copyrightlaw
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US court rules that using online photos can be considered 'fair use'
In the real world, copyright legislation seems simple enough -- don't steal something and claim it as your own work. Online, however, things are murkier. The EU Parliament recently passed a law that would stop users from uploading copyrighted content -- but in the digital age, what does 'copyright' actually cover? An Insta picture of your morning coffee? A meme? What about a cropped photograph of a D.C neighborhood? It's the last of these options that resulted in a legal tussle, and ended with a federal court ruling 'fair use'.
High Court sides with UK music industry in challenge to CD copying law
A group of organisations representing the UK music industry has today succeeded in challenging recent copyright legislation that legalised the duplication of music for personal use. You see, before October last year, it was actually illegal to copy media, even for private consumption -- and yes, we're talking about stuff you'd legitimately bought. Ever ripped a CD so you could listen to the album on your phone? Well, that was technically an offense, or at least before October 1st 2014 it was. On that date, the government addressed the outdated legislation and added a private copying exception to copyright law, making ripping CDs and the like for personal use legal. The music industry wasn't best pleased. Not because of the private copying exception itself, but because the government didn't include any "copyright levy" as part of the revised legislation.
Musicians and Congress join forces in fight for royalty reform
Fair artist compensation from internet radio and streaming services is quite the hot topic of late, and now members of Congress are joining the debate. Congressman Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, and Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, alongside the musicFIRST Coalition, introduced the Fair Play Fair Pay Act today that would end regulations that don't require terrestrial radio stations to pay royalties to artists and labels. As it stands, those AM/FM stations available in your car only pay licensing fees to songwriters and publishers. Organizations like ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) handle those agreements, collecting fees every time a copyrighted song is played on the radio or during a public performance. For its part in managing those agreements, ASCAP brought in over $1 billion last year.
Canadian internet providers now have to forward warnings to pirates
Watch out, Canada: you now have to deal with anti-piracy notices, much like your American friends. The country has just implemented a copyright law provision that requires internet providers to forward copyright violation warnings to customers caught downloading allegedly pirated material. The networks aren't obliged to punish you, so accusations shouldn't lead to disconnections or throttling. However, there's nothing dictating what those messages are allowed to say. There's a concern that the law lets copyright settlement firms run rampant, like they have in the US -- they may try to scare you into making an expensive payment rather than defending yourself in court. Also, virtual private network hosts will have to keep six months' worth of activity logs on hand, so your privacy is at greater risk even if you're squeaky clean. It'll be a while before Canucks know the full effect of this measure, but there is a chance that it'll create more problems than it solves. [Image credit: Samuel Chambaud/AFP/Getty Images]
EU court rules that reading online news doesn't violate copyright
You probably didn't know it, but the legality of what you're doing right now has been a hotly debated issue in EU courts -- reading articles online. For the last four years the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) and the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) have been trying to determine if browsing and viewing copyrighted material online required the authorization of the copyright holder; today the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that it does not. It sounds like a no-brainer, but the facts are a little more complicated: the two groups were arguing over the application of licenses to media monitoring agencies and their effects on the end-user.
Changes to copyright laws could be very good or very bad; it depends on who's involved
When it comes to data we upload to the web and digital content in all its forms, it's hard to tell who owns it. At Expand NY's panel today, Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Julie Samuels, Techdirt's Mike Masnick and American University Washington College of Law professor, Michael Carroll discussed that very issue in the context of the user data lockdown from Megaupload, legal concepts of digital ownership and privacy and how increasingly irrelevant copyright laws could change in the future.
German publishers opt to remain in Google News, still expect to get paid
Google said last month it would require German publishers to opt-in if they wanted to continue to be featured on Google News. The AP is now reporting that several have decided to remain on the service, including Spiegel Online, Zeit Online and Springer AG. Publishers have long been pushing for the government to change the law so news aggregators would have to pay for the content they scrape. A new copyright law does come into effect today limiting how much info aggregators are allowed to borrow for their feeds, and to avoid any legal scuffles, Google decided an opt-in policy was safest. This may not be the end of the company's troubles with publishers in the country, however, as Springer AG has said "it still expects to receive money from Google eventually."
Google's 'Defend your Net' campaign asks Germans to resist copyright changes
Remember when the German government was thinking about making search engines either remove news excerpts from results, or pay royalties for including them? Well, these changes could soon be enforced, and Google has launched the "Defend Your Net" initiative to urge the German people to stop that happening. On the campaign's pages, the search giant voices its opinions on what such a decision would do: harm the German media and, by extension, the country's economy. It also points out that its news service is ad-free, publishers can opt out of listings, and that some German outlets receive roughly half their traffic from Google searches. Anyone who wants to receive information on the bill's progress can register for email updates, and a tool is available to find the contact details of your local official if you're feeling proactive. Need firing up? Then check out Google's motivational video below.
