Jan 30, 2009
A recent New York Times article discusses the print magazine business and the rising number of casualties the recession has claimed. This month has seen 14 magazines go under, including Country Home, Arthur, Vital Source, Map Magazine, and Teen. Going down with the balance sheets, obviously, is each of those respective brands. Effectively, each demise takes with it that brand's intellectual property, including copyrights, trademarks, customer lists, subscription lists, vendor lists, and more.
Many smaller print-media magazines probably don't have much overhead. A ... Read More
Jan 27, 2009
Barton Beebe, a copyrights and trademarks expert and professor at Cardozo School of Law, recently published an article titled "An Empirical Study of U.S. Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005".[1] The Study is a thorough statistical examination of every federal court opinion that significantly involved fair use since 1978. The study was so insightful that it is important to summarize and share some of the key empirical data to the copyright law professional community. In short, much of the data went "against the ... Read More
Jan 17, 2009
Copyright and music publishers in Nashville have for years adopted and exercised a business model that was created decades ago. That model includes hiring songwriters, or buying the composition right to songs (as opposed to the sound recording right), and marketing those rights to record labels and artists for inclusion in an upcoming album (and the payment of performance and mechanical rights). Transactions in this business have been controlled and channeled by those companies that have been doing it for a long ... Read More
Jan 12, 2009
I recently authored an article ("Termination Rights: A Second Bite at the Apple") that was published in the January 2009 issue of The Federal Lawyer regarding section 304(c) of U.S.C. Title 17. That section, which affords certain termination rights to authors of copyrighted works which were secured and granted prior to 1978, has garnered little attention until recently, mostly because of the small timeframe through which the rights can be exercised.
I wrote the article because of a string of recent cases (and ... Read More
Jan 12, 2009
IP Prospective will be a source of information and a medium for intellectual exchange at the intersect of intellectual property, law, investment, money, and corporate action.
It is my hope that this online magazine will serve as a center of information and ideas for those with a keen interest in the future relationship of intellectual property and business. Indeed, while some may measure the success of this weblog by the quantity of readers it accrues, it is the quality of readers that will make the success uniquely ... Read More
Trevor M. Blum is a former Associate in the Chicago-based, valuation practice group of Ocean Tomo, LLC., an intellectual property (IP) consultancy. Additionally, he provided instrumental research support to Intellectual Property Exchange International, Inc., an IP exchange start-up. Trevor holds a B.S. from Indiana University and is currently an MBA candidate at the University of Cambridge, focusing on international business and finance. His interests also include entrepreneurship, economics, and informational visualization. He enjoys running and cycling in his free time. Trevor seeks to bring a transnational business perspective to the blog. 