Day January 12, 2018

USTR Notorious Markets: Online Ads Still Funding IP Infringement; Alibaba Fires Back About Report

[William New] The Office of the United States Trade Representative today released its annual list of the worst outlaw online and physical markets around the world, citing a range of major sources of problems in every part of the world. The list this year highlights new technologies, identifies online advertising as a large revenue source for counterfeiters, and includes Chinese online market Taobao, owned by internet giant Alibaba, for the second year in a row, leading the company to claim bias and politics are at play.

Cisco Systems v. Arista and the Scenes a Faire Doctrine

The Cisco Systems v. Arista case has gotten very little attention among the information justice community who generally care about freedom to reuse unprotectable elements in copyrighted works. The case and the issues it raises deserve more visibility, as I expressed in a brief I wrote in support of Arista. Cisco charged Arista with infringement for its reuse of 509 command-line interface (CLI) terms, along with some additional elements of the Cisco user interface, which engineers use to configure their ethernet switching technologies.