Here are some interesting IP-related posts and because everyone (at least in Chicago) still seems to have last week’s election on their minds, the first is election related:

  • The MTTLR Blog’s Dorothy Eshelman has an interesting post on whether the use of debate clips by, among others, the candidates involved is fair use — click here to read it.  I agree with Eshelman’s conclusion that it is probably not fair use.  And I agree that debate footage should be dedicated to the public domain, at least on a limited basis.  It would be an easy matter for debate commissions to require that for the privilege of filming the debate networks agree that their footage be available in the public domain so long as it is not used near in time to the debate itself (perhaps within an hour) and so long as clips are limited to no longer than a few minutes or one question and set of answers. 
  • The MTTLR Blog’s Sherri Nazarian looks at the application of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") to hacking VP candidate Sarah Palin’s email and argues that the CFAA needs to be modernized — click here to read the post.  Nazarian explains that the email hacking was not enough to trigger the CFAA, enacted in 1984.  Perhaps it is time to update the 24 year old CFAA to meet the massive changes in technology.