It’s easy, in many instances, to see violations in the IP sphere to be of less consequence than other crimes we see in the news. After all, there’s no physical violence done to any of the parties in those cases, with the only harm being financial, and even that is abstract or theoretical, given that what is stolen is value rather than actual dollars. That it’s value is still of consequence to the companies losing out on it, and thus to those found guilty of improperly depriving that value to those who rightfully own it.
Continue reading “Former Waymo Employee Sentenced In Trade Secret Theft Case”
We’ve placed an awful lot of faith in technology to fix problems and generally bail us out of issues we’ve created for ourselves as a species, from the biggest existential threats to the smallest inconveniences. Which is all well and good, save for the fact that tech has shown itself to be as smart as we might assume it to be, or rather is only as smart as the people creating and programming it.
If you’ve even spent any time on Twitter (and for your sake, I hope you haven’t) you recognize it as a space largely disassociated from the world in which its users live. While there are plenty of real people engaging in genuine interactions, no one is necessarily attached to any actual identity, and thus millions are large freed from the consequences that might follow them in real life. It can feel like a space to say and do whatever you want, with seemingly no one interested in stopping you, save for the overwhelming concern Twitter professes for copyrighted material. And now Japan seems poised to take that concern to perhaps absurd heights.
There’s nothing good that can’t be ruined, and nothing bad that can’t be made worse, and that holds true for intellectual property as it does for anything else in life. Take the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), for example; like any law, it has its flaws, but applied in the spirit in which it was intended, the DMCA probably does more good than harm. But measuring good versus harm is always subject to the small group of bad actors willing to do the worst things they think they can get away with, and those outliers are often enough to sway at least some thinking on the efficacy of any program or law.
For some products, form matters as much as function, if not more so. With something like, say, your lawnmower, the aesthetics aren’t so important as long as it performs the work of cutting your grass. But your car? Your car says something about you, given how much you might be investing in it. And it says something about the company that made it, which is why some car makers have labored for decades towards mastery of the form as well as the mechanics, and have sough to protect the designs they’ve made iconic.
In cases of infringement, intent is irrelevant to the substantive facts of a case. Either something infringes upon a copyright or trademark or patent, or it doesn’t; whether the accused meant to do it or not changes nothing. Still, it probably matters to our ideas about justice and recompense as to whether intent existed or not. We’re far more likely to be forgiving of a careless mistake made without malice than instances of deliberate theft, and perhaps more likely to be considerate of others’ IP if we’ve had our own misappropriated.
What right does any company have over names that are similar only due to that company’s sheer size and ubiquity? It’s true that certain brands can be evoked not only by their name and logo, but by an entire subcategory of similar designs and conventions, but should that be the case, from a legal perspective? Maybe it speaks poorly of our regulatory bodies that said companies are allowed to lay claim to names and marks considered too similar, and that such matters are ultimately decided by those companies and their resources — resources that smaller businesses deemed to be infringing cannot possibly match in a legal battle.
Innovation is what spurs tech companies to the top of the proverbial pile, but, once there, some seem to lose that innovative spirit, relying instead upon their accrued power to stay atop the marketplace. Instead of coming up with new ideas, it’s easier to simply buy up the innovative companies out there, or perhaps just copy the innovation you see. At the risk of generalization, Big Tech can get lazy, and that laziness can result in problems if they’re not careful about what they do.
Among the many benefits that the proliferation of the internet and search engines have provided, finding song lyrics wouldn’t rank among the most important, but it would certainly be a more popular use than, say, looking up academic papers for school work. And it’s an underrated benefit; for years prior, you had to rely on liner notes from records or CDs, and that’s even if the artist put the lyrics there. Otherwise, you were left guessing as to whether you heard the words correctly over the radio, only to be corrected years later.
I’ve written previously about the relatively recent problem of video games reproducing real-life products and places and the potential for trademark infringement, at least in the minds of those companies who find their products in games that seek to replicate facsimile of the world as we know it. Not every game seeks to do that, however; in fact, most games use the technology available to create something new entirely, often recognizable as something that can only exist in the digital sphere. That doesn’t seem to mean that trademark disputes won’t port into this new realm, apparently.