Free for a Fee

With everyone from authors to librarians upset about the initial settlement of the Google Books copyright lawsuit, and the US Department of Justice hinting that it was likely to be illegal, the parties involved withdrew it from consideration. After some modifications, it was resubmitted to the court; the deadline for comments on the new version passed yesterday, and many of the same parties submitted new briefs. But anyone who read the initial round may feel like they’re experiencing déjà vu when reading the new batch. For most of the settlement’s critics, very little has changed, and their initial complaints remain.

To be sure, Google has now won over a number of authors groups, including groups from Australia, Canada, and the UK. But in the list of filings tracked by the public index, objections abound. Some of these come from the authors themselves. Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, organized over 350 authors who objected to the fact that the agreement would apply to anyone who didn’t opt out of it, a condition that most observers consider a major change in US copyright policy.

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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.

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The debate over the applicability of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in cases of alleged employee disloyalty has yielded quite a few rulings over the last several years, and generated a circuit split last September with the Ninth Circuit decision in LVRC Holdings LLC v. Brekka, 581 F.3d 1127 (9th Cir. 2009). In that civil action alleging employee theft and misappropriation of trade secrets, the appeals court rejected an expansive interpretation of the CFAA, concluding that an employee’s authorization to access an employer’s computer network is not automatically revoked when the employee is acting in a manner that is disloyal to the employer’s interest. The Ninth Circuit explicitly rejected the contrary reasoning of the Seventh Circuit in International Airport Centers, LLC v. Citrin, 440 F.3d 418 (7th Cir. 2006). In the Citrin case, Judge Posner authored a panel ruling that under common law agency principles, an employee who breaches the duty of loyalty to an employer thereby lacks authorization within the meaning of the CFAA.

The battleground in those two cases was whether a former employer could bring a civil action under the CFAA against former employees who accessed the employer’s computer network, while still employed, for disloyal purposes.
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The content in this post was found at http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2010/01/articles/computer-fraud-and-abuse-act/applying-9th-circuit-lvrc-v-brekka-ruling-district-court-dismisses-most-cfaa-criminal-charges-in-united-states-v-nosal/?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 content in this post was found at http://jetl.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/the-riaas-never-ending-battle-over-file-sharing/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

The content in this post was found at http://legalrants.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/kodak-sues-apple-rim-over-digital-imaging-patents/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.