Your Nightstand.”
