Blawgletter once heard that some people believe they have a constitutional right to buy knock-off handbags.  Now we learn that they just about had it right.  The Copyright Act of 1976, according to The Los Angeles Times today, doesn’t protect designer-label designs, only artwork; and we suppose that trademark law covers the labels themselves.

A bill pending in the Senate — the Design Piracy Prohibition Act — would, you know, prohibit design piracy. 

We predict a slow, agonizing, and possibly brutal death for the DPPA bill, not least because we agree with the guy who said:

I love the bill theoretically, but I don’t think it will ever work.  I think it’s next to impossible to enforce any of this.  Some of the biggest designers would be in court every other week for knocking off other people.

Barry Barnett

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Today’s edition of The Washington Post includes a surprise — an op-ed by William S. Lerach, the long-time securities class action lawyer who pleaded guilty two weeks ago to a federal conspiracy charge.  The piece lambastes Corporate America for paying "loser CEOs" huge sums after they run their companies into the figurative ground.  The govment gets a tongue-lashing too.

Exhibits A and B consist of E. Stanley O’Neal and Charles O. Prince — the departing chiefs of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, respectively.  The former’s going-away gift came to about $160 million (on top of $100 million in regular compensation), and the latter’s reached the centi-million-dollar mark also.  Together, they presided over $20 billion in market value losses at their companies.  See Subprime Time for Merrill Lynch and Citigroup.

Mr. Lerach can’t resist contrasting the legal system’s toughness on shareholder lawyers like him with its laxity towards Wall Street executives such as Messrs. O’Neal and Prince.  Blawgletter can hardly blame him.  But we note that Mr. Lerach keeps the whininess to a minimum while making a compelling case for more accountability by Corporate Titans, Captains of Industry, and Masters of the Universe.

Barry Barnett

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Blawgletter never met Norman Mailer in person, but we did get to know him a little by reading The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Castle in the Forest (2007).

The former introduced us to a new word, micturate, which refers to making water (urinating).  The latter dealt with the birth and pre-adolescence of Adolph Hitler and the fight for his soul between angels and the servants of Satan.  It also mentioned, too many times for us, less elegant terms for human excretions.

So what do we make of Mr. Mailer, whose mother birthed him in New Jersey, who grew up in Brooklyn, and who earned a reputation for anti-feminism and proclaiming other unpopular beliefs?  We can say only that we felt a connection with him.  That we think he did his best to tell the truth as the light gave him the ability to tell it (excepting of course the stuff he made up).  And that his vulgarity didn’t, at last, obscure his talent for seducing readers into letting him have his way with their feelings.

Thank you, Mr. Mailer.  Rest in peace.

Barry Barnett

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How can big cable operators get away with raising prices a whole bunch faster than the rate of inflation?

The NYT reports today that the head of the Federal Communications Commission wants to rein in the two largest cable operators, Comcast and TimeWarner, which together serve around 80 percent of U.S. subscribers.  The article notes that FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin, a Republican, supports adoption of rules that would require the two cable giants to (a) charge competitors less for programming, (b) stop forcing competitors to buy programming in "bundles", (c) lower prices for using their systems, and (d) let subscribers choose (and pay for) only the channels they want.

Blawgletter expects a fierce fight.  As you might expect, Comcast and TimeWarner have huge legal staffs, public/government relations departments, and lobbying resources.  They also budget tens of millions of dollars to get their regulatory way.

The conflict reminds us of the cable companies’ campaigns to stamp out "theft of cable" services.  Each outfit offers online information regarding the subject — here and here.  They and their comrades even got Congress in 1984 to pass a law making cable theft a federal crime.  See 47 U.S.C. 553.

But the real theft may happen in the other direction.  Think about how many dollars that cable into your home sucks money every month out of your household budget.  If the cable companies got or kept their monopoly power in your market by anticompetitive means, your payments to them include overcharges.  Billions of dollars nationwide.

Theft of cable?  Theft by cable.

Barry Barnett

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Cathat
Would this feline bite the hand that pets it (and puts a frog head on its noggin)?  We hope so.

Blawgletter continues our hot-and-heavy love affair with the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.  Who could blame us?

Take today as a for instance.  Under the heading "Tinkering With Toys", the guardians of American bidness mock a Democratic Senator’s efforts to give more oomph — a lot more oomph — to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.  His bill, the editorial notes, would provide rewards for whistleblowing and allow fines up to $100 million.  The editors’ principal complaint?  That increasing CPSC resources would discourage bidness’s "strong" "appetite" for "self-policing".  Plus, they assert — with a charming failure to cite evidence — that "[p]rosecutions would rise, while actual enforcement would fall."  And that the bill "would protect lawyers more than children."

Our ardor of course permits us to overlook small matters of illogic and unreality.  It’s okay shnookie-wookie!  But still we wonder why so many lawyers who defend the interests of capital purr while the hands that pet them also try to ring their necks. 

For our part, we arch our back at the attention and adore it.  But we at least know that our strokers don’t love us, not really.

Barry Barnett

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Antitrust authorities in Europe, Japan, and South Korea conducted surprise, er, inspections at companies that make cathode ray tubes or CRTs, according to our friends at Bloomberg.  The agencies apparently want to find out whether the manufacturers agreed to limit competition in this fast-shrinking industry. 

CRTs go into television sets and computer monitors of people who either (a) can’t afford a flat-screen device or (b) like honkingly bulky electronic equipment.

Blawgletter suspects foul play.  Contact us if you know something.

Barry Barnett

Feedicon14x14 Have a wonderful autumnal weekend.

Tocqueville wrote in chapter 16 of his Democracy in America (1835):

The people in democratic states do not mistrust the members of the legal profession, because it is known that they are interested to serve the popular cause; and the people listen to them without irritation, because they do not attribute to them any sinister designs.  The lawyers do not, indeed, wish to overthrow the institutions of democracy, but they constantly endeavor to turn it away from its real direction by means that are foreign to its nature.  Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link between the two great classes of society.

Barry Barnett

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Blawgletter rejoices once again today in the reconditude, the complexity, the obscurantism of patent law.  For which we thank the Federal Circuit, which held 2-1 that a less-than-pellucid incorporation by reference of an invention in a "grandparent" patent doomed its "grandchild" to the graveyard of invalidity by anticipation.  The dissenter scalded his colleagues for ignoring the district court’s findings as to the adequacy of the inc-by-ref and for adding "new judicial tightropes" that patent-drafters must now walk.  Zenon Environmental, inc. v. United States Filter Corp., Nos. 06-1266 & 06-1267 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 7, 2007).

Barry Barnett

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