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Whether and to what extent the reasoning of the DVDCCA court will be followed by other courts and in other cases is unclear. Furthermore, some violations of trade secrets law might be characterized as "commercial speech" entitled to less protection than this case affords. Nonetheless, this decision should put businesses on notice that the First Amendment can curtail their ability to prevent dissemination of their trade secrets, at least in the absence of a non-disclosure agreement.

Prior restraints are not per se unconstitutional, U.S. v. Frandsen, but they are such an "extraordinary remedy" that they will only be upheld where the evil that would result from publication can be shown to be both "great and certain," and cannot be militated by less intrusive measures." Procter & Gamble Co. v. Bankers Trust Co.

So, in conclusion, you can apply your First Amendment rights but expect to have to take it to court, and in some cases the supreme court.

Here in London we don't have a constitionally protected freedom of speech, so it is possible to get a court order to prevent publication of information that is deemed harmful. But this is a straw man, we are discussing your rights in the USA, not the rights of Britons.

• Has this happened to you? You plunk down a pretty penny for the latest and greatest software, speed back to your computer, tear open the box, shove the CD-ROM into the computer, click on "install" and, after scrolling past a license agreement which would take at least fifteen minutes to read, find yourself staring at the following dialog box: "I agree." Do you click on the box? You probably do not agree in your heart of hearts, but you click anyway, not about to let some pesky legalese delay the moment for which you've been waiting. Is that "clickwrap" license agreement enforceable? Yes, at least in the case described below.

  decision by William C. Young, U.S. District Court Judge
  

This is truly an unacceptable situation. Many posts I've seen call for IP reform, and I think that it needs to be specific, as in:

1) If you do not enforce a patent against a certain infringement within two years, you lose the right to enforce it. If you don't LEARN about it until that point, well, tough.
This would encourage companies and countries (China) to sneak around and conceal their production activities.
This would also encourage companies to lay low with limited production for 2 years and then BLAM!! full scale legitimate infringement.

2) Current User-Interface patents and similar software patents are released into the public domain two years after application, and new ones will be denied patent protection. Between junk like Amazon's 1-Click and this mess, we need to stop this type of patent.

Problems would result in establishing a bright line around what exactly constitutes a "similar software patent".
I think (and others think also) that "one click" patent should be reexamined and deemed obvious (see link below).

3) In liu of this, a new type of UI/Software algorithm protection needs to be established with reasonably high entry guidelines - industry/community review, intense prior art search, reasonable announcement, significant achievement, etc. These would not have a preset term - this would be decided on with the application, with NO recommendation by the person applying. This would prevent 'hyperlink' patents but would secure important developments, like the predictive text input system on slashdot a month or two ago and other INNOVATIONS.

I think that new guidelines for business method patent examination (can't patent a process that is argued "unique" by simply automating an old manual process onto a computer) will weed out some of these problem patents.

It's nice to call for patent reform, but you need to say what you want. The numbers and specifics are arbitrary, but you get the idea.

I agree, like to see people think seriously about this issue.

Tell your congresscritter that you want patent reform and then they'll probably *lengthen* the terms.

Not always true.

Fonts can be copyrighted too

In the European Union, font designs can be copyrighted. In the United States, only the programs (.ttf, etc) that generate those programs can be copyrighted, but the designs themselves can be patented.

Copyright, patent, and trademark are all just forms of IP law.

As for Tolkien, I don't know any details, but the law is not self-executing. Private parties have to litigate it. Perhaps Tolkien did not discover "trade dress" and the C&D letter in time. I have no doubt the copyrights on his books are intact. Anyway, he consciously ripped off much from older traditions in Welsh and Anglo-Saxon mythology himself. Imitators are not necessarily derivative of his version. Disney the copyright nut received many of its stories from Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm tales, and so on -- public domain.

GUI -- microsoft stole from apple stole from xerox. We're probably better off they got away from it. The look and feel thing was novel and shaky from the start. Other models are probably superior to copyright.

Music -- Patent? Trademark? Really? Enforcement of copyright and, lately, interferance with illegal duplication, are the usuall routes.

If Microsoft makes a serious effort to make Windows easy to use, they could theoretically win the TCO fight, or at least beat the penguins.

The alternative is that Microsoft will try to raise the TCO for open source, by buying laws that criminalize open-source development, by turning the personal computer into a locked box that dispenses pay-per-view content to consumers, and by threatening "intellectual property" lawsuits against companies and individual developers.

Of course, that's just a paranoid theory. I mean, if things like that were happening in real life, people would do more than just whine about it on Slashdot, right?