Introduction to OFF THE CLOCK

THE CLOCK… you know, that stop-watch lawyers have instead of a heart to click-count every second of the billable day, their jokes included… and who was that lawyer who billed 25 hours one day (and night), taking advantage of the fact that he spent part of it going west, flying back against the time line?  Only that’s supposedly a true story—not a joke—even though it also represents a metaphor of lawyerly aspiration to be flying eternally west, sleepless, timeless and billing continuously…

Well, not here: this blog is off the clock, the part outside the 25 hour day.  And hey (I write, kicking off my shoes) that makes it playtime, a place to meander.  I’ll keep it legal mostly, but without any promises for now to update on particular issues.  Mostly it’s a place where I plan to report curiosities, occasionally give practical advice, and in the blog tradition, grouse about the inequities and silliness I find in the legal world.

Especially, to grouse.

Most of the time, my subject matter will be software licenses, website issues, and trademarks, often with a particular focus on legal issues relevant to games.  For example, in coming weeks I anticipate posting entries about:

• * An audacious trend in online sweepstakes;


• * Ways to try to protect secrets without an NDA (nondisclosure agreement);


• * How, why and when characters in games are worth protecting;


• * The long and ongoing story of the war by owners of SCRABBLE against similar computer-simulated board-based word games;


• * How open source—besides being a terrific idea—has complicated software development;


• * The rats-nest of USA Federal Regulations and foreign laws that affect software exports (which includes software downloaded outside the USA); and


• * Things about trademarks—how you can do preliminary searches yourself, and other aspects of getting a potentially strong and protectable mark.

And to help keep it useful, I’ll provide samples and links to resources.

Guess I’ll write the article about sweepstakes first, but I’m not sure about the order or timing of the others.

Hey, I’m OFF THE CLOCK. 

- Charles

===========================================
Charles B. Kramer, Esq.
~ ATTORNEY ~ Member of the Bars of New York and Illinois
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/charleskramer
===========================================
For discussion purposes, not legal advice.
===========================================

Law, nonsense, and predatory dinosaurs

Sympathy for the typo

Pouncing on a typo may seem petty.  For one thing, everyone makes them, and they sometimes survive endless diligent re-readings.  But they can cost big time, and not only when the typo consists of a misplaced decimal point in a dollar amount.  In one famous dispute a telecommunications company risked losing millions because a single misplaced comma made the renewal term ambiguous.  The issue was resolved, but not until a decision, an appeal, and lots of expert testimony about what the placement of a comma signifies.

Looks like an auction, but smells like a lottery

A SWEEPSTAKES, A LOTTERY OR SOMETHING ELSE?

There’s a new game in town.  Instead of a sharpie lurking in the shadows inviting you to pick a card, any card is the website equivalent holding a royal flush of iPods.

In the United States, at least, gambling has long been considered not just illegal, but immoral and depraved.  The Quakers (the USA’s colonial arrivals who begot frontiersman Daniel Boone and Presidents Hoover and Nixon) forbid cards, dice, and other similar amusements.  They “thought it right, upon the same principle, to forbid the custom of laying wagers upon any occasion whatever, or of reaping advantage from any doubtful event, by a previous agreement upon a moneyed stake”  (from the Quaker View of Gambling by Thomas Clarkson (1806)).  The Quakers also discouraged the buying and selling of publicly traded stocks.

Maybe they were on to something….

Of course States have been able to run lotteries pretty much forever, and now casino gambling is available in many places.  Whether the susceptibility to gambling represents a psychological disorder or just an evolutionarily useful “risk taking” gene may be debatable, but not so the amount of money spent: billions per year on gambling, more than the total spent during the same period on movies, sporting events, concerts and amusement parks combined.

While lotteries and other types of gambling are illegal (at least unless the State or sovereign Native Americans get involved), running a sweepstakes is legal.  In general, for a game to be gambling (and illegal) it must contain all three of these elements:

Page 1 of 1 pages