Archive for the “Copyright” Category
Posted by Eoin in Blogging, Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, Censorship, Copyright, Cyberlaw, Digital Rights, Freedom of Expression, Media and Communications, Regulation, Universities, tags: Academic Freedom, Holocaust, journalism
 I suppose if I spent ages thinking about it, I could find a spurious thread linking three stories that caught my eye over the last few days, but in truth there is none, except that they update matters which I have already discussed on this blog. (Oh, all right then, they’re all about different aspects of freedom of expression: the first shows that copyright should not prevent academic discussion; the second shows that hecklers should not have a veto; and the third is about broadcasting regulation).
First, I had noted the proclivity of the estate of James Joyce to be vigorous in defence of its copyrights; but it lost a recent case and now has agreed to pay quite substantial costs as a consequence:
The James Joyce Estate has agreed to pay $240,000 (€164,000) in legal costs incurred by an American academic following a long-running copyright dispute between the two sides. The settlement brings to an end a legal saga that pre-dates the publication in 2003 of a controversial biography of Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, written by Stanford University academic Carol Shloss. …
More: ABA Journal | Chronicle | Law.com | San Francisco Chronicle | Slashdot | Stanford CIS (who represented Shloss) esp here | Stanford University News (a long and informative article).
Second, I have long been of the view that hecklers should not be allowed to veto unpopular views, and none come more unpopular that holocaust-denier David Irving. Now comes news that NUI Galway’s Lit & Deb society have withdrawn their controversial invitation to Irving for security reasons:
The proposed visit of the controversial historian David Irving to the NUI, Galway Literary & Debating Society has been cancelled. In a statement the Lit & Deb said the cancellation was “due to security concerns and restrictions imposed by the university authorities”. …
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Posted by Eoin in Copyright
Roll up, roll up, for the next great online copyright bout. In the red corner, weighing in at almost 153 years old, is the venerable National Portrait Gallery, an institutional heavyweight if ever there was one. In the blue corner, weighing in at just over 8 years old, is the upstart Wikipedia, a sprightly bantamweight which has bulked up considerably in recent years and now packs a hefty punch. The fight is over whether Wikipedia has infringed the Gallery’s copyright in recently-created digital images of portraits which are out of copyright. A piece on this by TechnoLlama (Andres Guadamuz) – including the choice of image, though its subject has previously appeared on this blog – is too good to pass up (links in original):
 Several news sites have reported an interesting copyright case involving the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Britain. The NPG undertook a £1 million GBP digitisation exercise, and placed high-definition versions of their pictures in a database locked with technological protection measures. Derrick Coetzee, a volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation, accessed the database, circumvented the protection, and uploaded 3,300 NPG pictures to Wikimedia Commons. The original portraits are in the public domain, so it would be a fair assumption that pictures of the originals would not have copyright either. However, the NPG disagreed, and sent a cease-and-desist letter to Mr Coatzee alleging copyright infringement, database right infringement, circumvention of technological protection measures, and breach of contract. This is an interesting legal issue for many reasons, chiefly because the legal status of pictures of public domain paintings is not clear in UK copyright law.
… To conclude, this is an interesting legal case for many reasons. … I believe that the NPG would have a difficult time in court, with the exception of the contractual case, but as I said, many of the legal issues are completely open in the UK. In a selfish way, I wish the case would be litigated, as it would provide us with some interesting precedent in the case of originality of copies of public domain works, and also on the issue of browse-wrap agreements.
Read the rest of this fascinating entry here (for full value, click through the two links at the end [one of which has now been updated], and read the debate in the comments to Andres’ post). The Register has some background, and – inevitably – there’s now a wikipedia page about the controversy; of the torrent of online news and comment, I’ve found the following most useful: BBC | Boing Boing | Creative Commons | David Gerard | Edward Winkleman |Guardian | IP Osgoode | ORG | Roger Pearse.
I think this one could go the full fifteen rounds, and I shall watch every punch with great interest.
