Pam Chestek

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Pam is a Board Member of the Open Source Initiative and the principal of Chestek Legal in Raleigh, North Carolina. She works with creative communities, giving practical legal advice on branding, marketing, and protecting and sharing content. Pam has authored several scholarly articles, has a legal blog at Property, Intangible, and was formerly an adjunct professor at Western New England College School of Law.

Authored Content

Baseball Cards and Prior Art

Patent decisions are usually pretty dry stuff, but In Media Technologies Licensing, LLC v. The Upper Deck Co. is a patent lawsuit about sports trading cards. This is what a…

Our social lives as art

The mashup and the meme aren't new, but there is an interesting video on YouTube about "stage 2" video mixes and their creative and social implications. The narrator describes…

Photos are not where they seem

Photographer PeteZab , Peter Zabulis, publishes his photos on Flickr. Here are some of his snow scenes: © Peter Zabulis, All Rights Reserved. The UK newspaper The Independent…

Orphan Works

" CBS uncovers rare Jack Benny treasures, puts them back and tosses out the key ." We need an Orphan Works Act before we lose more of our social and cultural heritage to time…

Letting go

When I came to Red Hat, I had to make about a 180-degree shift in my approach to my work. My practice is in trademarks, copyrights and patents, fields that are traditionally…

Authored Comments

It's a really interesting area, which is why I like working in it so much. When you dig in, I think there is a lot that communities are already doing, we just have to recognize them and be prepared to advocate to a court that they are adequate. All FOSS projects exercise quality control over the software in one way or another, which is the most important element, so that's a good start. It's actually also not a problem that is unique to FOSS -- courts have dealt with in with church groups, community organizations, fan clubs, etc., so it's not entirely unknown territory.

You raise an excellent question. Trademark law doesn't really cope well with informal non-hierarchical business models, so there are potential risks no matter how the trademark ownership is managed. There should be an article in then next IFOSSLR that gives my views on how to do it.

Sorry you can't make it to Raleigh for the conference, it will be interesting!