Archive for the ‘intellectual property’ Category

A proposed global intellectual-property treaty no longer nudges the international community to develop “three strikes” protocols to suspend internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement released Tuesday.

The official draft of the proposed intellectual property accord was released after months of leaks and assertions by the Obama administration that it was a classified national security secret.

Still, critics of the proposal said Tuesday that a controversial theme in the draft (.pdf) remains: that the United States was “attempting to export a regulatory regime that favors big media companies at the expense of consumers and innovators,” according to Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C., digital rights group.

The group and others were, in part, referring to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Under the DMCA, internet service providers are responsible for the infringing material hosted on their networks if they fail to remove the content at the rights holder’s request.

That is a sea change to Canadian copyright statutes, for example. “That is inconsistent with Canadian law, which has no such requirement,” said Michael Geist, an ACTA expert at the University of Ottawa.

A biggest surprise in the official draft, which is being hammered out by the United States, Canada, the European Union, Japan and dozens of others, is the removal of a controversial U.S.-backed footnote that appeared in an unofficial, yet previously leaked version. The footnote provided for “the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts on the service provider’s system or network of repeat infringers.”

Continue Reading “ACTA Backs Away From 3 Strikes” »

With the annual Burning Man celebration of art and self-expression four months away, its organizers are taking a second look at their Draconian photo and video policies.

As it is now, the Burning Man Organization requires ticket purchasers to assign to the group the legal rights of photos and video taken at the festival.

That grants the festival the legal standing to order the removal of images taken at the Black Rock City when they appear online. Burning Man’s organizers say this is so they can control how the content is used commercially. They also require commercial users to let the organization review and approve any photos or video in advance.

The group says the policy has two “essential” reasons: “To protect our participants so that images that violate their privacy are not displayed, and to prevent companies from using Burning Man to sell products.”

It “affords an opportunity to monitor for uses of footage and imagery that are exploitative of participant privacy or artists’ rights, or are overtly commercial in nature,” says the organization, on its website.

But the policy has been controversial. ”We understand the real challenges BMO faces in trying to preserve its noncommercial, community character,” Corynne McSherry, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a blog post on Friday.  ”That said, a benevolent censor is still a censor, and if other event organizers follow suit, assignment and abrogation of rights could become standard Terms of (Ab)use in all ticket contracts.”

Continue Reading “Burning Man Rethinks Its Legal Ownership of Your Photos” »

Google’s legal battle to create a digital library of the world’s books hit another snag Wednesday when photographers and illustrators filed suit claiming the Mountain View, California, search giant was unlawfully scanning and posting their works online without permission or payment.

The suit brought by the American Society of Media Photographers and others claims Google should compensate them because the company is violating their copyrights (.pdf). Photographers and illustrators largely have been shut out from participating in a pending $125 million court settlement between Google and writers over the same issue.

“If there is going to be a system developed to manage the compensation for these types of books, we felt visual artists need to be represented,” Eugene Mopsik, the executive director of the American Society of Media Photographers, said in telephone interview. “We have been totally excluded. We want a seat at the table.”

The new lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, seeks class action status to represent what could number thousands of artists. It comes as Google and writers are embroiled in a 5-year-old lawsuit over Google’s move to digitize the world’s literature.

Continue Reading “Artists’ Lawsuit Demands Piece of Google Books Pie” »

A federal appeals court ruled against luxury jeweler Tiffany and Co. on Thursday in finding eBay is not liable for trademark infringement just because some sellers hawk counterfeit goods.

Tiffany’s lawsuit accused the online auction house of contributory trademark infringement because it allegedly turned a blind eye to a steady stream of sellers offering fake Tiffany items.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, agreeing with a 2008 lower court ruling, said trademark law does not impose liability for contributory trademark infringement on eBay because, among other things, the company removes auctions of bogus goods upon request.

Tiffany said it was considering petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision. The company argued that it’s being forced to police eBay auctions non-stop to flag counterfeiters.

Continue Reading “Appeals Court Sides With eBay in Tiffany Trademark Suit” »

Warning to pirates: you’re no longer safe downloading movies that nobody ever heard of.

A consortium of independent filmmakers has launched an RIAA-style mass-litigation campaign, suing thousands of individual BitTorrent users whose IP addresses were detected feeding and seeding films like  Steam Experiment, Far Cry, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D.

