Category: Copyright

Fair Use: Be careful what you wish for!

| 3 Comments
| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Copyright, Cyberlaw, Defamation, Digital Rights, Fair use

Google image, via GoogleA little later than promised, here are some thoughts that occurred to me at the recent seminar on Promoting innovation – Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy (which I blogged here and here). In the same way that browsers have a constant battle between features and speed, so the modern law of copyright is faced with a similar dilemma between encouraging and rewarding innovation. It is becoming increasingly clear that it has not solved this dilemma in a particularly satisfactory way. More than that, the most popular emerging solution – the introduction of a fair use defence to EU law – may not be sufficient for current needs, let alone for future developments.

At the seminar, Johnny Ryan argued that with the rise of the internet, where everything is in perpetual beta, we are in effect are reverting back to the pre-Gutenberg plasticity of information. In historical terms, this is the norm. It is the post-Gutenberg era of fixed information which is the anomaly. Copyright is a feature of this period: in the 1500s, it developed to protect the publishers; in the second half of the 1600s it came under increasing pressure to protect authors, and this was codified in the Statute of Anne, 1710; thereafter, the statutory protections were slowly expanded to other creators of other original works.…

Read More »

Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy – II – the liability of intermediaries

| 2 Comments
| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Copyright, Cyberlaw, Defamation, Defamation Act 2009, Digital Rights, Fair use

Google image, via GoogleAs I said my first post yesterday, last Friday morning I attended a seminar on Promoting innovation – Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy, hosted by Google Ireland, co-sponsored by the Institute for International and European Affairs (IIEA), and chaired by TJ McIntyre. In that post, I summarized the presentations by Johnny Ryan (the internet has created a hinge in history when information is plastic and copyright law is a block upon total commerce) and Niall O’Riordan (for Google, a fair use doctrine in Ireland and Europe is an idea whose time has come). In this post, I’ll look at last Friday’s other presentations; and in tomorrow’s post, I’ll add a few comments of my own on some of the issues raised by the seminar.

Kate O’Sullivan (Director of Regulation and Public Policy, UPC Ireland) pointed out that intermediaries (such as Google, Facebook, and ISPs) are caught in the middle between content producers seeking to enforce their rights as against users, and it is not appropriate that ISPs should be judge and jury in such a cause. Section 40(3) of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000 (also here) provides that the mere provision of facilities by an ISP, for example, which enable the making available to the public of copies of a work “shall not of itself constitute an act of making available to the public of copies of the work” and therefore shall not for that reason amount to a copyright infringement.…

Read More »

Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy – I

| 4 Comments
| Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, Copyright, Cyberlaw, Digital Rights, Fair use

Google image, via GoogleLast Friday morning, I attended a seminar on Promoting innovation – Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy (Irish Times | SiliconRepublic here and here). It was hosted by Google Ireland and co-sponsored the by Institute for International and European Affairs (IIEA); and the morning was very ably chaired by TJ McIntyre (blog | Chair, Digital Rights Ireland | Consultant, Merrion Legal | UCD). There were five presentations; in this post, I’ll deal with the first two; in the next tomorrow’s post, I’ll deal with the remaining three; and in a third post, I’ll add a few comments of my own on some of the issues raised by the seminar.

First up was Johnny Ryan (IIEA | author A History of the Internet and the Digital Future) speaking on “A hinge in history: the conditions of the digital future and the need of rights reform”, and setting the scene for the debates that would follow. (Update: Johnny comments below that video of his presentation is now available). For him, we live in the age of the perpetual beta. Before Gutenberg‘s printing press, hand-transcribed manuscripts made information fluid. By contrast, after Gutenberg, the printed book fixed information in static form.…

Read More »

Harry Potter and the Chancery Judge

| No Comments
| Copyright

For those who have an interest in the copyright travails of Harry Potter, about which I have blogged previously (1 | 2 | 3), Jeremy Phillips has an interesting blogpost on The 1709 Blog:

Wizard gears up for ten-day tangle with boy magician

Word is now spreading about the news that Scottish author JK Rowling and Bloomsbury Publishing have failed in their bid to prevent an unwanted copyright infringement action getting to court.  A a 10-day Chancery Division trial is now expected, following today’s ruling by Mr Justice Kitchin here that Paul Allen, the trustee of the estate of Willy the Wizard author Adrian Jacobs, has an arguable copyright infringement claim against the author and publisher of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

JK Rowling and Bloomsbury (her UK publisher) both deny all of the claims and argued that, since they were groundless, they should be dismissed summarily. However, after an interim hearing in July which lasted three days, Kitchin J has now concluded that the claim may succeed and would not therefore be dismissed at this early stage. … more here

The New York Times adds:

British Judge Refuses to Throw Out Suit Accusing Rowling of Plagiarism

J.

…

Read More »

Ten Copyright Myths

| 7 Comments
| Copyright, Fair use

At Ignite Dublin #4, held in TCD’s Science Gallery as part of last week’s Trinity Week celebrations, I gave a 20-slides-in-5-minutes presentation on Ten Copyright Myths, in part because the previous weekend saw the 300th anniversary of the first modern copyright statute, the Statute of Anne, 1710 (fascimile | transcript | wikipedia). For the day that’s in it, here’s a YouTube video of my presentation:





For those who don’t have 5 minutes to watch, here are the myths debunked:

  1. You don’t need to put the copyright symbol © on a text to claim copyright. All that matters is that the work is original.
  2. You don’t need to put it in an envelope and send it to yourself. If the work is original, then copyright just vests.
  3. There is no doctrine of fair use outside of the United States. Instead, there is a much more limited doctrine of fair dealing for the purposes of research or criticism.
  4. Just because something has been published on the internet doesn’t mean that it’s in the public domain. There’s a lot less in the public domain than you might think.
  5. Taking a work, and transforming it, still infringes copyright.
…

Read More »

Updates: Joyce, hecklers and broadcasting

| 1 Comment
| Academic Freedom, Blogging, Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, Censorship, Copyright, Cyberlaw, Digital Rights, Freedom of Expression, James Joyce, journalism, Media and Communications, Regulation, Universities

Updates logo, via Apple websiteI 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:

Joyce estate settles copyright dispute with US academic

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).…

Read More »

Ding, ding! Seconds out, round one: National Portrait Gallery Wikipedia v Wikipedia

| 2 Comments
| 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):

National Portrait Gallery copyright row

Jeremy Bentham, via WikipediaSeveral 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.

…

Read More »

When is a guillotine a good thing? When it’s used on a Defamation Bill?

| 2 Comments
| Blasphemy, Copyright, Defamation, Defamation Bill 2006

A guillotine, via The Guillotine Headquarters websiteIn this morning’s Irish Times:

Defamation Bill to pass within weeks

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:

Guillotine allows ‘one minute 20 seconds’ per amendment

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:

Coalition to ‘guillotine’ debate on Bills

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.

…

Read More »

© cearta.ie 2021. Powered by WordPress