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[Thad]

Well, no shit, but it sounds like they've got good lawyers.

Moreover, I find it pretty hard to believe that the current SCOTUS would rule that the government can just take people's websites down without evidence, if it were to come to that.

I expect this to come down to a tidy settlement and the Justice Department thinking twice next time.

[Thad]

Ars: Fair use (mostly) triumphant: Judge exonerates campus "e-reserves"

It's a narrow ruling but a good one and potentially important; the upshot is that a single chapter copied from a reference text for educational purposes is fair use.

A couple highlights:

In a massive 350-page ruling (PDF) handed down on Friday, the judge overseeing the case dug deep into the questions surrounding fair use and concluded that copyright was meant to promote the writing of more books. And, the judge concluded, "There is no reason to believe that allowing unpaid, nonprofit academic use of small excerpts in controlled circumstances would diminish creation of academic works."

So—crushing victory for Georgia State, whose professors can now dance gleefully through the ash of their foes in publishing? Not quite. After years of litigation, the case came down to 75 particular items that the publishers argued were infringing. Five unlicensed excerpts (from four different books) did exceed the amount allowed under factor three above. These books include The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in both its second and third editions, along with The Power Elite and the no-doubt-scintillating tome Utilization-Focused Evaluation (Third Edition).

While the university had issued a 2009 guide designed to help faculty know when they needed a license for excerpts, the judge found that the policy "did not limit copying in those instances to decidedly small excerpts as required by this Order. Nor did it proscribe the use of multiple chapters from the same book."

Still, copyright and fair use can be murky, and the judge found no bad faith on the school's part, concluding: "The truth is that fair use principles are notoriously difficult to apply."

[McDohl]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/23/xbox-360-sales-ban-for-us-recommended-by-judge

Motorola is seeking action against Microsoft because...um, money?

It has to do with video codecs and Wi-fi functionality, and, while I can't verify it independently, apparently Motorola released these architectures in to the realm of free usage.  If this goes through, Motorola would be entitled to a slice of that fat X-Box pie.

[Thad]

Judge dismisses Apple/Motorola patent suits with prejudice.

Judge Richard Posner previously canceled a jury trial in Chicago in the case, and then castigated both Apple and Motorola while calling the entire US patent system "chaos."

[...]

Posner complained that Apple's attempt to get an injunction restricting the sale of Motorola phones would have "catastrophic effects" on the mobile device market and consumers. He further criticized Motorola for trying to use a standards-essential patent to get an injunction against Apple.

Good step towards patent sanity.

[Thad]

And in a good step AWAY from patent sanity: Judge bars sales of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 in US.

[Thad]

Meanwhile, Patent trolling cost the US $29 BILLION in 2011, according to research by the Boston U School of Law.

While high-profile cases – by NPEs [non-practicing entities, ie companies that own patents but don't actually use them] the researchers describe as “big game hunters” – give the impression that patent trolling is mostly between giant corporations, the researchers noted that the median defendant had annual revenue of $US10.8 million, and 82 percent of actions were launched against companies with less than $US100 million in annual revenue.

[...]

It should be noted that this research focused only on the NPE business model – it didn’t take into account the increasingly bitter, frivolous and expensive patent spats between active vendors such as Apple, Motorola, Samsung and the rest.

[Thad]

Just when I'm considering deleting The Reg from my RSS feed, it posts something that's actually edifying.

US mulls outlawing rival product bans using standards patents

The US Congress is holding a hearing today to consider whether companies that own standards-essential patents (SEP) should be allowed to use them to get sales and import bans on their rivals' products.

That Congress is even having this conversation is a step in the right direction.  A tiny one, but still a step.

[Thad]

More in the Superman case.

Shuster's heirs (his sister and nephew) are poised to seek termination for their half of the property next year.  But DC has just released documentation indicating that they already signed a contract agreeing NOT to seek termination.

Following this discussion, the parties executed an agreement on October 2, 1992. It confirmed that DC would cover Shuster’s debts and pay Jean $25,000 a year for the rest of her life. SUF 19. In exchange, Jean and Frank re-granted all of Joe Shuster’s rights (including any Superman copyrights) to DC and vowed never to assert a claim to such rights. The 1992 Agreement stated, in pertinent part:

We [DC] ask you to confirm by your signatures below that this agreement fully settles all claims to any payments or other rights or remedies which you may have under any other agreement or otherwise, whether now or hereafter existing regarding any copyrights, trademarks, or other property right in any and all work created in whole or in part by your brother, Joseph Shuster, or any works based thereon. In any event, you now grant us any such rights and release us, our licensees and all others acting with our permission, and covenant not to assert any claim of right, by suit or otherwise, with respect to the above, now and forever. SUF 19 (emphasis added).

via

[Caithness]

Shouldn't Superman be in the public domain by now? Or is that never going to happen because he was created after Mickey Mouse?

[Thad]

...I know this is a long thread, but that question is answered in the first post.  And repeatedly afterward.

Yes, Superman is still under copyright.  Yes, he got the same extension Mickey Mouse and every other corporate mascot got.  Yes, the original expiration would have been 56 years, or 1994 -- which is why the Siegel and Shuster heirs are entitled to reclaim the rights.

