Idea Lawyer Blog

Peter Norton describes his growing up in Seattle in the 1950s and early 1960s as an "Ozzie and Harriet" existence, white picket fence and all. Yet he felt himself a classic outsider, who kept to himself and, without ever really breaking out, never really fit in.

Continue reading "Peter Norton Part II: What is Math?" »

"What advice would you give to people with ideas?"
"I don't think people with ideas should be given any advice at all."
--from our interview with Peter Norton

How do you make $100 million in seven years as an inventor?

Well, if you're Peter Norton you go through public schools as "a loner," attend (and drop out of) a small college in the Pacific Northwest known for "brilliant and unstable" students; get drafted and spend two years teaching combat first aid; spend five years in a Buddhist monastery in Northern California; bounce from job to job in computers; return to college and get your degree; and work for Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Continue reading "Peter Norton Part I: The Man Behind Norton Utilities" »

Gamers - here are 10 tips (compliments of Businessweek) for packaging your game to sell.
Careful - decisions are made in as little as 50 milliseconds...not much time to make a first impression, eh?
Short form, just for starters.....
1. Keep it simple, (silly!)
2. Dress for Success
3. Less Talk More Action
......(keep reading below)....

Continue reading "BOXING the GAME" »

What DO you want :Sex Drugs Rock and Roll? Money fame, power? Influence? Market share? Global domination? A better bottom line? Peace, quiet and good tilled earth?
If you're too busy for KARRASS , or unclear on Burning Man
do the "two step" of a Biz Dev dynamo at a Fortune 100 company:
Step 1: Know what you want*
Step 2: Get it
* Cliffs Notes: Step 2 is a no-brainer. Most fail at step 1.
Hence Mick Jagger's: " I can't GET No.."
As an IP professional, I have observed that few folks are sadder than those who are granted patents (or that perfect trademark or music deal) and don't see dumptrucks of money on their front lawn....
How have you honed - in on step 1? Done step 2? Tell us please....

Thanks to Colette Vogele for announcing her panel on music rights and licensing at the BANDWIDTH Conference. Colette has her finger on the pulse of the "internet and society" aspects of media technology. We hope to get her down to Beverly Hills before long!

For the best of web-mediated completely independent and professional musicianship with global scope, check out The MARSH Let us know if you don't think it beats MySpace as a real place for real professionals, instead of lemming-minded consumers or "look at me" wanna bees? Am I missing something? We're listening.....

Stultification or Sway?

Quote of the day:Robert Jackson
"The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish."
Media literacy is squandered under the mind numbing minions of self promotion on the web: a purgatory of other people's kids/pets/pratfalls in print/ photo/video.
What of the potential for "internet journalism" ? I commend a New Yorker article entitled "Journalism without the Journalists" by Nicholas Lemann... read the "best" of "hyperlocal" journalism.... (and you thought your life was mundane).
Arguably the "opposite of Oprah" or sensationalized self-obsession, hyperlocal journalism highlights by contrast a distal point of internet-enabled free speech: a borderless venue for conscious responsive social journalism of staggering sway. How can one best use and appreciate the precious right of free speech? What is the most potent form of communication? Let us know what you think....

GAME DESIGNER Kit for The MASSES?

With the development costs for new video games nowadays heading far
north of $10,000,000, Microsoft has announced an interesting new set of programming tools called Microsoft XNA.
For fees topping out at $99/year, you can get what you need to develop
relatively simple games for the XBox 360 or PCs. Apparently, games
created with the software will not be sold, although "enhanced" versions might
go onsale via Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft will also be selling a
more complete toolset, called XNA Game Studio Professional, for
developers looking to build games for retail.

What do you think? Will XNA provide the newest "calling card"
technology for aspiring designers—and create a new road into the world
of game designing? Will we soon see a sort of YouTube for
hand-crafted XBox 360 games—or maybe even a kind of game designers'
version of Sundance? Send your comments.....

