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Artist Shepard Fairey, who created the “Hope” poster of now President Obama, has filed a pre-emptive law suit against the Associated Press. The suit, which has been filed in United States District Court in New York, seeks a declaratory judgement for Fairey ruling that the poster is protected by fair use and does not infringe AP’s copyright in the photograph. The suit also seeks an injunction preventing AP from asserting its copyright in the photograph against Fairey.

From left to right: the original AP photograph (taken by Mannie Garcia in April 2006) and Shepard Fairey's poster

So, how does Fairey’s claim measure up against the four factors considered in fair use arguments? (more…)

Ever wanted a copy of the Australian Constitution when not at your desk? If so, you may be interested to hear that the full text of the Australian Constitution is now available for your iPhone (or iPod Touch). It’s a free application, available internationally through iTunes (please note that this link will work only if you have iTunes installed).

It may interest readers to know that our own Ben wrote the application and uploaded it to the Apple App Store.

Thanks, Ben!

There is certainly a value to social networking websites. Some serve professional networking purposes (such as LinkedIn). And others, like Facebook, have proved to be an effective means of connecting with old friends (for me, including ones I’d lost touch with completely).

It’s not news that we use these websites at our own peril. But here’s a couple of more reasons to be wary, both legal and technical.

A new Facebook notification? “You’ve been served!”

In what seems to be a legal first, a judge of the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court has upheld the right of lawyers to serve legally binding court documents and notices by posting them on defendants’ Facebook sites.

Plaintiff MKM Capital applied to Master David Harper of the Supreme Court to use Facebook to serve notice of a judgment on two borrowers who had defaulted on a loan. The defendants had failed to repay a loan of $150,000 they borrowed from MKM last year to refinance their mortgage. After being granted a default judgment for the loan amount and for possession of the house after the couple failed to appear in court to defend the action, MKM then had to locate the defendants and serve them with the papers.

After hiring private investigators and 11 failed attempts to find the couple, the lawyers identified the Facebook profiles of the defendants, convinced the court that those profiles did in fact belong to the couple, and satisfied the court that communication through their Facebook pages was a sufficient means of communicating with the defendants.

Wormholes

It was just a matter of time before social networking websites became infected with computer viruses. And now it’s happened: Koobface, a Trojan worm, has been making its way through Facebook and to other social networking websites. The worm generates profile comments that encourage users to click through to an external website that pretends to offer a video to view, but then says that an upgrade of Adobe Flash is necessary first. Users who click on the “install” button infect their computer with the virus. The result? Enabling identity theft and click fraud.

On 3 October, Australian Arts Minister Peter Garrett announced that the Australian Federal Government plans to introduce a resale royalty right for works of visual art by 1 July 2009. This right will ensure that visual artists receive a portion of the proceeds from resales of their works. The legislation establishing the resale royalty right scheme has not yet been introduced in Parliament, but is expected bythe end of 2008.

The Government has issued a fact sheet on how the right would be structured. In short, the resale royalty scheme would involve a mandatory five per cent artist’s royalty on resales of artworks, when works are sold for $1,000 or more. The right will apply to works by living artists and for a period of 70 years after the artist’s death. (more…)

Google turned 10 last week, to Microsoft’s 33.

There’s a little comparison of Google and Microsoft here. Both the comparison and the comments it received are interesting.

For one, although both giants in their fields, can the two companies really be compared?

The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has published Discussion Paper 72, asking for feedback on “301 proposals for overhauling Australia’s complex and costly privacy laws and practices”.

As stated in the ALRC’s media release, key proposals arising from the public consultation process undertaken to date include the following:

–simplifying the current regulatory scheme for privacy law;
–providing for the protection of personal information stored or processed overseas;
–introducing a new system of data breach notification to individuals;
–introducing a new statutory cause of action where an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy has been breached;
–abolishing the fee for unlisted telephone numbers;
–expanding the enforcement powers of the Privacy Commissioner;
–imposing civil penalties for serious breaches of the Privacy Act; and
–introducing a more comprehensive system of credit reporting.

Submissions in response to the discussion paper are due by 7 December 2007. The ALRC plans to release a final report and recommendations in March 2008.

