By Chike Eze
Generally, the author of a work owns the copyright in the work. However, an exception to the rule is that the employee or hiring party for whom the work was prepared is considered the owner of the work. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York applied the “instance and expense” test in Urbont v. Sony Music Entertainment to determine whether the Iron Man Theme, created by Jack Urbont (“Urbont”) at Marvel’s request, was a work made for hire. Continue reading
By Brennen Johnson
The fight is back on between Apple and the FBI over encryption technology. In June 2014, we first covered Apple’s move to encrypt iOS 8 phones that could stump even the FBI. But the FBI wasn’t happy about it. Last November, we covered how the FBI sought a court order to force Apple to develop a method for breaking the encryption on these phones with “brute force.” However, the phone in that case ran older software that Apple could simply unlock, iOS 5, so the FBI wasn’t able to use the case as a stepping-stone to win the fight over encryption.
But as of last Tuesday, February 16, the heat turned up when a Federal Magistrate Judge ordered Apple to provide the FBI with software and technical support to help crack an iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. Authorities recovered the iOS 9 phone after a married couple, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, shot and killed 14 people and wounded 22 others last December. After the judge issued the order, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the order a “dangerous precedent that threatens everyone’s civil liberties,” while other tech giants, like Google, stated their own support for Apple: Continue reading
By Gwen Wei
As it turns out, it’s a terrible idea to try to lock down the Internet’s favorite toys via trademark. Who knew?
Certainly the news seems to have come as a shock to a few businesses in the new year. On October 28, 2015, Sony Computer Entertainment America applied to trademark the phrase ‘Let’s Play’. According to its application, Sony intended the trademark for goods regarding “electronic transmission and streaming of video games via global and local computer networks; streaming of audio, visual, and audiovisual material via global and local computer networks”. Continue reading
By Kiran Jassal
Law students across the United States are familiar with “The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation,” prepared by the Harvard Law Review Association. Recently, the manual’s copyright and trademark protections have come into question. More specifically, the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at New York University joined Public Resource to publish “Baby Blue,” a public domain version of The Bluebook. Publishers of Bluebook vehemently defend their work, claiming copyright and trademark infringement. Professor Christopher Sprigman, of NYU Law, explained Baby Blue’s open access objective in an interview with the NYU Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law. To show support for the project, Yale Law students have started a petition, stating Baby Blue “will ensure that no one…is denied access to these rules of legal citation”. The question remains, however, whether Baby Blue infringes on any of Bluebook’s publisher’s intellectual property rights. Continue reading
By Grady Hepworth
Last year, national sandwich chain Jimmy John’s garnered widespread media attention after it was revealed that the company requires many of its sandwich makers, and some delivery-drivers, to sign non-compete agreements for entry-level jobs. The Huffington Post originally obtained Jimmy John’s non-competition covenant, and Jimmy John’s has since become the center of litigation, as well as Congressional legislation, to protect the mobility of low-wage workers.
Jimmy John’s non-compete agreement shocked some, and outraged others, for its potentially far-reaching effects and the hardship it could impose on low-wage workers. The agreement prohibited former employees from working for any sandwich-making restaurant within a three-mile radius of a Jimmy John’s location within city limits, for at least two years. As drafted, the agreement could preclude former employees from working for any competing restaurant within an entire city (the covenant applies to any restaurant that derives at least ten percent of its profits from sandwich-like products). Jimmy John’s justifies the agreement due to the “substantial time, effort, and money in developing the products sold to customers” and effort spent “refining the procedures to be used in operating” Jimmy John’s restaurants. Subsequently, the controversy has inspired media outlets to expose similar low-wage non-compete agreements utilized by other companies, including Amazon. Continue reading
Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts 