(Part 2) Best intellectual property law books according to redditors

Said in mocking tone: "Aw, boo."

> It's more likely the downvotes were from people in the computer security field who understand that the internet is the 2012 version of the wild fucking west

Sad for you, I actually have worked in computer security, now I'm a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property and internet law, I'm in-house for a company that makes, among other things, enterprise grade security software, and that is just total fucking bullshit. Everything you are saying is infuriatingly wrong.

In the last 30 years, there have been fifteen sets of laws passed by the US congress directly regulating online behavior.

Not only that, this:
> Most of the outcry over CISPA has been from the people who want to keep the internet some sort of lawless land where they can anonymously download their fill of horse porn while some other guy steals 4 million identities and sells them to fraud mills in taiwan and china.

Is just utter fucking bullshit. I don't even know where to start: the internet is not just for horse porn, and your argument saying that open = evil is a classic 'moral panic' argument, the opennness of the internet is precisely what has allowed google, airbnb, amazon, twitter and foursquare to work, and if you cannot understand that horse-porn is an unfortunate but necessary externality of this open-ness, it is because you are a dumbass; the people who write this legislation don't know how to check their own fucking email, and are utterly unqualified to be doing this; identity theft is already illegal and passing new laws about using computers in identity theft won't make it less common; local law is not going to regulate behavior in china; the list goes on.

The only 'wild west'-ness of the internet is that computers are general computation machines, and code can be run on them to do pretty much anything, but, other than that, the internet is regulated by all the same laws that your behavior IRL is regulated by. It has multiple governing bodies, ranging from the US courts to the UN and Icann. Many thick textbooks and treatises exist on internet law. Not just that, but, if you have read Code 2.0 by Larry Lessig, and it is abundantly clear you have not, you would know that law simply doesn't change the way the internet works, it just changes what you can throw people in jail for. So, basically, CISPA and SOPA do not make the internet a better place or reduce cybercrime, and, even, if they were perfect, it is still theoretically impossible for these bills to accomplish those goals, and, often the proposed legislation makes the problem worse. It is literally outside the possible realm of law to stop people from being gullible idiots and falling for nigerian scammers.

So, basically, everything you have said is wrong, and, sadly for you, I not only have a JD, but my first career was in IT, and just... nothing you are saying is right, and not only is it wrong, it is just retweeting the hysterical nonsense of copyright maximalist groups and people who are paroxysmically and unjustifiably afraid of terrorism and willing to throw their rights away because one time a few brown people did a thing with some planes. I sincerely hate that this was your answer, because this is precisely the sort of bullshit that makes me so fucking depressed: not only are your arguments wrong, they are based on luddite misconceptions, actively hinder progress, are not shared by experts, and, most importantly they employed rhetorical devices designed to make your opponents look like criminals and pornographers, so, sincerely, go fuck yourself. I am not 'implying' that you are a pornographer or a criminal, I'm actively calling you a douche, and I fully stand by my decision to openly call you a douche and claim your contribution to the debate as a detriment to society, because at least I'm being goddamn upfront about it.

See section 102(b) of the US Copyright Law:
>(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

The textbook I'm using this semester calls this the "Idea/Expression Dichotomy" and summarizes it like this:

>This principle is derived from the Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. (11 Otto) 99 (1879), which held that, under copyright law, the copyright owner of a book explaining a system of accounting could prohibit others from copying the original expression containted in the book, but could not prohibit them from copying the accounting system itself. See also Mazer V. Stein, 347 U.S. 201, 217 (1954) ("Unlike a ptent, a copyright gives no exclusive right to the art disclosed; protection is given only to the expression of the idea--not the idea itself").

Hey, those are literally my specialties! (I'm a lawyer / registered patent attorney / former media law professor.)

If you're just getting into these areas, the In a Nutshell books are actually a pretty decent place to start.

http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Law-Nutshell-Martin-Adelman/dp/0314279997

http://www.amazon.com/Global-Internet-Nutshell-Michael-Rustad/dp/0314283307

Cyber/internet law is kind of a nebulous concept, because it's primarily regular law, applied to the internet. It's one of those things that non-lawyers like to argue about, because everyone has ideas about how things should work, and so there's a lot of popular media written for a lay audience. For thought leaders when it comes to internet law, I'd recommend Lawrence Lessig, Ryan Calo, Jonathan Zittrain, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. There are also groups, like the EFF and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, that have a lot of good resources.

Patent law is different -- it's incredibly complex, which is why it has its own additional exam that attorneys need to pass in order to prosecute patents (not to litigate them, though). Laypeople still have their own ideas about patent law, but generally those ideas boil down to "patent trolls are bad, mmmmkay?" Due to the complexity of the field, there's not much written for non-lawyers.

A lot of laypeople tend to conflate patent law with copyright law, and the fact that you didn't mention it here suggests that you may be doing the same. To quickly disambiguate them, patents prevent you from synthesizing a patented pharmaceutical, whereas copyrights prevent you from pirating movies.