I have not been able to review the ALRC’s proposals in depth, but they appear to be responding to the considerably complex nature of Australian privacy laws (which are addressed at the federal and state levels, sometimes with separate treatment for medical records), as well as attempting to bring current privacy principles in line with current information technology and its implications.

If you haven’t already seen it mentioned in the news, there’s now a way to identify who is editing entries in Wikipedia–or at least the organisations from which the edits are being made.

WikiScanner, created by a Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student, provides a searchable database that cross-references edits to Wikipedia pages with information on the owners of the IP addresses from which those edits originate. (more…)

The Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has appointed Australian Federal Court judge Susan Kiefel to serve on the commonwealth’s highest court. Justice Kiefel, who will take up her new position on 3 September, replaces Justice Ian Callinan, who is required to retire once he turns 70 on 1 September. See here for some news coverage.

Justice Kiefel, who is based in Brisbane, has sat on the Federal Court of Australia since 1994. Before that, Justice Kieflel was a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland.

She is the forty-sixth judge, and will be the third woman appointed to the High Court. The first female judge on the court was Justice Mary Gaudron, who sat from 1987 to 2003. The second female judge on the court, Justice Susan Crennan, was appointed in 2005.

Justice Kiefel is currently a part-time member of the Australian Law Reform Commission, as well as President of the Federal Police Disciplinary Tribunal.

There have been a couple of interesting developments in social networking land lately. One demonstrates the value that these networks represent. The other highlights some complicated issues about risks associated with using social networking tools, as well as possible privacy and more general regulatory concerns. (more…)

And here’s a new danger from posting information on Facebook–your university might use the information to fine you for breaking the rules.

Oxford University has reportedly used photographs of students on the popular social networking website Facebook who they say have broken the University’s rules regarding conduct after examinations to charge fines. The conduct? Being sprayed by shaving cream, covered by flour and silly string, and similar offences. (more…)

Australia’s competition regulator, the ACCC, is taking Google to court, alleging that the search engine company has engaged in “misleading and deceptive conduct in relation to sponsored links that appeared on the Google website”, in contravention of section 52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth).

Section 52(1) provides that a “corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive.”

The ACCC has alleged that Google has engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in breach of section 52 by:

–in 2005, providing sponsored links to online classified advertisement provider Trading Post’s website, in the guise of hypertext links to two of Trading Post’s competitors (but associating the text with the Trading Post’s URL); and
–on a continuing basis, “failing to adequately distinguish sponsored links from “organic” search results”.

The ACCC has also alleged that Trading Post contravened sections 52 and 53(d) of the Act in 2005 when the names of their business competitors (car dealerships) appeared in the title of Google sponsored links to Trading Post’s website. (Section 53(d) prohibits a corporation from representing that it “has a sponsorship, approval or affiliation it does not have”.) (more…)

While Google is currently the dominant player in the Internet search engine business, that doesn’t mean that there is not a great deal of activity among companies vying for a piece of the action. As was recently reported, even 1% of the global search market represents quite a bit of money.

Not all search engine companies use the same strategies to capture market share, however. (more…)

The folks over at strangemaps have posted an interesting map of the USA, matching the gross domestic product (GDP) of each individual state with a country with a similarly-sized GDP.

Strangemaps rightly points out that the map presents a somewhat distorted picture; while the state/nation state GDP levels may be similar, the corresponding population levels are not. This means that similar GDP figures do not necessarily indicate similar levels of wealth per capita in the US states and countries compared, although it does rank the size of the economies of US states and the corresponding foreign countries.

The rest of strangemaps is worth a look if you have a moment–there are some very interesting maps there. One of my recent favourites is the Online Communities Map.

Although our frequency of posts has dropped off since the second half of 2006, things have been going on behind the scenes at LawFont.

Kim has recovered from her 2006 overload, and will be blogging primarily on Australian intellectual property issues. Sarah hopes to be back soon, and will be blogging again on a range of issues, mostly on developments outside of Australia.

Finally, we’d like to formally welcome our new blogger. Susanne is particularly interested in the regulation of communications and media content, counter-terrorism and national security regulation, and administrative law. We are very happy to have her with us!

And apologies for my not posting over the past few weeks — I recently changed jobs and am working things out with my new employer. I hope to be back soon!