IP review (16-20 July 2012)
The IP world is becoming less
calm, more interesting.
There have been lots of debates
around Supreme Court of Canada’s rulings regarding 5 important copyright cases,
which mostly favoured the users rather than the copyright holders. We recommend that you firstly take a look at
this good
overview to get familiar with what these rulings actually mean for the
consumer and then to read the Canadian
creative industry’s viewpoint on the recent copyright decisions. On another note, the Canadian Parliament
passed the C-11
Bill, the Amendment of the Copyright Act finally reaching a decisive
conclusion.
Moving the focus away from
Canada, we found two other interesting rulings in Germany and France. A
confused and mixed ruling at the Federal Supreme
Court in Germany suggest that cyber lockers are not liable for uploads
directly, but if they are alerted of copyright infringement, they should have a
system in place to filter content and prevent that file from being uploaded. The
French Supreme Court issued other somewhat contradictory rulings with
regard to the role of online service providers in policing copyright
infringements. The Court ruled that Google's
autocomplete feature Google Suggest actually “provided the means to infringe
copyright and related rights”.
In the Netherlands
one can hear the sound of the copyright infringement irony, as one Dutch music
royalty collection agency got a € 20K fine
for...copyright infringement! The agency used music from one of its clients in
its anti-piracy advertisements, without any permission and failing to pay
royalties.
A coalition of
leading organisations that support learning, libraries and librarians warned
that the UK Digital Economy Act risks limiting internet access in libraries,
schools & universities, and therefore threatens the learning process. Meanwhile,
a UK media monitoring company suggest that the Government should legislate on web browsing
copyright issues, rather than waiting for UK or European Court rulings on the
matter. Blocking pirate websites doesn’t seem to be an effective long-term
solution, as a BBC article shows by analysing the
Pirate Bay case.
The Megaupload
case doesn’t seem to come to an end any time soon. The judge overseeing the
Kim Dotcom extradition case has stepped down after making comments during a
copyright conference, suggesting the United States was the "enemy".
Here are some interesting opinions about this decision: “Pro copyright judges never drop cases over conflicts, so why does
Megaupload judge have to step down?” and “What Judge Harvey actually said.”
In the
meantime, Kim Dotcom has launched a campaigning site called kim.com that
accuses the US of waging war on him and a music video called Mr President that
attacks Megaupload’s enemies...
And last but not
least, we would like to mention a must read regarding the Google’s
Transparency Report. This is a very interesting viewpoint on how Google
inadvertently provides the largest database of links to pirate media, opening
up the
possibility for outsiders to mine this data for pirate search engines.
*For daily IP updates, please follow us @KLipcorp