At the risk of sounding glib, has any company fared better during the pandemic relative to its prospects otherwise than Zoom? Amazon has done well, sure, but Amazon will always do well. Zoom, on the other hand, has gone from useful to vital in a period of months, and probably more accurately in a period of a few weeks in the spring when every meeting became a virtual one. I can’t attest to Zoom’s outlook pre-COVID, but undoubtedly this period has led to the type of success that spurs thoughts of exponential growth and, inevitably, brings lawsuits.
Continue reading “Zapier and Zoom In Trademark Scuffle Over Zaps”
If you’ll forgive visiting once more with a frequent topic of this blog, we have to talk yet again about the DMCA. Specifically, about the ability of seemingly any company to use the DMCA for other than what it was ostensibly created, which is to protect copyright on the internet. We’ve seen the fruits of the maximalist position that most corporations have taken: every video that even makes mention of a product ends up flagged, regardless of the dictates of fair use. It’s rote at this point to say that the implementation of the DMCA has been manipulated to the point of near-uselessness, but it’s worth saying over and over again, in the hopes something might change.
Most people intuit that advertising is some mix of fact and fiction; not lies per se, but perhaps a burnished version of the truth. Rare is the product that actually changes our life (although, 
You could be forgiven if you’ve forgotten the names Mark and Patricia McCloskey — indeed, you could be counted lucky in that regard. But likely you recall the gun-waving couple that caught national headlines earlier this summer during the Black Lives Matter protests in St. Louis, even if the names attached to those figures failed to stick. They seemed likely candidates for a mere fifteen minutes of fame, but alas, it would appear that the pair that took to their front yard armed with guns might be somewhat confrontational! Who might have guessed?
If you’re exhausted of politics (and at this point, who isn’t) rest easy; this isn’t a post on politics, or at least not politics as we’ve come to think of it in 2020. The issue at hand harkens back to a simpler time, or at least a time more familiar to those of us who chose to watch how the proverbial sausage was made at a time when there was a choice to look away and go about your life.
We cover video games here from time to time, in part because, well, I enjoy video games, but also because they provide a fascinating window into copyright issues as they approach greater degrees of photorealism. Just as 
Copyright concerns probably don’t rate as even a second-order issue when it comes to artificial intelligence, but it is an interesting topic if you’re inclined to think of such advances esoterically. What does it mean about us, about our creativity, if a machine is able to replicate it in some manner? Is the idea of creation somewhat diminished, even though the existence of AI requires in and of itself creativity? Will there come a time when human creativity is rendered unnecessary by this AI, and all of our content is generated by machines designed to optimize your enjoyment of it?
Given what we’ve seen of how people can behave online, it’s probably good and almost certainly necessary that some protections exist for platforms and internet service providers. That’s not to absolve the likes of, say, Facebook from moderating what’s posted on their site, or taking steps to prevent the violation of laws on the part of users to a reasonable degree; it’s simply to note that even with the best efforts of these companies (which, to be clear, we almost certainly aren’t seeing) there’s not much to be done should people decide to do whatever they want, rules be damned.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the biggest thing going for the surname Hamilton is the Lin-Manuel Miranda-penned musical, a blockbuster of both stage (back when theaters were open) and screen (via a release on Disney+). But that would be a myopic view of both the world and pop culture, one that excludes the larger world of culture and sport. And in the interest in broadening all of our horizons, we’re heading across the pond and into the cockpit for today’s IP news.