The US Supreme Court Holds that Georgia can’t Claim Copyright over its Annotated Code

The US Supreme Court Holds that Georgia can’t Claim Copyright over its Annotated Code

The US Supreme Court has quite recently ruled that Georgia, a state located in the southeastern region of the US, can’t claim the Copyright over its annotated code.

The ruling held by the Supreme Court is a victory for Carl Malamud, who is an American author, technologist, and open government activist. In 2013, he had posted Georgia’s annotated code online. For more than a decade now, Malamud and his corporation, Public.Resource.Org (publishes and shares the public domain material in the US and all across the globe), have been working efficiently to liberate the state laws and regulatory codes digitally.

State governments and related authorities quite often claim that they must copyright the works and creations to recoup the expenses involved in the research and print of voluminous editions. Georgia has a contract with LexisNexis (a corporation specializing in providing business research, legal research, and risk management services) to govern the research work and distribution of the annotated codes. LexisNexis, in turn, gets the exclusive rights corresponding to publishing the codes, while the state gets a cut of any sales made. The non-annotated codes are available at no cost; however, the hardcover annotated set costs $412. The copyright clash stemmed from Georgia’s lawsuit against Public Resource when the non-profit corporation tried to publish the code on its own.

Malamud and other transparency groups say that law can never be copyrighted. They believe that under the “Government edicts doctrine,” the same holds for legislative statutes, judicial opinions, and any other writing corresponding to the force of law. They always say that as per the public policy, people must be able to inspect all the laws that are bound by, and no one can ever claim the ownership or authorship of such laws. To be specific, what they mean to say is that the laws belong to the people.

After Public Resource posted Georgia’s annotated code online for free, the state sued Malamud and his corporation in 2015 in federal court. In 2017, a US District Court judge rendered a decision in favor of Georgia by stating that the annotations only had pieces of commentary and didn’t focus on the force of law. However, after some time, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling, which led to a showdown at the US Supreme Court.

In the US Supreme Court’s majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts stated that the officials empowered to speak with the force of law can never claim authorship of the works, which they create in due course of their official duties. He further said that even if the annotated codes were non-binding, they were still very much created in the official capacity by the legislative branch, which doesn’t enable the same to seek Copyright Protection.

In a recent statement delivered, Malamud mentioned that he and his corporation are happy with the US Supreme Court’s decision and are now looking forward to making the Official Code of Georgia readily accessible and usable for the citizens. For more visit: https://www.trademarkmaldives.com

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Coronavirus Outbreak – How the Tech Giants are Easing Patents for a Greater Cause

Coronavirus Outbreak – How the Tech Giants are Easing Patents for a Greater Cause

The tech giants, most of the time, do every possible thing they can to keep their fundamental and crucial innovations under their purview. The most obvious way for them to do the same is via filing Patent Applications. Many of the widely-known tech companies out there file for thousands of patents every year. For instance, in 2019, IBM received a total of 9,262 patents and topped the business technology companies’ list of the most frequent patent recipients for the 27th year in a row. Moreover, companies, including Microsoft and Intel, are never far behind in this scenario as well.

IBM’s chief patent counsel, Manny Schecter, said in an article in 2018 that patents and the corresponding inventions are sometimes used as a currency for innovation. While keeping all such aspects in mind, something far away from the norms has to happen for the patent status quo to be disrupted, which, at present, is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The Open COVID Pledge

At the beginning of this month, all the tech giants mentioned above, along with HP Enterprise, Amazon, Facebook, and many others, joined a new initiative known as the Open COVID Pledge. To the specific, the tech companies are proactively setting aside the digital norms for allowing other companies out there to use their Intellectual Property (IP) temporarily and free of charge in efforts to combat the novel Coronavirus. In particular, the Open COVID Pledge is indeed like a superset of open-source licensing and Creative Commons for undoubtedly a difficult situation.

