"Is this the worst paragraph in your publishing agreement?"

The Passive Voice, a blog I follow that has tons of information for authors, has a really important post today entitled "Is this the worst paragraph in your publishing agreement?"

The advice in here is good for not just authors. App developers and film/TV producers should know about it too.

Three reasons Harlequin shouldn't get to have the e-books litigation dismissed

On October 19, Harlequin filed a motion seeking to have the e-books litigation dismissed. They make a lot of interesting arguments. Their lawyers are earning their money. But ultimately these arguments collapse onto themselves. This motion should lose.

Why is it so hard to stop patent trolls?

In the right hands, patents are good for inventors and for society. The monopoly they give allows for companies to do R&D work and commercialize that work, creating things that are a net gain for all of us.

The problem is, there are also companies out there that never make anything. They just see an issue, think about what kinds of things might somehow be related that issue, and then file patents based just on the description of how something should work rather than on something they've actually done. They never manufacture anything using that patent. They never even have any intention of doing it. Their definition of "doing business" with their patent is to find people who they think are doing something similar to the things described in their patent, contact them, and offer to license or even sell the patent. Meanwhile the companies that license or buy the patent just keep doing what they were doing, making things to try to help the world.

I have, of course, just described startup pharmaceutical companies.

A 3-step guide to basing fictional characters on real people

In a previous post, I've given a high-level overview of the issues involved in using real people as the basis for your characters. But this raises a very technical issue called libel in fiction. And that can be just as bad as libel in fact.

Here's three steps to consider if you want to take a real person and use them as the basis for a character in your fictional universe:

A checklist of 5 things creators could do at the beginning of each month

I like to set various habits at the beginning of the month to get myself in the practice of checking things that bear checking on a fairly frequent basis. If you're a creator, especially an author, here's 5 things that might help you in your work as well as in protecting your work.

Look and feel of your apps and games: two important cases on copycat apps

What's so special about Angry Birds or Tetris that makes them so lucrative? Why can't someone just create their own versions of these games? Or can they? Two recent judgments on copycat games shed some light on a fast-breaking area of the law that's important for developers to understand.

Video games are almost unique among copyrightable materials because they can be simultaneously protected under copyright law in multiple ways: the source code in which they are written is protected by literary copyright, and the look and feel are a protected audiovisual work. But there's another interesting issue about video games, which is that they simultaneously have creative and functional content: the art and music vs. the rules that make the game work. This matters: creative content can be copyrighted, but functional content can't.

At least that used to be the case.

Three reasons the ex-Register of Copyrights doesn't like change (and one reason he's wrong)

"[Aereo] appears to have been designed by a copyright lawyer peering over the shoulder of an engineer to exploit what appeared to Aereo to be a loophole in the law and shoehorn the Aereo business model into the Cablevision decision"

Designed by a copyright lawyer... He says that like it's bad!

Okay, maybe I'm kidding. And some background may be helpful.

Ralph Oman, the retired Register of Copyrights (the person who runs the office that handles copyright registrations), has filed a brief in the ongoing Aereo litigation. Aereo, as you may know, is a service that uses thousands of little antennas to capture over-the-air TV broadcasts and stream them. One stream per subscriber. Why not have one big antenna? Well, that takes some explaining too.