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Category: Copyright

The 1709 Blog: Happy New Year and Welcome to the Public Domain

5 January, 2011
| No Comments
| Copyright, General

Happy New Year and Welcome to the Public Domain

 

pride and prejudice 1Holidays, festivals and parties abound as the year turns from one to another.  As we recover from all the celebrating, let us not forget one of copyright’s biggest days buried in the midst of all the punch, eggnog and streamers: Public Domain Day.

As is usual for this most festive of IP days, many posts around the blogosphere are listing works that have entered the public domain, works that would have entered the public domain under previous copyright laws and parties and events celebrating it all.

 

Picture: A page from this blogger’s favorite public domain work

 

via the1709blog.blogspot.com

 

…

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The “Fallacy of Intellectual Property” Fallacy | Copyhype

5 January, 2011
| No Comments
| Copyright, General

The “Fallacy of Intellectual Property” Fallacy

… Law professor Eric E. Johnson is currently writing a series of posts on “the great fallacy of intellectual property“. He describes this fallacy this way: “The long understood theory for why IP rights are necessary has been that people won’t invent useful technologies or create worthwhile art and literature without having the right to profit from their labors.”

We can call this the “fallacy of intellectual property” fallacy.

It’s a fallacy because it doesn’t accurately state the theory behind copyright. The economic justification for copyright is that it is an incentive to create — not a necessary condition. True, there exists a base level of drive to create knowledge and culture. But, as knowledge and culture are fundamentally important to a democratic society, an incentive to create above and beyond this base level provides significant benefits to that society.

In addition, the “fallacy of intellectual property” fallacy fails to account for an arguably more important function of copyright. Copyright provides an incentive to invest in creation.

via copyhype.com

This is an extract from a long, fascinating and subtle discussion by Terry Hart of a very important issue.

…

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Fair Use: Be careful what you wish for!

20 December, 201016 January, 2011
| 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.…

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

24 November, 20106 November, 2012
| 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.…

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Reshaping the Law for the Digital Economy – I

23 November, 20105 December, 2010
| 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.…

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Harry Potter and the Chancery Judge

15 October, 201022 October, 2010
| 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.

…

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Ten Copyright Myths

26 April, 201023 November, 2010
| 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.
…

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Updates: Joyce, hecklers and broadcasting

2 October, 20091 January, 2012
| 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).…

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Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


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