False advertising over legality of gambling devices

FortuNet, Inc. v. GameTech Arizona Corp., 2008 WL 5083812 (D. Nev.)

FortuNet, a Nevada corporation that is involved in the development and manufacture of electronic gambling devices such as bingo games, sued competitor GameTech, a Delaware corporation, for RICO and false advertising violations. (Intriguing side note: the court found that the state unfair competition claims were preempted by Nevada gaming law.) GameTech allegedly falsely advertised it was Nevada-licensed when it had no Nevada gaming license, required to manufacture, sell, or distribute the devices from Nevada.

There are actually two defendants, a parent company located in Nevada, and a wholly-owned subsidiary with no employees of its own, located in California, that developed the gaming devices at issue, which GameTech wasn’t licensed to develop in Nevada. GameTech went through some serious contortions to do large portions of the work in the California facility, making clear that its motives were to arbitrage legal differences. Its website, which covered both the parent and the subsidiary, used a disclaimer that “Some or all of our products may not be legal in your jurisdiction.” Many key development activities actually took place in Nevada; GameTech has since secured a Nevada gaming license for its subsidiary and discontinued using California.

Plaintiffs had no evidence of actual deception. Though courts may presume deception from literal or intentional falsity, plaintiffs may not recover damages without other proof of damages, unless the defendant engaged in direct comparative advertising or the market is essentially a duopoly. Once injury is established, however, the amount of damages need not be precisely shown and the plaintiff can recover the defendant’s profits.

FortuNet argued that GameTech’s website, which lists the Nevada parent as the contact entity, necessarily implied that all devices sold on the site were licensed in Nevada, as did ads distributed at trade shows with similar statements. But the court determined that the listing was literally true, and would be misleading, if at all, only in context. FortuNet was thus required to present evidence that the website or the ads actually conveyed the implied message, but there was no evidence that any consumer received that message.

FortuNet also claimed falsity in GameTech’s ads which identified the subsidiary, rather than the parent, as the owner of the registered trademark for one of the devices. The court agreed that this could be literally false, but noted that there was no evidence that a misstatement of trademark ownership as between a parent and subsidiary would be material to consumers or injure FortuNet.

FortuNet also argued that one of the devices was falsely advertised as a Class II gaming device, when it was really a Class III device that requires greater regulation and licensing. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act distinguishes gaming devices using physical, tangible media (Class II) from electronic gaming devices (Class III). GameTech argued that its device was Class II because it could be played in a tangible paper medium. The court, looking at a number of other cases about the proper classification of similar games, found a genuine issue of material fact about whether the ads were false. However, FortuNet failed to show injury sufficient to entitle it to damages. There was no comparative advertising, and no other evidence of harm to FortuNet in particular given that there were several competitors in the market. Injunctive relief on this claim remained available, but the parties didn’t brief it, so the court ordered further briefing.

Perils of collecting IP memorabilia

Your kids may decide that the Fartman doll you finally scored off of eBay is there for their entertainment. (The oldest also misidentified Fartman as Batman, showing a distinct lack of brand discrimination.) Since the plaintiff's lawyer kindly sent me a Pull My Finger Fred, expect some nice color pictures comparing the two to show up in the Georgetown IP Database soon.

Pissing contest: urine removal lawsuit continues

Medallion Products, Inc. v. McAlister, 2008 WL 5046055 (N.D. Ill.)

Some previous reporting; there are a lot of parties and I have ignored a large number of claims; the post title is actually pretty appropriate.

Interestingly, the parties agreed that Lanham Act standing requirements applied to the Illinois UTPA and Consumer Fraud Act claims, which I’m not sure is established law. In any event, the defendants argued that plaintiffs lacked standing because they never sold a pet stain product directly to consumers, as defendants did. Rather, they sell only to distributors, who ultimately sell to retailers and consumers. The court noted other cases requiring the plaintiff to show that it competes at the same level of business as the defendant. I’m not sure this makes sense, depending on the composition of the market—if the causal chain of injury is pretty obvious, I’m not sure why plaintiffs need a retailer on their side; the retailer may lack sufficient incentive to sue given its multiple sources of revenue, while the individual product manufacturer may be in the best position. Moreover, the parties appear to be dealing with different levels of business in part because of the somewhat unusual nature of the “as seen on TV” market, where products are sold via infomercials and fulfillment is accomplished through complicated business arrangements.

