IP Casebook: For Free!

Partly, we do it because we think the price of legal casebooks and materials is obscene. Law students, who are already facing large debt burdens, are required to buy casebooks that cost $150–$200, and “statutory supplements” that consist mainly of unedited, public domain, Federal statutes for $40 or $50. The total textbook bill for a year can be over $1500. This is not a criticism of casebook authors, but rather of the casebook publishing system. We know well that putting together a casebook is a lot of work and can represent considerable scholarship and pedagogic innovation. We just put together this one and we are proud of it. But we think that the cost is disproportionate and that the benefit flows disproportionately to conventional legal publishers. Some of those costs might have been more justifiable when we did not have mechanisms for free worldwide and almost costless distribution. Some might have been justifiable when we did not have fast, cheap and accurate print on demand services. Now we have both. Legal education is already expensive; we want to play a small part in diminishing the costs of the materials involved.

It offers the full text of the Federal Trademark, Copyright and Patent statutes (including edits detailing the changes made by the America Invents Act.) It also has a number of important international treaties and a chart which compares the various types of Federal intellectual property rights — their constitutional basis, subject matter, length, exceptions and so on

Do you think anyone ever patented the patent process?

Do you think anyone ever patented the patent process?

Better off than we are now? Yes.

The best solution? No.

Why?

It seems like in a total open-source environment, people would just camp ideas to iterate upon instead of come up with unique innovations.

It's a flimsy argument I'll admit, I'm really just basing it off the reactive and greedy nature of human beings.

Hardware has a material and fabrication cost, so I agree with you there. When you buy a physical product, it should be yours to do with as you please, though I'd argue (poorly) that it gets a little grey if you delve into things like the proprietary software that runs on that hardware. Meaning that you take the nebulous, effectively free and infinitely replicable program, distribute and use it for profit. (Like what China did with the IOS put on their ChInaPhone model)

I think both Total Open Source and Current IP Protection policies create stagnation.

In our current model, creators aren't pushed to iterate fast enough, but in Total Open Source, few people (Save your Nikola Teslas) are willing to risk putting out new ideas that will immediately be pilfered and resold without any compensation to the original work.

I'm ok with dialing back to original IP term limits. it would encourage and reward innovation without choking out leap frogging and future work. But that is not going to happen any time soon.

Too many lobbyists, too much money spent enforcing criminal charges (homeland security:not unnecessary when someone is watching a movie with google glasses), and too many international treaties that the US has encouraged strong armed.

Movie theft is something we take very seriously, and our theater managers contact the Motion Picture Association of America anytime it’s suspected that someone may be illegally recording content on screen. While we’re huge fans of technology and innovation, wearing a device that has the capability to record video is not appropriate at the movie theatre.

If everything were open there would be no incentive to be greedy, just end users and people who make ***to make it.

There's still ways to profit off free ***however, I mean look at Google.

I'm mostly going to speak from a hardware standpoint for a moment since it's my core knowledge: there's really no good reason to have "IP" on hardware, it's literally choking innovation to death. The mere concept that somebody shouldn't be allowed to load cfw on the hardware they purchased yes purchased, sorry guys you're not going to sell the concept of license based use on hardware to anyone but politicians), is severe insanity.

It'd be like you buying a microwave and not being allowed to reprogram the popcorn button to pop your favorite popcorn, it's irrelevant if the popcorn you buy is supposed to make their profit margins or not and the microwave was sold at a loss (stupid model in the first place).

Not to mention: why the *** is the department of homeland security involved in movie piracy? what the *** hell?

All other facts of the instance aside...yeah. Homeland Security really shouldn't be involved with illegally recorded movies at the theater.

Not to mention: why the *** is the department of homeland security involved in movie piracy? what the *** hell?

HSI investigates immigration crime, human rights violations and human smuggling, smuggling of narcotics, weapons and other types of contraband, financial crimes, cybercrime and export enforcement issues. ICE special agents conduct investigations aimed at protecting critical infrastructure industries that are vulnerable to sabotage, attack or exploitation.

Sony suing those who load cfw on their devices and show others how to do it, etc.

Can't say that I followed those cases closely (or lately) I believe that is due to violation of the DCMA/agreements to not reverse engineer, not due to hardware IP rights.