After a considerable amount of interest in my prior article on Fair Use, I have decided to expand on the subject.

Free Republic, LLC, owner of the political website freerepublic.com, was found liable for copyright infringement in L.A. Times v. Free Republic for reproducing and archiving full-text versions of plaintiffs' news articles even though the judge found the website minimally commercial. She held that "while defendants' do not necessarily 'exploit' the articles for commercial gain, their posting to the Free Republic site allows defendants and other visitors to avoid paying the 'customary price' charged for the works."

The April 2000 opinion ruled concerning the four factors of fair use that 1) "defendants' use of plaintiffs' articles is minimally, if at all, transformative," 2) the factual content of the articles copied "weighs in favor of finding of fair use of the news articles by defendants in this case," though it didn't "provide strong support" 3) concerning the amount and substantiality prong, "the wholesale copying of plaintiffs' articles weighs against the finding of fair use," and 4) the plaintiffs showed that they were trying to exploit the market for viewing their articles online and defendants didn't rebut...

After a considerable amount of interest in my prior article on Fair Use, I have decided to expand on the subject.

Free Republic, LLC, owner of the political website freerepublic.com, was found liable for copyright infringement in L.A. Times v. Free Republic for reproducing and archiving full-text versions of plaintiffs' news articles even though the judge found the website minimally commercial. She held that "while defendants' do not necessarily 'exploit' the articles for commercial gain, their posting to the Free Republic site allows defendants and other visitors to avoid paying the 'customary price' charged for the works."

The April 2000 opinion ruled concerning the four factors of fair use that 1) "defendants' use of plaintiffs' articles is minimally, if at all, transformative," 2) the factual content of the articles copied "weighs in favor of finding of fair use of the news articles by defendants in this case," though it didn't "provide strong support" 3) concerning the amount and substantiality prong, "the wholesale copying of plaintiffs' articles weighs against the finding of fair use," and 4) the plaintiffs showed that they were trying to exploit the market for viewing their articles online and defendants didn't rebut...

For over ten years a California man named, Rick Norsigian has been trying to prove that a box of glass-plate negatives he bought at a yard sale are the work of Ansel Adams. Norsigian bought the negatives at a Fresno, California, garage sale for $45.

After marketing prints made from the negatives as Adams prints the Ansel Adams Publishing Right Trust filed a federal trademark infringement lawsuit against Norsigian. Norsigian responded by filing counterclaims against the Trust.

A team of experts concluded they were Adams' early work, believed to have been destroyed in a 1937 fire at his Yosemite studio, Norsigian said. The Adams Trust disputed that.

However, the authentication effort was hampered from the beginning by the emergence of Earl Brooks. An Oakland woman, Marian Walton, produced a photo she said was taken by her "Uncle Earl" which seemed to match one of the negatives â a shot of the Jeffrey Pine in Yosemite.

Also in the fall of 2010, another seemingly matching photo of Yosemite was found in a photo scrapbook belonging to Brooks' great grandson. No word from Earl Brooks' family about settlement agreement; one legal chapter might have closed, but many questions remain.

Consequently, this week, Norsigian agreed to a ...

I canât say that I am surprised to see this, after Appleâs heated battle with Microsoft over the âApp Storeâ trademark, they are now suing Amazon for âimproper use.â

The trademark being sought by Apple is for "App Store." Under the relevant trademark law, a trademark cannot be registered if it consists solely of a generic or purely descriptive term. "Store" is generic. So too is the word "application," which is commonly thought of as being what the word "app" refers to. Therefore, no trademark could ever be registered for the word "store" or for the word "application" and certainly not for "application store" (no trademark can be registered when all of its constituent elements are generic). A trademark identifies the origin of goods or services and no one vendor can claim that a whole generic category of goods or services can be set out as a domain for which it and it alone is the origin. The question is, does any of this change because Apple's claim is for the word "app" as opposed to "application."

Apple claims that "app" in this context is a word that refers uniquely to Apple in the public mind, that is, when a typical consumer hears of an "app," that person immediately associates that word with an "Apple app" and not with...