The court, however, found that there was no competition for sales and thus no standing. In any event, plaintiffs couldn’t show actual reliance on the allegedly false representations at issue.

Medallion also sued defendant Harriet Carter, a mail-order company, for defamation per se, for falsely telling dissatisfied customers that the urine removal product was manufactured by Medallion. The court granted summary judgment because this statement was not defamatory per se. Medallion’s only evidence was that Harriet Carter referred dissatisfied customers to Medallion. The court found that this didn’t count as uttering an actionable defamatory statement. I think the necessary implication that the bad product was Medallion’s fault could plainly be defamatory, but the court held that it didn’t fall into the five categories of defamation per se under Illinois law.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, the court denied summary judgment on a very similar claim against another defendant, who allegedly gave test results to a Fox news reporter, identifying them as results from tests performed on Medallion’s product, knowing that the product wasn’t actually made by Medallion. Since the tests showed minimal levels of enzyme activity, contrary to the product’s ad promises, the natural result was harm to Medallion’s reputation. The court found that this was not defamation per se because of the lack of an explicit statement, but there were enough factual issues that it might constitute defamation per quod. Maybe defamation law needs the Lanham Act’s doctrine of falsity by necessary implication?

Medallion did better with a defamation per se claim against defendant NPI, which told some of the other defendants that it was looking for a new supplier for the urine removal product because it was having problems with its current supplier (Medallion), including failure to deliver product on time, poor-quality product and inability to make orders. Medallion alleged that these statements were false. NPI argued that it didn’t identify Medallion by name and that it didn’t make the statement to one of Medallion’s competitors, both of which would be necessary for defamation. The court, unsurprisingly, disagreed. There was evidence in the record to create a triable issue that the other defendants knew who NPI was talking about; also, given that the other defendants could supply the product, they were competitors (not sure why that matters for defamation anyway). Summary judgment was denied.

The court also denied summary judgment on defendants’ counterclaims for trade libel and defamation based on plaintiffs’ complaints to the FTC and to third parties. There were material issues of fact on plaintiffs’ defense of absolute privilege (which would require a pending FTC investigation) and qualified privilege (as to which there’s a fact issue on plaintiffs’ good faith). Moreover, plaintiffs’ statements that defendants lied about having enzymes in their product and that the product didn’t work as advertised aren’t, as a matter of law, subject to an “innocent construction” sufficient to avoid liability for defamation per se.

The awful truth: "degrading" but true statements ok

Goldic Technology, Inc. v. Maxmile Corp., 2008 WL 5096866 (Cal.App. 2 Dist.)

Here’s a quirky little case: Goldic sued Maxmile for, among other things, breach of a settlement agreement that barred communications that “defame, libel, slander or degrade” Goldic’s products, based on a flyer that contined “true but unflattering” statements about Goldic’s products. The trial court ruled that truth did not degrade; Goldic appealed.

The parties compete to sell electronic Chinese/English dictionaries. Goldic sued a bunch of defendants, including Maxmile, in 1997; in 1999 the parties settled. Their agreement contained the language quoted above.

In 2005, Goldic introduced a new electronic dictionary. Maxmile distributed a Chinese-language flyer in its stores saying that Goldic’s new product “Makes Mistakes in its own Example Sentences!” The flyer listed 12 examples, and went on: “Erroneous machine translation, misleading the children, misleading other people and hurting business!” It concluded: “Please note that [Goldic] does not guarantee the accuracy of translation, and it specifies that the manufacturer shall not be held responsible for ‘any and all disputes or legal responsibilities’ resulted [sic] from the result of translation!”

The trial court entered a preliminary injunction, ruling that these statements, even if true, could reasonably be interpreted as degrading in violation of the contract; any harm to Maxmile’s freedom speech came from a voluntarily incurred obligation. At trial, the only remaining cause of action was breach of contract, and the parties agreed to have a bench trial on contract interpretation.

At trial, Maxmile’s principal testifed that “erroneous machine translation,” “the machine will also mislead the children,” and “the machine will mislead people,” were his opinions. Goldic’s president testified that the alleged erroneous translations were accurately reported, and he notified his software company of the problems.

