Copyright
The internet as a commons
Since the beginning of the “information revolution” there has built up a tension between the rights of the owners of information and other intellectual property and the practical ability and desire of others to exploit that property using the developing technologies. This tension heightened considerably with the popularisation of the internet and the web as […]
Internet law (copyright in particular)
Reblogged from Legal Web Watch April 2014. April 26 was World IP Day. I didn’t notice too many people getting excited by this. But one who did was Graham Smith. Graham is a partner at Bird and Bird and the leading expert in internet law, central to which is IP law and, in particular, copyright […]
Crown Commons
With the launch of the data.gov.uk beta website – providing access to over 2,500 central government datasets – comes a new licensing model for government information which it is intended will be launched government-wide by the end of May 2010 to replace the existing “Click-Use” licence. The new licence is interoperable with the Creative Commons […]
Free Culture – the extended Remix
Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy (published in the UK by Bloomsbury Academic) is the latest in Lawrence Lessig‘s series on regulation of cyberspace. Lessig is undeniably the leading thinker on copyright in the digital age and, though many label him a radical, his arguments derive from those of earlier leading […]
Moral panics
Last night in London the SCL welcomed William Patry – inter alia long-time author of 6,000 pages of Patry on Copyright, past Copyright Counsel to the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and currently Copyright Counsel to Google inc – to deliver its the annual lecture, “Crafting an effective Copyright Law”. His central thesis […]
Pirates, criminals or would-be honest consumers?
The SCL has published 11 articles arising from its forum entitled ‘Legislating for Web 2.0 – Preparing for the Communications Act?’. I was rather taken with Andrew Adams and Ian Brown’s presentation on the futility of seeking technological solutions to enforcing copyright, entitled Keep Looking: The Answer to the Machine is Elsewhere, from which: On […]
Corruption 2.0
Corruption 2.0: The Next Problem Technology Must Solve was the title of Larry Lessig’s SCL 2008 Lecture last night. But, not to disappoint the largely IT/IP law-interested audience, in the event it was a distillation of his arguments about regulation and specifically copyright regulation in Code, The Future of Ideas and Free Culture with Corruption […]
DIG it
Further to my last post, here’s a Proposed Compromise in respect of Digital Rights vs. Copyright Enforcement based on “a little education, a little guilt, and a little fear”. The proposer, K Krasnow Waterman, is an independent consultant, advising or providing interim leadership to corporations, government, start-ups and a project building new web technologies at […]
The Future of Ideas
A little bit of a stir erupts as Lawrence Lessig persuades Random House to release his (2001) The Future of Ideas, in which he explores “the fate of the commons in a connected world”, under a Creative Commons licence. But don’t get too excited just yet. It’s currently available only as a single, dumb, 350-page […]
An optimal copyright term
Victor Keegan in How long should copyright last? covers the arguments for a shorter copyright term in the digital age. To exemplfy the absurdity of a strict application of copyrights, he points to Nate Andersen who reports that John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, totted up all the infringements he might […]
Long tails, short change
John Lanchester in the Guardian writes a lengthy article on the copyright issues surrounding books in the digital age. He concludes with an interesting proposal: let copyright endure for only a reasonably short period but guarantee the creator a percentage from further sales for a lengthier period – a lesser “royalty right”. Makes sense to […]
Viacom v. GooTube (2)
In countering Viacom’s $1 billion suit against YouTube, Google relies on the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to shield it from liability for third party copyright infringements. That’s stretching it a bit says OUT-Law.com. In Viacom’s words, “the YouTube strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the […]
Google is illegal says Brussels
Struan Robertson analyses on OUT-law.com the Court of First Instance ruling in favour of newspaper group Copiepresse that Google News and Google’s caching of web pages infringe copyright. The Belgian court … ruled that it cannot be deduced that the absence of technical protections [the robots.txt and NOARCHIVE protocols] is an unconditional authorisation. Google’s method […]
Viacom v. GooTube – who’s evil?
The battle for badness rages … From Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing: Viacom did a general search on YouTube for any term related to any of its shows [eg all those Jon Stewart clips] , and then spammed YouTube with 100,000 DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] take-down notices alleging that all of these clips infringed […]
Will Google strike a fair deal?
Welcome to the blawgosphere – and thanks – to Eoin O’Dell, a Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin, blogging at cearta.ie, mainly on contract, restitution, freedom of expression, media, IT and cyber law. He refers to the excellent recent article in the New Yorker by Jeffrey Toobin on the […]
