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Creative Commons announced the release of the Public Domain Mark today, a tool that will help easily identify those works that are free of copyright restrictions. The mark - the letter C that's associated with the symbol for copyright, but with a slash through it - is meant to make it clear that the material is free to reuse.

Works are part of the public domain when their copyright expires or when the artist designates the work as such. This means that people can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work - even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.

The notorious U.S. patent 6,411,947, a broad "method" for automatically classifying and responding to email inquiries known as the Firepond/Polaris patent, has finally been invalidated after 12 years on the books.

The patent was on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's list of top ten most bogus patents because it claimed nothing more than a system using natural language processing to select and send responses to customers' online or email inquires.

When the Supreme Court ruled last month on the Bilksi case, denying Bilski's patent claim that Bilksi's patent but not making any real statements on the overall patentability of business methods or software, several opponents of software patents, including VCs Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld expressed their disappointment.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of IP Ventures, Microsoft's program that opens up technologies developed internally at Microsoft to entrepreneurs and new businesses.

The IP Ventures team within Microsoft identifies technology not being used by the company - or that could be used in a different way - and treats this IP as a form of currency that can be invested in other businesses. While the new companies that take advantage of these technologies still need to find financial backing, the Microsoft program helps provide ample technology support and business guidance throughout the process.

When the business review site Yelp added badges and royalty titles to its check-in features earlier this month, it seemed clear that it was doing so in response to those very features made popular by the location-based network Foursquare.

Of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

And in some cases, imitation might be a good business strategy as well: take something your competitor is doing and do the same thing, but (hopefully) better.

It's hard to believe that it is May already as a third of the year is complete and summer is almost here. With graduation season upon us, perhaps the entrepreneurs of tomorrow will want to take a look at the most popular startup stories from this week in our Weekly Wrapup. This week we've got more pitch deck suggestions, dealing with PR disasters and learning from failure. Also, we discuss some new data surrounding angel-backed companies, founders as long-term CEOs and how intellectual property effects innovation.

Companies that rely on fair use generated $4.7 trillion in revenues and $2.2 billion in value added - roughly 16.2 percent of U.S. GDP in 2007. This is among the findings of a report released yesterday by the Computer and Communications Industry Assocation. The report based its findings on what it dubs "fair use industries," which includes educational institutions, software developers, Internet search and Web hosting providers, and manufacturers of consumer devices that allow for the copying of copyrighted programming.

In the last few months, we've focused from time to time on design and how it affects startups. One of the larger issues that comes up that goes hand-in-hand with design is the copywriting that accompanies that design. The importance of carefully crafted wording can not be understated; after all, the words are what actually speaks to your audience when they visit your site. Copywriting is as much an art and a skill as design is, and that's why the crowdsourced design network crowdSPRING is now including copywriting jobs for bids on their site.

Last week we brought you our curated and organic List of Legal Resources For Startups and Entrepreneurs which includes blogs, online legal tools, articles and tips from venture capitalists. Just recently, Jill Hubbard Bowman's brand new blog IP Law For Startups, an excellent new source for startups, was added to the list of blogs.

While Google continues to digitize everything from the view from the driver's seat to the contents of your appointment book, their tremendous attempt at digitizing the written word, Google Books, has run into a snag in the most ironic of places - China. While the country is infamous for copyright infringement, especially of intellectual property, it too is working to prevent the unfair use of its citizen's copyrighted works.

Bloomberg reported this morning that Google "has agreed to meet demands from a local writers' group that it stop scanning and uploading books to the company's online library without authors' permission."