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With spring in the air, it is time to take another look at current news in the world of patent troll litigation. By now full-fledged media darlings, patent infringement lawsuits filed by non-practicing entities are everywhere you turn, garnering not just upvotes on Hackernews, retweets on Twitter, but time in the halls ...

Bitcoin, an anonymous currency imagined by a mysterious individual with a secret identity, is on everybody’s mind. The cryptographic digital currency, operating through a decentralized peer-to-peer network, is both an opportunity for criminals and entrepreneurial early adopters as well as a challenge for regulators. Since inception, bitcoin has captured headlines, ...

A recent conference at Stanford Law brought together top-flight litigators, intellectual property scholars, representatives from USPTO and WIPO, and in-house counsel for a rousing discussion of emerging issues in design patents. In contrast to an ordinary utility patent, a design patent is granted to an inventor of a new, original and ...

The embittered battle between Dish Network and American Broadcasting Companies has given a public face to the struggle between the entertainment and technology industries over the role of copyright in media. In this battle, however, theoretical copyright interests are secondary to networks’ central business concern: profit. The future of advertising ...

Three states have recently passed legislation authorizing online gambling within their borders. Proponents of online gambling are drafting similar legislation in other states and even in Congress. In addition to examining these recent legalization efforts, this post takes a look at the complicated history of online gambling in the United ...

BTLJ is excited to welcome Jane C. Ginsburg of Columbia Law School on April 18–19, 2013 to the 17th Annual BTLJ/BCLT Symposium: Reform(aliz)ing Copyright for the Internet Age?. This is a summary of Professor Ginsburg’s topic of discussion and forthcoming article:   Copyright formalities are back in fashion, but their acolytes have ...

BTLJ is excited to welcome Molly S. Van Houweling of Berkeley Law on April 18–19, 2013 to the 17th Annual BTLJ/BCLT Symposium: Reform(aliz)ing Copyright for the Internet Age?. This is a summary of Professor Van Houweling’s topic of discussion and forthcoming article:   Intellectual property scholars often contrast tangible and intangible ...

BTLJ is excited to welcome Daniel Gervais of Vanderbilt Law School on April 18–19, 2013 to the 17th Annual BTLJ/BCLT Symposium: Reform(aliz)ing Copyright for the Internet Age?. This is a summary of Professor Gervais’s topic of discussion and forthcoming article:   The policy that copyright protection vests as soon as a work ...

Last Fall, Derek Khanna, then an intern at the Republican Study Committee (RSC) released a policy brief concerning copyright entitled “Three Myths about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix it.” Khanna insisted, based on a textualist reading of the constitution, that copyright has become too favorable to the ...

The Supreme Court recently handed down its decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, a copyright exhaustion case concerning the sale of “gray-market” works published outside the United States and imported for sale. In a surprisingly decisive 6-3 decision, the Court reversed the Second Circuit’s decision and held that ...