International Law

Business survival checklist

Posted on April 21, 2009
Lightbulb is a law blog on intellectual property and its commercialisation. They might be regarded as esoteric or technical subjects. They are, and they aren't. For example, their broader context is business law and business needs generally...

Interpreting 1,000,000,000 downloads

Posted on April 20, 2009
Sometime this week Apple's App Store will reach the milestone of one billion downloads (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/apples-app-store-nears-one-billion-served/). That is a billion downloads of mini-applications, available free-of-charge or for a fee, from the App Store on Apple's iTunes, for use on an Apple iPhone or iTouch...

7 key questions for IP valuation

Posted on April 20, 2009
Perhaps you are thinking of selling, buying, investing or advising on a transaction in which valuation of intellectual property is required? This article sets out seven questions to review with specialist advisers. Valuation is a complex subject...

Internet video business models

Posted on April 20, 2009
Our law firm is now geared for more regular production of online video. The latest videos are linked below. In technology terms we've achieved the competency in collaboration with Michael Ney at Sensory Image (http://www.sensoryimage.net) and Jason Kemp at Dialog (www...

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Web 2.0 and online collaboration for Australian retailers

Posted on April 19, 2009
It's time for Australian retailers to get on their online bike. As lawyers specialising in internet and web services we see many IT trends years before they become common knowledge in the market. For example we've noted for years that Australian marketers of apparel will miss potential sales if their brands have a poor online presence...

Encyclopaedia content licensing and contracts

Posted on April 16, 2009
Microsoft's announcement in March 2009 that it will discontinue Encarta provides valuable business strategy and management lessons. Encarta was an encyclopaedia offered from 1993 on a CD-ROM disc and subsequently on the web. All will end in 2009. While money was not the motivator, the crowd that clouds at Wikipedia and elsewhere on the internet has helped starve the business out of Microsoft's Encarta (http://en...

Which franchise group has the most outlets, 36,000 restaurants?

Posted on April 15, 2009
QUESTION: What is the biggest franchise group in the world in terms of its number of sites or outlets? CLUES: (1) It is a franchise group, ie it owns more than one brand. (2) Its sites are restaurants, there's 36,000 of them in more than 110 countries...

Red ink in the U.S. newspaper business

Posted on April 07, 2009
Newspapers are in big trouble. ... The Seattle Post Intelligencer and Christian Science Monitor shut down (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29731700/) their print newspapers, but have online editions. The Rocky Mountain News shut down completely. The Boston Globe will be shut down unless the unions agree (http://www...

IP law experts recognised by WIPO

Posted on April 01, 2009
The Dilanchian website received substantial international positive feedback yesterday. One of our articles was included in the March 2009 SMEs Newsletter . That enewsletter is published by the World Intellectual Property Organisation. WIPO is a United Nations agency based in Geneva...

People Contracts - Contractor or Employee?

Posted on March 30, 2009
3915135 An introduction to legal distinctions between employees and independent contractors under law in Australia and many other common law jurisdictions.

Contracts for Business Collaborators

Posted on March 30, 2009
3914488 A discussion of 9 types of COLLABORATIONS formed with CONTRACTS - (1) Co-operative, (2) Licensing, (3) Distributorship, (4) Joint Venture, (5) Franchising, (6) Outsoursing, (7) Strategic Alliance, (8) Co-production, (9) Partnership. The video ends with a recommendation that you consider business and management needs and only then legal needs.

Sell Your Concept

Posted on March 30, 2009
3913534 Legal protection is available for pitching ideas. The protection usually involves CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION LAW and a CONTRACT. This video sets out a legally-informed three step process to define, develop and make a proposal for a concept.

Australian average earnings, CEO remuneration and CPI: 2001-2007

Posted on March 16, 2009
Over the period from 2001 to 2007, median fixed remuneration [of CEOs in Top 100 companies] increased by 96.4% in total, or 11.9% per annum compound... Over the same period, average adult weekly ordinary time earnings increased by 32.3%, while the consumer price index increased by 17...

Cue > IP Commercialisation Law Blog

Posted on March 05, 2009

Website Business Planning

Posted on March 05, 2009

Electronic litigation mandated

Posted on March 03, 2009

Business death or reinvention

Posted on March 01, 2009

Facebook's monetarization strategy

Posted on February 24, 2009
Commercial websites are often littered with advertising. Facebook is not. Facebook has long kept it's site clean and with minimal advertising. The question is why? One of its board members in an interview this month said it could have a billion dollars of revenue today from ads if it wanted to increase the flow from Facebook's advertising tap...

Copyright licensing 101 for the almost famous

Posted on February 23, 2009
Seeking fame off the back of other people's content is a risky business. If the content belongs to others you may need a licence, permission or consent, preferably in writing. The Rin on the Rox story this week illustrates the risks. They are an LA amateur vocal duo...

