Court Declares Newspaper Excerpt on Online Forum is a Non-Infringing Fair Use [Righthaven loses again] | Electronic...

Pull quote: "The ramifications of this are no less than chilling and every single organization branded or operating under .com, .net, .org, .biz etc needs to ask themselves about their vulnerability to the whims of US federal and state lawmakers (not exactly known their cluefulness nor even-handedness, especially with regard to matters of the internet)."

Pull quote: "The disconnect between these two worlds—one in which physically distant actors can have a very substantial impact (good or bad) upon you or your property, and one in which it is difficult to bring law to bear upon those very actors—is at the heart of the problem that SOPA is trying to solve.

It’s a profoundly difficult problem.  Some of us saw it coming, twenty years ago or so.  An enormous amount of creative and innovative thinking is going to be required if we are to solve it in a sensible way.

SOPA does reflect some creative and innovative thinking; indeed, it embodies a radical new plan for the way that law enforcement will proceed on the Net.  But the new plan is deeply flawed, and would set us on precisely the wrong course for dealing with this difficult challenge."

There are oodles of meaty copyright issues in the case — including many that one would not think would still be unresolved at this late date. ReDigi is arguing that what it’s doing is protected by first sale: just as with physical CDs, resale of legally purchased copies is legal. Capitol’s counter is that no physical “copy” changes hands when a ReDigi user uploads a file and another user downloads it. This disagreement cuts to the heart of what first sale means and is for in this digital age. ReDigi is also making a quiver’s worth of arguments about fair use (when users upload files that they then stream back to themselves), public performance (too painfuly technical to get into on a general-interest blog), and the responsibility of intermediaries for infringements initiated by users.

Pull quote: "An eight-member federal jury in East Texas deliberated Thursday for just a few hours before concluding that all of Eolas’ asserted claims of ownership to technology allowing access to the interactive web were invalid. That means the three upcoming trials that were scheduled to rule on infringement and damages, for Google, Yahoo and other companies, have been canceled. The eight defendant companies who resisted the lawsuits won’t pay anything to Eolas or its partner, the University of California, for using the web."

Pull quote: "The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, testified in a courtroom Tuesday for the first time in his life. The web pioneer flew down from Boston, near where he teaches at MIT, to an eastern Texas federal court to speak to a jury of two men and six women about the early days of the web.

His trip is part of an effort by a group of internet companies and retailers trying to defeat two patents — patents that a patent-licensing company called Eolas and the University of California are saying entitle them to royalty payments from just about anyone running a website with “interactive” features, like rotating pictures or streaming video."

Pull quote: "The recent Department of Justice decision to indict Megaupload for copyright infringement and related offenses raises some very thorny questions from a criminal law perspective. A few preliminaries: I’m responsible for the musings below, but I thank Robert Weisberg of Stanford Law School for taking the time to talk through the issues and giving me pointers to some relevant cases. Also, an indictment contains unproven allegations, and the facts may well turn out to be different, or to imply different things in full context."

Toledo schools sued by publisher [with claims of copyright piracy] | The Columbus Dispatch

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by E-mailby RSSDelivered by FeedBurner It is another e-books issue of DLTJ Thursday Threads with updates on three significant efforts: HarperCollins, Google Book Search Settlement, Digital Public Library of America. And, jus

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by E-mailby RSSDelivered by FeedBurner<br />
This week's big news is hard to miss -- we have a decision by the judge evaluating the settlement agreement in the Google Book Search lawsuit. This is probably the first of many follow-u

[caption id="attachment_2743" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Wordle of the Opinion Rejecting the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement"][/caption]This afternoon, Judge Denny Chin released the opinion of the court rejecting the proposed settlemen

You may have given away your right to feel the holiday spirit via some click-through license dreamed up by an over-exuberant lawyer. Don't believe me? Anything is possible in the world of contracts; read on...

An in-law sent me a flash animation card

Spotted in the Chronicle of Higher Education Online this morning is mention of two lectures by Wendy Seltzer that will happen today on the topic of copyright and fair-use doctrine. Here are the summaries and hCalendar events (the latter being useful if yo

I've been collecting disclaimers that appear on the bottom of e-mail messages in a draft post on DLTJ for about a year now -- every time I'd get a new one with a different twist, I'd save it anticipating the day would come that there would be enough humor

This posting has two goals -- first, to introduce DLTJ readers to the notion of "Educational Patents" or "edupatents" and provide an update on events of this week. Second, to frame the sometimes contentious interaction between academic institutions and su

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by&nbsp;E-mailby&nbsp;RSSDelivered by FeedBurner This week's Thursday Threads highlights includes two legal cases that bear watching. The first is the case of SkyRiver/Innovative Interfaces versus OCLC (covered on DLTJ previo

One of the baffling elements I've found in discussions of the history of OCLC is that of its tax exempt status under Ohio law. The latest example of this comes from documents filed in the SkyRiver/Innovative-vs.-OCLC case that make disparaging remarks abo

On September 9th, OCLC filed its first substantial response with the court to the antitrust lawsuit file by SkyRiver and Innovative Interfaces. And in a motion where OCLC requests a change of venue from the Northern District of California to the Southern

* Ohio Revised Code
* » Title [1] I STATE GOVERNMENT
* » Chapter 149: DOCUMENTS, REPORTS, AND RECORDS

Ms. Scheid, of RapidShare, said that installing filters that would check work for copyright violations before it is posted would violate strict German privacy laws. "So basically, this boils down to a discussion about how society wants to balance the need for protection of copyright versus the protection of data privacy," she said. "As long as this conflict has not been resolved in Germany, there will be more trials regarding this matter."

