Peter Edidin at the New York Times writes that J K Rowling sued the publisher of the Harry Potter Lexicon by Steve Vander Ark, causing it to suspend printing while a court determines whether her copyright has been violated link here. The copyright is now apparently held by Warner Brothers, the Potter film maker, so it is not clear to me who is suing whom. In any case, the lexicon (a collection of words that make up the vocabulary of the books) started as a user-contributed website. Grounds asserted are that it "borrows too heavily" from the books and interferes with Rowling's plan to publish her "encyclopedia on the wizarding world." Rowling apparently said on her website that she took "no pleasure" in preventing publication.

But she will profit. This isn't going to end soon because there are fair use questions galore. And two beneficiaries, if we count Warner. Well, the court may decide in time for next year's Christmas sales.

In the meantime, Potter lexicon seekers will have to be content with online version link here.

Nate Anderson tells us that the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act, also known more colloquially as the Pirate Act, is back under consideration in the Senate link here. At its base is the attempt to get the Feds at the Justice Department to enforce intellectual property law, taking the onus and the cost off the business owning the IP. For example, the RIAA has been having trouble identifying the culprit who transfers copyrighted material on P2P links, much less getting evidence sufficient to convict. Given the power of the FBI, the Feds will no doubt do better, particularly since the government is already reading all our email. In addition, the law gives Justice the power to pursue cases as either criminal or civil, an advantage to IP owners as civil law requires a lower level of evidence to convict.

Consider writing your Senators.

We rarely get the chance to make the case for protecting any form of intellectual property. Here is one from Mike Masnick at Techdirt. The Korean cell phone maker, LG, is peddling a phone called Black Cherry very close to RIM's BlackBerry link here. If people are as mindless about shopping for named goods as I, they could easily confuse them. That is the bottom-line case for trademarking--it's protection for the buyer.

T-Mobile claims to own the color magenta, ostensibly having put it under trademark. The law on this is complicated beyond belief, which allows an otherwise ridiculous determination to continue to be enforced. Read all about it here and here.

Who is going to sue at great expense to get it overturned?

Patent troll NTP (otherwise described as a patent-licensing company) has had its patent-infringement lawsuit against Sprint Nextel, AT&T, and Verizon put on hold until the Patent Office finishes its review of NTP's patents link here. It was previously determined that those patents, covering wireless e-mail transmission and reception, should not have been issued, but NTP appealed that finding and the review is still underway.

NTP's suit was a desperation measure, given the adverse first review of its patents, but it is still good news that it can't proceed for now because the defendants will incur no further costs for the moment and face no financial pressure to settle with NTP.

We wrote earlier about Fox TV issuing takedown notices to several Republican candidates who used clips from the last debate in their ads. The story gets more interesting now, since Fox has gone after Mitt Romney who had his lawyer reply that what he had done was fair use link here and here. Fox now counterclaims Romney's ad far exceeds fair use.

Will they go to court? That would be an interesting chance to reexamine the meaning of fair use. Stay tuned.

Why is that news? Because Procter & Gamble, maker of Folgers coffee, and Kraft, maker of Maxwell House, are suing one another for patent infringement link here and here. Each claims to have a patent on the can or some element of it.

Here is the actual patent: Patent #7,169,418 "A fresh packaging system for roast and ground coffee having a top load capacity of at least about 16 pounds (7.3 Kg) comprising a container with a closed bottom, an open top, and a body enclosing a perimeter between the bottom and the top. A protuberance is continuously disposed around the perimeter of the body proximate to the top and forms a ridge external to the body. A flexible closure is removeably attached and sealed to the protuberance so that the closure seals the interior volume of the container. The container bottom and container body are constructed from a material having a tensile modulus number ranging from at least about 35,000 to at least about 650,000 pounds per square inch (at least about 2,381 to at least about 44,230 atm)."

That isn't coffee you smell, its prior art.

The fight over fair use of copyrighted video material is getting more complicated. The Big Content side of the argument wants to use a cheap way, filters, to determine copyright violation, leading to an automatic take-down notice which it wants the You Tubes of the world to obey. The Public Interest groups argue that fair use under that system will get lost and proposes freer and more flexible guidelines. You can read more about the differences here and here .

No sign yet of who is likely to prevail. Too bad no one comes out for doing away with copyright on the grounds that it is monopolistic and a bane of creativity.

Here is another IP as a Joke item. Nate Anderson reports that a player in the virtual world game Second Life had "her Nomine-branded avatar skins allegedly ripped off by another user who has been selling counterfeit copies for his own profit." She has now gone to court for violation of her copyright link here. Since the skins can be sold to others for "virtual" Linden dollars, for which there is a real-world dollar market among other game players, the skins can be said to have some value, but only among the demented.

For more on the case, read this link here

It will be interesting to see where the court takes it, in another example of the unreality of IP law. Why not set up avatars of lawyers and a court and a judge and a Congress to revise the law? Then the real-world judge could argue that he does not have jurisdiction and the suit has been brought in the wrong court. Problem solved.

Comcast has come under criticism, first for having slowed its broadband users' large file transfers in apparent disregard of their service contracts and more recently for lying about it link here. They seem now to have been caught. They were not the ones restricting usage, but they had hired another company to do it for them link here. In judging this, one needs to remember that Comcast is at best a duopolist in markets with few or no other companies offering broadband .

The one positive fallout of this is that it has revived the campaign for legally enforcing net neutrality. Consumers are simply not sure that they can get a fair shake from competition in these markets.