teachingaway

I see 205 of "Launcher, Grenade" followed by only 1 of "Laundry, Cleaner"

If the dataset comes from the Gov't (e.g., Freedom of Info Act), one might argue that its public domain data. If its public domain, then slapping a license on it doesn't change anything.

If its not public domain, and you want people to use it fairly freely, Apache seems like a good license.

Disclaimer: i haven't thought about this very carefully before posting. Could be wrong.

One thing I do know is that @copiesofcopies is a former EFF guy that knows open source licensing. Ask him!

Takeaway: make sure your users click-to-agree on your terms of use. Referencing them in the fine print somewhere isn't safe.

Professor Goldman often makes this comment: > "there are two types of online terms: mandatory click-through agreements and everything else, which I’ll call 'things that aren’t contracts.'”

Secondary takeaway - you probably want a mandatory arbitration clause in your terms of service. Discuss it with your lawyer, but arbitration is often far less expensive and less distracting for a startup (compared to litigation).

Carolla should donate that $500k to the EFF or similar anti-patent troll organization. He raised that money to fight the case. If he settled, he should pass the $$$ forward to the next defendant that wants to pick up the torch.

>> c) have some real sense of what being a lawyer actually means (e.g. they spent at least a couple years working at a firm in some non-lawyer capacity...

This is the most important factor, in my opinion. Work as a paralegal (or similar job) for a year before you apply to law school.

Its about context. If this were claim construction brief, just looking at one random figure would be totally wrong. But a proper and careful analysis of the claims would be a snoozefest. I wanted to tell a story celebrating the hard work of these wonderful students.

Since we won on jurisdiction, the patent itself wasn't a big part of the story.

>> There are so many worthier avenues for pro-bono legal work than helping out for-profit companies.

I have a handful of students who want to be patent lawyers. Should I make them work on death penalty or civil rights cases?

>> I'm surprised there isn't an EFF-like non-profit that provides pro-bono patent defense to start-ups, against patent trolls.

Part of the problem is making it scale. It takes a lot of man-hours to defend a patent litigation case. Its certainly possible to set up such a non-profit... its just difficult. We're working on it!

In most cases, if a plaintiff withdraws, it needs to be with prejudice. Thats the default rule. In this particular instance, there was a procedural twist that make it a somewhat close call.

Maybe its a close question for the first 2 or 3 patent lawsuits. But when someone's filing 10+ patent lawsuits at a clip, its difficult to imagine a legitimate scenario.

True. This doesn't solve the patent troll problem. We could replicate the clinic at a few different schools, and maybe win 5 or 10 cases per year out of the hundreds that get filed. Not a solution, but maybe better than nothing?

Unpaid labor - students get school credit, and its way more fun that sitting through lectures.

Honestly, 911 Notify is far from the worst troll. Most of their targets are deep-pocket public companies that have plenty of cash to hire big brand law firms.

I think it would be a great use of student time to identify the most egregious patents / trolls and try to invalidate their patents.

pretty much true. Its not a grand slam win, and the case could come back (but not in Delaware). I still think its a win.

We definitely want to put together some guidelines for other schools to run similar projects. In fact, @jorgemtorres wrote an entire Kauffman Fellows thesis on this topic.

>> Does the decision encouraging "fee shifting" require that the case go to trial?

Nope. It only requires that the case is "exceptional" -- in the sense that the plaintiff filed an exceptionally crappy lawsuit.

>> Does it require that the fees actually be paid by the defendant? Or might the law school students still be able to receive payment by the troll for their pro bono defense?

I haven't looked into this myself, but my law students tell me that we can get fee shifting even for pro bono work.

I think that's correct, but calling them a "front" makes it sound a little sinister.

I'd say "Polaroid" is mainly just a trademark licensed out by a shell company for random products because its still widely recognized and loved (at least by old people).

on second thought... maybe playing with our emotions like that is a little sinister?

"... an examiner missed 304 hours of work in a year but was paid for the time. Despite warnings, this examiner kept cheating and was caught twice but not fired."

>> By the way, there's no such thing as a "provisional patent"

Right. But its just shorthand for "provisional patent application". Maybe its sloppy, but I don't think its a big deal.

just tried HN Special... much better than the default styles. Thanks!

looks like a solid patent:

1. A method of monosyllabic communication over a communications network, comprising:

- a bespoke user interface selected from a colorway including purple, violet, orchid and lavender,

- sending at least one monosyllabic communication,

- wherein, in response to receiving a first message from at least one messaging subsystem, producing an audible vocalization of consisting of at least a "Yo",

- receiving agile tweetstorm heuristics, including but not limited to fullstack machine learning for map reduce.

Really sounds out of place. I always cringe when I write it.

Sometimes I'll change it to "Request for Relief", and I've never had a judge comment on the change.

"Real Lawyer"... technically true... But the lawyer doesn't appear to know much about the relevant law or technology.

He does have a pic of himself photoshopped into a courthouse. Weirdly floating at the bottom of this page: http://vandykelawfirm.com/index-2.html

I think a lot of these "not legal advice" disclaimers are overkill. You can't get proper "legal advice" from a blog. You get legal advice when you hire a lawyer. A blog might be full of accurate and useful legal information, but that doesn't make it "legal advice" in the sense that you can sue the blogger for legal malpractice.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but has anyone actually seen such a lawsuit?

Follow-up article: "When is it Legal to Just Google Around a Paywall?"

Its not incorporation itself that attracts patent trolls. They go after the scent of money. Like, after you announce a round of funding, a troll will suddenly realize you are 'infringing' on their patents.

You're totally right (I edited original comment to reflect that those are US cases). I'm not sure what the equivalent UK law would be.

In the U.S., visual aspects of software are generally copyrightable. Check out the Pac-Man v. KC Munkin case from 1982. There are several others. www.copyrightcodex.com/infringement/16-infringement-substantial-similarity/software-copyright-infringement#Pac-Man_v_KC_Munchkin

But when "visual" includes GUI, there's less copyright protection (because user interface elements are functional). Check out the Apple v. Microsoft case from 1994 as an example.

I'm not sure what the equivalent UK law would be.