Supreme Court rules public domain isn't permanent, says Congress can re-copyright some international works (update)
If you've been enjoying the fireworks over PIPA and SOPA these past weeks, get ready for more intellectual property ugliness. The US Supreme Court handed down a decision in Golan v. Holder Wednesday granting Congress the power to restore copyright claims on works that had entered the public domain. The six to two decision (with only the conservative Samuel Alito and liberal Stephen Breyer dissenting) was issued primarily with an eye towards bringing the country in line with an international treaty known as the Berne Convention. The plaintiffs in the case included orchestra conductors, educators, performers and archivists who rely on public domain works such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and compositions from Igor Stravinsky. Many orchestras, including that of lead plaintiff Lawrence Golan, will now be forced to stop performing works that are a regular part of their repertoire due to licensing fees. Hit up the more coverage link for the complete (PDF) decision.Update: To be clear, this decision upheld a statute granting copyright protection to a bundle of international works that were placed in the public domain (and therefore denied copyright protection) under previous US laws.
The Lawbringer: The trouble with fan fiction
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Finally, I return home after a bit of bliss. Fun is over -- it's time to get serious by talking about fan fiction. Sort of. You see, fan fiction is one of those areas that people love to hate, hate to love and everything in between. What is it about fan fiction that gets people so upset and so defensive? Is it the personal nature of the craft, the accusatory piggy-backing on other people's characters, or just that so much of it is mind-numbingly terrible? Who knows? Today, we're going to explore a few of the concepts of fan fiction in a very no-nonsense, barely legal way, to give you aspiring authors something to consider while writing your own fan fiction or even original content. With my post-vacation bliss now completely out of my system, thanks to reading so much terrible fan fiction in preparation, I am happy to share with all of you a story that I've been writing for the last minute and a half. Don't be cruel, now. It's pretty much going to become the greatest story ever told. Enjoy.
Did the Fifth Circuit just make breaking DRM legal? Not quite.
The world of digital copyright law is a busy place this morning -- not only did the Library of Congress hand down new exemptions to the DMCA that allow smartphones to be jailbroken and short portions of movies to be ripped, but a new decision out of the Fifth Circuit has caused some major waves because it seems to say breaking DRM is legal. Except, well, maybe not. Here's the deal: an uninterruptible power supply company called MGE sued GE in 2004 for using hacked-up copies of its software to maintain its clients' power systems -- the software was only supposed to work when a hardware dongle is plugged into the system, but GE engineers were using cracked software. After a lengthy trial, the jury awarded MGE $4.6m in damages for copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, and -- you guessed it -- violating the DMCA by circumventing the protection on the software. On appeal, the Fifth Circuit -- which was reviewing this kind of DMCA claim for the first time -- noted that MGE's hardware dongle only protected access to the software, not copying it, and that the DMCA is only effective when the protections in place guard something more than simple access. Here's the money quote from the decision: Merely bypassing a technological protection that restricts a user from viewing or using a work is insufficient to trigger the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The DMCA prohibits only forms of access that would violate or impinge on the protections that the Copyright Act otherwise affords copyright owners... The owner's technological measure must protect the copyrighted material against an infringement of a right that the Copyright Act protects, not from mere use or viewing. Broadly read, this means that breaking DRM just to look at or use a copyrighted work is fine -- it's when you break DRM that expressly protects activities reserved for copyright owners (like, say, making copies) that you get into trouble. That's a tiny little step back from other DRM-related decisions in other circuits, which have generally held that any DRM-breaking is illegal, but it's not completely without precedent -- since this was the first time the Fifth Circuit looked at this type of lawsuit, it looked to decisions from other appellate courts and found similar rulings on which to rely. Let's get back to what this means in practical terms, though -- although many are breathlessly reporting this to mean that breaking DRM is now legal, that's actually not the case at all. First of all, Fifth Circuit rulings are only directly effective in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, so this isn't the law across the US yet -- that's going to take a Supreme Court decision. (We'll get to that in a second.) Second of all, the crux of the decision is that DMCA lawsuits are only valid if the DRM systems actually protect against copyright infringement, as opposed to merely controlling access, and that's only a slight narrowing of the law. Think about it: the number one thing forbidden by copyright law is making unauthorized copies. There's nothing in this ruling that suggests anyone can make copies of works without the explicit permission of the copyright owner -- it's still very much illegal to strip copy protection DRM off a video in order to transfer it to a portable media player, for example, since you're making an unauthorized copy. It's a subtle, but extremely important distinction. All that said, most of the other appellate courts in the US that have looked at DMCA issues have generally found that breaking DRM for any reason not covered in the exemptions is illegal, so the Fifth Circuit's decision here has set up what's called a "split in the circuits" -- different interpretations of the law in different parts of the country. That's the sort of situation the Supreme Court is there to resolve, so it's possible we'll see MGE appeal this one all the way to the top and DRM law will drastically change in one way or another. In any event, it's clear that the legal tide is slowly starting to turn against DRM, and that's definitely a good thing -- regardless of how small each individual step might be.
