Consumer-Directed DVR Service Infringes Copyright–20th Century Fox v. Cablevision
By Eric Goldman Twentieth Century Fox Films Corp. v. Cablevision Systems Corp., No. 06-Civ. 03390 (SDNY March 22, 2007) Not infrequently, copyright defendants argue that they are offering a service that passively implements consumer directions to infringe. In some cases,…
Can A Spider Enter Into A Binding Contract?–Internet Archive v. Shell
By John Ottaviani Can a spider enter into a binding contract when the terms and conditions on the website declare that copying or distributing anything on the site indicates an agreement to or acceptance of terms, and the spider copies…
Viacom Sues YouTube
By Eric Goldman Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc. (SDNY complaint filed March 13, 2007). Complaint available here. After public saber-rattling by Viacom and significant negotiations between the parties, Viacom finally pulled the trigger and sued YouTube for copyright infringement….
February 2007 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman * The California Highway Patrol (which, for reasons unclear to me, has investigatory power here) has concluded that the Angelides campaign did not break any laws when they reverse-guessed URLs on Schwarzenegger’s website and found an unrestricted…
Google Loses Belgium Copyright Case–Google v. Copiepresse
By Eric Goldman Google v. Copiepresse, No. 06/10.928/C (Tribunal de premiere instance de Bruxelles) (decision in French) (English translation) Google has lost (again) the Copiepresse copyright case in Belgium over Google News. In September 2006, the court initially ruled against…
Ochoa on Unabomber Papers
By Eric Goldman There was some press today about the government’s efforts to resell papers of Ted Kaczynski (a/k/a the Unabomber). While the government makes those papers available in unmodified form to researchers, the proposal was to publicly sell some…
Top Cyberlaw Developments of 2006
By Eric Goldman and John Ottaviani [Eric’s Note: I will be in Israel for the rest of the year. So while it’s a little premature to publish an end-of-the-year recap, this may be my last post for the year. John…
October 2006 Quick Links
By Eric Goldman * All the media wants to do is talk about Google. All Google, all the time. Three major pieces in the span of three days: The NYT on lawsuits against Google. The WSJ on Google’s hiring practices….
Internet Law Updates Talk
By Eric Goldman Yesterday I gave a talk called “Internet Law Updates” at an event sponsored by the California State Bar’s IP Section. My slides.
Grokster Website
By Eric Goldman I wanted to see what was going on now at the Grokster website, so I checked out www.grokster.com today. I got this stern lecture: The United States Supreme Court unanimously confirmed that using this service to trade…