Silicon Valley IP Licensing Law Blog Silicon Valley’s Resource to Intellectual Property Licensing

Anticipating a likely copyright battle over its new Kindle 2 audio feature, Amazon has backed down on its previous position and announced that publishers and authors will be able to decide whether to enable the feature.
The Author’s Guild first signaled that a fight was brewing when it issued a February 12th alert over the Kindle [...]

Reversing its course again for the third time in less than a month, Facebook has proposed another new set of terms and conditions and is adopting a townhall format to allow users to comment and even vote on the new changes.
CEO Mark Zuckerburg explained the new changes at the Facebook Blog as follows:
We sat down [...]

Following up on our blog posting yesterday regarding the recent controversy over a Facebook decision to amend its terms and conditions, Facebook has decided to reverse its previous decision and temporarily adopt its previous terms and conditions.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the change of policy late last night, stating as follows:
Many of us [...]

Following on the heels of a 2007 controversy over its privacy and advertising policies, Facebook has now set off a new controversy on the web with its decision to amend its terms and conditions, which deal with the licensing of content posted to its site.
The provision at the heart of this controversy states as follows:
You are solely responsible for the User [...]

It’s inevitable: in a recession, most businesses are trying to cut costs wherever they can.   Every business owner is seeing the effects of this all around them.
So, if you are a software company, how do you keep your maintenance agreements from being the target of one of these cuts?
The Software Licensing and Master Services Agreements [...]

Following up on my blogposting earlier this week on how the Bad Economy Presents an Opportunity to Renegotiate Contracts, I came across today a timely article addressing the same issue by The Wall Street Journal. 
According to The Wall Street Journal, small businesses are having a lot of success in renegotiating contracts in the current bad [...]

Increasingly, I have noticed a trend with websites: more and  more, companies are displaying other companies’ logos on their websites.  In fact, when my new website was in development, my developers proposed that I do the same.
However, if you are displaying other companies logos on your website, there is a high likelihood that you are infringing [...]

While the bad economy has stopped much of the deal activity going on in the business world, the poor economy presents one opportunity that you may have overlooked: the opportunity to renegotiate your contracts. 
Why does a bad economy provide such a good opportunity for renegotiation?  Well, the answer is fairly obvious: in a bad economy, parties [...]

Given where we are on the patent reform debate, is it time to move patent reform off the table and work on copyright reform?
If you haven’t heard many calls for this lately, you are not alone, but according to Wired, Judge Miriam Hall Patel, who presided over the Napster case has had time to think [...]

A posting by Kevin Smith on the Scholarly Communications @ Duke Blog explores the argument that the academic world should consider adopting the Creative Commons Licensing system for their academic works. The article got me to thinking: should the blogosphere consider adopting the same model?
Smith’s argument is that the problem with the current copyright [...]