After trial, the court found that the contract was not ambiguous, and that “degrade” did not cover true statements. The evidence established that Maxmile’s statements were accurate; there were only two competitors in the Chinese electronic dictionary market; and that Goldic’s own ads touting its products’ advantages could be interpreted as drawing unflattering comparisons with Maxmile, and thus would violate the settlement agreement under Goldic’s definition. The court found it significant that the original cause of action was based on false statements. Thus, it ruled that the parties had not intended to make “degrade” cover truth.

The court of appeals agreed. The parties provided guidance to their intentions by incorporating Goldic’s allegations of false advertising into the settlement agreement. This context trumped the dictionary meaning of “degrade.”

Comment: this is why lawyers like to use terms that have hardened into concrete over time, even if it leaves us with a lot of meaningless leftovers.

criticizing other women's pleasures

Beyond the valley of the doilies: Salon’s Joy Press did an interview with Jessica Helfand, a design critic/graphic designer who teaches at Yale, about her book on scrapbooking. In the interview, Helfand says a lot of interesting things about gender, pleasure, and creativity, three things that are rarely recognized as being bound together. Helfand is a firm believer in a certain kind of elite standard—“It's at once horrifying and fascinating to witness the degree to which design is being discussed online by people whose concept of innovation is measured by novel ways to tie bows,” she wrote—but she also found herself more sympathetic to scrapbookers than she expected.

The interviewer describes scrapbooks as often “cheesy and sentimental and generic,” but also “hands-on design as practiced by regular people rather than artists -- an attempt to represent everyday experience through visual culture.” Why are professional writers always so shocked to find out that many, many people want to recognize the creative potentials in their own lives? Of course most of the results are bad; that’s just Sturgeon’s law. But we sing to our kids even though we’re not good at it (I know I’m not); being good isn’t the point.

Anyway, Helfand calls scrapbooks “the original open-source technology, a unique form of self-expression that celebrated visual sampling, culture mixing, and the appropriation and redistribution of existing media.” Apparently the Gutenberg parenthesis had some parenthetical interventions of its own.

I’m interested in scrapbooks because of the way they employ copying, or physical appropriation, in the service of self-production: scrapbookers define themselves by what they take from the rest of the world. As, in the end, we all do, but the scrapbook foregrounds the materiality and creativity of the project of self-construction from found objects.

Helfand discussed the pleasure that people—mainly women—find in scrapbooking, and her discomfort with the $2.6 billion industry that, she argues, talks down to them: “Why are women targeted in this treat-them-like-13-year-olds way? I went to one of these scrapbooking retreats, and it's all these women in their pajamas with snacks -- Hostess Twinkies everywhere! There's something about junk food being part of this. It's like, no husbands, I'm going to let myself go and look at pictures of my family and eat Twinkies.” She references a study called “Making Me Time,” “about the creative crisis of the stay-at-home mom who needs to feel she's doing something with her day. The physicality of putting pen to paper and grease pencil to word fetti is making them feel they're doing something.” I’m reminded of Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: one thing a romance-reading hobby does is give a busy woman an excuse to turn away from her family and spend some time on self-care. Should the fact that Harlequin profits from this disturb us? Or are some kinds of profit more acceptable than others?

The answer, at least for scrapbooking, might lie in how much the premade materials enable creativity and how much they constrain it. Helfand likes messy scrapbooks, not stereotyped ones. Though I should admit that this too is a design preference with a particular cultural and class background: she points out in the interview that many scrapbookers like premade stickers because they don’t trust their own handwriting and spelling; maybe the ultimate solution is to convince them that their writing is worthwhile anyway, but that’s going to be a hard sell—it really will make the scrapbooks harder to show other people. It’s hard to condemn someone who wants her scrapbook to be a better version of herself.

At the same time, there’s something of value lost in that we now seem to be performing ourselves even in the most intimate aspects of our lives. As Helfand says, “I have a theory that contemporary scrapbooking is a little bit of a reflection of reality TV. … People want to gussy themselves up. … So you take this scrapbooker, and she's thinking, I'm overweight and I don't want a picture of myself in the scrapbook, but I do want to show off my cute kids and pretty pink ribbons. It's this externalizing idea of, I want this to look good for everyone else so if I ever get famous my scrapbooks will show that I'm perfect. But the whole purpose [of scrapbooks originally] was to celebrate the everyday.” Being famous to fifteen people, as opposed to being friends with fifteen people, changes our relationships to them and to ourselves. Abercrombie and Longhurst’s Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination gets into this (as does Veronica Mars, in a different way).

