Andrew F. Sellars's blog

This morning Jeff and I had the pleasure of watching the Massachusetts Appeals Court argument in Jenzabar, Inc. v. Long Bow Group, Inc.  As we mentioned once before on this blog, the CMLP filed an amicus brief in this case with the assistance of Harvard Law School's Cyberlaw Clinic. (And thanks again to HLS students Mike Hoven and Andrew Pearson for their help!)

The case concerns a documentary film company that released a film concerning the Tiananmen Square protests, called The Gate of Heavenly Peace. The film profiles many of the figures surrounding the protest, and is critical of a student protester named Ling Chai. Chai later moved to Boston and co-founded an educational software and service company named Jenzabar. The film company, Long Bow, created a website related to the film, which, among other things, criticized Chai on a webpage. Long Bow titled the page "Jenzabar," and included terms related to Jenzabar in the metadata.   read more »

From the ever-growing file of trademark cases that are bad for free speech, Eric Goldman and Techdirt bring us an interesting case concerning a recent Hyundai ad. The ad is a series of brief vignettes conveying luxurious items in non-luxury settings: a yacht parked next to a small suburban ranch house, cops in a squad car snacking on caviar, chandeliers for streetlights, lobsters and roast pigs in what looks like an office breakroom, and – most importantly for our purposes – a group of people playing basketball with a ball that appears to have what Louis Vuitton calls its "Toile Monogram" pattern on it. Baroque music plays throughout, and a sonorous voice asks the audience, "What if we made luxury available to everyone? Would it still be called luxury? Or maybe we'd need a word for it. Oh, here's one: 'Hyundai.' The all new Hyundai Sonata."

Get it? The ad asks us to ponder whether luxury is defined by its exclusivity to an upper caste, or whether we can all experience the creature comforts of "luxury" regardless of social strata, when a vendor makes high-quality goods at a convenient price point. (Also, buy our car.)   read more »

By now you might have heard about the lawsuit that the Associated Press filed against on-demand software company Meltwater News. AP has been critical of aggregators in the past, and decided to file suit against this specific party, alleging copyright infringement, removal of copyright management information, and (drumroll, please…) hot news misappropriation. Yes indeed, the tort made famous by the 1918 Supreme Court case INS v. AP – and about which we here just love to write – refuses to die.   read more »

Say you're in law school, and your professor gives you the following hypothetical:

It's 1968. A man named Paul Robert Cohen is in the Los Angeles County Courthouse, in a public corridor. On Cohen is a jacket, and on the jacket are the words "Fuck the Draft." He takes the jacket off as he walks into the courtroom, but puts it back on when he's in the corridor again. When he does so the courthouse police arrest him and charge him with disturbing the peace. Cohen challenges the arrest as a violation of his First Amendment rights.

"How should the court rule?" your professor asks.   read more »