Kudos to vloggers and authors Ryanne & Jay founders of an open source collaborative to teach videoblogging around the world. For those not able to take their Vlog workshop, their on line tutorials and books are not to be slighted.

Continue reading "Vlog as a New Media" »

Here is one "quote-oid" in series (balanced, we aim to be) of points of view about "open systems"
by James Boyle in Financial Times.

Continue reading "Open mind Open systems?" »

Grand Theft Auto - a popular "adult" video game does did not infringe a parodied "sleezy" club in Los Angeles. Plaintiff argued the game "hurt the club's reputation."
What reputation? How can you tell? Inquiring minds want to know!

An inauspicious beginning....

Trek bike's Burke
tells INC magazine the story of how he parlayed mediocre grades, the 1973 oil embargo, and a bike frame operation in a red barn (with $25,000 to invest in manufacturing) into the largest US bicycle manufacture.
Today, most folks know of Lance Armstrong, and the Trek name.

We first backed a team in the Tour de France in 1998. In 1998 if you asked 10 people on the street they wouldn't have heard of the Tour. If you wanted to watch it you couldn't find coverage.

No one had any idea in 1999 that Lance or the team would do so well.

We commend our readers to the article, and invite you to send us pointers to other business success stories.

Voluntary - and fun!- ubiquitous monitoring: new uses for that cell phone.

Last night I attended Connected Healthcare: The $34 Billion Dollar Market, an event sponsored by SmartSilvers Alliance (Leveraging technology to foster active aging TM") The evening ended too soon: speaker and panelists could easily have presented much more on this compelling topic to the packed room.

The intro by moderator Richard Adler effectively framed the evening, harkening back to the 3 pound, $3999.00 "first mobile phone" created in 1983 by Martin Cooper, and citing present day penetration of cell phones in Italy at 108% (see my earlier blog entry on cell phones as a fashion accessory).
The sharpest dividing line between the generations is the proclivity to use one's mobile phone to receive or send "text messages."
Who besides me is wondering why in heavens name the advances in voice recognition are being ignored in favor of keyboards for those with tiny fingers and stacatto prose??

Continue reading "Boomers:Healthcare Technology " »

Disinclined to waste anything as precious as time, I must salvage yesterday's random point & click on the internet into the sembalnce of a blog entry ....here's the path I clicked...
beginning with "parody" and "fair use" as general topics, I visited:
Google's website for public posting of video's and laughed at low brow parodies of Shakira (while listening to the entire song - something about Hips----).....{my preferred writing music is Johnny Marr and The Healers}
http://The Law and Politics of Internet Activism: The Yes Men, Peta, Rtmark, and the Phenomenon of Parody Websites by Anita Ramasastry;

coverage of the Ludlow Music versus Jib Jab case and settlement [ i commend downloading the EFF complaint and viewing pdfs of Woody Guthrie's original documents filed in the US Copyright Office....]
EFF's Fred von Lohmann writes:
"The idea of copyright law is that, after a time, every work comes back into the hands of the public, where it can be reused, recycled, made part of new creativity without having to pay a fee or call in the lawyers. That's the great thing, the real genius of copyright."(emphasis added)
moving through Kevin Heller's blawg
checking out MP3 aggregators
elbo.ws
At the end of my click fest, I still am unclear about how much of a copyrighted new release I can use for my upcoming vlog (!!!) without taking one or more licenses. However, I might go buy a Shakira tune to play during my next click fest.

Another commendable blog from Irving Wladawsky-Berger concerning his panel at the Innovation Summit @Stanford.

Despite a flurry of blog activity in support of a proposed French law permitting reverse engineering of the iPod/iTune proprietary platform and the reduction of file sharing fines to the level of a parking ticket, the French Constitutional Council rejected the so-called IPod law as unconstitutional.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/28/yourmoney/music.php

One in every color?

