- “Make patent trolls pay in court” [Judge Randall Rader, Colleen Chien, and David Hricik, NYT]
- “Let’s play”: Nintendo claims “monetization rights” to fans’ videos on YouTube [Doctorow, BoingBoing]
- I only read it for the cease and desist notices: University of Kansas lawyers go after Twitter feed featuring suggestive display of university licensed apparel [Gawker]
- Alleged misdeeds of Prenda Law just got even stranger [Mike Masnick, TechDirt, earlier; Nate Anderson ArsTechnica] Piling up statutory damages, experimental suit-filing, cost infliction? Copyright mills like Prenda didn’t invent any of that [Mitch Stoltz, EFF]
- “Here’s the Chipotle Ramen Concept Lawsuit, in Full” [Eater]
- “Help the EFF save podcasting from a patent troll” [Mark Frauenfelder]
- Semi-defense of Craigslist suits against competitors [Jerry Brito]
Posts Tagged ‘copyright’
“Lawsuit Filed To Prove Happy Birthday [the song] Is In The Public Domain”
Warner/Chappell Music continues to demand and collect royalties for public performance of the ditty, although its melody was first published more than 120 years ago and the familiar celebratory words have been sung to it for more than a century. A new lawsuit seeks a judicial ruling that the song is in the public domain and asks a return of wrongfully collected royalties. [The Hollywood Reporter via Mike Masnick, TechDirt]
“Keep Calm and Carry On” copyright controversy
You’d think if anyone owned the phrase, it would be Her Majesty’s Government or, failing that, the bookselling couple in the North of England who brought the W.W. II-vintage poster back from obscurity. But one former TV producer has different ideas, and would like to own the rights. [CBS News (autoplays; I’ve removed the previously embedded video because I couldn’t disable autoplay); earlier]
“Copyright troll Righthaven finally, completely dead”
Judge Clifton of the Ninth Circuit (via ArsTechnica):
Abraham Lincoln told a story about a lawyer who tried to establish that a calf had five legs by calling its tail a leg. But the calf had only four legs, Lincoln observed, because calling a tail a leg does not make it so,” the opinion begins.
Before us is a case about a lawyer who tried to establish that a company owned a copyright by drafting a contract calling the company the copyright owner, even though the company lacked the rights associated with copyright ownership. Heeding Lincoln’s wisdom, and the requirements of the Copyright Act, we conclude that merely calling someone a copyright owner does not make it so.
Postal code lookups on websites
“Canada Post — a failing, state-owned Crown Corporation — not only claims a copyright on the database of postal codes (a collection of facts, and not the sort of thing that usually attracts copyright). They also claim a trademark on the words ‘postal code,’ and have sent legal threats to websites that use the words factually, to describe actual postal codes.” (U.S. = zipcodes) [Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing; Eruci]
Will loser-pays bring down notorious copyright troll?
Cathy Gellis, guesting at Popehat, has a long post on the latest in the Prenda Law saga. A relevant paragraph:
The default rule in American litigation is that everyone pays for their own lawyers. But some laws, the Copyright Act being one of them, have provisions so that the loser pays for both sides’ lawyers. … But just because a judge may grant an award of attorney fees doesn’t mean the money will ever be recovered; enforcing a judgment often presents its own expensive challenges, meaning a wronged defendant can still be saddled with the costs of his own defense. However the California Code of Civil Procedure has a provision, § 1030, to help mitigate that financial risk by allowing defendants in similar positions as Mr. Navasca [a man seeking fee recovery from Prenda Law over a questionable copyright action] to require plaintiffs to make an “undertaking;” that is, to post a bond that would guarantee, when the defendant inevitably wins his fees, that he would actually get the money.
Both provisions could prove important in bringing the rogue legal enterprise to heel. If only other areas of law besides copyright had loser-pays, and other states besides California emulated the “undertaking” idea. Earlier on Prenda Law here and here.
Prenda Law story hits the bigger press
While I often part company from the views of L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, in this case he shines helpful light on the doings of now-infamous copyright mill Prenda Law (earlier), much discussed by Ken at Popehat in recent weeks.
Intellectual property roundup
- Sounds promising: “Peeved politicians want ‘loser pays’ rule for patent trolls” [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica] Defense of patent trolls in Wired mag [Michael Risch]
- Scènes à Faire: the copyright exception for scenes that inevitably suggest themselves [Bruce Boyden, ConcurOp]
- If the terms of service/purchase say you don’t have a right to resell the digitized book or song, maybe you don’t [The Digital Reader on court decision against ReDigi startup]
- Pay to quote a single word from a newspaper? That’s what the popup at Canada’s National Post seems to suggest [Doctorow, BoingBoing]
- Inside copyright enforcers’ “bait-car” operations [TechCrunch]
- “Firm and two of its lawyers must pay $200K over frivolous patent case” [Sheri Qualters, National Law Journal]
- “Crazy copyright bot (now suspended by Twitter) threatens those who tweet tiny poem” [Rob Beschizza via @ChrisBellNZ]
Court: reselling foreign editions here doesn’t infringe copyright
The Supreme Court ruled that the first-sale doctrine of copyright law protects the rights of someone who buys books abroad for resale here, whether or not the publisher approves. [Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons: Joe Mullin/Ars Technica, SCOTUSBlog, Margot Kaminski/Concur Op (“this is all statutory interpretation” and subject to change by Congress; conflict with existing international trade agreements), earlier here and here] More: Chris Newman.
Time to fix copyright on sound recordings
Terry Teachout, WSJ (via About Last Night):
…In Europe, sound recordings enter the public domain 50 years after their initial release. Once that happens, anyone can reissue them, which makes it easy for Europeans to purchase classic records of the past. In America, by contrast, sound recordings are “protected” by a prohibitive snarl of federal and state legislation whose effect was summed up in a report issued in 2010 by the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress: “The effective term of copyright protection for even the oldest U.S. recordings, dating from the late 19th century, will not end until the year 2067 at the earliest.… Thus, a published U.S. sound recording created in 1890 will not enter the public domain until 177 years after its creation, constituting a term of rights protection 82 years longer than that of all other forms of audio visual works made for hire.”
Among countless other undesirable things, this means that American record companies that aren’t interested in reissuing old records can stop anyone else from doing so, and can also stop libraries from making those same records readily accessible to scholars who want to use them for noncommercial purposes. Even worse, it means that American libraries cannot legally copy records made before 1972 to digital formats for the purpose of preservation—not unless those records have already deteriorated to the point where they may soon become unplayable.
That’s crazy.