Copyright law is pretty hotly contested amongst the laity, and more than a few lawyers think that the field needs a bit of reform. However, whereas non-lawyers tend to think that copyright law needs reform because of some misguided notion about how the internet makes sharing information easy, so we shouldn't have copyrights, the legal community tends to think copyright reform should focus on things like reducing the term of copyright protection to a more reasonable number of decades.

When you look for thought leaders about copyright, despite it being a pretty popular topic on the internet, you're not going to find as much (although, you'll see a lot of the same people who talk about internet law also writing about copyright). The reason for this is that the whole internet piracy/copyright debate basically went nowhere way back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's reached a pretty stable, logical place in the law. There are pro-piracy websites written by non-lawyers (e.g., Torrent Freak) that are kind of the holocaust-deniers of copyright law (and thus get the appropriate adoration from like-minded folks), but I'm having a hard time coming up with many academic writers of note that supports that position. Charles Nesson (who actually founded the Berkman Center, if I'm remembering right) could probably be called sympathetic, but I'm not very familiar with his work.

If you are not going into debt to pay for law school, keep at it if you enjoy it. Otherwise, consider reading this book ASAP: http://www.amazon.com/End-Lawyers-Rethinking-nature-services/dp/0199593612/ref=pd_sim_b_1

If you PM me your email address, I can also send you my outline.

In terms of books, the most concise and easiest to read book I've found is Copyright in a Nutshell. It's around 400 pages, but it's super short and fat with big text so it's not actually 400 pages worth of reading. The digital version is only $15 on Amazon and my law school's library had it for $20.

If you need something more in depth than the nutshell, I also liked the Copyright E&E. It takes longer to get through, and I wouldn't call it "concise" but it does distill the concepts pretty damn well.

> The penalty for plagiarism (the consequence of a plagiairsm accusation) is typically being forgotten. There are tons of authors who have engaged in practices of reproduction/repetition, been deemed plagiarists, and been promptly forgotten as a result. For an author, that entails losing one's livelihood.

But see, that isn't a result that the legal system cares about. Not directly, anyway. The closest actual cause of action I can think of would be the accused artist filing for defamation against those who say he was a plagiarist, because actually being a plagiarist. . . isn't illegal. Copyright infringement is, but borrowing too closely from someone else's work to be in good taste is not a legally actionable issue.

At least, not in the US. Europe has some stronger IP protections than the US does, but these can be pretty problematic (especially the concept of "moral rights," which the US has no real equivalent for). But Desforges doesn't necessarily strike me as proving your point, as (1) she was cleared on appeal as you say, but (2) went on to right eight more entries in the series, all of which appear to have been successful. Being accused of artistic crimes is unpleasant and distressing, particularly when said crimes are also potentially legal. But the legal system does not exist to be the arbiter of matters of taste or propriety. As you say, artists stand and fall on how they are perceived, but those perceptions aren't something with which the legal system has all that much to do. There is no right to having one's work well-received, and if one's fortunes depend on that reception, there's not a whole lot to be done about that. One does have the right to not be injured by false statements that tend to damage one's reputation, so an artist falsely accused of plagiarism could have a remedy in defamation laws. But that's as far as it goes.

You also appear to be misreading the significance of the Ouloguem situation. My admittedly cursory reading suggests that the problem here was not with references to the Koran, but with essentially copyright infringement of living authors, particularly of Graham Greene. Again: the problem there was not strictly that he'd referenced or even quoted other authors, but that the way he did it made it appear as if he were simply passing off their work as his own. If he'd quoted and attributed it, that'd have been fine. But verbatim grabbing pages' worth of material with no attribution? Yeah, that's copyright infringement, whether or not it's plagiarism.

The focus is, in part on the "use-mention distinction." Using someone else's work as your own is problematic, both on a copyright and a plagiarism level. But mentioning it, whether as an allusion, a quote, a reference, whatever, is fine. Authors and artists are free to interact with other works of art, and indeed, the failure to do just that is one of the main hallmarks of a bad or at least ignorant artist. The point is to make other works part of the conversation, not using them as if they were your own.

I think you may find this book to be of interest. It's by federal appellate judge Richard Posner (7th Cir.) and it's all about plagiarism. I haven't read it, but it seems to be on point.

Although I'm inclined to say it really boils down to behaving like a timid, conformist, mediocre thinker, I must be wrong because there are entire books and articles written about it:

http://www.princeton.edu/~slaughtr/Commentary/On%20Thinking%20Like%20a%20Lawyer.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Like-Lawyer-Introduction-Reasoning/dp/0674062485

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-Lawyer-Reasoning-Professionals/dp/1627221417/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414643817&sr=1-3&keywords=think+like+a+lawyer

http://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-Lawyer-Gary-Fidel/dp/1413461476/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414643817&sr=1-5&keywords=think+like+a+lawyer

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Like-Lawyer-Introduction-Reasoning/dp/0813344646/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414643817&sr=1-6&keywords=think+like+a+lawyer

http://www.amazon.com/Language-Law-School-Learning-Lawyer/dp/019518310X/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414643817&sr=1-8&keywords=think+like+a+lawyer