The best thing about this pledge is that all these tech companies, along with a couple of patent holders and laboratories, love their patents, and yet, they are willing to see the utmost importance of the better cause. The Chief IP Counsel at HP Enterprise, Brett Alten, wrote last week in a blog post that patents provide a competitive edge by granting the respective owners the exclusive right to prevent others from exploiting their unique innovations and inventions; however, in tough situations like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, cooperation holds more importance than the competition in all aspects.

The most engaging part is that the initiative or pledge came to life as a consequence of several academic and legal experts realizing a need, steering it, and then building something exceedingly robust for the tech giants to reply upon conveniently. As a part of the steering community, the General Counsel and Corporate Secretary for Creative Commons, Diane Peters, wrote in the blog post last week that the initiative came together very quickly due to the exigent circumstances. She further noted that Creative Commons is now looking forward to working efficiently with various policy experts and talented international legal professionals on the subsequent steps to make the Open COVID Pledge an impactful and fruitful reality.

According to some experts, there are a few complicating factors involved as well to make the pledge work since it deals with patents. The most critical aspect lies in the fact that some of the tech companies taking part in the initiative are not using the license created for the pledge specifically, and instead, using a separate license in the spirit of the Open COVID Pledge, which includes companies like Intel and IBM.

Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly incredible to come up with such an accomplishment in a short span. At the moment where so much is in the air, and a lot of technological innovation is the need of the hour, the Open COVID Pledge can provide ways to determine effective treatments and cures for the deadly Coronavirus. For more visit: https://www.trademarkmaldives.com

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Commvault Sues Cohesity and Rubrik Alleging Patent Infringement

Commvault Sues Cohesity and Rubrik Alleging Patent Infringement

Commvault (a publicly-traded data management and data protection software company headquartered in New York) has quite recently filed Patent Infringement lawsuits against Rubrik (a California-based cloud data management company) and Cohesity (a privately held IT company headquartered in San Jose, California) in federal court in Delaware. Commvault has stated that the companies have altogether infringed upon its seven patents, which correspond to a plethora of widely used data management technologies such as data deduplication, cloud, security, snapshots, virtualization, and search. To be specific, Commvault has claimed that both Cohesity and Rubrik have appropriated its patented technologies to short-circuit their development processes and reduce the investment needed, corresponding to building competitive products.

The Vice President and Chief Intellectual Property (IP) Counsel at Commvault, Marcus Muller, has said that the lawsuits hold the responsibility of safeguarding a company’s employees and investors, and also bring about fairness when it comes to competing in the global market. He further mentioned that for over two decades now, Commvault has been successfully delivering solutions to its customers and has become the pioneer in this space. By investing even more than $1 billion in its innovations and inventions, Commvault, at present, owns 900 patents across the globe and over 350 pending patents.

Commvault’s General Counsel, Warren Mondschein, mentioned in a recent statement that Commvault is not at all a litigious company; however when companies like Cohesity and Rubrik commit willful patent infringement, then it is the company’s responsibility to file such lawsuits and take a stand for the protection of its innovations and IP assets.

Lynn Lucas, the Chief Marketing Officer at Cohesity, has said that it is not unusual for legacy vendors to come forward and disrupt the market by filing frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to suppress sales and innovation. Coming to this matter, he stated that Cohesity came to know about the patent infringement lawsuit, not by Commvault’s representatives but through the media. He believes that there is no merit to the lawsuit filed as it is only an attempt to slow down Cohesity’s rapid growth and obstruct its accelerating success.

In an unattributed statement, Rubrik only stated that it doesn’t comment on any pending litigation.

When Commvault was asked why it is filing patent infringement lawsuits against Rubrik and Cohesity corresponding to widely implemented storage software capabilities such as cloud, search, virtualization, to name a few, Muller said the company is not claiming on all the aspects in these technologies and is looking at specific patents. He further declined to speculate about whether the company would file similar lawsuits against other such competitors in the market or not.

