The Supreme Court today announced its decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Kirtsaeng was an enterprising Cornell student, who asked his relatives in Thailand to ship him cheaply-published textbooks, which he resold in the United States, undercutting the exclusive U.S. publisher's editions sold at the university bookstore. The Court, in a 6-3 decision, held that the First Sale doctrine of copyright law applies to permit the resale of these "gray market" imported textbooks. 

Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion (joined by Justices Roberts, Thomas, Sotomayor, Alito, and Kagan). Justice Kagan filed a concurrance (joined by Justice Alito). Justice Ginsburg filed the dissent, which was joined by Justices Scalia and Kennedy.

Will the opening of a "global marketplace" for textbooks ultimately lower prices for students?

Can "big data" predict the outcome of cases? How can law firms leverage the power of "quantitative legal prediction" to better serve clients while reducing costs? Law Technology News has published an interesting article presenting the challenges of this exciting technology and how law firms may benefit from "big data." Several law firms implementing these new technologies and companies providing data analysis services are profiled in the article.

On January 30th the law library will host a conference entitled Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information.  By bringing together academics, governmental staff, policy advocates, and librarians, the day-long program will examine how to use data for the public good while protecting personal privacy.

In September, 2011, the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, Pub. L. 112-29, was signed into law. The U.S. Patent and Trademark office has prepared an indepth resource guide on the implementation of this act which is available on their website. The guide includes a complete legislative history of the act, including bills, Senate & House debates and hearings. Over the next couple of months, the USPTO will be traveling throughout the country to discuss proposed rules for implementation of the act and their scheduled presentations are highlighted here as well.

For secondary sources on conducting patent law research, take a look at the library's Patent Law Research Guide,

On October 12, 2009 the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued the sixth edition of the Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure (TMEP). The TMEP, provides USPTO trademark examining attorneys, trademark applicants, and trademark attorneys with detailed information about the practices and procedures for prosecution of applications to register marks in the USPTO.

The sixth edition incorporates USPTO trademark practice and relevant case law reported prior to September 1, 2009. The policies states that this revision supersede any previous policies stated in prior editions, examination guides, or any other statement of USPTO policy, to the extent that there is any conflict.

The TMEP may be viewed or downloaded free of charge from the USPTO Web site at: http://tess2.uspto.gov/tmdb/tmep/.

A group of lawyers in California are challenging the California Supreme Court's practice of giving briefs to Westlaw and Lexis for uploading. Lexis and Westlaw charge fees for their users to search and use the briefs, and the lawyers who write them receive no payment. This is a copyright violation, according to the California lawyers. For more information, see Legal Research Plus Blog.

On Friday, MIT announced that its faculty has unanimously voted to make their scholarship available for free to the public. Authors will give MIT nonexclusive permission to make their articles available through DSpace@MIT, an open access platform developed by MIT Libraries and HP.  Under the policy, MIT and its faculty authors may use their articles in any way other than to make a profit.  They may also authorize others to use the works under the same terms.  Authors may opt out of the policy on a paper-by-paper basis.

Read more about the policy:

MIT Press Release.

Blog entry from Open Access News, reprinting the resolution.

...is the title of a posting yesterday (2/4/09) by Frank Pasquale at the Balkanization blog. It reviews the excellent piece by Harvard's Robert Darnton in the Feb. 12, 2009 New York Review of Books, "Google & the Future of Books" (accessible as e-journal for us Georgetown affiliates). Darnton's essay echoes much of what John Palfrey had to say about the settlement at the AALS in San Diego when he spoke at the Law Library section lunch. Pasquale addresses briefly some of the possible challenges to the settlement, but all three professors- Darnton, Palfrey, and Pasquale- are worried about the possiblity of changing times or the end of good will on the part of Google, and in principle, the privatization of a project that cries out to be for the public good, with equality of access to the information in perpetuity.

According to Google, a settlement has been reached in the class action lawsuit filed against Google Book Search by a series of authors and publishers, including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.  For more information, click here to access Google's announcement, including information on how Google Book Search will change based on the settlement agreement.  The agreement must still be approved and finalized by the Court.

You can read more about the lawsuit and the settlement in the Guardian's article "Google Settles Dispute Over Online Books" and in the Chronicle of Higher Education's article in their Wired Campus section.

A recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article announced that the Campus Computing Project has issued a new report entitled, “The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance, ' which finds that colleges are spending money to keep students from downloading pirated music and movies, but generally are not paying for legal alternatives to peer-to-peer piracy.

On its website, The Campus Computing Project states that the paper reports the results of a summer 2008 survey designed to address the campus costs of compliance with the new P2P filesharing mandates in reauthorized Higher Education Act (HEA) that was signed into law on August 14, 2008.  The report is based data from 321 colleges and universities and focuses on P2P compliance costs as reflected in expenditures (e.g., content and software licenses)  and also the time that campus personnel spend on P2P filesharing issues.

This year the report finds that just 3 of 321 institutions have licenses with file sharing services, while a 2005 Educause survey found that dozens of campuses had agreements with services like Napster, Cdigix, and Ruckus.  The Chronicle article discusses how the market has changed for legal downloading services.