(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best intellectual property law books

Did you know Amazon will donate a portion of every purchase if you shop by going to smile.amazon.com instead? Over $50,000,000 has been raised for charity - all you need to do is change the URL!

Here are your smile-ified links:

this book

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^^i'm ^^a ^^friendly bot

There's a compelling case that the opposite would happen

https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Property-Stephan-Kinsella/dp/1933550325

No worries, friend. If you want to know more, your should check out this book.

Say no to patents and copyright.

Although I'm inclined to say it really boils down to behaving like a timid, conformist, mediocre thinker, I must be wrong because there are entire books and articles written about it:

http://www.princeton.edu/~slaughtr/Commentary/On%20Thinking%20Like%20a%20Lawyer.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Like-Lawyer-Introduction-Reasoning/dp/0674062485

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-Lawyer-Reasoning-Professionals/dp/1627221417/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414643817&sr=1-3&keywords=think+like+a+lawyer

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-Lawyer-Gary-Fidel/dp/1413461476/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414643817&sr=1-5&keywords=think+like+a+lawyer

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Like-Lawyer-Introduction-Reasoning/dp/0813344646/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414643817&sr=1-6&keywords=think+like+a+lawyer

http://www.amazon.com/Language-Law-School-Learning-Lawyer/dp/019518310X/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414643817&sr=1-8&keywords=think+like+a+lawyer

The problem is that you think it is unethical

Edit - Please read https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Property-Stephan-Kinsella/dp/1933550325/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

To add to what /u/Amarkov is saying, consider the Aqua song "Barbie Girl," where Mattel sued the band and pretty much every related entity for trademark infringement over the doll. The court rules it was a parody and fair use, but not until a huge, expensive legal battle.


Madonna is heading into a similar battle with a less-clear of a parody by the Girls Gone Wild dude over her song of the same name.


I found a book you can use to research, though!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470339454?pc_redir=1410489519&robot_redir=1

There are a lot of grey areas with plagiarism in fact. A lot of it comes down to expectations but there are no laws governing this. It is an issue of academic culture. If I were you I wouldn’t cause too big of a stink about it and just not share stuff with this person and go publish more things.

Have a read here:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Plagiarism-Richard-Posner-ebook/dp/B000S1LD8O

>Oh really? The 1st amendment is pretty clear.
Ah, another person who's not read much about the actual meaning or intent of the First Amendment, nor the history of the Supreme Court's first amendment decisions. There are many forms of speech that are not protected speech under the first amendment. I suggest any number of good books on the subject. State laws on threats and intimidation have been upheld by the SCOTA - several of those books will explain this to you.

> I was giving an example of why threats are meaningless without the action behind them.

Mmm.. I completely understood what you meant. I simply think you're being far too superficial and sophist. I pointed out the difference in the terms of your (rather bad) analogy. Threats are, obviously, not meaningless. Threats are an expression of intent. We frequently make decisions in our lives based on the statements of intent from others. Some people make meaningless threats, others do not. What's more, you don't even think they are meaningless. In this same thread, you say "If someone makes a threat against my life, I will always take it seriously. I'll make sure I have the means to defend myself and when the time comes I'll be able to. To not do so is foolish and naive." Cognitive dissonance much?

> The penalty for plagiarism (the consequence of a plagiairsm accusation) is typically being forgotten. There are tons of authors who have engaged in practices of reproduction/repetition, been deemed plagiarists, and been promptly forgotten as a result. For an author, that entails losing one's livelihood.

But see, that isn't a result that the legal system cares about. Not directly, anyway. The closest actual cause of action I can think of would be the accused artist filing for defamation against those who say he was a plagiarist, because actually being a plagiarist. . . isn't illegal. Copyright infringement is, but borrowing too closely from someone else's work to be in good taste is not a legally actionable issue.

At least, not in the US. Europe has some stronger IP protections than the US does, but these can be pretty problematic (especially the concept of "moral rights," which the US has no real equivalent for). But Desforges doesn't necessarily strike me as proving your point, as (1) she was cleared on appeal as you say, but (2) went on to right eight more entries in the series, all of which appear to have been successful. Being accused of artistic crimes is unpleasant and distressing, particularly when said crimes are also potentially legal. But the legal system does not exist to be the arbiter of matters of taste or propriety. As you say, artists stand and fall on how they are perceived, but those perceptions aren't something with which the legal system has all that much to do. There is no right to having one's work well-received, and if one's fortunes depend on that reception, there's not a whole lot to be done about that. One does have the right to not be injured by false statements that tend to damage one's reputation, so an artist falsely accused of plagiarism could have a remedy in defamation laws. But that's as far as it goes.

