/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ the politics of IP en-us wex@hovir.com 2012-01-25T11:52:36-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/25/what_the_hell_is_up_with_copyrights_in_the_uk.php I freely confess that I'm even more ignorant of how the UK regulates copyright than I am about how the US does. They're a signatory to Berne, obviously, and work-for-hire is not legal there. But beyond that I'm pretty ignorant, and I find myself utterly boggled by two stories out of the isles this week. In the first story, the BBC reports that student Richard O'Dwyer has lost his appeal and is set to be extradited to the United States for copyright infringement. The Beeb has the sense at least to put 'piracy' in quotes because even if O'Dwyer is... 75404@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2012-01-25T11:52:36-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2012/01/23/on_the_dissent_in_golan_v_holder.php On Justia Verdict today Julie Hilden posted an interesting analysis of the Breyer dissent in Golan v Holder which I think is worth noting for a couple points. First, she correctly emphasizes that the works in question are not your traditional public domain works. In traditional cases works come into the public domain because their copyrights legally expire. In this case the works in question were considered public domain erroneously, and only because the US did not abide by its treaty obligations, specifically the Berne Convention's Article 18. Under that Article, the US should have implemented copyright regulations that protected... 75395@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2012-01-23T11:34:05-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/12/08/ebook_pricing_war_gets_dojs_attention.php Remember back in August I noted a class-action suit around alleged e-book pricing collusion? Well now the feds are involved. Yesterday the L.A. Times reported that the US DOJ is investigating "potentially unfair pricing practices" by the big five book publishers. DOJ joins Europe's cops and some states' attorneys general who've all said they are investigating. Investigation is a long way from indictment, however, and I suspect we won't see indictments come out of this. If the big publishers feel the heat they'll probably enter into some kind of negotiated settlement promising to play fair. And the prices of e-books... 75319@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-12-08T14:27:27-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/10/20/david_post_on_dmca_and_the_arab_spring.php David Post has been heavily involved in Viacom v. YouTube for many months. Recently he posted to Volokh Conspiracy an item he wrote as an op-ed that never got published, as arguments in the case began yesterday In this piece he draws a line between the DMCA and the Arab Spring, as we in the west have come to call the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere that have toppled dictators and probably changed the face of politics in the region for generations to come. The argument is pretty simple: without the Safe Harbor provisions of the Act, open... 75233@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-10-20T09:30:25-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/10/17/how_to_get_out_of_bittorrent_lawsuits.php According to TorrentFreak, just be a politician, work for the army, or maybe the police. What seems to have happened is that the ham-fisted attempts by the adult film industry to mass-sue their customers for downloading porn torrents has revealed some interesting things about who does and who does not get sued. The process is a familiar one - the entity owning the rights to the material sues a bunch of IP addresses that have been spotted downloading it. Various legal machinations are then engaged to associate IP addresses with names, and the names thus associated become the new targets.... 75227@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-10-17T11:56:46-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/09/09/silly_people_books_are_for_reading.php Book publishers have convinced the US Second Court of Appeals to issue a ruling that is grotesquely hostile to first sale doctrine and seriously makes one question what the hell they think they're going to accomplish. The case at hand is John Wiley & Sons Inc. v. Supap Kirtsaeng. If you understand all this stuff feel free to pause here and read that. For those who don't, let's start with the basics: "First Sale Doctrine" is an exemption first recognized about 100 years ago in the US to the limited monopolies of copyright law. The doctrine says that if you... 75169@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-09-09T13:39:51-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/09/05/its_not_just_the_cartel_excessive_awards.php Law.com has an interesting item from The (California Legal) Recorder describing Judge Phyllis Hamilton's decision to slice USD 1 billion off of damages for copyright infringement. The damages were laid against SAP in its loss to Oracle over illegal downloading. In pre-trial documents SAP admitted that a company called TomorrowNow - an SAP subsidiary - had downloaded or made "hundreds of thousands of infringing copies of Oracle's software and support materials." Given that admission, the purpose of the suit and trial was solely to determine the extent of damages and what SAP would therefore owe Oracle. According to Ginny LaRoe's... 75162@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-09-05T15:06:49-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/08/22/what_makes_fair_use_easier.php Nate Anderson's piece for Ars on Brownmark Films v Comedy Partners et al is too funny for me to do justice to. You should go read the original. The gist, for you folk who want to know what you're getting into first, is that a decision last month in Wisconsin in the suit over South Park's parody of the viral YouTube video for "What What (In the Butt)" may help people who want to cite fair use defenses in copyright cases. In particular, the judge agreed to a motion to dismiss on fair use grounds very early in the case,... 