Free for a Fee

The settlement between Google and book copyright holders has been examined by everyone from librarians to the US Department of Justice. Most of the issues identified by outside parties have focused on two issues: the market power it cedes to Google, and the ability of the public to access the knowledge that is contained in out-of-print works. The latest organization to weigh on the settlement is Oxford University Press, which occupies an interesting position, as it’s both a publisher of copyrighted works and has a mission of disseminating knowledge. As such, the position taken by the head of its US division is quite nuanced: the deal is flawed, but may be essential for maintaining the public’s access to knowledge.

Tim Barton, the head of OUP USA, discussed his views on the settlement in an essay that appeared at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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By Eric Goldman

F.T.C. v. Accusearch Inc., 2009 WL 1846344 (10th Cir. June 29, 2009). My blog post on the district court opinion.

Introduction

June has been an active month for 230 jurisprudence. Cases this month include Doe IX v. MySpace (actually a May opinion but I blogged it in June), Gibson v. Craigslist, the Barnes v. Yahoo amendment, and Zango v. Kaspersky–all defense-favorable outcomes. As I mentioned in my post on the Doe IX case, the Ninth Circuit Roommates.com en banc decision has not cast a long shadow on 230 jurisprudence; it has been cited less than 10 times in the past year, and prior to yesterday, only once in favor of the plaintiff. Unfortunately, those good times may be over. The Tenth Circuit has largely adopted the rule and reasoning of Roommates.com in FTC v. Accusearch, effectively making Roommates.com the governing law west of the Rockies.

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By Eric Goldman

Ascentive, LLC v. Google, Inc., 2:09-cv-02871-JS (E.D. Pa. complaint filed June 25, 2009)

Guess who got sued again? Google now has 6 pending lawsuits challenging its AdWords service. The previous five are:

* Rescuecom v. Google
* FPX v. Google
* John Beck Amazing Profits v. Google
* Stratton Faxon v. Google (this wasn’t a trademark case last I checked)
* Soaring Helmet v. Bill Me

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The content in this post was found at http://arisebharat.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/traditional-knowledge-should-not-be-ignored-iied/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Geoff Taylor, head of UK major label trade group BPI, wrote an op-ed piece for the BBC today in which he called Napster the “Rosetta Stone of digital music,” said it was “simple to understand and use,” and said that the music industry should have “embraced Napster rather than fighting it.”

While this might sound radical, it’s not actually a controversial position among major label executives anymore—a top RIAA executive said the same things to me last week at the Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial in Minnesota.

More interesting is the rationale for why such a deal never got done. If Napster was truly the “Rosetta Stone” that unlocked the mysteries of digital online distribution, why was it sued out of existence?

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