IP news


Weekly IP review (11th -15th June)

It’s Monday again and, as usual, we got our very own IP review ready to share with you. If you had a really busy week, this is your chance to catch up on what’s happening in the IP world.

Let’s start with copyright and Europe. One of last week’s highlight was definitely the European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDig) conference held in Stockholm which included some insightful seminars discussing copyright issues. You can find more details here. To get familiar with the conference agenda, we would recommend as must - read Neelie Kroes’s (Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda) speech “A European vision for internet governance” .

In the UK, the copyright discussions are moving increasingly into the public sphere. The Copyright Licensing Agency drafted a new Code of Conduct and invited licensees and some of their representative bodies to submit their comments by 6th July 2012 as part of a consultation process. Moreover, the IPO released the summary of responses (471 in total) received during the open consultation on copyright issues. An expert, on the other hand, warned that implementing quick changes to the copyright law may lead to trouble instead of solving the existing problems.


A recent press release of The Court of Justice of the European Union clarifies that Sky football content can be reused in news without infringing copyright, if it is under 90 seconds.

Moving away from Europe, we find again some happy news for Google which finally ends a really long legal dispute with a French publishing trade group and a French authors’ association over the scanning of copyright-protected books. Google will financially support the SGDL Society of Authors’ development of a database of book authors and right- owners, but declined to disclose the financial terms of the support.

On another hand, a controversial anti-piracy patent to stop students from sharing textbooks has been trending on social networks, raising some important educational problems. This approach pushes things a bit too far, disregarding the issue of educational disadvantage and the students’ capacity to afford buying the textbooks.

Having in mind an insightful ArsTechnica piece on copyright math and copyright currency, we met the absurdity of a New York federal court ruling which raises the question whether selling your old iPad may be a copyright violation. Find our more here.
Over in Australia, ISP iiNet speaks out about the difficulties of negotiating with Hollywood over copyright. Find out here why negotiating with the movie industry is like talking to a ‘brick wall’.

In Canada, however, writers and publishers speak with one voice on copyright, expressing their support for the recent model collective licences signed by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) and the Association of Community Colleges of Canada (ACCC).

And last, but not least, despite its less mature copyright law, India continues its struggle against piracy in the movie industry with the new Copyright Infringement Detector developed by Copyright Labs.

Have a good week and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @KLipcorp (if you haven’t done it yet), to get the most important daily IP updates.