You also appear to be misreading the significance of the Ouloguem situation. My admittedly cursory reading suggests that the problem here was not with references to the Koran, but with essentially copyright infringement of living authors, particularly of Graham Greene. Again: the problem there was not strictly that he'd referenced or even quoted other authors, but that the way he did it made it appear as if he were simply passing off their work as his own. If he'd quoted and attributed it, that'd have been fine. But verbatim grabbing pages' worth of material with no attribution? Yeah, that's copyright infringement, whether or not it's plagiarism.

The focus is, in part on the "use-mention distinction." Using someone else's work as your own is problematic, both on a copyright and a plagiarism level. But mentioning it, whether as an allusion, a quote, a reference, whatever, is fine. Authors and artists are free to interact with other works of art, and indeed, the failure to do just that is one of the main hallmarks of a bad or at least ignorant artist. The point is to make other works part of the conversation, not using them as if they were your own.

I think you may find this book to be of interest. It's by federal appellate judge Richard Posner (7th Cir.) and it's all about plagiarism. I haven't read it, but it seems to be on point.

Said in mocking tone: "Aw, boo."

> It's more likely the downvotes were from people in the computer security field who understand that the internet is the 2012 version of the wild fucking west

Sad for you, I actually have worked in computer security, now I'm a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property and internet law, I'm in-house for a company that makes, among other things, enterprise grade security software, and that is just total fucking bullshit. Everything you are saying is infuriatingly wrong.

In the last 30 years, there have been fifteen sets of laws passed by the US congress directly regulating online behavior.

Not only that, this:
> Most of the outcry over CISPA has been from the people who want to keep the internet some sort of lawless land where they can anonymously download their fill of horse porn while some other guy steals 4 million identities and sells them to fraud mills in taiwan and china.

Is just utter fucking bullshit. I don't even know where to start: the internet is not just for horse porn, and your argument saying that open = evil is a classic 'moral panic' argument, the opennness of the internet is precisely what has allowed google, airbnb, amazon, twitter and foursquare to work, and if you cannot understand that horse-porn is an unfortunate but necessary externality of this open-ness, it is because you are a dumbass; the people who write this legislation don't know how to check their own fucking email, and are utterly unqualified to be doing this; identity theft is already illegal and passing new laws about using computers in identity theft won't make it less common; local law is not going to regulate behavior in china; the list goes on.

The only 'wild west'-ness of the internet is that computers are general computation machines, and code can be run on them to do pretty much anything, but, other than that, the internet is regulated by all the same laws that your behavior IRL is regulated by. It has multiple governing bodies, ranging from the US courts to the UN and Icann. Many thick textbooks and treatises exist on internet law. Not just that, but, if you have read Code 2.0 by Larry Lessig, and it is abundantly clear you have not, you would know that law simply doesn't change the way the internet works, it just changes what you can throw people in jail for. So, basically, CISPA and SOPA do not make the internet a better place or reduce cybercrime, and, even, if they were perfect, it is still theoretically impossible for these bills to accomplish those goals, and, often the proposed legislation makes the problem worse. It is literally outside the possible realm of law to stop people from being gullible idiots and falling for nigerian scammers.

So, basically, everything you have said is wrong, and, sadly for you, I not only have a JD, but my first career was in IT, and just... nothing you are saying is right, and not only is it wrong, it is just retweeting the hysterical nonsense of copyright maximalist groups and people who are paroxysmically and unjustifiably afraid of terrorism and willing to throw their rights away because one time a few brown people did a thing with some planes. I sincerely hate that this was your answer, because this is precisely the sort of bullshit that makes me so fucking depressed: not only are your arguments wrong, they are based on luddite misconceptions, actively hinder progress, are not shared by experts, and, most importantly they employed rhetorical devices designed to make your opponents look like criminals and pornographers, so, sincerely, go fuck yourself. I am not 'implying' that you are a pornographer or a criminal, I'm actively calling you a douche, and I fully stand by my decision to openly call you a douche and claim your contribution to the debate as a detriment to society, because at least I'm being goddamn upfront about it.