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EFF's Teaching Copyright curriculum was created to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way. Teaching Copyright provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law. In five distinct lessons, students are challenged to: * Reflect on what they already know about copyright law. * See the connection between the history of innovation and the history of copyright law. * Learn about fair use, free speech, and the public domain and how those concepts relate to using materials created by others. * Experience various stakeholders' interests and master the principles of fair use through a mock trial. Teaching Copyright will require your students to think about their role in the online world and provide them with the legal framework they need to make informed choices about their online behavior.

"When Canada started a consultation on implementing these treaties in June, 2001, one of the first books I read was Jessica Litman's book "Digital Copyright". The website for the book is Digital-Copyright.com, and the similarity to the Digital-Copyright.ca name is not a coincidence. This book is the journey in the United States from 1993 and the Bruce Lehman Working Group, through the policy-laundering of their harmful ideas through WIPO in 1996, to the passage of the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998. This is likely the best book to understand how the USA got their DMCA, and by extension why this harmful policy is now being pushed into Canada. It should be noted that even Bruce Lehman has stated publicly that his Clinton-era policies didn't work out well. Probably the best resource for understanding how the DMCA has harmed (and continues to harm) the United States is to read the DMCA archives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This includes the paper Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA from April, 2006."

CNN, copyright and censorship? It is a kind of censorship, I think we can say by now, to cynically use the copyright laws to shut down embarrassing publication of obviously non-infringing works. It's particularly ugly when media outlets do it, though. Yet that's what Patterico says is going on right now with a video that showed a CNN reporter being a little too partisan at a "tea party," formerly available on YouTube (most recently reposted here). Let's cut to the legal mumbo-jumbo, which is what we're all about here after all - as Patterico puts it, "As to the validity of the copyright claim, let me turn over the megaphone to Ben Sheffner of Copyrights and Campaigns":

The government recently released Decree 47, raising the maximum fine for copyright infringement from 70 million to 500 million dong. The highest fine will be imposed in the following cases: appropriating copyrights, directly or indirectly copying shows, directly or indirectly copying visual and audio recording works, copying broadcasting programmes, appropriating related rights. The decree also stipulates supplementary forms of punishment and measures to repair damages. Vietnam Literary Copyright Centre Director Doan Thi Lam Luyen said: "The new decree is harsher but it is insufficient if only a fine is applied. While someone who steals a chicken or a cow faces imprisonment, stealing intellectual products only results in a fine." The new decree will take effect on June 30, 2009.

China's largest Internet search engine, Baidu, was said to be "responsible for the vast majority of illegal downloading of music in China, deriving significant advertising revenue." But last month China issued an IPR protection plan involving 28 ministries and organizations that had 170 concrete measures to fight copyright infringement. Also, the Supreme People's Court raised compensation for victims from 500,000 yuan ($73,000) to more than 1 million yuan ($146,000). Last year, China closed 192 websites that profited from copyright infringement and uncovered 5719 cases of copyright infringement, Commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office Tian Lipu said.

"I think the trend is now clear. There have been a number of cases in the last five years and if you look at the way they have been decided - the Kazaa case in Australia clearly referred to the American [Grokster] decision and just tweaked the law in a way that suited the rights holders. In Belgium, an ISP [Scarlet] was forced to implement filtering [June 2007, Belgian Society of Authors Composers and Publishers (SABAM) v Scarlet, Brussels Court of First Instance, currently under appeal]; there was a case in Finland [June 2008, Finnish Court of Appeal, where administrators of P2P site Finreactor were sued on an individual basis and 21 people were jointly fined €500,000 ($647,284) for copyright infringement and assisting copyright infringement; 14 are appealing] where the BitTorrent super-users were found guilty and they pleaded they were only linking. So I do see that trend." [...] "The big frustration is that we act for all these legal services who pay lots of money to the rights holders, and it's almost impossible to get licenses. They are so expensive and the process is so slow. Two or three years can go by and you can throw millions at trying to get a compelling service launched, and there are obstacles in the way all the time. Pandora is a great example, it's just not possible [to operate it in Europe]. We also advise Last.fm and MySpace, it's just so much hard work. This is the irony: they [labels] complain about piracy and then you walk in the door with a new service with some VC funding and an amazing bit of software that is essentially promoting and selling their content. But they say 'we are not moving unless you give us an advance of $5 million plus equity."

About Copyright and the Collections Content found on the WDL Web site is contributed by WDL partners. Copyright questions about partner content should be directed to that partner. When publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in a WDL partner's collections, the researcher has the obligation to determine and satisfy domestic and international copyright law or other use restrictions.