Are you online in real time?

Posted on February 22, 2009
LGqLeaUi31Y Rather than fall victim to negative vibes about the end of business as we know it , Marc Andreessen is moving into funding new ventures. In this video you'll hear in 2 minutes why he thinks the iPhone is a full general purpose computer and part of a new trend...

Picnic grounds for lawyers

Posted on February 17, 2009
In Australian parliaments politicians with law degrees greatly outnumber those with other professional qualifications. For example, currently the Federal Coalition has a shadow cabinet (http://www.liberal.org.au/Shadow%20Ministry/) of 21 frontbenchers...

Friday IT lawyer humour

Posted on February 12, 2009
Headlines can be funny. I was just reading one of my online news feeds. First there was a CRN article headlined: Microsoft wins 10,000th patent, lawyers everywhere rejoice. I was instantly impressed. Scanning down the news feed I saw that at Digg (http://digg...

Lawyers for Online Retailing in Australia

Posted on February 10, 2009
Defeating the ill winds of the economic downturn, Amazon had good financial results for the last quarter in 2008. If it is so good for the world's biggest online retailer, how is progress for Australian-owned online retailers? This month Patrick Stafford has a very useful piece on online retailing in Australia (http://www...

iPhone pinch pinched?

Posted on January 27, 2009
The Apple iPhone has popularised the use of a pinch gesture to increase the size of text, a photo or other data on a screen. Is the pinch intellectual property, hence an asset for which Apple can claim a monopoly right of ownership? Some bloggers think so, but given the reality of patent litigation caution is required...

Which franchise serves 58 million customers per day?

Posted on January 26, 2009
In calendar year 2008 the McDonald’s Corporation served 58 million customers per day. In 2008 it had more than 30,000 fast food outlets in more than 100 countries. Currently, there are over 745 McDonald's restaurants located in Australia. Source: McDonald's press release (http://www...

Cue > Dilanchian IP Commercialisation Law Blog

Posted on January 22, 2009
This is the January 2009 issue of Cue, the Dilanchian email newsletter. Cue is a monthly selected list of our Library (general-items/library.html) articles and Lighbulb (lightbulb-dilanchian-ip-blog-/index.php) blog posts on IP commercialisation. You can freely subscribe to Cue (component/option,com_contact/task,view/contact_id,3/) or our full RSS feed (rd-rss/index...

iPhone - 500 million downloads of 15,000 applications

Posted on January 19, 2009
There are more than 15,000 apps on the App Store, and so far iPhone users have downloaded an incredible 500 million, in every category from games to business. Apple home page advertisement, 20 January 2008. Further reading: Software ecosystems (ip/software-ecosystems-2...

Commercialisation and Advertising Contracts in Paris

Posted on January 14, 2009
The brilliant French film comedy actor, Jacques Tati (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Tati) (1907-1982), made a career out of man versus machine films (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004244/). They involved fish out of water stories with the fish (him) trying to come to terms with very modern technology...

IBM's record 4,186 US patents in 2008

Posted on January 14, 2009
IBM (NYSE: IBM (http://www.ibm.com/investors/)) today announced that it earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year. IBM's 2008 patent issuances are nearly triple Hewlett-Packard's and exceed the issuances of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google -- combined...

Outdoor advertising contract deals and statistics

Posted on January 14, 2009
We're engaged in discussions with a client for its outdoor advertising technology. Our work has been to model and structure its commercialisation roadmap, business models, intellectual property and contracts. This requires understanding the law and business of outdoor advertising...

Predictions 2009: Information and Communication Technology - Part 3

Posted on January 13, 2009
And so we come to the big concept, habits. This is Part 3, the conclusion of our look at ICT developments in 2009 and beyond. Parts 1 and 2 examined the concepts of hype, spin and buzz. They achieve a major payoff when they change consumption habits...

Software ecosystems

Posted on January 12, 2009
In a second year in a row Facebook has won the top prizes at TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/), a leading techie web blog. This post suggests some clues on why Facebook keeps getting more popular, both among users globally and the digerati...

Hulu traffic statistics, 25% of YouTube's

Posted on January 10, 2009
The blogosphere was sceptical about Hulu, but the site, still only available in the US, has been a hit. ComScore, the market research company, pegged its unique monthly visitors for October [2008] at 24 million. On average, a visitor watches 10 videos on Hulu in a month...

Predictions 2009: Information and Communication Technology [Part 2]

Posted on January 08, 2009
This is Part 2 of our look at ICT developments in 2009 and beyond. The discussion is structured by the typical marketing lifecycle implemented by ICT vendors. Part 1 discussed the use of hype and spin in ICT marketing. The terms were applied to the increasing importance of cloud computing in 2009 and beyond...

