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See Grimmelmann's post about the real situation at his blog, The Laboratorium.

I am sorry that I commented based on a reporter’s description of the filing rather than asking to see it myself.

Here is a pretty good analysis from one of Duke University's legal advisors (posting in his role as blogger rather than formal legal advice, of course). Generally a win for libraries, but there are some oddities. For example, the specific rules on proportionality that the judge set forth are a bit odd and potentially gameable: 10% by page count of a work fewer than 10 chapters, or up to one full chapter for a work with 10 or more chapters. Does this still hold if presses start deliberately putting out books with a ton of really short chapters? Are there cases where >10% by page count should still be fair use? Copyright law doesn't actually set a strict percentage limit, though there might be some advantages in clarity if it did.

Another interesting aspect, which I got from this also-interesting analysis of the decision, is that many of the claims never even got to a legal analysis stage, because the publishers couldn't produce sufficient evidence of having a registered copyright: either they couldn't find a signed copyright transfer from the author showing that the publisher actually had copyright properly assigned to them, or they couldn't produce evidence that they had registered the copyright (a prerequisite under U.S. law for suing).

Hi, nice to see you here on Slashdot (and with a smaller UID than me, no less).

I admit to have been confused (particularly on-topic here, I suppose) because I was very concentrated on the (seemingly frivolous) takedown of The Sweet 16.

I did not understand that the MMSE had historically been used and copied freely and only recently been licensed to PAR, and the consequences of the new licensing terms are perhaps even more consequential to the medical profession.

I would like to point you to a blog post by a professor of law, James Grimmelmann, who is of the opinion that PAR's claim, that copying the MMSE forms is infringement, is very weak. If he is correct, couldn't it be possible that the EFF would be interested in defending the ongoing free use of the MMSE?

I also read in the comments at The Laboratorium about another test called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment which is under a somewhat open license --- perhaps you should try to encourage them to move to a straight copyleft license?

I wish you success in shielding the medical profession from the dark side of the copyright force. And a Happy New Year!

There are many ideas about what copyright is, or should be.

A paper by James Grimmelmann, The Ethical Visions of Copyright Law addresses this (found via his website The Laboratorium).

> The Economist said it recently and they were correct:

I'm glad that they're so much more interesting to believe than, for example, William Patry. The "control" versus "economic incentive" debate is still going strong, and it seems silly to unilaterally name one side as the winner. (In my eyes, it's very similar to debates on religion, BTW.)

See the following links for debate / discussion on this issue:

• Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars (don't miss the archives for 2009).
• The Ethical Visions of Copyright Law (read the PDF which reviews US legal decisions and comes to the conclusion that they view the economic side as more important)

Could you possibly post a link to the Founder's texts on which you (or the Economist) base your argument? The wording in the Constitution itself would seem to be on the "economic incentive" side of the argument, no?

Yes--I'm talking about trademarks and I didn't say anything about copyrights. I agree that a trademark is not a copyright, but they can both be infringed.

As I said, Thomson requested their trademark not be used in the Refer/RIS option and in the most recent complaint, they want the court to enjoin against further "inappropriate use" of this trademark (such as using it to describe .ens style files).

I happen to think that Thomson is on weak ground in these two claims, due to fair use of the mark.

If Thomson's reading is accurate, though: I fail to see why Thomson would think that Zotero is infringing their "EndNote" trademark when it describes Refer files, while google is using the same trademark to refer to the same filetype. Trademark law says that marks must be licensed and protected zealously. (This is why we have "Iceweasel"--Mozilla must defend their "Firefox" mark, or risk losing it.) Either Thomson is not zealously protecting their mark against the likes of google (which can mean that it becomes unregistered), or they are misusing their trademark registration by asking Zotero to stop using it (and could also lose the mark).

This may or may not be a threat. Some interesting thoughts here

But it seems to be that it would be awful hard for something from the ground to actually hit the inside of the cockpit unless it had some sort of tracking device to track the plane, and was high enough to hit the inside of the cockpit instead of the nose cone (perhaps on a tall building or mountain near an airport).

I think this could be another tactic to strike fear into the populace.

Last, I have trouble understanding how so many of these bugs come from a company with many of the brightest programmers. Is it a largely problem of scale and bureaucracy?