Technically Legal

This week, court documents were posted online indicating that Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s third trial is set for next October. Hat tip to Ben Sheffner for reporting this on Monday on his Copyrights & Campaigns blog.

A few weeks back on our Podcast and blog (see here, here, and here), we covered the first part of this story when Judge Davis granted a remittitur reducing the damages in the case from $1.92M ($80,000 per song infringed) to $54,000 ($2,250 per song infringed). As we noted, once a remittitur has been granted, the opposing party has the option to either accept the reduction in damages or have a new trial. They opted for the new trial, which will only concern the issue of damages.

A bigger question, as we (and Sheffner), have noted is whether the ultimate amount of damages will be capped in the new trial at $54,000 (based on the remittitur) or whether the plaintiffs will be able to cover any amount within the spectrum of statutory damages under the copyright act.

Comment on this post Posted in: Commentary, Links on March 3, 2010

Yesterday I mentioned on our twitter feed that the Supreme Court released an opinion relating to copyright law. Evan Brown, of Internet Cases and a regular TWiL panelist, wrote up a post that goes over the facts and ruling of the case. This case is a little dry, but if you’re interested, please hop over to his blog and check it out.

Comment on this post Posted in: Links on March 3, 2010

This is still breaking, so we’ll have more coverage as the details of the litigation emerge.

Apple has sued HTC for infringement of Apple patents relating to the user interface and underlying hardware of the iPhone. While I don’t have my hands on a complaint yet, there’s a fair bet it involves the patent for capacitive touch screens Apple was recently awarded.

UPDATE: You can now download the relevant documents. I’ll try to get a look at them later today or this evening.

Comment on this post Posted in: Links on March 2, 2010

We’ve covered the Redbox suit before and are a little sad to report that they’ve agreed to Warner’s demands not to rent new releases for 28 days. Warner hopes that this will boost sales of DVDs. Presumably because if people didn’t want to see a movie in the theater, they will run out and buy the DVD, rather than just waiting another month before renting it. That makes sense? Right?

This announcement comes on the heels of Netflix caving to Warner’s demands in January.

Comments Off Posted in: Links on February 16, 2010

Ben and I appeared as guest panelists yesterday, February 12, 2010, on This Week in Law, which is part of the TWiT network with fellow attorneys Ernie Svenson and Denise Howell.  We had a lot of fun doing it and hit some great topics.  Be sure to check it out.  The audio podcast should be available early next week and the (unedited) video broadcast is available on twil.blip.tv (and below).

Comments Off Posted in: Links on February 13, 2010

Two quick updates:

The RIAA has rejected re remittitur in the Jammie Thomas case, meaning that there will be a third trial, this one only for damages. One wonders what this trial will look like, when the Judge has already ruled at $54,000 was the maximum that any jury could reasonably award for these damages.

Similarly, the RIAA opposed Joel Tenenbaum’s motion for remittitur, which is in no way surprising.

Comments Off Posted in: Links on February 9, 2010

Somehow this story slipped past us last week. A Federal District Court in Oregon held that a man had no reasonable expectation of privacy in files that was easily viewable over his unsecured wireless network.M

The man had an unsecured network which a neighbor was using. The man was allegedly using Limewire to download child pornography, and had Limewire and iTunes set-up to automatically share the downloaded files through iTunes’ built in sharing.

The neighbor was browsing the man’s shared files and stumbled across the child porn.

So, count this as reasons:
(1) Not to have an unsecured network
(2) Not to use Limewire, which is full of malware, and
(3) To check your sharing settings on all your apps that have a default.

Comments Off Posted in: Links on February 8, 2010

The judge in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case just reduced the damages owed from $1.92 million to $54,000. The RIAA can now choose to accept the lower damages, or schedule a new trial on the issue of damages.

We will certainly discuss this more, either in a post or podcast, but we wanted to get this up now.

1 Comment Posted in: Links on January 22, 2010

Psystar has appealed the summary judgment for Apple and permanent injunction. It will be a while before we have briefs, and the case won’t be heard, until much later in the year. We’ll follow it, as we have since the beginning.

Comments Off Posted in: Links on January 15, 2010

In a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court said that the Prop 8 trial could not be broadcast. The gist of the opinion is that there are proper ways to make new rules for the court that would allow broadcast, and those rules weren’t followed here. Much more at the link above.

Comments Off Posted in: Links on January 14, 2010