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When You Need Someone’s Permission to Use the Thing You Bought

How Long Is a “Transitory Duration”? Normally, you don’t need anyone’s permission to use a copyrighted work. If you buy a book, you may read it. If you are given a painting, you may enjoy it. If you take a knick-knack from your grandma, you may...

How Might I Own the Copyright? Let Me Count the Ways

All the Ways in One Case You can’t enforce what you don’t own.1For a certain value of “own.” That might seem fundamental to copyright law, but it’s frequently overlooked because it seems so obvious. Not knowing who owns a copyright is...

Schrems II left a mess, and other data protection news

I recently co-authored a short article earlier this month for the International Trademark Association Bulletin. In it, we discuss the recent cross-border data transfer issues wrought upon the EU and the US since the Schrems II decision last year and its aftermath. In...

Oracle Fought Google. Transformativeness Won.

Oracle v. Google Is Over. And Rick Can Stop Blogging About It Forever. I was in the middle of writing a blog post about The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith—you know, the one about Andy Warhol’s use of a photograph of Prince1The...

Some Fireworks on Our Way to Oracle v Google

The Case That’s More “Oracle v. Google” Than Oracle v. Google While we wait for the Supreme Court to hand down its decision in Oracle v. Google, we can have some fun with a case that might be exactly what folks are afraid Oracle v. Google is: use of...

Trademark Law Is Presumptuous Again

Party Like it’s 2006 I mentioned last time that the gigantic Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (remember that?) had three “IP”-related Easter eggs, two for trademark and one for copyright. I blogged about the copyright one last time, the...