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 In this morning’s Irish Times:
The Bill to reform Ireland’s libel laws is likely to be enacted within a fortnight, three years after it was published. The Defamation Bill was introduced by then minister for justice Michael McDowell in 2006 to repeal the existing legislation which dates from 1961.
The original government decision to approve the drafting of the new Bill was made as far back as June 2005 … the remaining stages of the Bill will be taken in the Dáil and Seanad over the next two weeks, with the Bill expected to complete its passage through the Oireachtas on July 10th, the last sitting day before the summer recess.
After dragging their heels for so long, this is to be achieved by means of a legislative guillotine:
A guillotine on housing legislation allowed just one minute and 20 seconds for each of the 170 amendments to be dealt with, Labour whip Emmet Stagg told the Dáil in repeated criticism of end-of-term deadlines. …
A further sotry in the same edition of the Irish Times lists Bills which are likely to be guillotined, including the Defamation Bill:
The Government will “guillotine” debate on at least 17 Bills in the last three weeks of the Dáil before the summer recess, Opposition parties have claimed. According to the whips for Fine Gael and Labour, the Government is rushing an unprecedented number of Bills through the Dáil between now and July 10th and forcing votes without allowing proper debate. … The schedule of legislation includes two separate Criminal Justice Bills, legislation for the €200 second home tax, an Aviation Bill, the Health Insurance Bill, the Bill for the second Lisbon referendum, the Bill ending pensions paid to serving Ministers, as well as the concluding stages of the Defamation Bill.
I’m not really in favour of legislative guillotines, but I’m prepared to make an exception for this long-delayed Bill, which has many serious flaws but is still on balance much better than the current position. Roll on July 10th!
Bonus links. First, following on from my discussion of the Irish Creative Commons licence, Karlin Lillington has an excellent artice on it in today’s Irish Times: Free and easy way to online licensing enters the mainstream
Second, the same edition of the paper has a rather charming story from the archives (sub req’d) of how Dorothy McArdle found herself the inadvertent victim of Irish censorship during the second World War over an issue of the ground-breaking British Picture Post photo journalism magazine.
Note (26 June 2009) This post has been revised slightly since it was first posted.
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 There is a tension at the heart of creativity. On the one hand, I might be moved by the muse to write/paint/create something interesting (I know, if you’ve read anything on this blog, you might wonder if that muse has ever struck, but bear with me). If I am, the law is likely to reward me for doing so by giving me a copyright (or similar intellectual property right) in what I have written/painted/created. On the other hand, the muse might strike you in such a way as to develop what I have done (entirely plausible, if you ask me), but my copyright protection can make this hard for you. You could email me and ask me if I’d let you do it, and I’d probably say yes. But now, multiply this a million million fold, to take into account everyone who has copyright and everyone who wants to develop a copyrighted work. Asking for individual permission every time becomes a logistical nightmare. So, Creative Commons has filled the gap, by drafting licences which any copyright holder may use to determine how others may exercise their copyright rights. If you look below the last post at the bottom of this page, you will see that I use just such a licence to allow you to use and share the contents of this blog, provided that you do so for non-commercial reasons and give me an attribution.
The terms of this licence are drafted having regard to US copyright law, which is similar to Irish copyright law in the same way as close cousins are similar: there is a strong family resemblance, but there are very important differences. The similarities are enough that I can reasonably use the US text, and I do; but it would be better to have a version drafted specifically to take Irish law into account. As I have mentioned previously on this blog, for some time now, Dr Darius Whelan and Louise Crowley of the Law Faculty, UCC have been working on just such a draft of an Irish Creative Commons Licence.
We are now fortunate to have the next fruits of that labour, as they have just announced that an Irish draft of the Creative Commons license version 3.0 is now available for public discussion, on either their mailing list or their blog. They have taken the existing US Creative Commons v3.0 licence and localised it to Irish conditions in the light of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (also here) as amended in 2004 (also here) and 2007 (also here).
