LuminousVoid

So I finished my privacy and trademarks exams. Both were well written. Trademarks even included as a fact pattern this recent issue: This post is rated G

The New York Times reports that the Motion Picture Association of America is sending cease-and-desist notices to fan fiction writers for merely rating their stories according to the MPAA’s G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17 code.

As IdleGrasshopper has recently found out, sometimes professors read blogs. I don’t want to give any exam particulars because I don’t want to spoil grading anonymity.

Now just my papers are left. One is a little bit for art of lawyering. I take some of the literature on what influences whether people will work in the public interest after law school and use those conclusions to discuss GW’s recent decision to compress our semester. The compressed semester makes for a busier week, more compressed projects like journal writing and moot court, but allows for an extra week at the beginning of the semester so that people can go to lots of Fall Interview Program activities. It’s mostly done

The big one is about the multinational treaty limitations to orphan works solutions. Orphan works are those works that we cannot find an author for. Thus people who wish to incorporate or license those works have nowhere to turn to and we end up losing these works. So people are looking for a solution where users of these works can pay someone and not face willful infringement liability.

The Berne Convention and TRIPS both limit what we can do with our copyrights. Berne Art 5(2) says that we cannot have any “formalities” like requiring owners to register their names somewhere. TRIPS Art. 13 says that limitations of rights (such as what an orphan works solution would be) have to be limited to special situations that do not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the rights holder.