Tag: Intellectual Property

This past Tuesday, I rushed home from work to download, install and test Google's new web browser Chrome, like the dutiful geek that I am. The next morning, Chrome was the talk of the town, with tech blogs far and wide falling over themselves to praise the latest open-source browser. It's fast! It has a built-in task manager! It sandboxes individual tabs and processes! Yes, yes, these things are all true and are all very exciting. However, just a scant few hours after Chrome's release and the fanfare that followed it, the honeymoon was all but over. Thanks to a carelessly crafted End User License Agreement (EULA), Google managed to turn a PR dream into a PR nightmare--and in record time to boot. It was an impressive demonstration of the speed with which a backlash can brew, even by Internet standards.

Yesterday, a federal district court in San Jose refused to dismiss a suit brought against Universal Music for improperly demanding that YouTube remove a home video from its site.

In this case, Stephanie Lenz was sent a takedown notice for posting a home video on YouTube. Lenz had made a video of her toddler stumbling through her kitchen, then hearing and bobbing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” which was playing tinnily in the background on a countertop stereo. Despite the obvious fair use of the work, Universal sent a takedown notice to YouTube anyway. YouTube took the video down and notified Lenz that she had been accused of infringing copyright. After Lenz consulted a lawyer and issued a counter-notice, the video was put up again some six weeks later. After this, Lenz sued Universal.

In my last post, I discussed the recent decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer and how it helps uphold the validity and strength of free and open source licenses.

The key innovation in these licenses is their ability to use the power held by the copyright holder—the power to restrict the flow of information—and turn that around (“intellectual jujitsu,” in a Stallman phrase) so that it enforces openness in spreading information and content.

Licenses can do that precisely because they are flexible—they can be drafted in any number of ways to require specific conditions before the follow-on user can perform any of the acts (reproducing, distributing, adapting, etc.) reserved to the copyright holder.

For the second straight year, I addressed the EDUCAUSE/Cornell Institute for Computer Policy and Law, held at Cornell’s beautiful campus. The Institute gathers 50+ higher education information technology (IT) professionals – usually campus CTOs, librarians and legal counsels, and teaches them the substantive particulars of IT policy issues and advises them how to be strong advocates.

Good news out of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit yesterday—the court ruled that a failure to meet the conditions of a free / open source license was an infringement of copyright. While defendants argued that the conditions of the license (that the author be credited and that modifications to the original be noted) were separate agreements that were at most breaches of contract, the court found that violating these conditions meant that the author’s copyrights had been infringed.

Free and open source licenses are ways for authors and other creators of copyrightable works to distribute their works openly, while still retaining some rights over the work.

I just wanted to make a quick note of a piece by Danny O’Brien (found via boingboing), which, among other things, notes that artists’ interests in copyright are frequently more nuanced than the law—for instance, in a lot of circumstances, attribution is more important than remuneration:

One behaviour I see a lot is a general tolerance towards copying, mixed with an absolute moral fury at passing-off. The fact that both activities are seen as straightforward violations of IP law both by the general public and by the legal system I think is confusing for everybody. Let me give an example. I have a friend who is a reasonably successful DJ. Her continuing success comes from the distribution of her mixes, which she lets be passed around online and off.

Yesterday, I noted that the buffer copy issue was just one of two major ideas coming out of the Cablevision decision that will have important and wide-ranging effects on the future of technology policy.

The other issue, which I’ll call the “volitional issue,” wades into slightly more obscure legal ground, but its effects on law and on technology policy are just as, if not more important.

Like I mentioned in earlier posts, there were three alleged infringements in the case.

In my post from Monday, I laid out a very brief outline of some of the conclusions reached by the Second Circuit in its Cablevision decision on remote DVRs. Today, I want to take a step back and discuss why it was so important for the development of digital media and technology.

Two theories espoused by the TV networks in the case were extraordinarily dangerous for copyright law. The first was that fleeting, transitory copies like buffer copies could make someone liable for copyright infringement.

On August 4, a federal appeals court ruled that Cablevision’s remote DVRs—which worked like off-site TiVos—didn’t infringe copyright. The decision, which overturns an earlier district court opinion, stated that there was no significant legal difference between the remote DVRs and a VCR. An all-too-brief summary of the history and findings follows.

The original case arose out of Cablevision’s creation and marketing of the “RS-DVR,” a service that, like a TiVo, let cable subscribers select different TV shows to be recorded digitally onto a hard drive. Unlike a TiVo, however, the hard drives of the RS-DVR are stored on Cablevision property. The difference between these configurations led to arguments by content companies that Cablevision was infringing the copyrights in their TV shows.

Consumer rights advocates and media companies have been fighting over digital rights management (DRM) software for many years now. In the age of the closing digital media store, the negative effects of DRM are more apparent than ever before.

Just a few days ago Yahoo! announced it would be closing its music store, taking the authentication server for its DRM offline in September. This will leave its users without access to the content they believed they bought once they: switch computers, alter their operating system, or try to copy their Yahoo! store music to an MP3 player. Luckily for Yahoo! customers the company has said it will compensate them for music they bought.