Forty percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research for the People and the Press, get most of their international and national news from the Internet. This is up from 24 percent in a similar poll taken in September of 2007. This is the first time that the Internet has been more popular than newspapers, which dropped to 35 percent in this most recent poll. Television news, however, is still the most popular source, and is cited as the place where 70 percent of Americans get their national and international news.

A new report in a Swedish news site, IDG, recently reported (Google translation) that officials from the BSA are now admitting that their own statistics shouldn't be treated seriously or should be treated like a pinch of salt. From the report:

But the settlement would also create a class that includes millions of people who will never come forward. For the majority of books -- considered "orphan" works -- no one will claim ownership. The author may have died; the publisher might have gone out of business or doesn't respond to inquiries; the original contract has disappeared. Google would get an explicit, perpetual license to scan and sell access to these in-copyright but out-of-print orphans, which make up an estimated 50 to 70 percent of books published after 1923. No other provider of digital books would enjoy the same legal protection. The settlement also creates a Book Rights Registry that, in conjunction with Google, would set prices for all commercial terms associated with digital books. Broad access is the greatest promise of our digital age. Giving control over such access to one company, no matter how clever or popular, is a danger to principles we hold dear: free speech, open access to knowledge and universal education. Throughout history, those principles have been realized in libraries, publishers and legal systems. There are alternatives. Separate from the Google effort, hundreds of libraries, publishers and technology firms are already digitizing books, with the goal of creating an open, freely accessible system for people to discover, borrow, purchase and read millions of titles. It's not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen. Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation. Through a simple Web search, a student researching the life of John F. Kennedy should be able to find books from many libraries, and many booksellers -- and not be limited to one private library whose titles are available for a fee, controlled by a corporation that can dictate what we are allowed to read.

"I guess spending $350 for the lowest-capacity Meizu M8 can put too much strain on on our bank accounts in this economic environment, which is what the good people of MeiLi must be thinking when they made their own version of the M8 Apple iPhone clone. The MeiLi M8 is undeniably a lookalike of the Meizu M8, a phone generally acknowledged as the finest iPhone clone there ever was. The question is if the MeiLi M8 is a Meizu M8 clone and the latter is a clone of the iPhone, then theoretically Apple can sue MeiLi for copyright infringement, too. Right?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a new tack against piracy, Microsoft Corp. will make a series of investments in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, which has promised to clamp down on illegitimate software. Microsoft will build two new technology centers and make other investments in the wealthy city on China's east coast, with the aim to establish a model city where intellectual-property rights have greater protections than elsewhere in China. In October, Microsoft started sending out software updates that turned users' computer wallpapers black if they had a pirated Windows operating system, a move that sparked anger among some Chinese users.

The WIPO Broadcasting Treaty (officially, the WIPO Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations) is a proposal within the World Intellectual Property Organization to give broadcasters intellectual property rights in their signals, in addition to the copyrights held by the creators of the works. Public Knowledge opposes the treaty, as it would create numerous conflicts with existing copyright law and policy in the US, as well as creating an additional hurdle for any users of broadcast content.

You can now access full text articles from research journals published by NISCAIR! Presently full text facility is provided for six of the journals viz. IJBB, IJC-A, IJC-B, IJPAP, JSIR, & IJRSP,. For other journals, you can access abstracts. Full text of these journals will be made available in due course of time.

The Act contains some contentious provisions - such as Clause 79, which has been widely criticised as being "draconian". Some provisions recommended by the Parliamentary Committee had been rejected by the Union government - particularly Clause 73 relatin g to cyber cafes maintaining a registry of persons and Web sites logged into. The Bill has been passed in some undue haste, for reasons not very clear. In this regard, the points raised by the Opposition are valid because the Act lacks clarity in many re spects, and seems to have been drafted without adequate legal and, more important, technical inputs. It must be emphasised that the optimistic projections by organisations such as NASSCOM (the National Association for Software and Service Companies), that the Act would boost the volume of e-commerce in India from the current Rs.450 crores to over Rs.2,5 00 crores and to Rs.10,000 crores by 2002, are quite misplaced. First, in the Indian context, much of the e-commerce involves neither business-to-client (B2C) transactions nor business-to-business (B2B) transactions but largely revenue from advertising o n the Web. Therefore, it becomes difficult to term precisely what e-commerce is and to quantify its value. Secondly, the Act itself is not going to alter greatly the situation because, for one, as legal experts point out, even in the absence of the Act t he judiciary would not have dismissed an evidence just because it is in the nature of an e-mail or an electronic document. It would have been treated as circumstantial evidence to the case at hand, and the provisions in the Indian Penal Code and the Crim inal Procedure Code have sufficient interpretative room to provide for prosecution if such evidence is conclusive.

There has been much discussion in the free software community and in the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk. Nonetheless, following the close of the ISO-BRM meeting in Geneva, SFLC's clients and colleagues have continued to express uncertainty as to whether the OSP would adequately apply to implementations licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In response to these requests for clarification, we publicly conclude that the OSP provides no assurance to GPL developers and that it is unsafe to rely upon the OSP for any free software implementation, whether under the GPL or another free software license.

"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.

So maybe Coldplay is not a group of plagiarists; rather, it is a group of pop hacks working on tropes that the entire pop music industry since the 1950's has stolen from elsewhere. Originality is a tricky thing. Just ask Shepard Fairey.

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":

When the Pirate Bay verdict came in last Friday, many feared that the copyright holders would use it as ammunition against other sites. Indeed, Antipiratbyrån - the Swedish anti-piracy office - is now going after BitTorrent trackers with that verdict in hand. They demand that the trackers stop their activities, threatening them with legal action.

Along with alarmist predictions of the death of film, "She added that the industry is moving away from the anti-piracy campaigns based around social stigma, such as "Knockoff Nigel", with a more positive campaign called "You make the Movies" launched earlier this month emphasising that DVD sales and cinema tickets are part of the funding process for high quality content."

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....