Librarian of Congress Eases DMCA Restrictions
The Librarian of Congress has the power to create certain excemptions from the DMCA. Some exemptions were released today, and they are doozies.
Among the things that are no longer violations of the DMCA:
- Circumventing CSS for fair-use, critical, and educational purposes
- Jailbreaking phones to obtain software interoperability for legally obtained software
- Unlocking your phone to work on another network
- Breaking game security for educational or security research purposes
- Getting around obsolete computer dongles
- Reading aloud eBooks for visually impaired people, even if the eBook says that feature is disabled
Now, none of this means that Apple has to make it easier to jailbreak or unlock the phone, it just means that actually jailbreaking or unlocking it is no longer punishable criminally or through a civil lawsuit.
RIAA Appeals Tenenbaum Ruling
The RIAA has officially filed a notice of appeal, challenging Judge Gertner’s ruling that the $675,000 award in the case was unconstitutional. We discussed the opinion in Podcast 58. Briefs won’t be filed for several months, but we will cover the case as it moves through the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
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Posted in: Links on July 22, 2010
Plaintiff Drops Scribd Suit
We mentioned before that a children’s book author was suing Scribd for copyright infringement. The suit was novel in that it claimed that Scribd’s filtering mechanism to keep copyrighted works off the site violated copyright law itself. The filtering software would store a copy of each file that was taken down subject to a DMCA notice so that the filter could then block anyone who tried to re-upload the same document.
The plaintiff has dropped the suit. While the use was probably a fair use under the Copyright Act, it’s good that the plaintiff’s dropped it. I’d rather have no law in this area than risk a court getting it wrong. We went into a little more detail about the fair use defense in this post.
US Copyright Group Enters Phase Two
The US Copyright Group has moved into the individual lawsuit stage of their Hurt Locker campaign. It looks like they are about to file suits against people who declined to settle after being notified that they were targets of the campaign.
This is following the same progression that the RIAA lawsuits followed. First, large John Doe suits, to identify individual infringers, then settlement demands, and finally individual suits. We’ll keep tabs on this as the lawsuits are filed and as the suits progress.
Class Action Against Apple and AT&T Gets Certified
One of the many suits filed against Apple and AT&T recently has gotten the go-ahead from a California judge to proceed as a class action.
The suit alleges that Apple and AT&T conspired to lock people in to their AT&T contracts for more than two years because, two years after the iPhone was released, AT&T is still the only provider of service in the US. This suit was combined with another that alleges that Apple’s gatekeeper function with regard to the App Store is illegal.
I don’t expect these suits to get very far, but if Apple or AT&T want to settle, the class action certification just made the settlement a lot more expensive.
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Posted in: Links on July 12, 2010
Judge Reduces Award in Tenenbaum Case
Judge Gertner of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts has released an opinion in which she found that the jury’s verdict of $675,000 to the RIAA violated Due Process, and reduced the award to $67,500, or $2,250 per song.
It’s a 64-page opinion. So, more to come.
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Posted in: Links on July 9, 2010
Men At Work Slapped with 5% Royalty on “Down Under”
The case in one of our most popular posts has finally come to some resolution. The band will have to pay 5% of their royalties from the song “Down Under” to the copyright holder on the famous song “Kookaburra,” going back to 2002. The Men at Work song borrows a few bars from the folk classic, which was enough for the Australian court to slap the 80s one hit wonders.
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Posted in: Links on July 7, 2010
Capitol v. Thomas-Rasset Update
In the never ending saga of the RIAA v. Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the parties have finally agreed on something: that they won’t agree on something.
The judge in the case ordered the parties to undergo mediation to settle the suit. The problem is that the RIAA is no longer willing to settle for a reasonable sum, but neither is Jammie Thomas-Rasset. The parties told the judge that settlement negotiations were just a waste of time and money, and that they should just set the case for a new trial, this time only addressing how much money Jammie Thomas-Rasset owes the RIAA.
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Posted in: Links on July 7, 2010
Bilski: Business Method Patent Invalid
Today the Supreme Court handed down its long awaited opinion in Bilski v. Kappos.
The opinion, authored by Justce Kennedy, affirms the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the patent on hedging investments was invalid.
We discussed this way back in November on podcast episode 25. We’ll be doing more detailed analysis over the next few days.
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Posted in: Links on June 28, 2010
Google wins case against Viacom
Google has won the $1 billion lawsuit brought by Viacom against Google it’s YouTube site. There will be more coverage over the next day.
You can find Google’s official announcement on their YouTube blog, where you will also find the 30-page opinion.
