IP Review – 3rd September 2012


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.

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