Perhaps I'm just overly cautious by nature - I wear suspenders and a
belt whenever I bungee jump - but I was a bit thrown by the Terms of Use
on the new Stanford site, which states in part:
NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY
Your access and account are strictly limited to non-commercial use. You
may not use this site for any commercial purpose or for private sector
remuneration-directly or indirectly. Some examples of EXCLUDED uses
include, but are not limited to: (i) attorney use of IPLC Services to
defend, manage, or prosecute a litigation (EXCEPT all pro bono or
directly analogous use is allowed and strongly encouraged); (ii) use by
a litigation consultant, of any kind, in relation to an actual or
potential litigation; (iii) any use by, on behalf, or for the benefit of
a for-profit legal entity, whether such entity is extant or to be
created; (iv) use of IPLC Services by anyone to analyze the purchase,
sale, licensing, or valuation of any intellectual property; or (v) use
of the IPLC to create an IP or litigation related database of any kind
(see also all prohibitions below). The above usages, and any other
commercial or private remunerative usages, are expressly prohibited.
It seemed rather all encompassing if you were either a private firm or
corporate law department, except possibly for pro bono work or drafting
a scholarly article. (Although even that might be construed as advancing
the firm's reputation and thus generating new business.) I sent an
e-mail off to Craig Anderson, author of the frontpage article on the
IPLC in the Daily Journal, copied to Prof. Mark Lemley at Stanford, who
is overseeing the project. I received the following response from Prof.
Lemley:
Our goal in the terms of use is to prevent commercial sites from
collecting and reselling the data in bulk; we cannot control the quality
of the data if they do so.
Law firms are welcome and encouraged to use the site, whether for
information, writing papers, or for use with clients or in litigation.
Access to the site is free. Law firms that use the site for their
business may eventually be offered an option of paying to receive access
to advanced functionality beyond the basic site. But we are not
restricting the use the law firms make of the site.
So feel free to use the site without fear of ethical missteps.
Bob Ryan
Librarian
Hill, Farrer & Burrill, LLP
300 South Grand Ave, 37th Fl.
Los Angeles, CA 90071
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-law-lib@ucdavis.edu [mailto:owner-law-lib@ucdavis.edu] On
Behalf Of Michael Dodson
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 7:28 AM
To: law-lib@ucdavis.edu
Subject: [LAW-LIB:57462] Stanford Law School has launched the Stanford
Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse
STANFORD, Calif., December 8, 2008-The Law, Science & Technology Program
at Stanford Law School today launched the Stanford Intellectual Property
Litigation Clearinghouse (IPLC), a first-of-its-kind online database
that offers comprehensive information about intellectual property
disputes within the United States. This publicly available, online
research tool will enable scholars, policymakers, lawyers, judges, and
journalists to review real-time data about IP legal disputes that have
been filed across the country, and ultimately to analyze the efficacy of
the system that regulates patents, copyrights, trademarks, antitrust,
and trade secrets.
The rest of the press release is here:
http://tinyurl.com/5ufk7a
===================================
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Dec 09 2008 - 16:57:14 PST