They have produced a good summary (pdf) of their reasoning for the various changes they recommend. It seems to me thorough, comprehensive, and persuasive – all in all, an excellent piece of work which will benefit the entire Irish online community. I eagerly look forward to the day when I make this blog subject to the Irish version of the licence. In the meantime, click on the widget below:
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 Not only are early incarnations of Mickey Mouse no longer covered by copyright, but as of 1 January last, neither is Popeye (King Features page | Popeye.com | wikipedia), at least in the EU. According to The Times:
Popeye the Sailor copyright free 70 years after Elzie Segar’s death
“I yam what I yam,” declared Popeye. And just what that is is likely to become less clear as the copyright expires on the character who generates about £1.5 billion in annual sales.
From January 1, the iconic sailor falls into the public domain in Britain under an EU law that restricts the rights of authors to 70 years after their death. Elzie Segar, the Illinois artist who created Popeye, his love interest Olive Oyl and nemesis Bluto, died in 1938. .. The copyright expiry means that … anyone can print and sell Popeye posters, T-shirts and even create new comic strips, without the need for authorisation or to make royalty payments. …
Elzie Segar is one of a number of authors whose work came out of copyright on 1 January last. However, in a similar story, The Telegraph warns
… the question of whether any company can now attach Popeye’s famous face to their spinach cans will have to be tested in court.
While the copyright is about to expire inside the EU, the character is protected in the US until 2024. US law protects a work for 95 years after its initial copyright.
The Popeye trademark, a separate entity to Segar’s authorial copyright, is owned by King Features, a subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation which is expected to protect its brand aggressively. …
Moreover, Likelihood of Confusion predicts that the US Congress might be persuaded yet again to extend that copyright period (though there must surely be limits to the US Supreme Court’s forbearance in this matter). In the meantime, as Techdirt (hat tip Peter Black) observes, “what happens with Popeye in the UK may be a rough guide as to what will happen should Mickey Mouse hit the public domain”.
Bonus link: An Informal Rant About [Copyright] Formalities (hat tip: Madisonian).
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 By way of updating my earlier post Is Harry Potter making a Parody of Copyright Law? the BBC has the following report:
A court in the Indian capital Delhi has rejected a lawsuit filed by Hollywood company Warner Bros against the makers of a Bollywood film Hari Puttar. … The court said Warner Bros could have brought the case three years ago and said readers could easily distinguish Hari Puttar from Harry Potter. The court decision means the film can now be released in India. …
“The case has been dismissed. The court said that Warner Bros had known the title of the film since 2005 and had delayed bringing the case to court until the last moment,” lawyer Pratibha Singh was quoted by news agency AFP as saying. …
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 A little while ago on this blog, I asked Is Harry Potter making a Parody of Copyright Law? One of the points I made was that J.K. Rowling and her publishers had sought to prevent the publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon. Now, from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog comes news that they have succeeded in this endeavour: Read the rest of this entry »
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 Disney and the Joyce Estate have competition in the world of ridiculous over-enforcement of copyright. Step forward Harry Potter. There have been many, many legal disputes involving Harry, and his creator, J.K. Rowling. For example, several years ago now, Tim Wu wrote an entertaining piece in Slate called Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright (with added links):
J.K. Rowling and her publisher [Bloomsbury / Scholastic] have launched an aggressive worldwide legal campaign against the unauthorized Potter takeoffs … [they] can use the courts in [TRIPS]/WTO-compliant countries to club her Potter rivals.
Moreover, Warner Bros (the studio behind the Harry Potter movies) takes stern action against cybersquatters on Potter-like domain names (including an infamous example where they threatened 15-year-old Harry Potter fan, Claire Field, with legal action, though they eventually backed down). More recently, the same plaintiffs have sought to prevent the publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon (see its earlier – and continuing – website incarnation here). While we await judgment, you could do worse than check out Neil Gaiman’s comments on the case.
Now comes news from Legal Eagle on Skeptic Lawyer that Warners are taking on the might of Bollywood, seeking to restrain the distribution of an Indian movie called Hari Puttar – A Comedy of Terrors. Legal Eagle wonders “if they are going to attempt a breach of trademark claim? Or will it be a passing off claim?” Reflecting this, Skeptic Lawyer assets that it “couldn’t be copyright, as they’d skate by as ‘parody’.” Read the rest of this entry »
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