LawFont.com

In case you hadn’t picked it up on the many places that have reported the news - the European Parliament has voted against a ‘three strikes’ policy which would require ISPs to ‘terminate’ internet access to repeat copyright infringers. Rapporteur Guy Bono commented:

‘The cut of Internet access is a disproportionate measure regarding the objectives. It is a sanction with powerful effects, which could have profound repercussions in a society where access to the Internet is an imperative right for social inclusion.’

Here here. Extended story: IP Watch. According to that story, the Parliament voted generally in favour of the report (report available here), but voted 314 to 297 on amendment 22 to request member states not to authorise shut-off as part of the graduated response to fight copyright violations.

Some colleagues of mine (Paul H. Jensen, Alfons Palangkaraya and Elizabeth Webster), from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, have published a new Working Paper that would be of interest to people who, like me, are fascinated by international dynamics in patenting. The paper is called ‘Application pendency times and outcomes across four patent offices‘.

OK, so it’s not the most exciting title in the world. But here’s the thing. They’ve got matched patents applied for in Europe, the US, Japan and Australia, and worked out differences - in outcomes, and how long it takes to get a patent - for the same invention. They’re measuring differences in approach between the different patent offices! How many people do you know who can do that? Here’s an extract from the introduction: (more…)

On proposing a 95 year term for copyright in sound recordings:

“I strongly believe that copyright protection for Europe’s performers represents a moral right to control the use of their work and earn a living from their performances…” [European commissioner Charlie McCreevy; press release here]

I’ve become more interested in copyright bureaucracies, and patent and trade mark offices: how they operate; how transparent they are; who they are; how powers are divided between them; how they interact; how they characterise their role, their ‘customers’, and their ’stakeholders’. How we make them accountable for the decisions they make - or how we fail to do so. Regular readers may have noticed this flavour seeping into some of my more recent posts and papers.

Today, my little obsession is the growth of cooperation between Patent Offices around the world. While there’s long been cooperation (Trilateral Cooperation, for example, between the US, Japan and Europe was set up as early as 1983) I’ve been detecting an increase in the number of press releases in this area, and the number of mooted pilots and activities. So, being the obsessive that I am, I thought I’d collect together what’s been going on - at least as published, that I can find - and offer a few thoughts and questions that these developments raise. (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…)

You will find, after a period of seriously heavy blogging recently owing to the Australian Copyright Amendment Bill, this blog will be a lot less active in the next while.

I’m in Melbourne, but preparing for a permanent move to the University of Queensland, site of the excellent ACIPA research centre on IP in January, and in any event, the urgency has gone out of the whole blogging thing now that the Bill is more or less done and dusted. We are all a bit copyrighted and commented and submissioned and discussioned out.

But there’s a couple of interesting things going on: one in open access in Australia, one in copyright in Germany. More over the fold… (more…)

As we await the implementation of the OzDMCA, it’s been interesting to follow the debates, over in Europe and elsewhere, about Apple’s iTunes/iPod link. The basic issue here is that iTunes-purchased music can only be played on Apple iPod players - unless, of course, you hack the Apple FairPlay encryption (which can be done using various well-known methods).

The issue, of course, is that if someone buys a whole bunch of iPod music, then you get lock in - they’ll be more reluctant to move to another player. The technological protection, in other words, might serve to raise barriers to entry in the music player market. It’s attracted a bunch of attention recently. Here’s the brief summary:

1. A few people got very excited when Microsoft announced it would be coming out with a new player/music service, so far named Zune, and that, to get out of this lock-in system, Microsoft would be looking to replace, for new users, any music they’d bought on iTunes. Have a look at the debate over on Freedom-to-Tinker (Post 1 and Post 2);
2. In France, we had the DADVSI law - originally seen as potentially ‘forcing’ FairPlay open, the final form of the law has, according to reports, seen the provisions on interoperability eviscerated (see the Wikipedia entry on DADVSI here)
3. Now, in Scandinavia, we have news today that Apple Computer Inc. met a Tuesday deadline with a 50 page response to Scandinavian regulatory claims that Apple is violating their laws by making its market-leading iPod the only compatible portable player for iTunes downloads. So far, the response is confidential.

What’s that phrase? Stay tuned? And perhaps watch for what the effect of any Australian law will be on all this…

Today’s funny moment is from The Australian, which is carrying a story that French cosmetic company L’Oreal has won a copyright suit against a Dutch company for copying a perfume. The story appears to have originated in The Times, but does not as yet appear to have been widely syndicated. The bizarre thing, of course, is how such a claim could be brought in copyright. (more…)

For the first time, the Court of First Instance has annuled the European Commission’s approval of a company merger. In January 2004, Sony and BMG notified the Commission that they intended to merge their worldwide music recording businesses (except for Japan) into a joint venture. In July 2004 the Commission approved the joint venture in Europe, and SonyBMG started business.

This week, in an action brought against the Commission’s decision by Impala, an organisation representing 2,500 independent music publishing and record labels, the CFI ruled that the Commission had failed to satisfy the legal requirement that the combined music recording businesses of Sony and BMG would not come to hold monopoly power.

What this decision means for the joint venture is unclear–reports state that Sony and BMG will need to lodge a new notice, and the Commission will undertake a new analysis of the transaction. But the conclusion reached could be the same. If it is not, it will be interesting to see how a joint venture that has been operating for two years will be unravelled.

From GrokLaw, the District Court of Amsterdam has upheld the validity of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. Adam Curry, a well-known media figure now living in Holland, posted some pictures of his family on photo-sharing site Flickr (his profile appears to be here). The photos carried a notice saying “This photo is public”, and were published under a non-commercial Creative Commons licence. A Dutch magazine reprinted four of the photos in a story on Curry and his children. (more…)

Following on my post the other day about courts ordering the release of “private” data about net usage, an interesting case in point is a decision of the Dutch Supreme Court in late November, which ordered Lycos to reveal the identity of a user of one of its websites who had anonymously posted slanderous (or potentially slanderous) allegations against a postage stamp dealer. (more…)

It is far too hot and sticky this morning in Melbourne to spend vast amounts of time blogging. (hmmm, theory, how does weather affect blogging? More blogging if colder and stuck inside..?).

Four interesting stories today though, on the continuing Copyright and Politics saga in Canada, on the take-down of Wikipedia Germany, on Google Subpoenas and on the question of who owns the news in the US? More over the fold. (more…)

If you want to know what they’re talking about in trade mark law in the US, you might want to head over to 43(b)log: in particular the posts summarising proceedings from the AALS Section on IP - Parts one, two, three, and four.

In other trade mark news, IPKat reports an ECJ decision (scroll down to C-361/04 P (2006-01-12) Ruiz-Picasso and Others v OHIM) on whether the mark PICARO for vehicles would be likely to be confused with an earlier mark, PICASSO (registered, inter alia, for vehicles). (more…)

As expected, earlier this week a the Vastmanland district court in Sweden handed down the nation’s first decision on Internet file sharing. (more…)

This week has had some mixed results for Google Print. The good news: Google Print has rolled out additional efforts to serve European users. The bad news: the Google Print Library Project has attracted another lawsuit in the United States, this time from the Association of American Publishers, objecting to the company’s “opt out” approach for scanning copyright works. (more…)