Group items tagged

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.

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.

In general, discussions at the conference covered four main points. The first is that official free access to law is not enough. Full free access requires a range of different providers and competitive republishing by third parties, which in turn requires an anti-monopoly policy on the part of the creator of legal information.... Second, countries must find a balance between the potential for commercial exploitation of information and the needs of the public. This is particularly relevant to open access to publicly funded research. The third point concerns effective access to, and re-usability of, legal information. Effective access requires that most governments promote the use of technologies that improve access to law, abandoning past approaches such as technical restrictions on the reuse of legal information. It is important that governments not only allow, but also help others to reproduce and re-use their legal materials, continually removing any impediments to re-publication. Finally, international cooperation is essential to providing free access to law. One week before the Florence event, the LII community participated in a meeting of experts organised by the Hague Conference on Private International Law's Permanent Bureau; a meeting entitled "Global Co-operation on the Provision of On-line Legal Information." Among other things, participants discussed how free, on-line resources can contribute to resolving trans-border disputes. At this meeting, a general consensus was reached on the need for countries to preserve their legal materials in order to make them available....

The strategy contains more than thirty concrete recommendations for improvement, falling into six main categories. First, we will lead by example. Specifically, we will work to ensure that we do not mistakenly purchase or use illegal products. Second, the strategy underscores that this Administration supports transparency. That includes transparency in our development of enforcement policy, information sharing, and reporting of law enforcement activities at home and abroad. Third, we will improve coordination and thereby increase efficiency and effectiveness of law enforcement efforts at the Federal, state and local level, of personnel stationed overseas and of our international training efforts. Fourth, we will work with our trading partners and within international organizations to better enforce American intellectual property rights in the global economy. In that regard, we will initiate a comprehensive review of current efforts in support of U.S. businesses that have difficulty enforcing their intellectual property rights in overseas markets, with a particular focus on China. Fifth, we must secure our supply chain. To achieve this most important goal, we will take a close look at the unique problems posed by foreign-based websites and other entities that provide access to counterfeit or pirated products, and develop a coordinated and comprehensive plan to address them. We will make sure our law enforcement has the authority it needs to secure the supply chain and also encourage industry to work collaboratively to address unlawful activity on the internet, such as illegal downloading and illegal internet pharmacies. Sixth, and finally, we will make sure we spend your money wisely, a process we have already begun. To do that, we have, and will continue to collect and track the amount of money we spend on intellectual property enforcement per year. We will use this information to map out the most effective way to fight this theft.

Excellent collection of articles on the public conciousness of the law (the Tamil Nadu Goondas Act) and its interactions with everyday affairs (video piracy).

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.

"The Three Laws of Open Government Data: 1. If it can't be spidered or indexed, it doesn't exist 2. If it isn't available in open and machine readable format, it can't engage 3. If a legal framework doesn't allow it to be repurposed, it doesn't empower"

Consider three questions. How would one decide if there was too much telecommunications surveillance in the United States, or too little? How would one know if law enforcement was using its surveillance capabilities in the most effective fashion? How would one assess the impact of this collection of information on civil liberties? In answering these questions, a necessary step, the logical first move, would be to examine existing data about governmental surveillance practices and their results. One would also need to examine and understand how the legal system generated these statistics about telecommunications surveillance. Ideally, the information structure would generate data sets that would allow the three questions posed above to be answered. Light might also be shed on other basic issues, such as whether or not the amount of telecommunications surveillance was increasing or decreasing.

In this editorial, Paul M. Schwartz asks the question: "How can we know if law enforcement is using its surveillance capacities in the most effective fashion?" and points out that "neither the government nor outside experts know the basic facts about our surveillance practices." "Ideally, we would answer these questions by examining data about government surveillance practices and their results. Sadly, rational inquiry about telecommunications surveillance is prevented by the haphazard and incomplete information that the government collects about its own behavior."

