©opyBites: Copyright Law Blog

Kazaa Installs Filters

• Washington Post:

  "The owners of file-sharing network Kazaa were working Monday to install filters aimed at preventing users of the software from swapping copyrighted material.

  Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox ordered Kazaa's owners to install the new filters last week as part of landmark music piracy litigation between Kazaa's owners, Sharman Networks, and the Australian record industry."

"Ankle," "Horse Opera," "Thrush," etc.

• Variety Magazine: Variety has posted an online reference dictionary defining common slang used in the Hollywood entertainment industry:

  "Almost from its launch in 1905, Variety has used its own, distinctive slanguage in headlines and stories, words like ankle, which refers to someone leaving (say, walking away from) a job, or whammo, which refers to something terrific, especially box office performance. In part it was a device to fit long words into small headlines, but it was also to create a clubby feel among the paper's entertainment industry readers. People in the business understood thrush; those outside the business, well, they weren't Variety's target readers anyway."

  "Now that Variety is being made available to the whole World Wide Web, [Variety] offers the following glossary of terms, most of which you're likely to see while scanning [our] site."

BitTorrent Agrees to Prevent Piracy

• Beta News:

  "BitTorrent and the MPAA struck a deal on Tuesday that may prevent future legal action against the file sharing network, and will make it tougher for users to find feature films through the service."

The Consequence of Fair Dealing

• Information World Review: Under European copyright law, Google admits that the equivalent to fair use, which is called "fair dealing," would not allow Google to digitise in-copyright material from European libraries.

Today’s New Challenges to the Publishing Industry

• INDICARE: Bill Rosenblatt, President of GiantSteps, has written an article, "Rights management and the revolution in e-publishing," that explores how Google Book Search and DRM are currently affecting the publishing industry:

  "Google Book Search and the handful of developments in its aftermath are ushering in the next wave of digital publishing. Discoverability and rendering of copyrighted works on the Internet add up to the most disruptive force to publishers' lines of business at least since the emergence of desktop publishing in the 1980s. Digital rights management plays a crucial role in this e-publishing revolution. In this article, we outline the big changes in online publishing today, and we discuss the role that DRM plays in new online content distribution, discovery, and retail initiatives, and how it should play a role in the future."

Survey Examines DMCA Takedown Notices

• Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog:

  "Jennifer Urban, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Intellectual Property Clinic at the University of Southern California Law School and Laura Quilter, Fellow of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) released a summary report (pdf) yesterday summarizing their findings after studying nearly 900 DMCA takedown notices collected by the Chilling Effects project."

Library of Congress to Create World Digital Library

• Washington Post:

  "The Library of Congress is launching a campaign today to create the World Digital Library, an online collection of rare books, manuscripts, maps, posters, stamps and other materials from its holdings and those of other national libraries that would be freely accessible for viewing by anyone, anywhere with Internet access."

Sony Sued Over DRM

• Washington Post: The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Texas Attorney General have both filed separate suits against Sony over its use of DRM in certain CD products.

Google Hypos

• University of Chicago Faculty Blog: Randy Picker poses two interesting hypothetical questions relevant to the Google Book Search project (formerly Google Print) that are designed to question the protections of derivative works and the boundaries of fair use.

  The first hypothetical Picker proposes is the “Google Index,” which is where humans read books, create indexes (just like those normally located in the back of a text), and then enter these indexes into a Google searchable database. The result of searching Google Index does not provide snippets of text, but “would return just the basic info on the book—author, title, ISBN and perhaps a link to Amazon to buy the book—and the page number relevant to the search, just like a paper index.”

  The second approach, “Google Digital Index,” is the same as Google Index except that “Google takes physical copies of the books, digitizes them, sics high-end software on the digital copies, [produces an index for the books, and then destroys the digital copies.]” As before, “a search on Google Digital Index generates only author/title/ISBN info and the page number in the physical book relevant to the search.”

  Based on these hypotheticals, Picker ends the post with three specific questions:

  “Is the index a derivative work? Does the presence of interim copies in the second version matter . . . ? Does the fair use analysis change if page numbers are returned as a search result rather than limited amounts of actual text plus page numbers as in the snippet view?”

Madonna Copied Song

• All Headline News: Madonna has lost a copyright infringement suit in Belgium over her hit single "Frozen." A Belgian court agreed with Salvatore Acquaviva's claim that the track used part of his song "Ma Vie Fout L'camp."