Fair Use. CopyR in idea. Capitol Records v Redigi. Dispute Over ‘Happy Birthday’ Copyright. It's copyright week, but also time to respond to EU Public Consultation on copyright. Today marks not just the anniversary of the first discovery by a European of one of the places this Kat has always dreamed to visit, ie the Hawaiian Islands [James Cook did so in 1778, and named them Sandwich Islands in honour of the Earl of Sandwich - this one, not this one], but also the second anniversary of the protests against two laws proposed in the US Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Building and defending a robust public domain - The public domain is our cultural commons and a public trust. Copyright policy should seek to promote, and not diminish, this crucial resource. Open access - The results of publicly funded research should be made freely available to the public online, to be fully used by anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Fair use rights - For copyright to achieve its purpose of encouraging creativity and innovation, it must preserve and promote ample breathing space for unexpected and innovative uses. Fix Copyright! Fix Copyright!
Nederland.fm embeding is communicating. Hookah pipes are not copyrightable. Liability of search engines for copyright infringement under Czech law. As internet use grows, with more and more information available, so does the rate of copyright infringement. There are the obvious – and much talked about – cases of piracy in the music or film industry. But fingers are pointed at other practices too, some concerning the automated action of search engines.
The king among them, Google, has been involved of late in skirmishes generating their share of publicity. It is interesting to see how the issues raised in these instances would be treated under Czech law. The usefulness and necessity of internet search engines is beyond dispute. They play a fundamental role in our everyday life by ensuring access to information. Intermediary service providers Google’s caching practice works as follows: an intelligent robot takes a snapshot of each page inventoried on a given day and stores them on the company servers. Google News (news.google.com) is a news aggregator service that compiles lists of news items published on thousands of news websites.
Feigning Deafness, Giving Your Dog’s Email and Other Reader Tips to Thwart Privacy Grubbers - NYTimes.com. Apple Sued for Copyright Infringement for Offering Online iBook. Robinson v. Cinar: Blatant Copying is Substantial Copying. NLA v Meltwater. Learning copyright law from TV’s The Good Wife – compulsory licenses, derivitive works and parody and fair use. The Good Wife is not usually where one turns for serious discussions of music copyright issues (nor is Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special where we found copyright issues discussed several years ago).
But I was surprised to find this Sunday that the principal plot line of The Good Wife was focused on a music rights dispute. After watching, I wondered how many people in the show’s audience had any idea of what the legal issues being discussed were really all about. In fact, copyright law, as confusing as it can sometimes be, is an unusual topic for a plot line on a TV show. It is not as universally understandable as is a criminal trial, a custody case or some civil suit for damages. In fact, as we’ve written before, the complexity of copyright law makes compliance difficult even for those involved in the industry. In dealing with the right to make reproductions, the show talked about the use of a compulsory license.
Are tweets protected by copyright (under US law)? Well, it would seem that under EU law - or rather CJEU understanding of EU law -, the answer should be in the affirmative [do you remember the discussion hosted on this blog about puns and copyright? See here and here]. In its 2009 decision in Case C-5/08 Infopaq the Court found that copyright may subsist in a text extract of 11 words and - more in general - it subsists whenever a work is its author's own intellectual creation. As fans of all things EU copyright will know, the EU standard of originality has been subsequently defined further, and found to involve 'creative freedom' [Joined Cases C-403/08 and C-429/08 FAPL, on which see here], a 'personal touch' [Case C-145/10 Painer, on which see here], and 'free and creative choices' [Case C-604/10 Football Dataco, on which see here].
However, an article appeared today on BBC News shows that this conclusion may not be so easy to reach, at least if one asks it from the perspective of US law. What happened in this case?
It's Time for a Fresh Look at Copyright Laws. International - Music, Film, TV and the Internet. Constitutional-and-historical-foundations-of-copyright-protection. Copyright on picture. Michael Mitchell v British Broadcasting Corporation [2011] EWPCC 42 (England, Patents County Court, 21 December 2011) Exhaustion of rights. French Law/ view.