Intellectual property
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 […]
Has Binary Law gone nuts?
No, it’s a new, lookalike IP blawg. [Update: No longer a lookalike as Binary Law is using a new theme.]
Gowers – IP a priesthood and a playground
From The future of intellectual property: Andrew Gowers interviewed on openDemocracy.net: The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has been broadly welcomed by copyright campaigners. Lawrence Lessig, the godfather of Creative Commons, has labelled research conducted into the economics of copyright extension “fantastic”, urging all governments to “muster the courage to follow this advice”; the Open […]
Pirates or just small-time criminals?
Peter Black, an associate lecturer in law at the Queensland University of Technology, hosts this month’s Blawg Review on his Freedom To Differ blog, which focuses on the legal regulation of the internet and the media, providing an extensive selection of great links for the IP/media lawyer in particular. One that caught my eye was […]
Where culture comes from
I can’t do better than quote verbatim from Jack Schofield in the Guardian Technology Blog: Over at Slate, Paul Collins makes the reasonable point that lots of examples of plagiarism may well come to light as more old works are digitised for Google Book Search. I should hope so! What he doesn’t point out is […]
Elvis is not going to produce any more recordings
In response to the proposed extension of UK copyright for recordings from 50 years to 95 years, Lawrence Lessig blogs on quantifying the value of the public domain pointing to this like-named paper by Rufus Pollock. He also refers indirectly to an article by Eric Flint for Jim Baen’s Universe Copyright: How Long Should It […]
Don’t break it when you fix it
Time was (last millennium) when every new government department / agency website was newsworthy whatever its utility. Then lots of content was added and content management systems were employed to structure browsing and search. That was all good stuff but with plenty of room for improvement. Many are now repainting their frontages and making those […]
RSS and the law
Kevin O’Keefe recently posted a thought-provoking piece on the Law on using others’ RSS feeds, garnered from an article at EContent: RSS: Use, Lose, or Abuse?. The strict position (in US law, but little different here), as stated by Peter Strand, partner of the US law firm Holland & Knight, is that: In general, the […]
Snakes, planes and the law
In an unashamed quest for blog popularity I give you a couple of connections between the movie “Snakes on a Plane”, released today, and the law, thanks to CNN (my emphasis added): The Internet hoopla started with a single entry on screenwriter Josh Friedman’s blog last summer. … Friedman’s wildfire spread … thanks to fan-created […]
Holiday reading?
Probably not in there with your Dan Browns, but here’s a some webby books I’ve read recently or plan to (listed oldest first). You could do worse than feed your brain with one of them this Summer. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (Paperback) by Lawrence Lessig (August 2000) A Brief History of the Future: […]
Anything but easy
Thanks to my fan Charon QC -who crafts his excellent blog without the aid of blogging software -for his kind comments about Binary Law. In the same post he picks up on Geeklawyer’s rant about Sir Stelios (Parental Advisory: includes **** – look away now) and points to the Wikipedia entry for the said Greek-Cypriot, […]
Free Culture
I’ve just ordered a nice print edition of Larry Lessig’s Free Culture – per one reviewer (and my snatches of it confirm this) – a “focused, measured argument of the issues around preserving and extending digital creativity”. Many feel it’s cool to cite his blog in their blogrolls. I don’t find that compelling reading; on […]
