Oracle v. SAP Lawsuit Comments

By Eric Goldman Oracle Corporation v. SAP AG, 3:07-cv-01658-EMC (N.D. Cal. complaint filed March 22, 2007) I realize I’m a couple weeks late to this story, but it’s too important/interesting a case not to address. TomorrowNow (TN) is a company…

AFP v. Google Settles

By Eric Goldman The Agence France-Presse v. Google lawsuit has settled. See news reports: AP, CNET News.com. Like it did with the Associated Press, Google struck a licensing deal for AFP content, including indexing it in Google News. Financial terms…

Ninth Circuit Opinion in Perfect 10 v. CCBill

By Eric Goldman Perfect 10, Inc. v. CCBill LLC, No. 04-57143, 04-57207 (9th Cir. March 29, 2007) The Ninth Circuit issued an important but characteristically quirky opinion in Perfect 10 v. CCBill. This omnibus opinion covered a lot of disparate…

The End is Near – Bertelsmann Settles EMI Claims Over Napster

By John Ottaviani Various sources are reporting that EMI has agreed to settle its copyright infringement lawsuit against Bertelsmann AG related to Bertelsmann’s investment in Napster. The settlement removes the last large record label with claims against Bertelsmann in the…

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…