Commvault, Cohesity, and Rubrik compete vigorously for data protection and management business in the market. On the one hand, Commvault is a long-established vendor, while Cohesity and Rubrik, on the other hand, are well-funded and rapidly emerging new companies on the block. For more visit: https://www.trademarkmaldives.com

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Unfolding the Hand-in-Hand Relationship between Blockchain and IP

Unfolding the Hand-in-Hand Relationship between Blockchain and IP

The to-the-point definition of the term blockchain defines it as an anonymous online ledger that efficiently keeps a growing list of records, known as blocks, which are, in turn, linked using cryptography, where every single block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, transaction data, and a timestamp. As a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, blockchain was invented by an inventor with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2008. The blockchain technology is a concept that is too simple on the one hand and much complex on the other. It is exceedingly diverse in all of its uses. Many experts across the globe believe that the blockchain phenomenon is quite similar to the revolution brought by the Internet and the online world. When it comes to the industrial application of blockchain technology – Finance is undoubtedly one of the leading areas where it is traversing its roots.

The early birds that filed a patent on the blockchain include some of the widely known financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs, Mastercard International, and Bank of America. In India as well, people have filed a few Patent Applications on the blockchain technology. Other than blockchain, shared economy, smart contracts, file storage, governance, identity management, Internet of Things (IoT), stock trading, data management, e-commerce, healthcare, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, luxury and consumer goods, and automotive, are some of the fields in which technology is gaining immense pace and momentum.

It is a matter of fact that yes – Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and the blockchain technology go hand-in-hand. On one side, IPRs protect blockchain, and blockchain, on the other side, can efficiently serve to strengthen the already existing Intellectual Property (IP) regime. Without any doubt, the world, at present, is realizing the enormous potential that blockchain holds, and IPRs are indeed going to play an integral role in coming up with a protected environment for the development of the technology. While taking into account the other side’s aspect, we can observe that the security and reliability offered by blockchain can very well strengthen every phase of the lifecycle of the IPRs including creating licensing agreements, resolving disputes over ownership, identifying counterfeit products, or creating an IP register to keep a record for all forms of IPRs.

Initiatives Taken by the Indian Patent Office

Many nations across the globe have started realizing the true potential of blockchain technology, and India is no exception in this case. The Indian Patent Office (IPO) is doing its best to stay at par with the technological advancements. It expects to be able to predict the timelines for users corresponding to the different actions to be taken by the office.  A scientifically-handled workload-based allocation of patent applications to the examiners shall result in making optimal use of human resources available.  Automated checking against all the formal requirements, including attachments, application formats, amongst many others, can speed up the entire process by reducing the manual intervention required.  With reduced manual intervention, there shall also be an impact on the accountability and transparency procedures in an optimistic way. For achieving all the above measures, the IPO is efficiently establishing a legal framework for a blockchain-based IP registry to commercialize ideas and further protect them.

Final Thoughts

The use of blockchain technology for the benefit of the IP industry is indeed significant. However, like other emerging technologies, blockchain technology has a few setbacks as well. At present, such setbacks include the need for massive processing power and restrictions on the number of transactions per hour. The reality is far away from simple when it comes to the ultimate notion of a method for connecting the IP registries around the world via a single distributed ledger. Remember, successful and proactive management of IPRs using blockchain requires having a standardized platform that is adopted internationally. For more visit: https://www.trademarkmaldives.com

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Music Companies Including Universal Threaten to Sue TikTok Over Copyright Infringement

Music Companies Including Universal Threaten to Sue TikTok Over Copyright Infringement

A body representing a lot of music publishing companies, including Universal, has quite recently threatened to sue TikTok (a Chinese video-sharing app and social networking platform) over Copyright Infringement.

For quite a while now, TikTok has become immensely popular as millions of people across the globe upload their short video clips on the platform, often indulging in lip-syncing with the background music. However, various music rights-holders think that the Chinese-owned video-sharing app doesn’t own the adequate licenses for the music used in its videos. According to a few sources, such music right-holders are now willing to initiate legal proceedings against TikTok.