The Lawbringer: The history of Blizzard and MDY (Glider)
It's a Glider! Sorry, that's as good as the jokes are going to get. Greetings from The Lawbringer, WoW.com's weekly look at the intersection between law and the World of Warcraft. I'm a newly minted law school grad acting as your tour guide between bar prep sessions. In the last two weeks, we looked at the difference between purchases and licenses. This is of vital importance as a major bit of cyberlaw plays out in the Ninth Circuit, namely the next stages of MDY v. Blizzard, Vernor v. Autodesk, and UMG v. Augusto. Today seems like an excellent time to review the case of MDY v. Blizzard, as we've covered the other two a bit. My source for this history will be the excellent collection of files at Justicia.com, which includes all documents filed in the district court of Arizona in this case. Let's get started!
Psystar files official notice of appeal, ruthlessly attacks windmill
We're still not clear on whether Psystar is still in business, or if it's selling anything other than T-shirts, but the would-be Mac cloner isn't totally out of the game yet: it's filed an official notice of appeal in the California court, which means it's going to try and fight that decisive victory and injunction won by Apple a month ago. Just based on the simple open-and-shut legal reasoning involved in the decision -- surprise, you can't copy, modify, and resell a copyrighted work without permission -- we'd say this appeal is a long shot, but we didn't go to Harvard Law School like Psystar attorney Eugene Action. Man, we missed that guy. Let's quote from his website again, shall we? The matrix is born and the energy sucking machine herds Americans into pods of predetermined limitations. Forced programming on your computer is just one of the provisional patents looming against freedom and democracy. Capitalism spurring innovation and creativity through open and competitive markets is at risk on this new frontier. This new battle is being fought on the abstract electronic plains of America while most of us cannot even open our email. The beachheads are red with the blood of ambitious Americans gunned down for their initiative. Let's be honest: we never, ever, want this story to end. P.S. -- Wondering why Rebel EFI is listed as "out of stock" on the Psystar website? It's because there isn't any stock, shockingly enough -- in a statement filed with the court on December 31, Rudy Pedraza says all copies of the bootloader have been destroyed except for one that's in the possession of his attorneys. Between this appeal and the pending case in Florida over Snow Leopard, we'd say that means it'll be a long time before the software is back on the scene -- enough time for the legit OSx86 scene to leapfrog it entirely.
Amazon suspends Kindle account after too many product returns
The Kindle should be a pretty straight forward proposition, but this just goes to show you how sometimes folks can stir up controversy even with something as innocuous as an e-book reader. First there was the hassle with the Writers Guild over text-to-speech, and then Amazon threatened MobileRead with legal action for merely linking to software they didn't take kindly too. And now we're hearing alarming tales of Kindle owners who have had their accounts turned off when inadvertently running afoul of company policy. Case in point, a user on the MobileRead forums reports being locked out of his account for what was termed an "extraordinary" rate of returns (that is, he returned electronics that arrived damaged or defective). Because of this, our man was unable to purchase new books for his device, or even check out magazine / newspaper / blog subscriptions he had already paid for. Luckily, this gentleman was able to plead his case and get his account reactivated -- but other users haven't been quite so fortunate. We'll be keeping an eye on you, Amazon -- so let's try and play nice for now on.[Via Channel Web]
Amazon using DMCA to restrict Kindle content sources
Oh, Amazon. Just a couple weeks after the Authors Guild's overzealous copyright-maximalist stance forced the bookseller to modify the Kindle 2's text to speech feature, the company's lawyers have had a fit of irony and sent out a DMCA takedown request to MobileRead, claiming that the site's links to a Python script that enables Kindle owners to shop at Mobipocket-format ebook sites constitutes circumvention of the Kindle's DRM. There's all kinds of corporate-lawyer idiocy at play here: MobileRead was just linking out to another site hosting the script, which can't actually be used to break Kindle DRM, and the only people using it are the people who want to buy more books -- not exactly the sort of customers you'd want to piss off. Amazon's sole motivation here seems to be the fear that people might buy Kindle content from somewhere besides Amazon, and it appears to be using copyright law to try and prevent that. Another corporation driven mad with DRM power? Say it ain't so.[Via TechDirt]
The Engadget Interview: Paul Aiken, Executive Director of the Authors Guild
As you're no doubt aware, this week's launch of the Kindle 2 came complete with copyright controversy -- the Authors Guild says that Amazon's text-to-speech features will damage the lucrative audiobook market. To be perfectly frank, we're of two minds on on this debate: on one hand, we're obviously all for the relentless progression of technology, and on the other, we sussed out the fundamental reasons for the Guild's objections almost immediately. It's pretty easy to find the first set of arguments online, but we wanted to make sure we weren't missing anything, so we sat down with Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken and asked him some burning questions. Read on!
Know Your Rights: Does the Kindle 2's text-to-speech infringe authors' copyrights?
Know Your Rights is Engadget's technology law series, written by our own totally punk ex-copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world. Disclaimer: this isn't legal advice, but it is best read aloud by a text to speech app. Hey, so does the Kindle 2's Read to Me text-to-speech feature really infringe on authors' copyrights? It's nice to be back! It's been a while. Yeah yeah. Get to it. Okay, so the issue is that the Kindle 2's Read to Me feature obviously threatens the audiobook market, and while at first blush it seems like the Authors Guild has a pretty weak case when executive director Paul Aiken says things like "They don't have the right to read a book out loud," it's not necessarily as ridiculous as it seems.
