Copyright Office Posts Comments Regarding Orphan Works
The Copyright Office has posted the comments it received regarding orphan works—a total of 716 comments! It will take a while for the copyright office to work through these. A number of the submissions are brief, in some cases just…
Webloyalty.com, Inc. v. Consumer Innovations LLC
Webloyalty.com, Inc. v. Consumer Innovations LLC, 73 U.S.P.Q. 2d 1898 (D. Del. Jan. 13, 2005). The parties compete in the online club membership business, selling packages of services that combine price discounts, insurance-esque protections and other low-value services that consumers…
AFP v. Google News Update
AP story recapping AFP v. Google, quoting Zittrain and von Lohmann (among others). Contrary to some popular press reports, it appears that AFP is pressing on with the lawsuit despite Google’s redoubled efforts to kick them out of Google News….
Initial Assessment of AFP v. Google
Lots of buzz about AFP’s lawsuit against Google for displaying AFP’s headlines and photos in Google News. Personally, I think Google News is great, and I use it often. However, we can’t let our love for Google blind us to…
Microsoft v. Zamos (and Zamos v. Microsoft)
Amusing story in the Register about David Zamos, a Kent State chemistry student, who bought a discounted educational version of Microsoft Windows XP Pro and Office XP Pro at the school bookstore. He decided he didn’t want it, tried to…
Copy of Marvel v. NCSoft Ruling
CE Petit has posted a copy of the court’s March 9 opinion in Marvel Enterprises v. NCSoft Corporation (CV 04-9253-RGK). The opinion is rather unremarkable—mostly it deals with motions to dismiss, so the standard for upholding the pleadings is pretty…
Ruling in Marvel v. NCSoft
NCSoft has won some favorable rulings in its lawsuit with Marvel. Marvel sued NCSoft because users could use NCSoft’s software in its City of Heroes MMORPG to generate characters that looked like Marvel characters. From the news/press reports, it appears…
Google AutoLink and Copyright Law–A Fuller Explanation
There’s been a lot of discussion about Google’s AutoLink tool, including some questions about why I think it might violate copyright law. I can understand why this is confusing, particularly because the AutoLink tool raises two discrete questions. First, what…
Student Convicted for File Downloading
Parvin Dhaliwal convicted of a state crime for downloading movies. I believe the article is correct that this is the first state prosecution, although I was able to find a couple of federal prosecutions for merely downloading items from the…
More Amicus Briefs in MGM v. Grokster
Yesterday was the deadline for respondents’ briefs in MGM v. Grokster. So far, EFF’s website shows 18 amicus briefs filed in the case on respondents’ side, making for a total of 46 amicus briefs. I joined the brief drafted by…