Opinion of U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin ruling in favor of Google over the Authors’ Guild in the long-running Google Books dispute: pdf
“Google Books ruled legal in massive win for fair use; Scans that show snippets are legal—they don’t replace the full book.” ARS Technica.
“Why Google’s Fair Use Victory In Google Books Suit Is A Big Deal–And Why It Isn’t.” Professor Eric Goldman in Forbes.
How much of an article or news report can an aggregator or clipping service copy under fair use? There’s no precise answer, but under the recent Meltwater ruling from a federal district court in the Southern District of New York, the answer in some cases may be “not much”. At PaidContent.org: AP wins big: Why a Court Said Clipping Content is Not Fair Use. The defendant Meltwater monitored the internett and ran a clipping service for its clients, sending newsletter alerts to its clients about articles in which they appeared. Meltwater included the relevant headline, lede and sentences in which keywords relevant to the client appeared. Key to the court’s decision was that Meltwater, by copying the headlines and ledes acted as a substitute to the underlying articles, rather than driving readers to the original article as a search engine might. As noted by PaidContent: “Cote’s rejection of Meltwater’s search engine argument was based in part on the ‘click-through’ rate of its stories. Whereas Google News users clicked through to 56 percent of excerpted stories, the equivalent rate for Meltwater was 0.08 percent …” The impact of the ruling outside the federal courts Second Circuit is unclear, but the result should be troubling for companies that scrape significant amounts of content from other sites in reliance on “fair use”.
The EFF’s critical take on the decision. The court’s decision (pdf).
FBI 2013 priority: obtaining new powers to surveil internet and cloud services in real time (Slate).
At ArsTechnica, news of new data transmission research: Fiber cables made of air move data at 99.7 percent the speed of light
TechDirt: Court Tosses Lawsuit That Said MMS Was An Illegal File Sharing Network”
Do Not Track as Contract by Joshua Fairfield, Washington & Lee University, School of Law, Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law, Vol. 14, No. 3, p. 101, 2012, arguing that as a matter of contract law, browser do-not-track options are enforceable against corporations.
The Anonymous Internet by Bryan H. Choi, Yale Law School, Information Society Project, Maryland Law Review (forthcoming).
From Lord Coke to Internet Privacy: The Past, Present, and Future of the Law of Electronic Contracting by Juliet M. Moringiello, Widener University School of Law, and William L. Reynolds II, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, Maryland Law Review (forthcoming).
Forcing Forgetfulness: Data Privacy, Free Speech, and the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ by Robert Kirk Walker, UC Hastings College of Law.
Unwrapping Shrinkwraps, Clickwraps, and Browsewraps: How the Law Went Wrong from Horse Traders to the Law of the Horse by Cheryl B. Preston, Brigham Young University – J. Reuben Clark Law School, and Eli McCann, 26 BYU J. PUB. L. 1 (2011).
Tackling Twitter and Facebook Fakes: ID Theft in Social Media by Alexander Tsoutsanis, DLA Piper and Leiden Law School, World Communications Regulation Report, 2012/4 p. 1-3.
Reclaiming Copyright From the Outside In: What the Downfall Hitler Meme Means for Transformative Works, Fair Use, and Parody by Aaron Schwabach, Thomas Jefferson School of Law, Buffalo Intellectual Property Law Journal, 2012.
Copyright Conspiracy: How the New Copyright Alert System May Violate the Sherman Act by Sean M. Flaim, Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, NYU Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law (forthcoming).
Oversharing: Facebook Discovery and the Unbearable Sameness of Internet Law by Bruce E. Boyden, Marquette University Law School, Arkansas Law Review, Vol. 64, 2012.
A Due Process Right to Record the Police by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, University of Tennessee College of Law, and John A. Steakley, Washington University Law Review, Vol. 89, No. XXX, 2012.
The New Federal Crowdfunding Exemption: Promise Unfulfilled by C. Steven Bradford, University of Nebraska College of Law, Securities Regulation Law Journal, Vol. 40, No. 3, Fall 2012, arguing that the recent crowdfunding bill signed by President Obama into law is flawed because the regulatory cost of selling securities through crowdfunding might still be too high.
Will Round Two of Cariou v Prince Change Art Law Forever?
As the appeal process in the Cariou v Richard Prince copyright infringement case (background) begins, Hyperallergic.com posts the first in a three part series on the impact of the case and the issues posed in the appeal, including whether Richard Prince’s photos are transformative and constitute fair use.
Part 1 (including a link to the defendants’ appellate brief)
Part 2
Part 3
Photographing Public Art: A Legal Waltz in Seattle
The Citizen Media Law Project (hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society) analyzes the question of whether photographing a public artwork can be fair use. The topic has come to the fore in photography circles as the result of a relatively recent lawsuit regarding a photograph taken of a woman standing near a sculpture in Seattle.
After weighing in that there appears to be a decent fair use argument in the Seattle case, the CMLP author recommends that: “Cities … should reconsider how they commission public artwork. Cities could demand that artists surrender their copyright interests in order to receive public funding … The most reasonable solution is to keep public artwork completely open to the public. Until cities do this, however, commercial photographers may want to think twice about incorporating public artwork into their photographs.”
Citizen Media Law Project: Primer on Copyright Liability and Fair Use
The Citizen Media Law Project’s short primer on copyright and fair use in the context of citizen media.
From D’Agostino’s abstract of this paper: “As a result of the March 4, 2004 Supreme Court of Canada decision in CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada for the first time in Canadian copyright history, the court determined that Canadian law must recognize a user right to carry on exceptions generally and fair dealing in particular. This paper compares the Canadian fair dealing legislation and jurisprudence to that of the UK and the US. It is observed that because of CCH, the Canadian common law fair dealing factors are more flexible than those entrenched in the US.”