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Viacom is maintaining its 2007 billion dollar lawsuit against Google (as it acquired YouTube in 2006), despite the latter continuous fervent denial. Though "Google argues that when YouTube promptly took down tens of thousands of videos after Viacom gave it notice, YouTube was within provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Viacom is stating that the infringement is taking the form of violating the 1998 Copyright Act. Which holds both content owners and systems operators responsible for the protection of copyrighted content online. After reading this article, a few questions come to mind: What can Google do to appease and keep the "integrity" of YouTube? and Isn't it interesting that Viacom only filed this $1 billion lawsuit AFTER Google had acquired YouTube? What can we say about interested parties possibly abusing copyright law?

Wow. It really is fascinating how people attempt to manipulate facts for personal gain through legal action. Now good business sense is collusion? My personal favorite comment on the article: "Good luck to him, he's 3 ignorant judges and 15 years in lawsuits away from winning"

Suing just to figure out who has the rights…

Companies are suing other websites that fail to hyperlink copyrighted materials. However, it seems excessive if it's just over a single photo.

The smart-phone is not only hardware, but software, which has already been patent-protected. In this competitive phone market, where Android takes the lead with 32% of the market, the onset of these legal battles began when Nokia accused Apple of infringing on its patents. The article maps out which companies are suing who and why.

The Country music duo the "Bellamy Brothers" are upset over Britney song title's resemblance to their 1979 hit but it seem they will not be suing the popstar.

I know that the Bellamy Brothers specifically mention the title, but I think they would have a much stronger case on the basis of "fixing" the double entendre within the song: the BB's lyrics are "If I said you had a beautiful body / would you hold it against me" vs. Britney's "If I said I want your body now / would you hold it against me." That's pretty startlingly similar, and even if you can't copyright ideas, you can copyright the expression of those ideas... and there's enough overlap between the two to be persuasive.

Now that I know copying a song title doesn't count as copyright infringement, I wonder what percentage of a songs lyrics must be exactly the same as another song in order for that to count as copyright infringement. And even if the lyrics happen to be the same, can an artist still avoid a lawsuit if his or her melodic line/ chordal progression/ instrumentation is different enough to make the song "original"? I'm guessing that its a case-by-case thing...

Personality rights, a subset of intellectual property/copyright, is a major issue among players in the NCAA.  

I think Mr. Gordon may have a good chance of winning the lawsuit. If you look at the original picture he drew, you can see that it was more than just an idea that was taken and used to make Kung Fu Panda. He even titled his own drawings "Kung Fu Panda Power." When comparing this to Rihanna's infringement for her S&M music video, I feel that Rihanna has a better chance of escaping charges for infringement than does Dreamworks, because Rihanna was able to take photos and recreate them originally into a different form of media. Kung Fu Panda, on the other hand, is an animated film, which means that these photos weigh more heavily because they were not really originally transformed, they are the same pictures, just moving. This will be an interesting case to follow.

Really neat series, lots of information...!

NY federal judge ruled against google last week in their copyright case, having  "[tossed] out a 165-page settlement reached in 2008 between Google and authors and publishers groups". This article discusses Google's 2009 plan for a global digitized library and the lawsuits that have surrounded it.

The article is recent from March 25th (LA Times, Business Section). It's discussing Google's history regarding the e-book controversy. Judge Chin's decision forces us to think about what an online digital library might look like without infringing parties, like Google. As noted in the article, Google was attempting to use "orphan works," whose right holders could not be found. As a result, Google would be using the works without being held accountable under copyright law. Here's the original document, filed by the U.S. Supreme Court, on 3/22/2011: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/74854-chin-ruling