Returning to the issue of the interface of copyright and design patents, which I discussed here on May 12: In the course of my research for an upcoming book review, I've gone as I sometimes do beyond the 'four corners' of the book and have read the following blog post, from Pamela Samuelson: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2017/05/overlapping-protecting-innovations.html That entry, posted almost precisely a year ago now, contends that in the specific field of application program interface (API) there isn't any significant overlap between the two sorts of IP protection. That position puts Ms Samuelson (portrayed here, a professor at Berkeley Law) at odds with the Federal Circuit, which recently (in ORACLE v. GOOGLE) said precisely the opposite.
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The publisher Hurst & Blackett brought out an English language edition of AH's book, Mein Kampf, in 1939. It was, as George Orwell says in the review to which I'll link you in a moment, edited in an appeasementist spirit: 'see? Hitler's not so bad, maybe we can all get along.' A year later, the same publishers re-issued it, apparently with new prefatory material etc. because Britain and Germany had in the meantime gone to war. I think Orwell's review, written in response to the re-issuance, holds up very well through all the intervening decades. I especially like the summary of the world Hitler wanted: " a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder." Here's the URL: https://worldview.carnegiecouncil.org/archive/worldview/1975/07/2555.html/_res/id=File1/v18_i007-008_a010.pdf
If you have any sense of the recent history of the US presidency, the above sentence, applied TO that institution, will seem insane. It appears to seem sane, though, to William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe, authors of RELIC, a new book about the presidency and related constitutional issues. Excessive suspicion of executive power is the late 18th century "relic" that they would like to excise from the US Constitution by amendment, on behalf of "effective government." I haven't read the book, and am relying here on a review in the September issue of THE FEDERAL LAWYER. Unless the reviewer, Louis Fisher, is doing the authors an injustice, though, Howell and Moe seem headed down a dangerous road. Whether the next President is named Clinton or Trump, my own response to the suggestion at the top of this blog post is, "hell no!"
In a Different Key: The Story of Autism By John Donvan and Caren Zucker Crown Publishers, New York, NY, 2016. 670 pages, $30. Reviewed by Christopher C. Faille Autism is part of who I am. Or, at least, I believe so. There’s never been anything so formal as a diagnosis, but people who love me, including some with credentials as health care providers, have told me, usually with some effort at softening the presumed blow, that I am “on the spectrum.” I have long since given up any impulse to argue the point. I don’t believe I’ve ever owned the term “autism” in public before, so I will use this book review, then, as a coming-out moment. The readers of The Federal Lawyer know something of me, from my numerous book reviews in the magazine. You have had plenty of opportunities to judge both my analytical abilities and the sort of stylistic quirks that enter into my prose style. That doesn’t make you diagnostic authorities, but it does mean that you are an appropriate community ...
My recent reading includes a review, by friend Henry, of SLAVISH SHORE, a new book from Harvard University Press about the life of Richard Henry Dana Jr. Dana argued the Prize Cases before the US Supreme Court in February 1863. At issue: when is a war a war? when is a blockade a blockade? was Lincoln's action in pursuing a war through the imposition of a blockade lawful? As Henry explains it: "A blockade is a war measure, and a President is authorized under his war powers to impose a blockade only when Congress has declared war against another nation....Lincoln denied that the Confederate states were a nation, he insisted that they were mere insurrectionists and traitors. No one questions that Lincoln could have closed the ports, as opposed to blockading them, but Britain had 'made it clear that it would not accept American "closure" of Southern ports that would expose British shippers to arrest as common smugglers.'" In that last half sentence, ...
A Big Enough Lie is a recent novel by Eric Bennett, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. A round-up of recent war fiction in the August Harper's focuses on Bennett's book, which takes as its protagonist a "student in a fictionalized version of the Iowa Writer's Workshop" named John Townley, who "pretends to be a disabled Iraq War veteran." In the course of carrying out his fraud, Townley borrows and attributes to his own military experience particulars from "the life of an American soldier who is presumed dead after a nationally reported kidnapping in Babylon." Townley's memoir comes to be "championed by an Oprah-like talk-show host, who transforms him into a celebrity and makes it all the more probable that he'll be exposed as a fraud." Nice set up.
The Hobbit first appeared in 1937. Yes, that's getting to be a long time ago. One of its more enthusiastic reviewers was famed medievalist, Christian apologist and science-fiction author C.S. Lewis. This was his take. There and back again Money quote, "But there are dwarfs and dwarfs, and no common recipe for children's stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien -- who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale." Happy Thanksgiving to all.
Last week I quoted the philosopher John Dewey on the difference between life and non-living matter. "The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered. While the living thing may easily be crushed by a superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence." A friend asked why I considered that profound. I'll reproduce here my response, with some very slight re-working. _____________________________ One obvious example of what Dewey has in mind is the immune system in humans and in just about all other creatures with blood coursing through veins. There is a wide range of infections which cause various nasty diseases in humans, whence most of those struck can and do recove...
Below I'll provide a link to a well-written blast at the expense of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest book, Anti-Fragile. The thesis of the book is that there are three different states-of-being for institutions, individuals, even academic theories: fragility, robustness, and anti-fragility. These are also, in order: really bad, not so bad, good. [I've written about one aspect of this book in this blog quite recently -- Taleb figures in my series of posts about Krugman and Gould. ] A brief illustration of the thesis might run this way: a nation that has built its whole economy around the production and sale of wine would be fragile. It would depend for its livelihood on the international market for wine, and, (even if demand for wine holds up forever) it could be devastated by climate changes that make its own terrain less hospitable to grapes. A nation that was less dependent on any single market or product would be robust. But better than robustness...