75146@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-08-22T10:26:53-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/08/12/theres_an_ebook_war_going_on.php Almost since the moment Amazon announced its Kindle ebook reader, a price war has been raging. It's been bloody complicated and has something to do with the limited number of book publishers, more to do with how they manage their ebook versus physical book businesses, and a lot to do with how new technologies get rolled out and what market lock-in effects mean. The fight has largely gone on behind the scenes - the most obvious consumer-visible part of it has been the fluctuating prices for ebooks. Now it threatens to burst into full public view, with a class-action lawsuit... 75132@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-08-12T05:41:20-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/06/14/misuse_of_dictionaries_in_patent_and_other_decisions.php Apparently it's WTF month here at Copyfight. Another one that has me scratching my head: a story in the NY Times describing the increasing frequency with which dictionaries are being cited as reference materials in judicial decisions. The article author, Adam Liptak, reports that the dictionary authors themselves are puzzled that the Justices seem to need to be sure what words like "prevent", "delay", and even "of" are supposed to mean. “I think that it’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom,” said Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary.... 75044@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-06-14T10:54:26-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/06/09/copyright_yo_face.php David Post had an interesting blog post last month asking the question of whether a tattoo is a copyright-protected item. The case in question involves a custom-designed facial tattoo created for Mike Tyson, and duplicated for actor Ed Helms in the film Hangover 2. The artist who created the tattoo, Victor Whitmill, claims copyright and sues for infringement. Post walks through the elements necessary to establish copyright - and remember that since Berne there is no requirement that copyrights be registered in order to exist. If a tattoo can be copyrighted - and Post strongly agrees that it can be... 75037@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-06-09T11:03:45-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/06/08/vicarious_infringement_in_corporate_settings.php A Copyfight reader who saw my footnote about working at a financial firm sent me a pointer to a law.com article on Lowry's Reports Inc. v. Legg Mason Inc.. This decision, which is now a couple of years old, sets an interesting standard for forwarding of copyrighted material within an corporate environment. Email makes this trivial, but in a word: don't. The notion that sharing something like a copyrighted newsletter would be fair use wasn't accepted by the court, and interestingly the company (financial firm Legg Mason) was found guilty of contributory infringement - the same thing that P2P software... 75034@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-06-08T15:22:05-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/04/02/viacom_et_al_v_youtube_and_its_importance.php David Post (of The Volokh Conspiracy) is rapidly becoming one of my favorite sources for Copyfight stories that don't get adequate mainstream media coverage. On Friday of last week he put up a pointer to his "brief" in the Viacom/YouTube case that is to be argued before the 2nd Circuit. Post makes the point that the decision to be rendered is potentially ground-breaking for not just YouTube but for the whole "safe harbor" exemptions provided by section 512(c) of the Copyright Act. These exemptions have allowed not just YouTube, but every blog, social site, site that allows user comments, and... 74932@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-04-02T17:45:29-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/03/17/us_wants_more_penalties_on_ip_violators.php Under the ponderous title "Administration’s White Paper on Intellectual Property Enforcement Legislative Recommendations", the Obama Administration has issued its latest call for more punishment of IP criminals. The 20-page PDF is a hodgepodge of wishlist items an enforcement bureaucracy can dream up, and it has the unpleasant behavior of lumping together all forms of IP crime. On the one hand, when talking about the manufacture of counterfeit drugs and fraudulently marketing them, you're talking about a serious crime with actual bodily harm or even life-threatening implications. On the other hand, the document does nothing to distinguish this level of crime... 74911@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-03-17T13:22:22-05:00 http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2011/03/17/copyright_vs_free_speech_at_scotus.php David Post at Volokh Conspiracy writes about the US Supreme Court's decision to grant cert to Golan v. Holder, appealed up from the 10th Circuit. This case is interesting for Copyfight on several fronts, as it touches on issues of copyright, copyright extension (and retroactivity), and freedom of speech. The case, with representation from Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, challenges a series of re-protections of works that were previously in the public domain, on the basis that such re-establishment of protection violates the First Amendment free speech rights. The legal issue here is twofold: 1. What, if any, degree... 74910@/home/corante/public_html/copyfight/ Laws and Regulations 2011-03-17T11:09:15-05:00