DMCA Circumvention Exemption Requests

List here. I am especially interested in the EFF's, which requests (along with a cellphone unlocking exemption) an exemption for circumvention that results in the creation of noncommercial videos using clips that qualify as fair use. This comes on the heels of Peter Decherney's success last time, which he is attempting to repeat, in getting the Copyright Office to recognize classes of uses/users defined by fair use. The idea is that the noncommercial clipping exemption would piggyback on a fair use determination, so that fair uses would not be deterred by the threat of DMCA liability, but there would not be a blanket exemption for clipping. Given the widespread practice of making fan videos, this is an exemption of particular interest to media fans.

Further evidence that the brain has no use in commerce requirement

Which is part of what makes dilution such a useless and misguided concept:

Guy #1: I think I'm going to go to Fortunoff's after work tomorrow to get the ring.
Guy #2: Why don't you just go to that place around the corner? You know, uh... Stephanie's!
Guy #1: You mean Tiffany's?
Guy #2: Yeah! Tiffany's!

--Financial District

From Overheard in New York

Chippendale's costume registration

The TTABlog notes that a hearing on the appeal of the denial of the registration of this design is coming up. Further from Likelihood of Confusion and the Las Vegas Trademark Attorney.

According to the application, "The mark consists of a three-dimensional human torso with cuffs around the wrists and neck collar comprising of a bow tie. The dotted lines in the drawing indicate placement of the mark. The matter shown by the dotted lines is not claimed as a part of the mark and serves only to show the position of the mark." PTO practice is not my specialty, but I'm not sure this actually makes sense: If the fact that the torso wearing the collar and bow tie is unclothed is not part of the mark, then any man in an outfit with cuffs and a bow tie is copying the Chippendale's mark. One might respond that lack of confusion will generally avoid infringement, but is that really how we want to think about it? I also note that the design codes include three referencing the underlying/underclothed man, which suggests that the torso is indeed part of the mark:
02.01.19 - Athletes (men); Golfer; Men, athletes, strongmen; Strongmen
02.01.31 - Men, stylized, including men depicted in caricature form
02.01.39 - Bathing suits, men wearing; Nude men, men wearing underclothes, bathing suits or brief attire; Underwear, men wearing

There's probably something here worth analyzing in terms of trademark and gender, but I'm not prepared to do it right now.

Repost: thoughts on taking my exams

I wrote a post here that still accurately describes my general attitudes towards exams. Previous copyright and trademark exams are also available at my website.

Dan Solove and Eric Goldman on 230 issues

Via Doug Lichtman: IP Colloquium is his podcast site, where you can find, currently, his opening interview with the EFF's Fred von Lohmann, a discussion of Bilski, and most recently a pair of discussions with Dan Solove and Eric Goldman focusing on 230's protections and its limitations from a policy perspective. If you regularly read this blog, then the discussions are probably not targeted at you (though you can get free CLE credit in California and New York, and apparently other jurisdictions are coming soon), but if you know generalists who want to learn more about IP issues, this could be a painless way for them to do so. The podcast will be a regular thing, and you can subscribe in iTunes.

Semi-falsity: California law rejects Lanham Act implicit/explicit divide

Silicon Image, Inc. v. Analogix Semiconductor, Inc., 2008 WL 4974325 (N.D. Cal.)

Silicon sued Analogix for copyright infringement, trade secret misappropriation, and unfair competition/false advertising. The false advertising was that Analogix allegedly promoted its microchip as “drop-in replaceable” with Silicon Image’s chip, misleading customers to think that they could use Silicon Image’s configuration software with Analogix chips even though Silicon Image’s software license agreement prohibits such use.

Silicon Image conceded that Analogix’s source code was not substantially similar to its own. The copyright infringement claim was thus based on a single email between Analogix employees containing Silicon Image source code. Analogix argued that this could not support an award of injunctive relief or damages. (Statutory damages were unavailable for want of timely registration.) The court held that, under the circumstances—where Silicon Image had alleged that Analogix went to great lengths to misappropriate confidential Silicon Image information—a past infringement could support an injunction against future infringements of different copyrights. (It remains to be seen whether there was actually an infringement under US law—the email was sent between two employees in China, though the email was stored on a server in the US; under the “volition” test for direct infringement, server storage may be insufficient. Without any actionable infringement at all, presumably there's no basis for injunctive relief even if the court determines that Analogix is a bad actor.)