Official estimate of 2009 GDP deficit of US - $1 trillion

Posted on January 08, 2009
[The United States federal government deficit] has been officially forecast at US$1 trillion for 2009 - double the 2008 deficit and equal to about 7.5% of US gross domestic product - without Mr Obama's proposed stimulus package, but some private sector economists forecast a deficit of as much as US$1...

Predictions 2009: Information and Communication Technology [Part 1]

Posted on January 07, 2009
What appears ahead in 2009 and beyond in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector? This is part 1 of our look at ICT developments. The discussion is structured around the typical marketing lifecycle implemented by ICT vendors. This involves understanding the terms hype and spin and other terms we'll pick up in the conclusion in part 2...

12 concepts for simplicity

Posted on January 06, 2009
The search for simplicity in life and work heightens after a good holiday break and at the beginning of each new year. Free of clutter, our minds thirst for what is important. Complexity is not the enemy. It often has a reason for being. The very best cheeses (French) and wines (Australian) I had during my holiday break were complex! Popular magazine articles on simplicity get it wrong year after year...

My GDP surplus is bigger than yours

Posted on January 05, 2009
China has its well-known 8% of GDP surplus, but Singapore, 15%, Malaysia, 15% and Hong Kong, 9.5%, all have even larger surpluses in relation to GDP. Economic conditions for Australians, November 2008 (ip/economic-conditions-for-australians-november-2008-2...

Are adaptations of copyright work legal?

Posted on January 04, 2009
In each case the question of whether there is a copyright infringement requires a review of the law and the facts of the case. We did this after a few minutes of enquiry last month triggered by a Google Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts) informing us that one of our articles has been adapted...

Special Collection: IP for developing economies

Posted on December 22, 2008
The world economy is reshaping faster than ever. Asia is on the fast track from KL to Kolkata, Singapore to Shanghai and Bandung to Bangkok. Australia is in synch sharing a common heritage with businesses in parts of Asia. This is the heritage of the use English common law and English as a business language...

Predictions 2009: Intellectual Property Law

Posted on December 21, 2008
Intellectual property (IP) law protects future things and processes using copyright, trade mark, patent, design, confidential information and other IP laws. This is usually in combination with IP licences and contracts. To excel in IP law, particularly the commercialisation of IP and IP contract drafting, it helps to be a good futurist...

Cue > Dilanchian IP Law Blog

Posted on December 16, 2008
This is the December 2008 issue of Cue, the Dilanchian email newsletter. Cue is a monthly selected list of our Library (general-items/library.html) articles and Lighbulb (lightbulb-dilanchian-ip-blog-/index.php) blog posts on IP and business law. You can freely subscribe to Cue (component/option,com_contact/task,view/contact_id,3/) or our full RSS feed (rd-rss/index...

Two new publications on IP contracts and business sales

Posted on December 16, 2008
Exciting news. The 2009 edition of the book, Licensing Update, includes a substantive chapter I penned. My piece is titled Current Approaches for Drafting IP Licenses. It has two audiences in mind. First, readers into licensing and IP law in Australia...

What do Australians love to wear the most?

Posted on December 10, 2008
Australians buy a lot of swimwear, underwear and shorts. They have a passion for them. This came to mind in recent intellectual property and business development project work for a client with a swimwear brand with growing export potential. What explains this Australian passion? Moreover, what explains Australia's success in the commercialisation of this type of apparel? The answer tells us a lot about the importance of national brand perceptions and national market size.

What every business should know about IP ownership

Posted on December 02, 2008
The legal ownership of intellectual property ( IP ) may be unclear if one party uses IP created by another but has no clear legally binding contract, preferably written. Stop reading if that point is understood with respect to employment and independent contractor agreements...

Green technology lowers friction and attracts VC

Posted on November 27, 2008
Climate changes, humans respond. People jump on new opportunities. This pattern is as old as humanity. One theory on why 150,000 years ago early man moved out of Africa points to climate change in that continent. Today the concern is that climate change seems to be speeding up...

Intellectual property rights defined

Posted on November 27, 2008
Here on one page are descriptions of intellectual property rights under law in Australia. It's part of our series defining key concepts relevant to IP and innovation (see further reading list). Questions answerd include - What subject matter attracts the rights? How do you get the rights? How long do rights last?

It's better to design your IP than IP your design

Posted on November 17, 2008
Kid, don't steal the hubcaps, steal the whole car. Frank Sinatra speaks this line in the 1964 Rat Pack movie, Robin and the seven hoods (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEED6133BF930A15755C0A967958260 sec= spon= pagewanted=2). He plays Robbo, a 1920s Chicago gangster...