Sony's seven-megapixel Cyber-shot(R) DSC-T10 digital still camera premiers this summer in pink, white, black and silver.
The camera's design "...is so stylish that it can be viewed as a fashion accessory " quipped Phil Lubell, director of marketing for digital still cameras and photo printers at Sony Electronics.
"The number of digital still cameras per household is steadily increasing, up to three or four, which suggests that people are buying cameras to fulfill different needs."

So fashion IS a need - --?
Design patents address ornamentation of useful objects, so one might define "fashion" as a social "ornamentation recognition" ......

Patent attorneys - protectors of fashion.
I love my job.

Chocolate chocolate chocolate
(imagine these immortal words intoned by Cary Grant rather than the ho hum Grant inflected "judy, Judy Judy).....

I love chocolate ----- what sort of patents apply to chocolate?
stay tuned as we bring several blogs on food and technology this month.
meanwhile see
http://www.cocoavia.com

The future of P2P
So Kazaa follows Napster- a re-birth...and Hollywood.Media partners anew:
Excerpts from The International Herald Tribune July 28, 2006 (By Eric Pfanner):

LONDON The music industry and Hollywood movie studios said Thursday that they had settled lawsuits against a longtime nemesis, the owner of the digital file-sharing network Kazaa, freeing that company to transform itself into a legitimate online distributor of films and music.

Sharman Networks, a privately held company that is incorporated on the Pacific island of Vanuatu and operates Kazaa from Australia, agreed to pay $115 million to the major record companies and movie studios, which accused Kazaa of aiding the illegal copying of music via the Internet."

"All the parties involved now recognize the time is right to work together, and we are looking forward to collaborating with the music and motion picture companies to make P2P an integral part of the future of online digital entertainment," Nikki Hemming, chief executive of Sharman Networks, said.

Kazaa has been earning revenue primarily from advertising, and Kennedy said the recording industry would not object if it persisted with an advertiser-supported model, rather than charging users, as long as it pays the proper royalties.

Such a model would differentiate Kazaa from other online music services, which typically charge users for downloads or subscriptions. Digital music offerings are proliferating, including several from companies that use peer-to-peer technology.

The movie industry has also begun to embrace peer-to-peer technology as a means of distributing its content. Several download-to-own services, which allow users to purchase digital files of films via the Internet and watch them as they would a DVD, have also been started.

see http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/27/yourn

Continue reading "Kazaa Agrees to License -P2P Suit Settled" »

Certainly you can win at the music game. Never forget, though, that the pop music business has long preyed on financially and legally unsophisticated people, often from disadvantaged communities, who produce so much of our popular music. To protect yourself in this racket, you need to rely on a fairly elaborate team.

Continue reading "Music: Winning the Game" »

Ya gotta ask (and answer) yourself:
IS IT MINE, MINE ALL MINE????

Before you borrow (cut/paste/sample/morph/imitate/reproduce, etc)
from *anyone* (dead, alive, or undetermined) else's work, make sure that the core of what you're creating is really your own.
Refresh your recollection: see http://www.copyright.gov
and try http://www.creativecommons.org

If you can trace the origin of the core to YOUR creative juice, and have asked permission or followed the guidelines of "kosher-copyrighting", then odds are you'll be okay. If you have a co-owner (co- creator or assignee of some or all rights) , we'll talk about that in another tip....

Niggling doubts....grey areas....you borrowed the mp3 riff of your buddy's dog howling but hey but the dog is dead and you know the dude /tte would be cool but you haven't asked.... either alter your project or seek written permission for borrowing.

TIP: Have your own permission letter handy to email and get permission...Make it easy for them to say YES!
Sample letters- stay tuned for the workshop section of this blog...

Continue reading "Copyright: Tips - Kosher Copyrighting- Keep a Form Handy" »

If your personal manager, attorney, and agent do their jobs, you're going to be making money. Handling that money is your business manager's job.

Continue reading "Music: Business Manager" »