The National Labor Relations Board has handed down another social media law opinion. Can an employee be protected from firing after a profane Facebook rant about a supervisor?
The National Labor Relations Board has handed down another social media law opinion. Can an employee be protected from firing after a profane Facebook rant about a supervisor?
The origin of the book, movie, and general cultural phenomenon that is Fifty Shades of Grey is an interesting case study about copyright fair use in the world of online content creation. Let’s skip all the innuendo and get down to the good stuff – when is it OK to publish your own takeoff of an existing media property?
I’ve written about Fair Use before (to see some of my previous posts on the topic, check out my blog’s handy new search function.) The hottest topic in fair use these days is, without question, the copyright transformative use issue. What does it mean to say the use of someone else’s copyrighted work is “transformative,” and how are the courts ruling on this topic?
Someone needs to put a stop to this kind of nonsense. In The Dark Knight Rises, a few references are made to a fictional software product known as “clean clate,” which can erase all information about a person’s past. This is handy if you are Catwoman and you live in a fictional comic-book universe. Fortres Grand (yes, apparently that’s how they spell it) is a software company that sells a product, named “Clean Slate,” which erases the data on an individual computer. It’s been on the market since 2000. Since 2001, they’ve held a USPTO trademark registration for the mark…