Thursday will be a big day in the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement: the parties to the lawsuit, along with the objectors, supporters, and friends-of-the-court, will be in the courtroom of United States District Judge Denny Chin offering oral argument

Queens Borough Public Library files a lawsuit seeking over $50M in damages from SirsiDynix.

From the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: A Practical Guide to Taping Phone Calls and In-Person Conversations in the 50 States and D.C.

Ah, it is the beginning of September when thoughts turn to going back to school, the days turn a little colder (in the northern hemisphere) and the smell of lawsuit briefs is in the air. Well, okay -- the latter might not be what you expect, but this is a

"The two-hour panel, "Expanding Access to Books: Implications of the Google Books Settlement Agreement,” featured David Drummond, senior v-p of corporate development & chief legal officer at Google; Richard Sarnoff, co-chairman, Bertelsmann, authors Jim Gleick and Peter Petre, and attorney and library legal advisor Jonathan Band, author of A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement. The panel kicks off a week of events in New York as the settlement enters a critical final month before a September 4 deadline for rightsholders to opt-out or object to the deal."

On Tuesday, the University of Michigan and Google executed an amendment to the original agreement that started Google's efforts to create a collection of scanned books. The amendment was publicized in a press release by the University of Michigan and desc

By clicking on the + and - boxes to open and close “branches” of the information “tree” embedded into this page, visitors can learn whether a particular work is covered by copyright in the United States.

Today was to be the deadline for objecting to, opting out of, and/or filing briefs with the court on the Google Book Search Settlement. That was the plan, at least, when the preliminary approval statement from the court was issued last year. That deadlin

The American Library Association (through the Association's Washington Office and the Association of College and Research Libraries Division) and the Association of Research Libraries filed a brief [PDF] with the court in support of the Google Book Search

How many books are in there already?
Can I download or buy old books through Google right now?
What about new books?
How did Google get away with scanning 7 million library books?
Then why did the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sue Google in 2005?
Why did Google settle in 2007 if it has the right to do this?
Why should I care about the settlement at all?
Who manages authors and publishers’ rights if Google is going to be advertising next to book pages and selling books?
What about libraries?
What is an author’s role in all this?
How can Google get a monopoly?
Is the opposition to the settlement all about the so-called orphans?
What’s the problem with orphans?
Could Google end up with the most comprehensive online library in the world?
Why can’t Amazon or Yahoo or Microsoft go to the Book Registry and get an orphans waiver like Google is getting?
Is a lot of money at stake?
Why does the Justice Department getting involved?

New York Judge Denny Chin recently issued two rulings in the Google Book Search settlement. In the first, he ' the request by the Internet Archive to intervene as a defendant in the lawsuit (and thus, presumably, be on firmer founding to guide aspects of

This column argues that the proposed settlement of this lawsuit is a privately negotiated compulsory license primarily designed to monetize millions of orphan works. It will benefit Google and certain authors and publishers, but it is questionable whether the authors of most books in the corpus (the “dead souls” to which the title refers) would agree that the settling authors and publishers will truly represent their interests when setting terms for access to the Book Search corpus.

The Archive is one of many Internet content providers that have an interest in opposing the proposed Settlement Agreement because it effectively limits the liability for the identified uses of orphan works of one party alone, Google Inc., and provides for a Books Rights Registry, the interests of which are represented solely by identified rightsholders, to negotiate their exploitation. All other persons, including Internet content providers such as the Archive, would not be able to use orphan works broadly without being exposed to claims to infringement.

"Americans have grown accustomed to finding just about anything they want online fast, and free. But for those searching for federal court decisions, briefs and other legal papers, there is no Google.
Carl Malamud has been leading the effort to push the court records system into the 21st century.

Instead, there is Pacer, the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records system designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems. Cumbersome, arcane and not free, it is everything that Google is not.

Recently, however, a small group of dedicated open-government activists teamed up to push the court records system into the 21st century — by simply grabbing enormous chunks of the database and giving the documents away, to the great annoyance of the government."