Analogix argued that there was no extrinsic evidence that consumers had been deceived by its allegedly false advertising. Silicon Image had evidence that Analogix chips weren’t software-compatible even though they were pin-compatible and register-compatible, and that this divergence prevented them from being truly “drop-in replaceable.” Silicon Image’s claim was brought under California state law, which doesn’t make the explicit/implicit distinction found in Lanham Act jurisprudence. Thus, all Silicon Image needed to establish was that the ad claims were likely to deceive a reasonable consumer, and it need not provide survey or other evidence of actual deception. The meaning of “drop-in replaceable” to a reasonable target consumer was a trial issue.

Pom and the art of motorcycle trademarks?

Spotted on the streets of DC, this Pom Wonderful ad. The Hells Angels are fearless, willing to litigate even against Disney; wonder what they think of this?

To speak is to remix

Kevin Kelly’s feature in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Becoming Screen Literate, is a fascinating read. Kelly argues that the average person’s ability to engage in visual remix is finally catching up with her ability to engage in verbal remix. One of the most striking things about the article, though, is that it doesn’t mention copyright at all. For Kelly, remix practices proceed unhindered by technological barriers (backed up by the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions) or legal threats (such as the hundreds/thousands of DMCA notices received by YouTube users every day). It’s true—in practice, there’s a lot of remix, and that’s great. But the law is vastly out of tune with practice, and that’s a serious problem, both in terms of legitimacy and for the unlucky few who get singled out for threats by copyright owners.

Anyway, here are a couple of passages I found most noteworthy (and notice how I don’t fear a DMCA notice for my quotes; if Kelly’s article were a movie, how different matters would be):

An emerging set of cheap tools is now making it easy to create digital video. There were more than 10 billion views of video on YouTube in September. The most popular videos were watched as many times as any blockbuster movie. Many are mashups of existing video material. Most vernacular video makers start with the tools of Movie Maker or iMovie, or with Web-based video editing software like Jumpcut. They take soundtracks found online, or recorded in their bedrooms, cut and reorder scenes, enter text and then layer in a new story or novel point of view. Remixing commercials is rampant. A typical creation might artfully combine the audio of a Budweiser “Wassup” commercial with visuals from “The Simpsons” (or the Teletubbies or “Lord of the Rings”). Recutting movie trailers allows unknown auteurs to turn a comedy into a horror flick, or vice versa.

Rewriting video can even become a kind of collective sport. Hundreds of thousands of passionate anime fans around the world (meeting online, of course) remix Japanese animated cartoons. They clip the cartoons into tiny pieces, some only a few frames long, then rearrange them with video editing software and give them new soundtracks and music, often with English dialogue. This probably involves far more work than was required to edit the original cartoon but far less work than editing a clip a decade ago. The new videos, called Anime Music Videos, tell completely new stories.

AMVs are singled out in Kelly’s account, but the related (yet also very different) practices of largely live-action “vidders,” who are mostly female, are nowhere to be found, despite the nearly four decades of history of vidding. Francesca Coppa has written and spoken about the importance of claiming a place for vidding in both histories of remix and current understandings of remix culture.

As Kelly points out, what is so hotly contested by audiovisual copyright owners is standard practice with written works:

In fact, the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases.

….With powerful search and specification tools, high-resolution clips of any bridge in the world can be circulated into the common visual dictionary for reuse. Out of these ready-made “words,” a film can be assembled, mashed up from readily available parts. The rich databases of component images form a new grammar for moving images.

After all, this is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images.

And here’s where copyright-blindness really hurts the article. The search and specification tools, which Kelly notes are already under development, could be used to free up creativity. But they’re being funded in significant part for the purpose of scanning the web for footage taken from existing mass media works—in other words, this powerful form of search will be used to subtract creativity rather than enhance it. Only a powerful account of fair use, one that is accepted by large content owners, will enable the new language of audiovisual creativity to survive and thrive, the way verbal creativity has.

