Category: Copyright

In what is sure to be big news for supporters of the Creative Commons licensing regimes, a Dutch court has recently upheld the validity of the Creative Commons Public Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 2.0 licence. From what I can make of the judgment (in Dutch), the action was brought by an Adam Curry, who was understandably… Read more →

Another United States cache-copyright case. This time, Judge Surrick of the federal circuit dealt with cached copies of Usenet materials. Google’s archiving of Usenet posts does not constitute copyright infringement, even if the posts themselves contain infringing material. The case revolved around excerpts from ‘The Seduction Library’, a series of guides from Snodgrass Publishing on… Read more →

A judge of the United States District Court has just handed down a verdict rejecting claims that the operation of Google’s ‘cache’ feature infringes copyright. (A cache is a temporary copy of a webpage stored in memory to preserve its state at a given point in time. Most usefully, it allows users to see what… Read more →

The Supreme Court of the United States has declined leave to hear a case brought by authors against National Geographic. The authors claimed to be entitled to additional royalties as a result of the magazine’s republication in CD-ROM format and online. This case has significant repercussions for authors and content publishers. Publishers are increasingly distributing… Read more →

Michael Geist has posted an analysis of the outcome in Stevens v Sony, recently handed down by the High Court of Australia. Professor Geist articulates several themes underlying the Court’s treatment of the issues: The case goes to the heart of anti-circumvention provisions that create very contentious proposals in Bill C-60 here in Canada. At… Read more →

The Japanese Intellectual Property High Court has awarded Yomiuri Shimbun, a domestic newspaper, ¥237 700 (AU$2758) in damages for copyright infringement by a website which republished news headlines without its permission. The Court overturned the ruling of an inferior court in March 2004, which held that news headlines ought to be made freely available online and… Read more →

The High Court of Australia has today handed down judgment in Stevens v Sony, ruling in favour of the mod-chippers.  Sony had brought a claim under Australia’s anti-circumvention statutory tort to stop people from modifying the Sony PlayStation to play cheaper overseas versions of games. Specifically, the Court found that: ‘[The] true construction of the… Read more →

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Grokster ruling, many have been speculating about what it means exactly to "induce infringement." Well, leave it to science to be the first to push the boundaries.  Professors in Florida have apparently taught a dolphin to sing the theme from the Batman TV show on command. A violation… Read more →

Baidu is, broadly speaking, the Chinese equivalent of Google. Last week, a Chinese district court found it liable for copyright violation. The act of infringement? Automatically constructing and maintaining an index of links, some of which were to infringing files. The Court ordered Baidu to pay damages of 68 000 yuan (AUD$8 400). The company now faces… Read more →

Jonathan Band has written an interesting analysis of Google’s Print Library Project, which would see Google scanning the full text of printed works contained in the libraries of several large universities. The results would be imported into its search database using optical character recognition and brief excerpts served up with keyword and affiliate advertising. The… Read more →