7 topics for proposal writing or review

Posted on November 12, 2008
Good ideas need a proposal in support. Here's a checklist of seven key topics to help improve your proposals. It is not written with any particular industry or type of product or service in mind. The further reading list contains more guidance, some of which relates to specific areas.

How to visualise your brand

Posted on November 11, 2008
A fun and helpful website tool at wordle.net (http://www.wordle.net/) can help visualise your business and its offerings. It can be used to visualise messages associated with your brand. If you don't have clarity about your brand, it makes it harder to sell to others...

Economic conditions for Australians, November 2008

Posted on November 06, 2008
Here at Lightbulb we are no friend of churnalism (http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1 storycode=40123 c=1). It misleads, rots the brain and produces stupidity. Instead of just pointing to or regurgitating writing by others (ie churnalism), our preference is to include links to good writing in our collated analysis or commentary...

Linkedin helps recruiters and employees but what helps employers?

Posted on October 30, 2008
If an employee collects customer friends in Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/home), can the employee do business with those friends after joining a new employer? Can that employee who collected the customer friends while at the former employer now use them with the new employer? This question became topical due to an English employment law court case in early 2008.

How to minimise risks under the Do Not Call Register Act

Posted on October 30, 2008
The A$147,400 fine paid by Dodo Australia Pty Ltd ( Dodo ) highlights the legal risks of telemarketing under Australian law. It also shows the teeth of the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth) ( Act ) for calls made to home landlines and personal mobile phones which are on the Do Not Call Register...

Key Australian stockmarket downturn statistics

Posted on October 30, 2008
One year ago, the benchmark S P/ASX 200 Index sailed to a record 6828.70 points. Amid the euphoria of a seemingly unassailable resources boom, even the most sober analysts thought a break above 7000 points was inevitable. Fast forward 12 months and the market is barely clinging to 4000 points...

13 tasks for starting a business

Posted on October 09, 2008
Yesterday I received an email from India asking advice for the establishing an IT consultancy business. I'll share my answer as most of it applies to all types of businesses. The email from India asked: How do I start my company, which persons do I contact, and what resources should I acquire...

The best time to invest

Posted on October 08, 2008
The best time to invest, always, is when everything looks gloomiest. That's when the bargains are to be had. - Special Collection: Business Valuation, Sale or Purchase (ip/special-collection-business-valuation-sale-or-purchase.html)

7 intellectual property principles build value

Posted on September 30, 2008
A few years ago I wrote a personal vision of what it takes for a client to benefit from innovation. At the time I was seeking to integrate several models or typologies for the commercialisation of intellectual property. I titled my statement RAPS Conversion Model ...

Television program costs per episode

Posted on May 29, 2008
The money men at PBL Media and its private equity owner, CVC Asia Pacific, are big fans of Ramsay. Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen cost Nine an estimated A$30,000 and A$15,000 an episode, compared with about A$1 million for each episode of Nine's hit local drama Underbelly and about A$300,00 an episode for its new reality show Domestic Blitz...

How to select a suitable business model, deal or contract

Posted on May 28, 2008
Is your business seeking to collaborate with others but is unsure how to go about it? Are you unsure of the options, legal jargon and financial terms of engagement? Here's the classic process to unblocking this log jam. Business relationships involve deals, deal making, business models and contracts...

Report lists top six ICT trends

Posted on May 21, 2008
A new report by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) highlights six trends in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) sector. The report suffers from a fixation on technology. Its comfort zone is bits, bytes and gizmos...

Robert Mondavi and the commercialisation of Leeuwin Estate

Posted on May 18, 2008
Naked ladies dancing on the tongue. This was my comment immediately on first tasting Art Series Chardonnay (http://www.leeuwinestate.com.au/index.php?page=84) at the cellar door of Leeuwin Estate in 2004. It is arguably Australia's greatest Chardonnay...

Speed pays in IP commercialisation

Posted on May 16, 2008
Speed pays. You already know that customers pay more if you can deliver fast with no reduction in quality. Speed wins. Speed is a critical pre-requisite to be competitive in markets. Speed in innovation pays and wins. In a commercialisation venture it is helpful to measure speed considerations affecting its intellectual property, management team, business processes, methodologies and technology.

Structured networks and the next internet wave

Posted on May 13, 2008
Sydney Olympics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Olympics) presented Nikki Webster in the Australian experience of going swiming. More than water skills will be needed beyond the Beijing Olympics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Olympics) for Australian online businesses to survive and thrive against the next internet wave...

How many servers do Facebook, Google and Microsoft use?

Posted on May 10, 2008
Facebook does not disclose the number of servers it operates. But research firm Data Center Knowledge puts the tally at about 10,000. [Facebook is rumoured to be buying 50,000 more servers with a recent debt raising of US$100 million.] ... Forrester Research's [Frank] Gillett estimates that Google, owner of the world's biggest Web search engine, is buying half a million servers each year, while Microsoft's annual consumption is as much as 200,000 servers...

