International Law

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...

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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...

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