Disclosures

I'm providing these disclosures to let you know what I think is important about how I intend to run the Automating Invention blog. (Some of these disclosures are copied from or influenced by David Weinberger's and Ed Felten's disclosures.)

I am solely responsible for deciding what I write about in this blog. All opinions I express in this blog are my own. No one pays me to write this blog or to say particular things in it.

By day I am a practicing intellectual property lawyer. Most of what I do is to help my clients in the computer industry obtain intellectual property protection for the technology they develop. I leave to your judgment whether this biases any of the views I express here. I am also a part-time law professor. My academic work focuses primarily on intellectual property protection for software. You can read my published academic work and decide for yourself what my biases are.

As a lawyer, I have to say that this site is provided for informational purposes only. Although I try to provide information that is accurate, I do not represent, warrant, or guarantee that any of the information provided on this site is accurate. Nothing on this site constitutes legal advice. Although I may express opinions on this site, nothing I say here represents an opinion about the application of the law to a particular set of facts. If you have a legal problem, you should retain a lawyer who is licensed to practice in the appropriate jurisdiction. Nothing on this site creates an attorney-client relationship between you and Robert Plotkin or Robert Plotkin, P.C.

I own the copyright to everything I write on this site. I may also own the copyright to content on this site that I didn't write, depending on the law and circumstances. (Yes, copyright ownership is not always easy to determine.) I reserve some rights in my copyrighted material under a Creative Commons license that you should read if you are interested in copying or otherwise using any of my copyrighted material on this site. I encourage you to provide comments about anything I've written on this site by posting your comments directly to the blog. You understand that anything you post to the blog will become available for anyone to read worldwide and therefore is not confidential. If you instead choose to comment about something I've written by sending me a private communication (e.g., an email), I will assume that I have your permission to quote from that communication on this site, unless you tell me otherwise.

Comments provided by you and other readers will appear in the "Comments" section below the corresponding post from me. These comments do not necessarily reflect my opinion. I reserve the right to remove comments that are clearly off-topic or highly offensive.

I respect the privacy of this site's users and will not resell or otherwise provide to third parties any email addresses or other personal information I obtain through this site, unless required by law.

If you don't like any of these disclosures, please let me know.