Social media's deep well

Posted on May 09, 2008
When did social media or online social networking start? Was it a few years ago off the back of MySpace, Facebook and Web 2.0? No. It was thriving in San Francisco and the Bay Area before Mark Zuckerberg, twenty-something CEO and founder of Facebook, was born.

Ratatouille director on employee morale

Posted on May 07, 2008
In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget - but never shows up in a budget - is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value...

Business endurance depends mostly on you

Posted on May 07, 2008
What is the secret of enduring greatness for a company? Jim Collins has an answer. Collins is a prominent writer on business management (http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/18/news/companies/enduring_greatness.fortune/index.htm) and author of business books which are among the all time best sellers...

Six fashion hints for entrepreneurs

Posted on May 05, 2008
Fashion, industrialisation and entrepreneurship (commercialisation-knowledge-management/special-collection-entrepreneurship-to-76.html) are forever linked. Something old. The word entrepreneur was made fashionable by someone who grew rich as a cotton factory entrepreneur...

Cue > Intellectual property law advice

Posted on May 01, 2008
This is the May 2008 issue of Cue, the Dilanchian email newsletter. Cue is a monthly selected list of our Library (general-items/library.html) articles and Lighbulb (lightbulb-dilanchian-ip-blog-/index.php) blog posts on IP and business law. You can freely subscribe to Cue (component/option,com_contact/task,view/contact_id,3/) or our full RSS feed (rd-rss/index...

What's your intellectual property strategy?

Posted on April 29, 2008
QUESTION: What are the most effective strategies for commercialisation of a company's ideas, products, R D and intellectual property? ANSWER: It is the approach that best suits - and is most closely aligned with - the company's overall corporate strategy and the competitive environment in which the company operates.

Collaboration for invention

Posted on April 29, 2008
A mantra for our business environment emphasising innovation and collaboration could be: Collaborate to survive and invent. Collaboration is as old as the first invention. Bill Bryson's remarkable book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, tells us in his 29th chapter about teardrop-shaped stone hand-axes...

Economics before legal solutions

Posted on April 27, 2008
I have a favourite question in conversations with start-ups and new clients. It is a question which leads to discussions about the client's business or commercial situation. It's a question designed to shed light on the client's business model, industry economics and facts relevant to providing a better legal solution.

Ray Charles learned from his mama

Posted on April 27, 2008
We all know that owning, controlling and trading in intellectual property (IP) can create wealth. Losing ownership and control, or not trading IP, can lose wealth. Industry case studies bring these truths to life. One for the music industry (http://www...

Improve your creativity, invention, innovation

Posted on April 17, 2008
We welcome and make no charge for conversations with new clients about how we might help with their intellectual property. To get you into the groove to call, here are some thoughts on creativity, invention and innovation. We are tracking with Australia's 2020 Summit (http://www...

Consultant or contractor intellectual property

Posted on April 16, 2008
In disputes between clients and their consultants two questions often arise. They are whether money is outstanding and who owns the intellectual property in completed and delivered work. The short answer for both questions is, it depends... and a lot on what is in writing.

Recoupment record of the Film Finance Corporation

Posted on April 16, 2008
The Australian government's Film Finance Corporation (FFC) will close in 2008. In its 20 year history it part-financed a total of 1007 projects with a total production value of A$2.38 billion, ie the FFC funded part of that sum. Successive governments transferred treasury sums to support the FFC and its investments, ranging from A$200 million for the first three years, scaling down to $A55 million per year under the Howard government and rising in the last few years to A$70 million...

Intellectual property is not a thing

Posted on April 16, 2008
Speaking in workshops and seminars I've often posed a puzzle to wake up the audience. I've asked: What is the most powerful thing in the cave of a cave man when he skins a freshly killed beast using a stone tool? Most guess that the most powerful thing must be the stone tool...

Employee or independent contractor?

Posted on April 15, 2008
In the eyes of the law, employees and contractors are as different as apples and oranges. Hence numerous legal issues turn on whether a person is another's employee or, alternatively, an independent contractor. The distinction is critical for ownership and protection of copyright and other intellectual property...

Food exports and food IP for Asia

Posted on April 15, 2008
... in 2006-07, Australian food and beverage exports to the 10 Association of South East Asian Nations [ASEAN (http://www.aseansec.org/)] member countries was worth over A$3.7 billion, over five times that of (exports to) China at A$687 million. Austrade's David Twine, quoted in The Age (http://news...

Website terms of use reduce risk

Posted on April 15, 2008
Millions of people each day accept or click OK to terms of use on websites and internet facilities. The terms of use (index.php?option=com_content task=view id=41) regulate legal relationships, particularly contractual dealings between users and site owners...