We found it rather ironic that, just as French President Nicolas Sarkozy was so adamant about passing a three strikes law to kick file sharers off the internet, he was being accused of copyright infringement himself, specifically for using music from the US band MGMT at an event and in two online videos without securing a license. Now, you might hope that this would cause Sarkozy to rethink his stance on copyright infringement. Instead, it looks like his political party has simply agreed to pay up and make the issue go away, while still pushing for the three strikes law. It sounds like they paid about 30,000 euros, which is a lot more than the single euro that Sarkozy's party initially offered (yes, seriously). No word on whether or not this counts towards the number of strikes on Sarkozy's internet connection.

On considering copyright as a crime. Includes a lengthy quotation by Sir Hugh Laddie.

The latest debate in the legal world is that intellectual property right (IPR) laws, meant to protect original creations, are serving private and not public interest. In order to highlight this fact, two students from Gujarat National Law University (GNLU), Gandhinagar, have authored a book on IPR laws. The book, Copyright Law Deskbook Knowledge, Access and Development, by Akhil Prasad and Aditi Agarwala examines the growing significance of IPR in today's knowledge-based economy. "In the chapter 'Debunking the Myth,' we have argued that the term intellectual property is a misnomer and should be replaced with the term intellectual asset. The term 'property' is tilted more towards private interests," says Prasad. The duo has also drawn attention to the fact that currently converting any book into Braille comes under copyright infringement and should be changed. "Whenever you convert a book into any other form without the author's knowledge, it is infringement of the copyright law and this holds true for books converted into Braille as well. Since it is difficult to take permission for each book before it is converted into Braille, we have drawn attention to the fact that this issue needs to be addressed," says Agarwala. Both Prasad and Agarwala started taking interest in IPR laws while pursuing their internship in Mumbai. "We had prepared an exhaustive 70-page petition on IPR during our internship. When we showed it to our former registrar he suggested we convert it into a booklet. However, we soon realised that there was a lot to write about and many issues needed to be addressed. So, we decided to author a 400-page book instead," says Agarwala.

Against widespread dissent and controversy MEPs in the European Parliament voted this morning to allow copyright term extension to pass a first reading. 4 out of the 7 main groups (ALDE, GREENS/EFA, NGL, IND/ DEM) together with a cross party platform of MEPs voted to reject the proposal. Internal opposition threatened the group positions of the two largest parties (PSE and EPP) as several national delegations and key MEPS also joined the fight to reject. We understand that, in total, 222 voted in favour of rejection, 370 against. The final vote was 317 in favour, 178 against, 37 abstentions. A key amendment to ensure benefits accrued only to performers was also rejected.

"In this article the author examines the impact that copyright law has on the issue of censorship and government regulation of mass media. The author states that copyright legislation pits international media conglomerates that control the availability of their products, against the consumer right to have access to information resources at a reasonable charge. It is suggested that the court cases Huntsman v. Soderbergh and Universal Studios v. Reimerdes tilted the advantage toward the proprietors of mass media outlets and away from consumers."

A landmark study by the Institute of European Media Law (EML) found that a levy on internet usage legalising non-commercial online exchanges of creative works conforms with German and European copyright law, even though it requires changes in both. The German and European factions of the Green Party who had commissioned the study will make the "culture flat-rate," as the model is being called in Germany, an issue in their policies. The global debate on a new social contract between creatives and society is getting more pronounced by the day. Two models are emerging: a free-market approach based on private blanket licences and voluntary subscriptions, and a legal licence approach based on exceptions in copyright law and mandatory levies, that now has been proven legally feasible and appropriate by the EML study.

"Meeting of the 14th session of the Intergovernmental Committee on the Universal Copyright Convention as revised in 1971 . 7-9 June, 2010 UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, France. "

"I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you're out, mate."

From Thimpu: We have our own Pirate Bay: the Indian city of Jaigoan, where Bhutanese films and music are rampantly pirated by Indian vendors. Local film and music producers would like to see similar action taking place against these pirates, but the problem is they are not operating on Bhutanese territory. Therefore, being outside the copyright law enforcement abilities of our government, our authorities have not taken any legal action, nor are there any plans to do so.

These are two speeches given by Thomas Macaulay in Parliament in 1841, when the issue of copyright was being hammered out. They are, no other word for it, brilliant - and cover everything fundamental which is involved in the issue.

Anti-piracy groups and lawyers across Europe are unmovable - they say that since they logged a copyright infringement from a particular IP address, the bill payer is responsible. Now a court in Rome has decided that on the contrary, an IP address does not identify an infringer, only a particular connection.

April 22, 2009: TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The Legislative Yuan ratified yesterday the latest revision of the Copyright Law to empower Internet service providers (ISPs) to "strike out" Internet surfers who have violated others' copyrights and posted unauthorized content on any Web sites.

Repository of Spanish cases on hyperlinking to copyrighted material. In Spanish.