LawFont.com

WSJ.com has a story on how Microsoft last year reversed its approach to writing Vista (aka Longhorn), the replacement for Win XP, and adopted a much more modular approach in the code. I’m rather surprised that they weren’t doing this already. It isn’t a good feeling to think that XP tends towards spaghetti code.

In December 2004, Google announced its Library Project — an initiative to index the book collections of Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library, and make their content searchable online. As with all things interesting to do with the Net and intellectual property, this project has not been uncontroversial. (more…)

Hmm, Google has just launched the Google Blog Search. Looks very interesting, and rather fast too…

Some more links to peoples’ comments on Kazaa:

1. a couple of articles are available on Online Opinion: including this piece by Stephen Peach (ARIA), and this piece by Stephen Abood.
2. Michael Madison’s views (University of Pittsburgh) – interesting comments comparing US and Australian approaches to legal development.
3. Phil Tripp’s views are here (Tripp is a music business type person, and runs the website themusic.com.au, a news/commentary portal for music biz)
4. Brendan Scott’s views here (pdf)
5. Ed Felten’s comments on Kazaa are here.
6. Kathy Bowrey’s Comments (and comments on many other digital copyright and ‘piracy’ issues) here.
7. David Starkoff (recommended – don’t agree with him on everything but it’s an interesting view);
8. IPKat (just saying it seems a sensible result. Of course, that’s not the issue – the issue is the reasoning, which is problematic for reasons I’ve outlined and Matt Rimmer has also underlined in his comment on this and Geists’ blog, quoted in Starkoff).

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The decision in the Australian KaZaA case (Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings Ltd [2005] FCA 1242) has been published.

The New York Times has also published an article on the decision, and gives a useful history of KaZaA since its launch in 2001.

It is clear that this decision will have implications beyond Australia’s shores. For some detailed comments on the decision, see Kim’s post.

I’ve already put up fairly extensive (albeit initial) comments on Kazaa below. I’m not, of course, the only one to comment on the case: here are some more links:

• Michael Geist on how the Kazaa judgment shows that Australian and Canadian copyright law are moving apart;
• The Australian (news story)
• Copyfight (reporting the story)

It’s not much – but I’ve not yet found all that much apart from news stories.

Let me know if you find more commentary that I should link to here. Also, if there is anyone out there with some comments they want to post, feel free to put them in the comments box or, if that’s just too annoying, email them to me so I can post them direct to the blog.

The Federal Court of Australia has ruled that the developers of peer-to-peer file sharing software infringes copyright in music recordings. Although the decision has not been posted yet, it has been reported on in the Australian press.

Interesting, Justice Wilcox has not ordered for the KaZaA system to be shut down, but for the technology to be modified so that instances of copyright infringement are reduced.

So today, senior Australian Federal Court judge Justice Wilcox handed down his decision in the trial of the Kazaa case. In this case, over 30 applicants – in essence, copyright owners – sued the companies and individuals involved in providing Kazaa software. They alleged all kinds of things, but the essence of the case is this question:

By providing P2P file-sharing software (and through all their other activities), did the respondents (Sharman companies, Altnet companies, and assorted individual directors) authorise the undoubted copyright infringement done by the users of the software?

The result?

• The Sharman companies did authorise infringement. They did not engage in other forms of infringement/illegality alleged by the copyright owners (including direct infringement, conspiracy, misleading conduct under the TPA or unconscionable conduct);
• The directors/head honchos in Sharman are liable for authorising infringement too;
• Some of the other parties avoided liability.

The Australian are calling it ‘The Day the Music Died’ (a bit odd, given that the market has, of course, moved on from the Kazaa system). Below are some initial thoughts.

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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.

A story from the Times-Picayune on a possible further problem for some of the unfortunate folk who have survived the hurricane: will there still be a record of their home ownership and mortgage status?

According to the article:

“one of the biggest legal ramifications of Hurricane Katrina’s flooding waters is the probable loss of real estate records dating back to the early 1800s. The records, which include titles, mortgages, conveyances and liens, were stored in the now-flooded basement of City Hall on Poydras Street.

In 2002, employees of Register of Conveyances Gasper Schiro began the tedious process of hand entering the records into computers, a $700,000 process that could have been contracted out and accomplished quickly but was instead done slowly by his staff to save money.”

This scenario shows the importance of true offsite data backup.

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…)

…which I thought was kind of interesting. And no, I’m not talking about the religious theme (warning, disturbingly twee photo of Alexander Downer behind that link).

Rather, I’m talking about the technology theme. And not just down in the technology section of the page. Up on the sidebar, quite high up, We have stories about the continuing sales of iPods, about the rise and rise of podcasting, and about digital TV – a story about how the BBC is launching an internet service allowing people to download its TV shows for later viewing, which will use a proprietary piece of software called the BBC Interactive Media Player (iMP), which apparently will use P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing technology.
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