Poster advertising legal claims

Posted on April 11, 2008
Poster advertising is a prominent ad trend in the release of 2007 statistics yesterday by the Commercial Economic Advisory Service of Australia. An inappropriate poster ad was also the cause of bad press for Virgin in 2007.

Teenage mobile phone use statistics

Posted on April 08, 2008
What use do 58,480 teenagers aged 12 to 18 make of their mobile phones in 31 countries? A major survey indicates a lot has changed in 18 months. The teenagers were surveyed in October and November 2007 by Habbo, part of Sulake, an online entertainment (http://www...

Telstra guilty in keywords advertising

Posted on April 08, 2008
The rise in keyword advertising has brought with it opportunity for some and piracy, theft or misleading conduct for others. Telstra yesterday admitted it fell into the later camp in 2005 in its use of keyword advertising. A court case report (http://www...

Record domain name sale prices mask a reality

Posted on April 06, 2008
While a .com.au domain name may be transferred, it cannot be sold given licensing arrangements, for example with IT Melbourne which issues them. The position is different for .com names. Year on year record prices are being achieved for .com names...

Cue > 2008 April - Business and IP law insights

Posted on April 01, 2008
This is the April 2008 issue of Cue, the Dilanchian email newsletter. Cue is a monthly selected list of our Library (general-items/library.html) articles and Lighbulb (lightbulb-dilanchian-ip-blog-/index.php) blog posts on IP and business law. You can freely subscribe to Cue (component/option,com_contact/task,view/contact_id,3/) or our full RSS feed (rd-rss/index...

What is the value of your blog?

Posted on March 27, 2008
In short, the task of valuing the largest blogs is impossible. That makes it much more interesting than writing about the P/E at General Electric. Douglas A. McIntyre, writing in the 24/7 Wall St (http://www.247wallst.com/) blog post titled The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs (http://www...

How to be smart in patent search work

Posted on March 27, 2008
I viddied right at once what to do says Alex in the 1962 book and 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange. Viddied is Alex's lingo for viewed, saw or realised. I had Alex's sensation this evening as I viddied a superb slide presentation titled Web 2...

Australia's mobile phone mania

Posted on March 27, 2008
...[I]n 2007, 9.64 million mobile devices were shipped to Australia and 3.55 million of these shipped in Q4, the highest quarter on record reports IDC’s Quarterly Mobile Phone (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prAU21155708) Tracker on 25 March 2008...

Lawyers who get social media

Posted on March 26, 2008
Every business has a brand, some have several. All businesses need customers for their brands because the dominant purpose of business is to make money. To reach those customers they need exposure. Simple really... except things constantly change. Take the business of Unilever Australia Limited (http://www...

Why is social media such a hit?

Posted on March 17, 2008
Today I want to join the dots between a few posts last week. I also want to put out a theory which may, at least partly, explain why social media sites are hits especially with teenagers. They include sites such as Facebook (ip/does-your-business-have-an-effective-digital-media-footprint-3...

Learning from Xerox's trademark makeover

Posted on March 13, 2008
PRESS RELEASE: Here at Xerox Corporation we've got a problem and we think we can fix it in 2008 with a brand makeover. Customers are being drawn to Canon, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba. Don't even mention Nokia or Apple! We have said goodbye to our almost 50 year old logo...

Bebo founders and VC backers sing Be-bop-a-lula

Posted on March 13, 2008
Michael and Xochi Birch made an estimated US$600 million (£295 million) yesterday after the sale of their 70% stake in Bebo, the social networking site, to the AOL division of Time Warner for US$850 million (A$898 million) in cash. ... News Corporation, the parent company of The Times, acquired MySpace for US$580 million in 2005, when it had slightly more than 25 million monthly users...

Contract Drafting Tips Series: Restraint of Trade Clause

Posted on March 12, 2008
A restraint of trade clause seeks to restrict the freedom of a person to trade or deal in specified ways with assets, information or third parties. It can apply during a contractual relationship and also for a period after its termination or expiry. This article is part of our series on drafting tips for contract clauses...

Commercialisation of IP and IT products for Australian children: trends and statistics

Posted on March 11, 2008
The habits of teenagers often stay with them for life. Music was one of my addictions as a teenager. It inspired me to write Music formats and law: commercialisation of 45-rpm records (content/view/196/36/). A recently released Australian Government survey contains good statistics on the habits of young people today and their use of digital media...

Does your business have an effective digital media footprint?

Posted on March 11, 2008
What does it take today to create or improve your corporate or business digital footprint? Is reaching business elites (http://www.marketingcharts.com/television/americas-business-elite-voracious-consumers-of-all-media-1842/?camp=newsletter src=mc type=textlink) part of your target? As a solicitor working with content for 25 years and with digital media since 1983 I've learned a thing or two about digital media law as well as creative and commercial considerations...