Revision history:

* Revised for distribution (March 14, 2009)
* Initial presentation, Google and the Future of Higher Education, Georgetown University Library (February 27, 2009)

I'm reading the notes from the Atlanta OLE Project regional workshop and right up at the top are these two statements that struck me as insightful. The first gets to the heart of how physical items in a library are different from digital items with respec

* Risk Management
* Data Stored on Your Computer
* Data on the Wire
* Information Stored By Third Parties
* Foreign Intelligence and Terrorism Investigations
* Defensive Technology

Earlier this month a group of law schools released a statement promoting open access publishing of law school journals. Called the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, it was signed by representatives from Duke, University of Virginia, Ge

Case summary and tracking from the Citizen Media Law Project

The Google Book Search Settlement Agreement includes two points where library consortia come into play: discounts for institutional subscriptions and receipt of digitized books by members of a consortium. The Google Book Search Settlement calls such cons

The Associate Press reported on Monday evening that the court has given preliminary approval to the settlement negotiated between Google and book authors and publishers over the use of copyrighted materials in the Google Book Search Library project. In gi

"All tangible and intangible personal property shall be exempt from taxation if the following conditions exist in the year for which exemption is sought:

(A) The owner is a nonprofit corporation that is exempt from federal income taxes under the provisions of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954, as amended, and the owner’s primary purposes are conducting research and development in library technology and providing computerized or automated services to public, charitable, or educational libraries;"

eby's wiki page of links to texts on OCLC policy change

George Mason University issued a statement this morning regarding the lawsuit filed against it by the Thomson Scientific division of Reuters. It looks like GMU intends to fight the lawsuit. It has restored the functionality that allowed Zotero to underst

This is a brief update on the EndNote/Zotero lawsuit. The story thus far: The Thomson Scientific division of Reuters, maintainer of the EndNote software, is suing George Mason University over the upcoming release of Zotero, the Firefox plugin for managin

Via a posting by James Grimmelmann, I found a link to the text of the complaint filed by Thomson Reuters against George Mason University in Virginia's state courts. The critical bits (to an untrained eye) are included below:

Paragraph 12: George Mason

Thomson Reuters is suing George Mason University to stop distribution of the newest version of Zotero, a Firefox browser plugin for managing citation data. According to a story from Courthouse News Service, Reuters is claiming that George Mason is violati

These grapes came with an End User License Agreement. In the small print at the bottom it says:

The recipient of the produce contained in this package agrees not to propagate or reproduce any portion of the produce, including (but not limited to) seeds, stems, tissue and fruit.

"All signs pointed to a Hollywood ending with Disney and Mickey Mouse living happily ever after -- at least until a grumpy former employee looked closely at fine print long forgotten in company archives. Film credits from the 1920s revealed imprecision in copyright claims that some experts say could invalidate Disney's long-held copyright, though a Disney lawyer dismissed that idea as "frivolous.""

To catch college students trading copyrighted songs online, the RIAA uses the same software that online pirates love, an RIAA representative told The Chronicle at the organization's offices during a private demo of how it catches alleged music pirates.

I've been collecting disclaimers that appear on the bottom of e-mail messages in a draft post on DLTJ for about a year now -- every time I'd get a new one with a different twist, I'd save it anticipating the day would come that there would be enough humor

You may have given away your right to feel the holiday spirit via some click-through license dreamed up by an over-exuberant lawyer. Don't believe me? Anything is possible in the world of contracts; read on...

An in-law sent me a flash animation card

Larry Lessig

gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this
elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument." The Net's most
adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights,
and the "ASCAP cartel"

The Justia Federal District Court Filings & Dockets site
republishes public litigation records retrieved from the US Federal
District Courts.

The Justia Federal District Court Filings & Dockets site republishes public litigation records retrieved fro

Spotted in the Chronicle of Higher Education Online this morning is mention of two lectures by Wendy Seltzer that will happen today on the topic of copyright and fair-use doctrine. Here are the summaries and hCalendar events (the latter being useful if y

My posting on Friday about the clashing values of academic institutions and businesses prompted a comment from Bill Hooker about linking to his blog posting about the pricing structure at BioMed Central (BMC). His comment and the e-mail I received this mo

This posting has two goals -- first, to introduce DLTJ readers to the notion of "Educational Patents" or "edupatents" and provide an update on events of this week. Second, to frame the sometimes contentious interaction between academic institutions and s

This posting has two goals -- first, to introduce DLTJ readers to the notion of "Educational Patents" or "edupatents" and provide an update on events of this week. Second, to frame the sometimes contentious interaction between academic institutions and s

Just in case: "You could try to use debt settlement methods with a collection agency, but you might want to try debt validation first. Why? Because they may not even be legally entitled to collect the debt from you."

Whether to Disclose Paid Posts; Is Deep Linking Legal; Use of Images/Thumbnails; Protect You From Stolen Content; Domain Name Trademark; Handling Private Data About Readers; Who Owns User-Developed Content and Can You Delete It; Duty to Monitor Blog Comme

This database makes searchable the copyright renewal records received by the US Copyright Office between 1950 and 1993 for books published in the US between 1923 and 1963. Note that the database includes ONLY US Class A (book) renewals.

some of the most common licenses and see where they fall from this [decision] tree. I’ll also try to address some of the issues that people pointed out in the comments to my last posting.

what is an open source license, and how do you pick the right one? This question comes up all the time so I thought I’d write up a simple decision tree to try to explain the choices.

the opinions of these experts offers a summary of the most common misunderstandings about the GPL, from comic exaggerations to potentially legitimate differences of opinion.