David Israelite, the chief executive at the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA – a trade association for the American music publishing industry), has stated that filing a Copyright Infringement Lawsuit against TikTok is most probably the future step as he could estimate that even more than 50% of the music publishing market remains unlicensed with the video-sharing app.

Since last year, the world’s largest music company, Universal Music, has been in licensing negotiations with TikTok as the company is looking forward to extracting more money from the video-sharing platform as its user base balloons. However, the publishing arm of Universal Music still doesn’t have any licensing agreement with TikTok in place. It implies that the songwriters at Universal Music, which include Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Elton John, and Billie Eilish, don’t get paid any royalties as and when their songs are inserted in the background music of TikTok videos. Many people believe that this level of blatant copyright infringement is rarely seen that too by a large multinational company.

A TikTok spokesperson, on the other hand, stated that the platform is proud to support the music industry with a plethora of licenses that it owns in place. He further said that the details of any discussions or agreements between TikTok and its partners remain private and confidential at all times and in all aspects.

The NMPA represents a lot of songwriters and music publishers in the United States and holds a previous track record of suing many widely-known companies such as YouTube, Spotify, and Peloton, and often ending up winning settlement money.  In 2016, Spotify had agreed to pay somewhere around $30m to the songwriters for unpaid royalties, and Peloton, earlier this year, settled for an undisclosed amount of money with the NMPA.

When it comes to the music industry, copyrights are generally dealt with separately on the publishing side, which covers songwriting, and the recorded music side, which covers the phase of representing the actual music tracks.

Without any second thoughts, online streaming services have indeed revived the music industry by funneling billions back to well-known music labels. Such companies fiercely safeguard their share of the streaming riches via high stake licensing agreements and negotiations with Google, Spotify, Apple, and many others. For more visit: https://www.trademarkmaldives.com

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Solaria Corp Sues Canadian Solar Inc Alleging Patent Infringement

Solaria Corp Sues Canadian Solar Inc Alleging Patent Infringement

A US-based solar technology company, Solaria Corporation, that specializes in designing, developing, and manufacturing crystalline solar modules has quite recently filed a Patent Infringement lawsuit against Canadian Solar Inc., (a publicly-traded company specializing in manufacturing solar PV modules and running large scale solar projects) in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California.

The lawsuit has claimed that with operations primarily in China and elsewhere in Asia, Canadian Solar has infringed upon Solaria’s US patent. The patent covers a process corresponding to separating the photovoltaic (PV) strips from the solar cells for use in tiled or the widely-known shingled solar modules, which are way more efficient than the conventional solar modules and have higher power as well. Solaria has further asserted in its lawsuit that it had first introduced its high-efficiency, high-density module technology to Canadian Solar in 2014. At that time, the representatives of Canadian Solar had analyzed Solaria’s next-generation shingling technology for a potential licensing contract. After the subsequent collaborations between both the companies over the ensuing year, in which Solaria has disclosed its business strategies and proprietary technology to Canadian Solar under a non-disclosure agreement, there wasn’t any licensing deal made in the end.

In a quite apparent reference to Solaria’s proprietary HDM technology, Canadian Solar came up with its “HiDM” shingled modules in 2019 and started marketing and selling them in the US. Solaria has stated in its complaint filed that Canadian Solar’s HiDM shingled modules infringe its patent, for which, it is now looking forward to seeking injunctive relief and damages.

Suvi Sharma, the CEO at Solaria Corporation, has said that the company has invested even more than $200 million over the last decade in developing its technology for creating the most advanced solar panels across the globe. He further mentioned that if foreign companies like Canadian Solar ignore the value of American patents and violate Solaria’s core Intellectual Property (IP), the company would always take action to enforce and protect the technology that required so much investment and effort to develop.

Solaria Corp has indicated that it may bring some additional claims, including a claim for misappropriation of trade secrets and additional patent infringement claims, if warranted.

With a strong track record and a 20-year history in product development and solar power innovation, Solaria Corp has been efficiently delivering solutions that address a unique set of requirements for commercial and residential solar markets. For more visit: https://www.trademarkmaldives.com

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