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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

Some claim that the digital music industry is not going to grow any larger than it already is--mostly due to piracy occurring online. Inspired by the U.S. Senate, which shut down LimeWire last year, other countries across Europe and Asia are looking to revisit copyright laws to crack down on piracy and promote growth in the digital music industry, as well as lead a shift away from monopolizing applications, like iTunes, and redirect sales to alternative subscription music service websites.

well, this sounds familiar.

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?

"A federal appeals court upheld a ruling that EchoStar infringed TiVo patents for digital recording technology, raising hopes the long legal battle could end with a TiVo victory."

I think this plan to pass the Digital Economy Act is completely unfair. It is certainly important to protect copyrighted works, but it is necessary to do so at the risk of eliminating equal access to information?

"Surveys have found the number of people who think digital copyright infringement is wrong has increased from 34% in 2007 to 54% in 2010." The keyword here being "think." Just because we know it's wrong doesn't mean we'll stop doing it.

In a turn for the absurd, HarperCollins determines that the value of an ebook is 26 reads. Libraries are less than thrilled.

A reference to Section 512 of Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbors" exception from my blog entry.