Brand Obama

The New York Times campaign blog has an interview with the designer of the Obama logo. I was interested in the designer's initial discomfort with alterations of the logo--it seemed very old-school brand ideology; he wanted total consistency and control. But alteration worked very well for the campaign (this link shows lots of intriguing logo variants adopted for subsegments of Obama's supporters), and it also allowed people to take ownership of and express their support for the campaign. My husband made me a Yes We Carve pumpkin for Halloween (see also Republicans for Obama logo). Then there were, among others, Craft for Change, Obama pies, cookies, and the handmade paper plate logos I saw at my local volunteer station. These all strengthened the Obama campaign, regardless of what traditional trademark ideology would say.

The lesson: the trademark owner should probably think of itself as a brand manager, not an owner.

IP/Gender: Call for Papers on Female Fan Cultures and IP

CALL FOR PAPERS

American University Washington College of Law

IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections

6^th Annual Symposium

April 24, 2009

Special Theme: Female Fan Cultures and Intellectual Property

Sponsored by
American University Washington College of Law’s

Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property

Women and the Law Program

Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In collaboration with

American University’s Center for Social Media

The Organization for Transformative Works

Rebecca Tushnet, Georgetown University

Francesca Coppa, Muhlenberg College

Deadline for submission of abstracts: December 19, 2008

The 6th Annual Symposium on “IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections” seeks papers on female subcultures and their relationship to intellectual property and copyright regimes, with a particular emphasis on fan works and culture. Appropriate topics include: fan arts, including fan fiction, arts, music, filk, crafts, and vids; and fan communities: including clubs, forums, lists, websites, wikis, discussion groups, rec sites, and other creative, celebratory, or analytical communities.

Introduction & Context

Historically, the study of subcultures has been biased toward male groups and activities: first, because male activities (e.g. punk rock, motorcycling, football hooliganism) tend to be public, and therefore visible; second, because many male groups have been seen as overtly resistant to mainstream norms. In contrast, many female subcultural activities took place in private, in the domestic realm or in other less visible spaces, and those that were visible tended, in the words of Sarah Thornton, to be "relegated to the realm of a passive and feminized 'mainstream' (a colloquial term against which scholars have all too often defined their subcultures)"; in other words, the things women did and do have often been framed as mainstream, passive, commodified, and derivative; consuming (in the negative sense of passive product consumption), rather than consuming in the sense of a passionate obsession or devotion to art or criticism.

This has changed significantly in the last twenty years, not only due to a rising feminist interest in subculture studies but also with the rise of fan and audience studies. In their pioneering "Girls and Subcultures" (1975), Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber presciently suggested that scholars turn their attention "toward more immediately recognizable teenage and pre-teenage female spheres like those forming around teenybop stars and the pop-music industry." Even they had trouble seeing what girls do as interesting and importing, noting that "[b]oys tended to have a more participative and a more technically-informed relationship with pop, where girls in contrast became fans and readers of pop-influenced love comics." McRobbie and Garber don't associate being "fans" with participation, and they see girls as "readers" only. In fact, as we know from fifteen years of fan and audience studies, fandom is a highly participatory culture, and female fans also write, edit, draw, paint, "manip," design, code, and otherwise make things.

However, even within this brave new world of mashup, remix, and fan cultures, what boys do (fan films, machinima, music mash-ups, DJing) is often seen by outsiders and critics as better--more interesting, more original, more clearly transformative-- than what girls do (fan fiction, fan art, vidding, coding fan sites, social networking). This normative judgment risks legal consequences.

We are seeking projects that investigate the ways in which issues of originality and ownership as related to copyright and other issues of intellectual property intersect with this gendered understanding of cultural productions and engagement, especially since these historically female subcultural activities and practices have increasingly become culture.

IP/Gender Mapping the Connections Organizational Details

· DEADLINE for submission of abstracts is DECEMBER 19 at 5:00pm.

· To submit an abstract for consideration, fill in the web-based form at https://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/ipgender/proposals.cfm . Participants will be notified if their paper has been accepted for presentation by January 15.

· The symposium will begin at 6:00 Thursday, April 23, 2009 at the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. The symposium will convene from 9:00 am until 4:00 pm on Friday, April 24, 2009.

· To view papers and programs from prior IP/Gender: Mapping the Connections symposia, please visit http://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/go/events/ip/gender/ip/gender-mapping-the-connection

· Papers may be published in the American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law.

· If you are interested in attending the event, but not presenting work, please contact Angie McCarthy, Women and the Law Program Coordinator at angiem@wcl.american.edu for details.