[Zaratustra]

How to defend yourself on the internet: Divide the insults between those directed to you and those directed to the company, then defend one with the arguments of the other.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-07-23-uniloc-founder-hits-back-after-minecraft-fans-vent-fury-in-disgusting-emails

[Thad]

So okay.  We've discussed previously that YouTube's ContentID system sucks.

Goes something like this: content owner uploads video; software looks for other videos that contain the same material.

As you can probably surmise, this pretty much fucks anybody who's using public domain or stock footage.  There are already multiple instances of videos of the Mars landing being taken down as  false positives.

And while Big Content is responsible for demanding that Google institute a system like this in the first damn place, in these specific instances it's not the people submitting their stuff to ContentID who are at fault, it's Google's fault for making ContentID suck.

Because here's the thing: you can TOTALLY create an original, copyrighted work -- say, a news broadcast -- that incorporates public-domain footage!  But ContentID has no mechanism for telling which parts are original and which are public domain!

Meanwhile, the fucking video gets taken down and is subject to a not-very-good review process.  Even if the people who (accidentally) got it taken down are scrambling to get it put back up again!

[Mongrel]

Google to downgrade search rankings of sites which are frequently reported for copyright violations

So now when I search for "Youtube.com" it'll come up on the fourth page?

Okay, I know that's not what they mean, but it's a bit of a dangerous precedent they're setting with major alterations to search patterns based on (mostly corporate) outside pressure. Of course they've done this before I think? But not on such a scale or with such a broad net. I really dislike the idea of a blatantly non-neutral search provider (even though none of them are truly so).

And of course, this risks opening the search results to massive gamesmanship.

[Thad]

Google to downgrade search rankings of sites which are frequently reported for copyright violations

Well, not exactly; they put the word "valid" in there and it's kind of an important word to define.

The biggest problem is, of course, the one I just got through talking about: completely fucking invalid copyright takedowns -- some of them automatic and even accidental!

I'm still inclined to think that Google should treat false copyright claims exactly the same regardless of whether they're from someone posting a video, or requesting a takedown of it.

You want to start penalizing sites that frequently post things they don't have the copyrights to, fine -- but you'd better fucking penalize Warner Music for its constant frivolous takedown claims while you're at it.

[JDigital]

Potentially open for abuse. Anyone can make a fraudulent DMCA takedown request and Google has to honour it.

It's bad enough on Youtube, but it'll be worse when it applies to all Google Search results.

However, I've always thought Google should do something about piracy sites blatantly appearing in search results. It's bad when the first link for an RPG book is a pirate PDF download.

[Thad]

Potentially open for abuse. Anyone can make a fraudulent DMCA takedown request and Google has to honour it.

Well, no, they don't.

I'm pretty damn sure that if I claimed I was the rightsholder for Thriller and submitted a takedown notice, it would not get taken down.

DMCA takedowns are dicey, but there's not actually an obligation to respond to ones that are patently frivolous and false.

So again, the question is, how does Google define "valid"?  It's clear from context that its definition falls somewhere short of "declared valid by a court of law".  So does "valid" mean "unchallenged"?

And that brings up the question of how QUICKLY this is going to happen.  If a site receives 2000 takedown notices in one day, does its pagerank immediately drop?  Or is it given a period of time to respond to the takedown notices?  If so, how long?

It's also probable that Google's definition of "copyright removal notice" is broader than simply DMCA takedown notices.  I'm thinking it probably includes YouTube ContentID, too -- and as I mentioned, ContentID is a piece of shit that recently took down the fucking Mars landing videos that my goddamn taxes paid for, fuck you Google.

That, really, is a kind of worst-case -- sites getting penalized, immediately and without a window for review, due to a false positive on flawed pattern-matching software aggressively enforcing a copyright claim that the supposed claimant never even made and is in fact frantically trying to reverse.

On the one hand, I'm sure Google's TOS are pretty fucking clear in disclaiming responsibility for fuckups like that.

On the other, seeing as Google is literally synonymous with the service it provides and YouTube occupies an equally dominant market position, a day could come when Google's capricious nonsense makes it legally vulnerable no matter what the TOS page says.

[Thad]

"You want me to do an order on 75 pages tonight? When, unless you're smoking crack, you know that these witnesses are not going to be called?" Koh shouted at Apple lawyers. "Who is going to call all these witnesses when you have less than four hours left?"

[...]

"Your honor, first of all, I'm not smoking crack," said Apple lawyer Bill Lee. "We have timed it out."

Apple lawyer Michael Jacobs also stepped forward, assuring her that they had done a time test, and could get through 20 witnesses today and tomorrow in its rebuttal case against Samsung. "We didn't mean to burden the court," he said.

"You filed 75 pages of objections!" shouted Koh. "What do you mean you didn't mean to burden the court?"

[Mongrel]

...and sometimes the gods are kind to us.

[Brentai]

I guess?  If Apple wasn't "that bunch of assholes with a crack team of lawyers" things wouldn't have gotten to this point.

[Friday]

If the gods were really kind that excerpt would have ended with Koh stealing Lee and Jacob's faces