Free for a Fee

By Eric Goldman

Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google, Inc., 2:04-cv-09484-AHM-SH (C.D. Cal. July 26, 2010)

In 2007, the Ninth Circuit issued an important but befuddling ruling in Perfect 10 v. Amazon and Google. That ruling addressed Perfect 10’s prima facie case of secondary copyright infringement against Google (and Amazon, which was using Google results) and remanded the case back to the district court for consideration of that issue as well as the underexplored 17 USC 512 safe harbors.

We’ve had a couple of blog-worthy rulings since then (on a motion to dismiss and A9’s eligibility for the DMCA safe harbors), but it’s taken 3 years to see where the court stands on Google’s eligibility for the DMCA online safe harbors. The news is largely good for Google.

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/07/google_gets_sev.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Move, Inc. Wins Real Estate Mapping Patent Case over REAL, Ltd. By Adena Schutzberg , Directions Mag

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The content in this post was found at http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=3556 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

A New York Supreme Court has dismissed a defamation suit over a private Facebook group that existed primarily for the purpose of mocking a teenaged girl. In the decision, Judge Randy Sue Marber wrote that the group’s malicious postings, which were made by a number of teenagers, were clearly not statements of fact—not to mention that they weren’t even public.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/judge-facebook-comments-were-puerile-but-not-defamation.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.

The content in this post was found at http://tkbulletin.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/this-week-in-review-%E2%80%A6-us-and-europe-are-rethinking-biological-patents-experts-say/ 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.