Free for a Fee

Who owns the firmware on a smartphone, the device manufacturer or the purchaser?  Ownership of copies of computer programs is a thorny issue with which the federal courts have grappled in numerous cases. The issue arose during the most recent round of triennial rulemaking that resulted in the promulgation of a new set of exceptions to 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a), which prohibits the circumvention of technological measures deployed to limit access to copyrighted works.

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The content in this post was found at http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2010/08/articles/copyright/register-of-copyrights-says-who-knows-on-ownership-of-computer-program-copies/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewMediaAndTechnologyLaw+%28New+Media+and+Technology+Law%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

The “copyright management” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 1202, prohibits the provision or dissemination of copyright management information that is false, as well as the removal or alteration of copyright management information. An issue that has divided federal courts is whether the scope of this section is limited to digital copyright management systems such as digital rights management technologies, or whether it extends to the removal or alteration of copyright information that is affixed to or associated with works by more traditional means. . . .

In Wayne Cable v. Agence France Presse, et al., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 73893 (N.D. Ill. July 20, 2010), Cable, the photographer-copyright owner, authorized a realtor to display his photographs of a home on the realtor’s Web site with the proviso that the display include attribution of his authorship and a link to his own own Web site.

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The content in this post was found at hhttp://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2010/07/articles/copyright/logo-copyright-notice-and-link-on-web-site-constitute-copyright-management-information-under-dmca/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NewMediaAndTechnologyLaw+%28New+Media+and+Technology+Law%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

A federal appeals court has just ruled that breaking through a digital security system to access software doesn’t trigger the “anti-circumvention” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Any other interpretation of the DMCA, declared the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, would permit infringement liability for tapping into a work simply to “view it or to use it within the purview of ‘fair use’ permitted under the Copyright Act.”

The ruling is already being hailed as another victory for fair use, following Monday’s Library of Congress decision giving wide approval to iPhone jailbreaking and DVD CSS circumvention on similar grounds.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2010/07/court-breaking-drm-for-a-fair-use-is-legal.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Every three years, the Library of Congress has the thankless task of listening to people complain about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA forbade most attempts to bypass the digital locks on things like DVDs, music, and computer software, but it also gave the Library the ability to wave its magical copyright wand and make certain DRM cracks legal for three years at a time.

This time, the Library went (comparatively) nuts, allowing widespread bypassing of the CSS encryption on DVDs, declaring iPhone jailbreaking to be “fair use,” and letting consumers crack their legally purchased e-books in order to have them read aloud by computers.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/apple-loses-big-in-drm-ruling-jailbreaks-are-fair-use.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

It has never been a secret that the majority of files being shared over BitTorrent are movies and music that are likely being shared illegally. (Sorry, Linux distro nerds.) Princeton senior Sauhard Sahi confirmed this recently after setting out to survey the content available on BitTorrent and, although there are caveats to his findings, they highlight the relationship DRM has with illegal file sharing. As in: the more DRM there is on the legit versions of the content, the more popular it is on P2P.

Sahi chose a random sample of 1,021 files from the trackerless Mainline DHT and classified them by file type, language, and apparent copyright status. He found that nearly half (46 percent) of files were nonpornographic movies and TV shows—the largest single category of content. 14 percent of the files were porn, tied with the 14 percent dedicated to games and software. Just 10 percent of the files were classified as music, and one percent were books and guides.

The content in this post was found at http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/BAaf and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.