This is your invitation to attend a free webinar on the recent Tiffany v. eBay ruling and its impact on brands of all sizes, and those of us who support and promote them. (Since this event has already happened, please follow this link to listen and view the recorded event in its entirety, or hear other events.)

On Thursday, October 2nd, I’ll be in New York moderating a discussion between two of the most expert and engaging voices in online law. Since this will be live, we’ll be taking questions from attendees, so I hope you can join us.

You can look forward to hearing the perspectives of Martin Schwimmer, the host of The Trademark Blog. Last year I enjoyed hearing his presentation on Trademarks and the Internet.  My employer, Thomson CompuMark, is delighted that he’s able to join us again.

You can also look forward to the expert views of Oren J. Warshavsky, who will join us from the firm Baker Hostetler. If you enjoy this blog, you’ll likely want to read his thoughts on the expanding right of publicity.

While you may pose questions during the event, you can also email me on what you’d like to hear about, and I’ll gladly share your requests with the speakers. I hope you can attend, and will post an update closer to the webinar.

I’ve previously blogged here about the economics of scalping, and my belief that anti-scalping laws prevent beneficial markets. So, I’m glad to see Stub Hub win a case which sets a precident for it to receive protection as an online service.

In January a class action law suit was brought against Stub Hub and its owner eBay. The complaint’s gist was that Stub Hub and its owner eBay profited by and encouraged scalping, which is a criminal offense in Oregon. The class of “disappointed fans” sought damages based on the increased price of tickets created by the secondary market which Stub Hub has built.

Judge Marilyn Litzenberger ruled that the claim was not supported by Oregon law, which does not provide civil penalties for scalping. Then she further ruled that Stub Hub would be immunized from scalping liability due to the Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 “safe harbor” provision for internet service providers.

Judge Litzenberger’s extention of Section 230 protection to Stub Hub will certainly be cited in future cases. It may also encourage franchizes to create their own secondary “fan-to-fan” markets, and for media outlets such as ESPN to partner with Stub Hub.

This morning at about 12:30am a series a failures occurred in our primary database. Over the next twelve hours, site functioning was restored by the efforts of our Wordpress consultant, Michael D. Pollock of Solostream, and contributing author Brandon Lovested. Their troubleshooting, and support form AN hosting restored site functioning making this an interruption an annoyance rather than, for me at least, a catastrophe.

Besides being thankful for their help, this has pointed out how important the collection of the site’s content has become. We’ll have some creative new ways to enjoy what you find here, and a renewed commitment to be here with news of online law for another year.

Useful Art’s host, Dave Wieneke, will be in Indianopolis September 24th to speak at ExactTarget’s national user conference. Want to know why I’m thrilled to be with 1,000 email marketers?  These are the people who directly connect brands to people online. They provide the “push” in “push marketing”.

The plan: show how to use customer data and analytics to communicate better with clients.

My thesis is simple: brands are just vessels that hold goodwill. It takes positive interactions with products, or the people who represent them, to generate goodwill. That means people and products come before brands. Brands don’t create their own love, so they best not upstage the assets which do.

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Blawg Review #176 is all about legal literacy. Its host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, put together a fantastic array of ways in which the law and literacy are in play. Our forum was recognized for its coverage of an effort to educate kids about copyright law with court-distributed materials that were shockingly in error about the application of law punishing teen downloaders. I’m delighted that a post including cartoons and irony received this attention; this seems to be our new specialty.

LexMonitor selected us as its site of the day from the 2,000 or so law blogs it monitors. They picked up on our coverage of a different cartoon inspiring irony: the use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer logo as part of branding for Chinese censorship police. Their “site of the day” pick kindly recommends UsefulArts to their readers:

UsefulArts.us is frequently updated with insightful posts on how trademark, copyright, privacy and politics shape the web. While the blog would be an especially good resource for those involved in patent and trademark law, it also serves as an interesting read for anyone, lawyer or not.

Wow, we’re honored to have this recognition, and most of all for readers like you. Thanks for making this effort a lot of fun.

Google may give Wikipedia lots of authority, but don’t count on that to help in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.  An immigration case appealed there hinged on the authority of a personal identification document, for which the feds used evidence from Wikipedia to determine that it did not meet its standards. Unfortunately for DHS, using Wikipedia did not meet the court’s standards.

Ars Technica explains:

The Department of Homeland Security, wishing to deny the asylum claim, argued that the laissez-passer was insufficient as a form of identification. Excerpts from Wikipedia apparently provided at least some of the information used by the DHS position to support its position.

The Court of Appeals ruled it was unclear if the immigration judge would have reached the same ruling without Wikipedia’s influence. The case has been sent back to the Immigration Judge for further consideration, using only admissible sources.

China’s noseless censor-mascots are back, and this time they’ve confiscated Microsoft’s Internet Explorer logo in their quest to intimidate Chinese net users. It’s being used on the very front page of the Xiamen Cyberpolice’s site.

Can you imagine what their request for permission to use this iconic logo might sound like? “We’d like to take your logo, color it red (for China, right?) and animate it spinning around on top of our online-censorship police call box.”

Actually, this might make sense from a branding standpoint. If you were seeking a logo for a repressive regime, why not start with one already nicknamed the “evil empire“?

Hats off to the IP Dragon blog who picked up on this one first.

There are lots of signs that the patent system needs reform. Have you noticed that some IP lawyers are now filing their own patents, and forming shell companies which exist only to generate lawsuits? Many writers have alarming stories about why IP law reform is needed. However, here is an eminently readable macro-analysis of issues facing the patent system and their real costs to innovators.

Economist and entrepreneur James Bessen has authored this analysis of the current state of the patent system with law academic Michael Meuer. Both are faculty members at Boston University, and their book Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk has drawn praise for its economic analysis of our patent system.

Nobel Laureate in Economics Eric Maskin calls the book “a pioneering and heroic effort to quantify the ways in which our patent system has failed to live up to its raison d’être: promoting innovation.” You can hear Michael Meuer discuss the book for about an hour on Stanford University’s Hearsay Culture Show, or view a sample chapter.

What’s impressive is that they go beyond providing examples of erroneous patents, or costs on individual innovators, to provide an economic and legal analysis of the system. They marshal data from decades of filings by publicly traded companies to compare the costs and benefits of the patent system.

Their fundamental conclusion is that in most industries, the hard cost on innovators defending against patent suits outstrips the financial benefit they gain through licensing. They compare the patent system’s conventions to those used to assign real estate property.

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Wylie Gustafson’s famous Yahoo yodel has been named the first soundmark in India.

India defines a trademark as “a mark capable of being represented graphically and which is capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one person to those of others.” Yahoo used musical notation in its application to represent its famous “Yahoo” yodel. The application took three years to approve, and is followed by Nokia’s distinctive ringtone, which is still in process.

Visit the USPTO’s collection of famous soundmarks.

Jeff Ooi gained notoriety by writing a daily Malaysian political blog. Like a lot of bloggers, he poured hours of personal time into it every day. Along the way, he exposed corruption and found a voice for demanding more competent government. Last March he posted a banner ad on his site: “Get a Blogger Into Parliment.” Eleven days later, his campaign began with $25,000 in donations. The Christian Science Monitor wrote a great feature about his election, and how new media has opened up Malaysia’s political process to new energy and ideas. Many politicians today have blogs, but this is another case in which social media is driving political change.