“There’s two-way liability here with BitTorrrent,” said Thomas Dunlap, the lawyer who brought the cases for the U.S. Copyright Group. ”Everybody with BitTorrent is an uploader and a downloader.”

The cases seek to unmask about 10,000 users, and Dunlap said lawsuits against another 30,000 torrenters are in the pipeline. That means the independent filmmakers are officially more litigious than the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued about 30,000 people in the entire life of its six-year litigation campaign.

The indie filmmakers are taking a different tactic than their commercial counterparts. The MPAA, for the most part, has limited its lawsuits to BitTorrent sites themselves — like The Pirate Bay, TorrentSpy, Isohunt.

Targeting BitTorrent downloaders is also uncommon in the United States.

The RIAA’s lawsuits against alleged music pirates were focused on old-school file sharing systems like Kazaa and Limewire. BitTorrent file sharing is more complicated, with downloaders and uploaders collecting in transient swarms of so-called feeders and seeders. ”Bits and pieces are contributed by many users of the swarm,” said said Ira Rothken, a California lawyer who is representing TorrentSpy and Isohunt in lawsuits brought by the MPAA.  ”To me, that seems like a harder case for content owners to bring. But it’s still doable.”

He said the judges in the case are ordering the ISPs to hand over the identities of the account holders whose IP address were sniffed out by Guardaley IT, a German peer-to-peer–surveillance firm. Dunlap said about 15 individuals have already settled for undisclosed sums in the cases, which he began filing in January.

Dunlap said he is hoping to capitalize on the RIAA’s litigation success. Almost every single case the RIAA brought in its 6-year litigation campaign against individuals has been settled out of court.

“People,” he said, “are calling us proactively to settle.”

See Also:

• RIAA, MPAA Converging on Political Conventions
• MPAA Waffling on Piracy Costs; RIAA Says Illicit CDs Worth $13.74 Each
• Imagine RIAA, MPAA in Control of Handbag Industry
• MPAA Negotiates With ISPs to Disconnect or Penalize Copyright Offenders
• Obama Taps 5th RIAA Lawyer to Justice Dept.
• Judge Finalizes $675000 RIAA Piracy Verdict, Won’t Gag Defendant
• Jury in RIAA Trial Slaps $2 Million Fine on Jammie Thomas
• Feds Support $1.92 Million RIAA File Sharing Verdict

A Salt Lake City jury on Tuesday ruled against SCO Group’s claim it owned the copyright to the Unix operating system, a cousin to the popular open-source OS Linux.

The verdict came seven months after a federal appeals court said the bankrupt SCO group deserved a jury trial on the hotly contested issue of who owns the copyrights. After a three-week trial, the jury said Novell retained the rights to the operating system, despite a highly complex 1995 deal between SCO Group and Novell.

The case is important in the open source community. While the litigation ground through the courts, SCO Group tried collecting licensing fees from some 1,500 corporate Linux users, claiming that portions of Linux are based on Unix, and thus violated SCO Group’s copyrights. Novell did not make a similar claim and has repeatedly said it had no intention of suing anybody for copyright infringement.

Ron Hovsepian, Novell president and CEO, said “This decision is good news for Novell, for Linux AND for the open source community.”

“Obviously, we’re disappointed in the jury’s decision,” said Stuart Singer, SCO’s lawyer. “We were confident in the case, but there’s some important claims remaining to be decided by a judge.”

He said that, despite the jury’s ruling, he would request that U.S. District Judge Ted Stewart give the copyrights to SCO Group.

The tortured history of the flap began in 1995, when SCO Group (then known as Santa Cruz Operation) bought the Unix operating system from Novell for $149 million. But which company owned the copyrights wasn’t clear, and years of litigation ensued.

SCO Group filed for bankruptcy two years ago after a Utah federal judge said SCO Group — considered a Utah-based copyright troll by the open source community — was not the owner, despite the $149 million deal with Novell. Despite bankruptcy, the SCO Group continued its battle to win the copyrights.

Still, the lower court’s decision suspended SCO Group’s aggressive licensing-fee-collection campaign the company was hoping to revive after a successful jury trial. That trial was born after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August ruled SCO Group had a right to a jury trial based on its claim that it owns the Unix operating system.

