LawFont.com

An article published in The Wall Street Journal Online (posted 31 August 2005) reports that a company has sued the owner of a blog for comments posted on his site by readers about the company. This case, should it proceed to trial, will raise very interesting issues that are similar to those recently raised in Australia in Universal Music v Cooper , which considered the liability of a website operator for links to infringing mp3s installed on his website by third parties. Although this case does not concern copyright law, but instead defamation and the misappropriation of trade sercrets, it considers the liability of a website operator for the actions of third parties. (more…)

The Register reports that DVD Jon has hacked Media Player file encryption (it’s the Microsoft NSC format which obfuscates the location of the stream being downloaded). It would be interesting to see the rationale offered for encrypting the data about the stream in the first place.

So I’ve been giving some thought to this question of – apart from the exceptions specifically allowed by Article 17.4.7 of the AUSFTA, just what additional exceptions might be required? You may recall that it is only to this, limited question that the Terms of Reference of the LACA refer.

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Last week, a review was announced dealing with the drafting of Australia’s new anti-circumvention laws. For those who joined us late, basically, anti-circumvention laws are laws which seek to control how people interact with technologies used by copyright owners to control use and/or access to copyright-protected material. We have to draft new laws, to replace the current law in s 116A of the Copyright Act, because of the AUSFTA, Article 17.4.7. Article 17.4.7 is based on the US law, the DMCA.
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Here’s an interesting one: a judgment from Branson J regarding an order made by the Patent Office revoking an innovation patent.

What’s interesting is that the case looks pretty much like a pure business method patent.

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I’ve been reading the submissions made in the Attorney-General’s Inquiry into Copyright Exceptions (colloquially known as the Fair Use Inquiry, or the iPod Inquiry).

Some time ago I mused in blogprint whether the AG would make submissions available online. So far, this does not appear to have occurred. But quite a large number of submissions are available online, and I’ve been spending a bit of time trawling (and then reading). Here’s a list of what I’ve found so far (once again, let me know if I’ve missed anything):
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On 13 July, the Court of Appeal ruled in BHB v William Hill, the long-awaited UK case applying the European database right. The judgment, which is the result of an appeal from Justice Laddie’s decision in the Chancery Division of the High Court, applied the findings of the European Court of Justice regarding the interpretation of the database right. The result was that the BHB database was ruled as not falling within the scope of the law’s protection, as it was not the result of a “substantial investment” in either the obtaining, verification, or presentation of the contents of the database, as required by Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9. (more…)

The New York Times has reportedthe increased use of tattooing technology to identify individual pieces of fruit with pricing and other information. Since 9/11, the United States government has been encouraging fruit suppliers to experiment with different ways to “track and trace” produce. Different ways of identifying fruit with “PLU” (price look-up number) numbers is being tested, among them tattooing and scannable bar-coding etched into the wax coating a piece of fruit. The idea is to replace those annoying little stickers.

In 2002, Georgia fruit grower and distributer Durand-Wayland bought the patent for a process that etches the PLU number and any other information directly into the skin of the fruit. The process permanently tattoos each piece of fruit, without piercing the skin.

Australia’s first decision involving the legality of linking was delivered last week. The good news for bloggers is that linking itself is not at risk. Providing links to infringing material is not such a good idea, though, especially when the material is owned by major music studios. (more…)

The Seattle Times is reporting that Amazon has sued Cendant alleging infringement of patents. The story is thin on details, but the patents are supposed to be “e-commerce” patents, and Amazon contends they were infringed when using tools “to secure credit-card transactions”. It will be interesting to analyse the claims (and the patents) when further details emerge.

Cendant sued Amazon last year, claiming infringement of a patent for recommending choices to buyers based on previous ordering history.

Groklaw is reporting that it has a copy of a 13 August 2002 email from an expert hired by SCO to look into whether any code had been copied from AT&T Unix into Linux.

It is interesting reading and does not bode well for SCO. The money quote: “At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.”

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Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock announced yesterday the appointment of Andrew Greenwood as a Judge of the Federal Court of Australia. Greenwood is currently a partner of law firm Minter Ellison, where he leads their Competition and Regulatory Policy practice in Brisbane. He also has experience in the areas of intellectual property law and commercial litigation.

Greenwood is currently Queensland Chair of the Intellectual Property and Trade Practices Committees of the Law Council of Australia, and is an Adjunct Professor in the fields of intellectual property and competition law at the TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland. Greenwood is replacing Justice Richard Cooper, who passed away earlier this year.

The New York Times reports that business is booming for manufacturers of cheap DVDs. An increasing number of titles, typically old films and cartoons, are being priced in the US$0.99 to US$1.99 range, the low price a reflection of the fact that these works are no longer protected by copyright.

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Not everyone is very happy about Google these days. The Association of American University Presses believes that Google’s plan to digitise the libraries of Oxford University and others will result in widespread copyright infringement. And a journalist at Wired.com has warned readers that Google is doing its best to collect more and more information on its users, noting that “Google is big, bad, ubiquitous, and whipping Microsoft, the dominatrix of the desktop.”

Have things really become that bad? I for one do not mind the targetted advertising that I see when I check my Gmail account. If Google has a little information on me that it uses to create advertising, I don’t mind so long as it’s discreetly displayed on the side of my screen. It is certainly a far sight better than the pseudo-pornographic spam that I receive at Hotmail.