Patents, Copyrights, Net Neutrality, Innovation and the Law are Featured at Stanford Lawyer Magazine

Lawyering, IP, Net Neutrality, Innovation and the Law are featured at the current Stanford Lawyer Magazine, Issue 95, Fall, 2016, which we receive quarterly as a Stanford Law School alumnus, and which is found online at https://law.stanford.edu/stanford-lawyer-magazine/.

The cover article by Stanford Lawyer Editor Sharon Driscoll is about
Innovation and the Law : IP and Net Neutrality Fuel Creativity and the Economy. Inter alia, Driscoll writes:

"While network neutrality is about the architecture of innovation, intellectual property rules like patent law, trademark, and copyright are about the innovations themselves."

Stanford Lawyer Legal Matters follows with
Lawyering at the Edge of Innovation: A Conversation with Kent Walker [Stanford JD '87], Google's General Counsel and Senior Vice President, a question-and-answer interview of Walker, a Stanford Law School graduate, by Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. A sample statement by Walker out of that interview:

"The Supreme Court’s decision in Alice ... was useful in analyzing the question of patentable subject matter and setting out a framework for how to assess whether or not a patent has made a unique and non-obvious contribution to the art."

Stanford Lawyer Perspectives has an essay by Kevin Patrick Gibson [JD '17] on Empirical Study of Patent Troll Litigation Practicum, where Gibson writes:

"Our general findings so far indicate that litigation growth in the past 15 years is due largely to the rise of PAE-initiated lawsuits. These lawsuits tend to involve software patents and they resolve much more quickly than other lawsuits, lending credence to the theory that PAEs often assert with the goal of extracting quick money from defendants.

Stanford Lawyer Online Features focuses on Stanford Law School's Copyright Licensing Practicum:

"[Paul Goldstein, the Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law at Stanford Law School ("SLS"] "has overseen a partnership between SLS and the United States Copyright Office to protect copyright owners while allowing the flow of information to remain relatively unfettered". [The result has been creation of] "a prototype for licensing photographs".

This is obviously an interesting issue for intellectual property questions but there are also addtional Stanford Lawyer articles on privacy, veterans treatment, criminal investigations, virtual law practice, class action litigation, public research and leadership in education, and peer review in government.

Take a look.

Happy New Year ! -- Another 1/230,000,000th of Our Galactic Orbit -- Caleb A. Scharf Comments 2017 in Life, Unbounded at the Scientific American Blog Network

Happy New Year 2017 !

To keep things on our planet in perspective for the New Year 2017, a terrestrial "Earth" year can be compared to a "Galactic" year -- as Caleb A. Scharf has done in his Life, Unbounded posting at the Scientific American Blog Network in

Another 1/230,000,000th of a Galactic Orbit.

Scharf suggests there:

"As the solar year ends, let's try to stop being so parochial".

Our comment is, "hear, hear !!"

As written at the Wikipedia for the entry "Galactic Year":

"The galactic year, also known as a cosmic year, is the duration of time required for the Solar System to orbit once around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Estimates of the length of one orbit range from 225 to 250 million terrestrial years. The Solar System is traveling at an average speed of 828,000 km/h (230 km/s) or 514,000 mph (143 mi/s) within its trajectory around the galactic center, a speed at which an object could circumnavigate the Earth's equator in 2 minutes and 54 seconds; that speed corresponds to approximately one 1300th of the speed of light."

We are, galactically seen, part of a much larger "picture", so to speak.

The word "scharf" in German means "sharp" and a sharp intelligence indeed is at work in writing perspicaciously about the present New Year as

Another 1/230,000,000th of a Galactic Orbit.

Take a look there for some outstanding insights about life on our planet.

In the meantime, Scharf might consider applying his own wisdom further, perhaps depart from the blindered parochial focus that marks the mainstream, and look at our "galactic" (if archaeological-anthropological-historical) decipherments of Stonehenge and Avebury in our previous postings -- from a broad historical-astronomical point of view, of course....

Privacy Law: European Commission Alleges Facebook Violation of EU Merger Guidelines in WhatsApp Acquisition: WhatsApp Data Collection by Facebook Not Legal in the EU: What about America and the FTC?

We posted our opinion already in August that the declared Facebook collection of WhatsApp data appeared to be illegal. See Facebook WhatsApp Privacy Invasion Promotes Anger and Likely Violates a 2012 Agreement with the FTC.

Already in September, Germany ordered Facebook to stop collecting WhatsApp user data as violating data protection laws. Facebook had to delete all WhatsApp data gathered by Facebook about German users up to that point.

In November 2016, Facebook had to stop collecting WhatsApp user data in Europe after pressure by governments.

Now, a December 20, 2016 press release from the European Commission of the European Union alleges that Facebook provided misleading information about its WhatsApp takeover.

As stated in that press release: "Facebook now has now until 31 January 2017 to respond to the Statement of Objections. If the Commission's preliminary concerns in this case were confirmed, the Commission could, impose a fine of up to 1% of Facebook's turnover (under Article 14(1) of the EU Merger Regulation)." [emphasis added] That's a lot of money, folks.

screenshot photograph clip by LawPundit

Meredith Ballard, Staff Writer at The Campbell Law Observer had a piece in October about WhatsApp’s legal challenges illustrate the stark difference in U.S. and EU internet privacy laws -- and we can second that ! -- where she wrote, inter alia:

"The legal disputes facing WhatsApp and Facebook arise at a time when privacy law in the United States is still developing.  Currently, the law in the European Union has a reputation for being more consumer-oriented, with greater monitoring and privacy protections for app users outside of the U.S. In the U.S., Internet companies, such as Facebook and Google, are overseen by the FTC."

The FTC has proven itself thus far to be a virtually do-nothing "paper tiger" in terms of enforcement. See Facebook’s Plan for WhatsApp to Get Close Look from FTC.

In our opinion, the clearly interlocking-endangered merger of Facebook and WhatsApp should never have been permitted because it was destined to lead to these kinds of nefarious privacy abuses.