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Home :: Copyright Law

23 Mar 2011

Judge Chin shoves the Google settlement toward sanity Copyright Law
The Google book settlement has been grinding through the courts since the Authors' Guild and Association of American Publishers (AAP) sued them in a class action in 2005, and they came to a tentative settlement in 2008. Yesterday Judge Denny Chin once again rejected the proposed settlement, with a strong hint about how to fix it. Fortunately for the American public, Judge Chin is an excellent judge with a deep understanding of the issues, and his
opinion makes it clear what all the problems with the proposed settlement are.

See more ...


posted at: 23:48 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Copyright_Law/googrej.trackback


13 Sep 2010

How is clickwrap software like a stolen work of art? Copyright Law
A recent case decided by a three-judge panel in the Ninth Circuit has been widely reported as saying that shrink-wrap license agreements on software supersede the traditional first sale rule, and mean that software vendors can keep customers from reselling packaged software. Having read the decision, it's a case with a messy set of facts that don't quite mean that first sale is dead.

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posted at: 15:19 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Copyright_Law/not1st.trackback


27 Jul 2010

It's legal to jailbreak your iPhone, sort of Copyright Law
Recent
fairly breathless news coverage has said that the US government has said it's legal to jailbreak your iPhone. That's somewhat correct but the reality is, as usual, somewhat more complex.

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posted at: 22:58 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Copyright_Law/jailbreak.trackback


16 May 2010

Photographers pile on to the Google settlement bandwagon Copyright Law
Last month the American Society of Media Photographers and other professional photographers filed
a class action suit against Google that bears a startling, dare I say, near photographic resemblance to the Authors Guild vs. Google class action. The latter case came to a proposed settlement that, in the opinion of many people including me, would be a breathtakingly aggressive rewrite of global copyright law in favor of Google and the members of the Authors Guild. (I'm a member, but they've never asked me or any other member whether we want them to do so.) The settlement has been in and out of court for the past couple of years, having provoked objections from parties ranging from the US Department of Justice to the State of Connecticut to the Federal Republic of Germany to the Open Book Alliance.

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posted at: 01:29 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Copyright_Law/pileon.trackback


14 May 2010

What are e-books worth? (Part II) Copyright Law

In our last installment we learned that most of the cost of a paper book is in spent the editorial process, not the physical printing and binding, so even though e-books cost nothing to produce physically, the cost to the publisher is nearly the same, so they can't afford to sell them for much less than paper books.

Today we'll look at the reasons that, even though they have some undeniable advantages, e-books are worth a lot less to book buyers than paper books. Assuming you already have a reading device like a Kindle, an iPad, or a Sony reader, you can store hundreds of e-books in it. In some cases you can share the books, along with your bookmarks and notes between devices, e.g., a Kindle and an iTouch or Blackberry running the Kindle app. The problem is that the "book" you buy to read on your device is not really a book, it's what publishers wish books were.

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posted at: 01:19 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
Trackback link is http://www.jl.ly/Copyright_Law/ebook2.trackback


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