We hope you had a great weekend and enjoyed the first days
of autumn. Summer is now gone, but the last week of August brought some
interesting IP news, so here’s your chance to get up to date with the latest
copyright trends.
Megaupload case caught again media’s attention, as New
Zealand court ruled in Dotcom’s favour, giving
him access to $4.83 million of his frozen funds. Oddly enough, it appears that
lawyers will also make money out of piracy, as Dotcom stated that “We now have
funds to pay New Zealand lawyers”..
Google’s transparency report showed that the
number of requests by rights holders to have content removed from Google has
doubled in the last month. The search engine now receives 1.5m takedown
requests a week. Although the number
seems impressive at first sight, you might want to have a look at the only
comment posted on this article. It sums up pretty much everything: “I'm
surprised the figure is so low - Google's YouTube alone, is full of other
people's copyrighted material.”
Following Surfthechannel’s case, UKNova became the
latest file-sharing site to be targeted by FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft). The free catch-up TV and radio
service has stopped offering BitTorrent links after receiving a demand from
FACT.
Two court decisions involving online services transmitting
broadcast television (Aereo & ivi) have been recently released and they do
share one thing in particular: in both cases, the court reiterated the public’s
strong interest in ensuring effective copyright protection. Find out more about
the two rulings here.
Berlin cabinet agreed on a highly criticised new copyright law,
which would require Google and other aggregators to pay for reproducing content
from news websites. Click here
to find out more about the new law and why web
activists are outraged.
Good & bad news for Apple: Coming off a major U.S. copyright victory
against the same rival just a week ago, Apple lost a case in Japan when a Tokyo court ruled that Samsung‘s mobile devices did not infringe on
an Apple patent involved in synching mobile devices and computers.
And last, but not least, here’s a
very interesting short Economist piece on copyright and
new rules for the digital age.