March 13th 2009
The Associated Press struck back as it countersued Shepard Fairey this week. The AP claims Fairey’s usage of an AP photo was uncredited and uncompensated, and violates copyright law. They added that it’s also a threat to journalism. The AP is seeking profits and damages. Apparently, Fairey used several companies to market the derivative work, […]
March 12th 2009
“The truth is an absolute defense to a claim of defamation.” But perhaps not always in Massachusetts, and that’s a problem. Judge Juan Torruella of the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has allowed Alan Noonan, a sales director fired by Staples, to pursue his libel claim against the company. Staples’s executive vice […]
March 11th 2009
Msgr. Carlo Maria Polvani, a Vatican diplomat, has issued a warning to the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit entity responsible for the Internet’s naming system, as they considering allowing virtually any word to be used as a top-level domain. Establishing religiously themed Internet domain names would lead […]
March 10th 2009
“It’s your right to arrange Chen Xiao’s life, and it’s my obligation to serve you…”. Chen Xiao has had a tough year. Blizzards covered her home town in China, her area was devastated by an earthquake. Her best friends divorced and her clothing store failed. What’s an entrepreneur to do? Rent your life to the […]
March 9th 2009
Wikileaks discovered that NATO’s communications briefs were all encrypted with the same easy-to-guess password: “progress.” Even military-strength encryption is useless if the password can be guessed by anyone reading a campaign poster. One document, “NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative,” is a 30-page guide to the “story” NATO representatives are to tell, and what details should […]
March 8th 2009
Last week, the Telegraph reported that French fighter planes were grounded because they were unable to download mission data from ships infected with the Conficker virus. The same article notes that most of the British fleet was also infected. Microsoft has offered a bounty of $250,000 for the arrest of what appears to be an […]
March 7th 2009
Documentary filmmaker Rob Spence is planning to outfit his prosthetic eye with a tiny wireless camera. His “EyeBorg Project” is intended to raise awareness of surveillance society in general, and of Toronto specifically, which is infested by 12,000 such cameras. According to his press release: In order for the project to be successful the smallest, […]
March 6th 2009
Over the next few weeks UsefulArts.US will be featuring some exciting new tools you can use to protect your online intellectual property. Anyone can describe the online risks to copyright and trademark holders, but if you read these posts you’ll find some exciting new ways to protect your assets, often with free services. Searching and […]
March 5th 2009
Sokolove Law: Both Entrance and Exit In January the Law Office of James Sokolove turned the media spotlight on itself. It issued a press release that Mr. Sokolove was making media appearances on a local rock station and PBS. Then there was the long-format feature in Boston Magazine, with the tag line “They’ve also created […]
March 4th 2009
Will Obama Break Google Up? Stop laughing. Christine Varney, Obama’s pick to head Justice’s anti-trust unit, describes Google as “quickly gathering market power in what I would call an online computing environment in the clouds”…“When all our enterprises move to computing in the clouds and there is a single firm that is offering a comprehensive […]
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