Tag: Copyright
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eDonkey Seeks Record Industry Deal
Derek Slater points to last week’s Senate hearing testimony by Sam Yagan, President of MetaMachine, the distributor of the popular eDonkey peer-to-peer file sharing software. The hearing’s topic was “Protecting Copyright and Innovation in a Post-Grokster World”. Had the Supreme Court drawn a clearer legal line in its Grokster decision, we wouldn’t have needed such…
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The Pizzaright Principle
Lately, lots of bogus arguments for copyright expansion have been floating around. A handy detector for bogus arguments is the Pizzaright Principle. Pizzaright – the exclusive right to sell pizza – is a new kind of intellectual property right. Pizzaright law, if adopted, would make it illegal to make or serve a pizza without a…
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Google Print, Damages and Incentives
There’s been lots of discussion online of this week’s lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from four large libraries, indexing the books’ contents, and letting people do Google-style searches on the books’ contents. Search results show short snippets from the books,…
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Movie Studios Form DRM Lab
Hollywood argues – or at least strongly implies – that technology companies could stop copyright infringement if they wanted to, but have chosen not to do so. I have often wondered whether Hollywood really believes this, or whether the claim is just a ploy to gain political advantage. Such a ploy might be very effective…
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Aussie Judge Tweaks Kazaa Design
A judge in Australia has found Kazaa and associated parties liable for indirect copyright infringement, and has tentatively imposed a partial remedy that requires Kazaa to institute keyword-based filtering. The liability finding is based on a conclusion that Kazaa improperly “authorized” infringement. This is roughly equivalent to a finding of indirect (i.e. contributory or vicarious)…
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Measuring the DMCA Against the Darknet
Next week I’ll be participating in a group discussion of Fred von Lohmann’s new paper, “Measuring the DMCA Against the Darknet”, over at the Picker MobBlog. Other participants will include Julie Cohen, Wendy Gordon, Doug Lichtman, Jessica Litman, Bill Patry, Bill Rosenblatt, Larry Solum, Jim Speta, Rebecca Tushnet, and Tim Wu. I’m looking forward to…
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Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Plan
Despite J.K. Rowling’s decision not to offer the new Harry Potter book in e-book format, it took less than a day for fans to scan the book and assemble an unauthorized electronic version, which is reportedly circulating on the Internet. If Rowling thought that her decision against e-book release would prevent infringement, then she needs…
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Encryption and Copying
Last week I criticized Richard Posner for saying that labeling content and adding filtering to P2P apps would do much to reduce infringement on P2P net. In responding to comments, Judge Posner unfortunately makes a very similar mistake: Several pointed out correctly that tags on software files, indicating that the file is copyrighted, can probably…
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Posner and Becker, Law and Economics
Richard Posner and Gary Becker turn their bloggic attention to the Grokster decision this week. Posner returns to the argument of his Aimster opinion. Becker is more cautious. After reiterating the economic arguments for and against indirect liability, Posner concludes: There is a possible middle way that should be considered, and that is to provide…
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Patry: The Court Punts
William Patry (a distinguished copyright lawyer) offers an interesting take on Grokster. He says that the court was unable to come to agreement on how to apply the Sony Betamax precedent to Grokster, and so punted the issue.