Tag: Intellectual Property

Yesterday, a federal court in Arizona decided MDY v. Blizzard, finding that violators of any licensing terms of an End User License Agreement (EULA) are liable for copyright infringement.

MDY sold Glider, a software program that let players of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game automate their play in violation of the game’s EULA. Blizzard contended that, since every user of the game must copy the game (or at least portions thereof) into RAM in order to play it, these copies would be copyright infringements but for the existence of the EULA. If the EULA then says you don’t get this license unless you don’t use a bot, then using a bot is copyright infringement.

The first Senate hearing I attended struck me as a “dog and pony show” since the witnesses were presented for display purposes, merely echoing the pre-determined opinions of the presiding Senators. I’m beginning to see the animals in a less benign light.

Today, Senator Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, held a hearing on “International Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights and American Competitiveness,” with Ranking Member, Senator Grassley (R-IA), in the wings and with Senators Kyl (R-AZ) and Roberts (R-KS) making cameo appearances towards the end. As for the witnesses, the deck was stacked, as appears to be more the norm than the exception.

Even though I was in Seoul a little less than a month ago, I would be remiss if I didn’t take note of the nightly protests that were occurring there. For one thing, they were impossible to miss—the convention center where the OECD Ministerial was held had a small phalanx of orderly protesters and riot police outside it during the days—a scene mirrored in vastly greater numbers each evening downtown. But another reason for me to pay attention to the protests was an issue that touched on media and even copyright issues.

On June 18, the front page of the Korea Times covered a speech given by President Lee Myung-Bak at the OECD Ministerial. The headline?

In its “Declaration on the World Economy”, the G-8 included an endorsement of ACTA and ongoing efforts to “standardize” IP enforcement through customs organizations. “We encourage the acceleration of negotiations to establish a new international legal framework, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and seek to complete the negotiation by the end of this year,” the statement says.

So we have a major endorsement of ACTA from the leadership of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And pressure to have this international legal agreement ready to roll at the end of the year. So what’s going to be in this critically important, possibly binding international agreement, to be completed in less than six months?

We have no idea.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been in South Korea, attending the OECD’s Ministerial on the Future of the Internet Economy. Rather than try to give a blow-by-blow account, I’ve tried to package some of my thoughts in a series of posts. Here’s one:

The OECD Ministerial has ended with the signing of the Seoul Declaration, a document signed by the member nations of the OECD, as well as the European Community and observer countries Chile, Egypt, Estonia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Latvia, Senegal and Slovenia. The Declaration sets out the international organization’s general policies for ensuring the future of the Internet Economy—including policies they believe will encourage creativity, support convergence, and promote confidence online.

Video sharing sites hit mainstream a long time ago—by the time a technology is feted as part of a presidential debate, it's no longer got that same early-adopter cachet. That doesn't keep it from being useful, though.

Right now, for instance, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is asking for your input on a key meeting this month.

Ever since my policy blog and Huffington Post responses to Larry Lessig’s New York Times op-ed on orphan works last week, I have received a large number of fairly unfriendly comments and emails. I won’t quote them here for fear of being sued for copyright infringement (I wish I was kidding). Rather than respond to each one individually, I address the vast majority of the arguments raised in this speech, which I will be giving today at a conference at the University of Maryland University College. I look forward to a new barrage of comments.

I never like to disagree with my friends in public; particularly friends like Larry Lessig, who I greatly admire and who, through his 24-7 work as the first populist copyright reformer, made the existence of organizations like Public Knowledge possible.

Since §230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed in 1996, online service providers (OSPs) and website operators have rested easy under the comfort of blanket immunity. Under the CDA, OSPs couldn’t be held liable for tortious content posted by others, but the CDA’s immunity wasn’t a free pass for copyright infringement or other intellectual property based claims. The CDA specifically stated that it was not designed to preempt intellectual property claims. However, in recent weeks, the scope of the CDA’s immunity and way in which the intellectual property exception should be interpreted has been called into question. Two recent cases—Fair Housing Council of San Fernando v. Roommate.com and Jane Doe v. FriendFinder Network Inc. have interpreted the CDA in ways that might have repercussions.

It must be spring, and a delightful spring at that. Like swallows to Capistrano, numerous pigeons created by the IP mafia over the years are at last coming home to roost. Today’s NYT provides the most recent returning pigeon dropping its unintended consequence out of a clear blue sky.