The new policy will allow businesses to place trademarked terms directly in the copy of text advertisements that run in the U.S. starting next month, the company announced in a blog post on Thursday. The move, which Google said will improve the quality of its advertisements, comes as advertisers have begun bidding less money for the individual search terms that their ads appear alongside and as Google's revenue growth slows in the dismal economic climate. Until now, Google has forbidden companies from placing trademarked terms in their advertising copy unless they owned the trademark or had explicit permission from the trademark owners. Brand owners have historically had serious concerns about Google's policy with regards to trademarks, said Eric Goldman, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law.

"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."

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.

The bank has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website. Florida-based Mr Morgan began a blog entitled "Facts about Goldman Sachs" - the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com - just a few weeks ago.

Recently, countries from China and Brazil to Malaysia and South Africa have passed laws promoting the patenting of publicly funded research [1,2], and a similar proposal is under legislative consideration in India [3]. These initiatives are modeled in part on the United States Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 [4]. Bayh-Dole (BD) encouraged American universities to acquire patents on inventions resulting from government-funded research and to issue exclusive licenses to private firms [5,6], on the assumption that exclusive licensing creates incentives to commercialize these inventions. A broader hope of BD, and the initiatives emulating it, was that patenting and licensing of public sector research would spur science-based economic growth as well as national competitiveness [6,7]. And while it was not an explicit goal of BD, some of the emulation initiatives also aim to generate revenues for public sector research institutions [8]. We believe government-supported research should be managed in the public interest. We also believe that some of the claims favoring BD-type initiatives overstate the Act's contributions to growth in US innovation. Important concerns and safeguards-learned from nearly 30 years of experience in the US-have been largely overlooked. Furthermore, both patent law and science have changed considerably since BD was adopted in 1980 [9,10]. Other countries seeking to emulate that legislation need to consider this new context.

This site endeavours to provide access to national copyright and related rights legislation of UNESCO Member States. The collection currently comprises about 100 laws and is constantly being updated and completed.

BERLIN (Reuters) - The German cabinet backed a new draft law Wednesday that would make it harder to access child pornography online and easier to prosecute those who use it. The bill will oblige Internet providers to block access to child porn sites by installing a "stop" sign when people try to enter them, the German ministries for justice, families and the economy said in a joint news conference.

An excellent legal analysis of caching and its implications on copyright law.

"Where then do solutions lie? Not in seeing any particular tool, movement, struggle or law as the magic wand. That only takes us to the same mindset which has resulted in our democratic institutions becoming perverted versions of what they were meant to be. Democracy in the last 50 years has been manipulated so that democratic participation has been reduced to a vote once every five years. Asserting one's right to participate in decision-making in an everyday sense, rather than once every five years, carries with it the responsibility of using that space. The dispossessed are always prepared to seize any new space. Indian democracy will only reflect the peoples' voice if it changes its emphasis from the present representative character to a genuine participation of the people themselves. And here lies the burden on all of us. The battle is for more than a right to ask, more than a right to monitor; indeed it is an important first step in an assertion to be heard and to call the bluff of a democratic system. By the people? Of the people? For the people?"

"In fact, more than combating corruption, the RTI campaign can serve as an effective tool to control the arbitrary use of power, and combat the failure of regulatory mechanisms in maintaining the rule of law. In all arenas - whether in economic policy or human rights - the need to make the matter public can act as a constraint on misgovernance. In this framework, the right to information is both a basic principle and a tool to enhance the political participation of ordinary citizens, where ethics and accountability work both ways - for the government to inform and people themselves to be more ethical in public life. By reinserting public ethics into our political discourse, it reinforces a position that no real alternative politics is possible without firmly establishing public ethics."

"The six classes of works are: (1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances: (i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students; (ii) Documentary filmmaking; (iii) Noncommercial videos (2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset. (3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network. (4) Video games accessible on personal computers and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully obtained works, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing for, investigating, or correcting security flaws or vulnerabilities, if: (i) The information derived from the security testing is used primarily to promote the security of the owner or operator of a computer, computer system, or computer network; and (ii) The information derived from the security testing is used or maintained in a manner that does not facilitate copyright infringement or a violation