The appeals court reversed a lower court judge who had ruled against SCO in 2007, the same decision a unanimous federal jury reached late Tuesday. The appellate court, without taking any sides, ruled the case was too close to call without a trial.

The jury’s Tuesday decision, if it withstands appeal, guts SCO Group’s separate high-stakes lawsuit against IBM. SCO Group is seeking more than $1 billion from Big Blue on allegations it used SCO-copyrighted Unix code in its Linux-based systems.

See Also:

• It’s Baaaack … Appeals Court Resurrects SCO Lawsuit
• Wired News Talks To The Most Hated Man In Software
• Inside the Mind of the Man Who Tried to Milk Linux

A federal judge on Monday nullified patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer.

It was the first time a federal court has invalidated a patent on genes. The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case, said the New York federal court decision “calls into question the validity of patents now held on approximately 2,000 genes.”

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet agreed with the civil rights group that the patents were invalid because they covered the most basic element of every person’s individuality. “Products of nature do not constitute patentable subject matter absent a change that results in the creation of a fundamentally new product,” Sweet wrote in a 152-page opinion.

The lawsuit claimed the patents were so broad they barred scientists from examining and comparing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes at the center of the dispute. The patents issued more than a decade ago covered any new scientific methods of looking at these human genes that might be developed by others.

The patents gave Myriad Genetics a virtual monopoly on such predictive testing for breast and ovarian cancer. Women who fear they may be at an increased risk are barred from having anyone look at their BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes or interpret them except for the patent holder, which charges about $3,000 for a test.

About 10 percent of women with breast cancer are likely to have a mutation inherited from their parents in the genes at issue, according to the suit.

Patents for exclusive genetic testing have also been issued for a host of genes, including those related to cystic fibrosis, heart arrhythmias and hemochromatosis.

The Patent and Trademark Office first issued a patent for a human gene in 1982 to the Regents of the University of California in connection to a hormone promoting breast development during pregnancy.

Myriad did not immediately respond for comment.

Photo: hibiotech

See Also:

• ACLU: Human Gene Patents Infringe Speech
• Wired News Readers: Roll Your Own Patent Reform Law
• The Patent Office Wants You
• Company Gets Asthma Gene Patent
• Patent May Yield Myriad Tools
• Gene Patents Under Legal Attack
• Gene Patent Guidelines Issued

The German producer of a popular device used to vaporize marijuana is claiming a North American dealer is bogarting its domain names.

But the World Intellectual Property Organization on Thursday sided against Storz & Bickel, the maker of the Volcano Vaporizer, ruling that MSI Imports’ four dozen Volcano-related domains aren’t treading on Storz & Bickel’s trademarks.
Continue Reading “WIPO: Dope-Vaporizer Seller Not Bogarting Domain Names” »

The United States is nudging the international community to develop protocols to suspend the internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a leaked draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

The United States is leading the 2-year-old, once-secret negotiations over the so-called ACTA accord. The Jan. 18 draft, about 56 pages and labeled “confidential,”  just surfaced, and follows a string of earlier, less comprehensive leaks.

The leak shows that the treaty, if adopted under the U.S. language, would for the first time on a global scale hold internet service providers responsible when customers download infringing material, unless those ISPs take action by “adopting and reasonably implementing a policy to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright or related rights.”

The specific ISP policy suggested in a footnote “is providing for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscriptions and accounts on the service provider’s system or network of repeat infringers.”

Continue Reading “ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws” »

A well-known financial news aggregator is being ordered by a federal judge to delay publication of prominent financial analysts’ buy and sell recommendations to allow the well-to-do the first crack at capitalizing on that trading research.

The 3-year-old litigation, brought by Barclays Capital, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and others, rests on the so-called “hot news” doctrine the Supreme Court first recognized in a 1918 case concerning the unauthorized and immediate republication of wire service reports.

A New York federal judge said Theflyonthewall.com breached the doctrine, which allows suits for re-reporting time sensitive “hot news.” Research that Theflyonthewall.com re-posted or alluded to on its site was designated for the banks’ clients that earn the firms not less than $50,000 to $100,000 in trading commissions yearly, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ruled.

Continue Reading “Rich Get Richer in ‘Hot News’ Stock-Tip Fight” »