Is there an engineer in the house? Australia's IP future.

Posted on March 10, 2008
When I go to a party alone and the host finds out I'm a lawyer I often hear: Oh, so and so over there is a lawyer, let me introduce you to her. My fantasy is to reply with this: Thank you. But is there an engineer in the house? You see, the work of engineers inspires me...

IP strategy for R&D: keep records like Thomas Edison

Posted on March 09, 2008
Making money from R D and intellectual property is based on documents. I learned this in 1983 on the first day of my first job as Legal Officer for Angus Robertson Publishers, Australia's oldest book publisher. A colleague pointed to three tall and very heavy fire-proof filing cabinets in a hallway...

Celebrating 200 Lightbulb Australian law blog posts

Posted on March 08, 2008
Here's a brisk jaunt through the last 100 Lightbulb posts. Lightbulb is our firm's blog on intellectual property law, commercialisation and related business law. The focus is on Australian law and circumstances. It now contains well over 200 substantive posts...

Six good questions for building wealth with intellectual property

Posted on March 07, 2008
Venture capital looks for great intellectual property (IP). So do many providers of seed capital, including angel investors like friends and family. A single IP asset or right is rarely a silver bullet, be it a patent, a trade mark, a specific trade secret or some other IP...

My shirt lacks legal design or how to beat parallel importation and avoid carpetbagger IP advice

Posted on March 06, 2008
It's casual Friday and I'm wearing a blue pinstripe white Ralph Polo business shirt. It has a blue embroidered polo player logo. A relative bought it for me in the United States. She bought it as an out of season design from an outlet store in California, probably for a price far cheaper than anywhere in Sydney...

Australia's common law near abroad

Posted on March 04, 2008
Twelve months ago I asked a friend, a visiting barrister from London, a question. I asked: Do the courts in England sometimes quote Australian judgements? He replied: England has judges whose legal minds can be extraordinary; and there are so many of them...

Special Collection: Retailing Law

Posted on March 03, 2008
This is a special collection of our posts and articles on law for retailing. They are useful for readers with businesses, whether or not they are retailers. Retailing involves marketing, one of the most regulated business functions. It is not surprising then that there are abundant legal stories about retailing...

Law with graphics and software

Posted on March 03, 2008
In the age of the internet and other computer networks, the lack of graphics to simplify law, let alone public software tools, remains remarkable. The legal sector's fixation on text alone, leads to data smog, information obesity, and information overload...

Index for Lightbulb by date

Posted on February 24, 2008
This is an index of Lightbulb posts by date order. Use it to search the 200+ posts since August 2006. To search instead by service area go to Index for Lightbulb by service area (content/view/141/36/). To search more specific topics, go to the Special Collections (commercialisation-knowledge-management/categorised-by-special-colle...

Successful partner visas overcome the 12 month rule

Posted on February 24, 2008
Partner visa applications take up about 25% of Australia's migration intake. There are two types. Firstly, Spouse Visas (for married or de-facto heterosexual couples). Secondly, Interdependency Visas (mainly for gay or lesbian couples). To apply for a Spouse Visa for a married couple, the marriage has to be recognized under Australian law...

DVD format war ends, Sony Blu-ray wins

Posted on February 20, 2008
Toshiba on Tuesday surrendered in the high-definition format war against Sony-backed Blu-ray, saying it would no longer make or market HD DVD players and recorders. The announcement came four days after Wal-Mart Stores, the world's largest retailer, said it would stop selling HD DVD movies and players (http://www...

Domain hijacking

Posted on February 19, 2008
Safeguarding your domain name and related intellectual property should be a high priority for your business. Unscrupulous opportunists troll the internet looking for businesses, both well known and not, checking for unregistered misspellings, similar domain names, or expired registrations...

Six permanent residency rules for couples or partners

Posted on February 18, 2008
In the year ending June 2007, Australia granted permanent residency to 161,000 migration applicants. About 25% of them came in as partners of Australians. These include de-facto, gay and lesbian partners. 1. At what time can a partner visa be lodged? A partner can be either overseas or in Australia at the time of lodging a migration application with the Immigration Department...

Australia's first 11 in performance and valuation

Posted on February 12, 2008
Every day people examine news, sharemarket performance and other factors looking for signs and explanations for shifts in valuations for companies, businesses and assets. Their search leads to mountains of books, articles and electronic data feeds...

Medical conditions don't rule out visa applications

Posted on February 11, 2008
Did you know that gay and lesbian applicants can successfully obtain an interdependent (partner) migration visa even when they have a serious health condition? They can seek what is known as the health waiver. This means that as long as health costs are not excessive, they can obtain the visa...

