Articles written by practicing attorneys make up part of our content each month, and our reader surveys suggest you find them useful. Marketing folks for law firms often ask me what the guidelines are for getting such an article published. If you want to pitch an idea, it's best for the author to simply send me a short email with a paragraph or two explaining the topic and how it will be addressed. Timely issues are what I'm looking for-but nothing that is going to be made moot by a judicial decision before we can get it into print.
Often I commission an article after hearing a lawyer speak at an IP event, or find myself sitting next to an expert. This winter F. Scott Kieff, a law professor at Washington University, was on a panel sponsored by the New York chapter of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. focusing on "the big picture" of copyright, including claims of copyright misuse in Shloss v. Sweeney over denial of a scholar's request to use the writings of James Joyce. My ears picked up when Kieff made a passing mention of the fact that Apple's license for iTunes might raise misuse issues. iTune's contract under state law, which strictly defines the number of copies a user can make, could be preempted by federal copyright law.
It's fine with me if a lawyer-written piece stirs some controversy. In our April issue, Wolf Greenfield attorney Edmund Walsh wrote about what he called "muscle-flexing" by the free software community-lawsuits against commercial companies for violations of the General Public License. Though he got a lot of moderate comments, some blogs written by open source partisans took heated issue with his interpretation and approach. "I knew there would be a high level of emotion" on an open source topic, Walsh now says.
In this issue, lawyers at Finnegan Henderson offer a "Smart Pill" advice article that's part of our cover package on the role of reexaminations in patent litigation. But the cover story itself was written by Joseph Rosenbloom, a freelance writer. Joe's extensive qualifications include being a lawyer. But his piece illustrates how, in writing about a big trend, a journalistic approach really pays off. It takes a lot of reporting to get the story right.
Pamela Sherrid
Editor