Intellectual property defined

Posted on February 06, 2008
This post continues the Lightbulb series on terminology. Intellectual property is a legal term. Intellectual property law is a loose category, with variations country by country. It includes copyright, confidential information, trade marks (registered and unregistered), patents and registered designs...

Want a work visa for Australia?

Posted on February 05, 2008
Clients often come into my office and make a simple request: I want to apply for a work visa. The reality is that strictly speaking a substantial number of visas are not granted because of work reasons. Instead, they may have a right to work attached...

Cue > Jan 2008 > Articles on business structuring, law and IP

Posted on January 31, 2008
This is the January 2008 issue of Cue, the Dilanchian email newsletter. Cue is a monthly selected list of our Library (general-items/library.html) articles and Lighbulb (lightbulb-dilanchian-ip-blog-/index.php) blog posts on IP and business law. You can freely subscribe to Cue (component/option,com_contact/task,view/contact_id,3/) or our full RSS feed (rd-rss/index...

"New England Australia" is now a geographic indicator for wine

Posted on January 29, 2008
New England Australia was registered in January 2008, joining about 60 other Australian wine regions recognised under law by Australia's Geographical Indications Committee. The name is now protected under Australian wine law. There are at least four practical consequence for wine producers of New England.

Gay and lesbian visa applications for Australia

Posted on January 24, 2008
Did you know that gay or lesbian partners of Australian permanent residents or citizens can apply for permanent residence of Australia? The visa to apply for is called an interdependency visa. The visa is similar to the spouse visa (de-facto grounds) applicable to heterosexual couples...

Special Collection: Business Structuring

Posted on January 17, 2008
Business structuring or reorganisation today requires classical and contemporary areas of expertise. Classical legal and accounting work is needed to set arrangements for taxation, the rights and shares of owners and the ownership of various types of assets...

Facts are critical for success in war and law

Posted on January 15, 2008
Gerard Chaliand, an international guerrilla warfare expert and friend, describes war as involving a combination of strategy, tactics and instinct. These ingredients are also necessary in legal work, especially for litigation and the resolution of disputes...

Online video grows via P2P

Posted on January 14, 2008
At a presentation in Australia late last year [1997], Optus' general manager, technology and planning, Peter Ferris, revealed that peer-to-peer traffic, almost exclusively video, soaked up more than 90% of the capacity on Optus' international Internet links during the night time, off-peak, period...

Project management rules for IT proposals and contracts

Posted on January 03, 2008
Software development agreements vary a lot. Long gone are the days of software development agreements with a stable state range of clauses. This conclusion arose after recent IT contract drafting work. It inspired Practical Rap: Drafting IT Contracts With Foresight (ip-tech-e-biz/practical-rap-drafting-it-contracts-with-foresight-14...

Creative Commons licences are useful but oversold

Posted on January 02, 2008
Creative Commons is a popular movement feeding on a populist anti-copyright molopolists zeitgeist growing in recent decades, particularly among academics, hackers and the digerati. The reception given to Creative Commons has been so positive and widespread that it has obscured the fact that it is the right solution some of the time; it is not all of the solution for all people all of the time...

In 2008 I'll rejoice if...

Posted on December 21, 2007
1. People (including our managing partner) realise the iPhone, though sexy, is not a new deity to be worshipped! 2. Old world corporations and organisations finally move out of the dark ages and into the new media reality. 3. Clients stop treating lawyers like the fire brigade – only calling when their house is on fire...

In 2008 I'll groan each time...

Posted on December 20, 2007
1. A conference organiser uses 2.0 after a one word conference title. 2. Writers spring to their keyboards after every news blip from Google, Microsoft or Facebook. 3. People and governments don't realise how much the world has changed in recent years...

Cue > Intellectual property, commercialisation and business law enewsletter, Dec 2007

Posted on December 20, 2007
Cue is the Dilanchian enewsletter for clients, collaborators and colleagues. Each month subscribers receive one Cue email. Cue is a selected list of our articles and Lightbulb blog posts on IP and business law. Subscribe to Cue (component/option,com_contact/task,view/contact_id,3/) or to our full RSS feed (rd-rss/index...

Business model defined

Posted on December 20, 2007
Intellectual property does not make money on its own. It needs a suitable business model. To illustrate that truism, flash back to the 1970s and the ever-fascinating PARC riddle. The riddle is: Why was so much invented and created at PARC, yet so little gained in financial terms by the owner of PARC? The owner of PARC was Xerox...

Jurisdiction clauses, legal rules and rulers

Posted on December 19, 2007
AAP reports (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22948623-2703,00.html) that this week a Magna Carta manuscript was sold at a Sotheby's auction for A$24.8 million to an anonymous telephone bidder. Ross Perot's foundation has owned it since 1984...