Newspapers need robust copyright law protection; Albuquerque Journal, 5/17/14

Caroline Little, President & CEO, Newspaper Association of America; Newspapers need robust copyright law protection:

"Newspapers’ concern in this area is not the personal use of newspaper-generated content but rather its use by businesses that benefit financially through the unlicensed monetization of that content.

By taking newspaper content without paying for it, these companies undercut the fundamental economic model that supports journalism that is so important to our communities.

As an example of the importance of copyright protection, consider a case last year that was decided by a federal judge in New York. The case involved Meltwater, a for-profit service, which scraped Associated Press articles from the Internet and resold verbatim excerpts to subscribers.

The AP sued the news service for copyright infringement, and the court properly found that Meltwater’s customers viewed the service as a substitute for reading the original articles."

The Biggest Filer of Copyright Lawsuits? This Erotica Web Site; New Yorker, 5/15/14

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Five years of being intimidated by the Harvard Bluebook's copyright policies; BoingBoing.net, 5/16/14

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net; Five years of being intimidated by the Harvard Bluebook's copyright policies: "Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, "For five years, Professor Frank Bennett, a distinguished legal scholar at Nagoya University School of Law, has been trying to add Bluebook Support to Zotero, the open source citation tool used all over the world. Professor Bennett asked Harvard Law Review for permission. They said no."

Seven people jailed in China's first online copyright lawsuit; ZDNet, 5/16/14

Cyrus Lee, ZDNet; Seven people jailed in China's first online copyright lawsuit:

"Zhou Zhiquan, CEO of the movie downloading website, was sentenced five years imprisonment for copyright infringement, and a fine of 1 million yuan (US$160,000).

Zhou's other six co-workers were sentenced in jail from one to three years, according to a Sina news report, which called the judgment "the first one ever" dealing with the country's online copyright infringement.

Siluhd.com was deemed as the country’s largest illegal high-definition movie downloading website, providing tens of thousands of high-definition Blu-ray movies as well videos and television programs. Its registered members had once exceeded 1.4 million.

However, in a crackdown in late April of 2013, when it was also the 13th World Intellectual Property Day, the Chinese police shut down the site and detained CEO and over 30 other employees for suspicion of infringing IP rights."

Copyright Licensing Organization Gets New Boss; New York Times, 5/14/14

Noam Cohen, New York Times; Copyright Licensing Organization Gets New Boss:

"Creative Commons, whose licensing system encourages the sharing of more than 500 million copyrighted works, on Wednesday appointed a veteran of similar open Internet projects to be its new chief executive.

The new leader, Ryan Merkley, 36, was recently the chief operating officer at the Mozilla Foundation, the organization that supports the open-source Firefox browser, and has also worked with the governments of Toronto and Vancouver...

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the idea of making it easier for people to give permission to the public to share or incorporate works under certain conditions — for example, if the new use is noncommercial, or credit is given...

Still, one of the principal challenges for the organization is to keep tabs on its licensees, Mr. Merkley said. The 500 million total “is an estimate, not an actual number,” he said. “It is hard to track them.”

That technical problem, he said, speaks to a larger concern: how to organize Creative Commons content so that the public can easily find and use it in their own projects."

Oracle wins copyright ruling against Google over Android; Reuters, 5/9/14

Dan Levine and Diane Bartz, Reuters; Oracle wins copyright ruling against Google over Android:

"Oracle Corp won a legal victory against Google Inc on Friday as a U.S. appeals court decided Oracle could copyright parts of the Java programming language, which Google used to design its Android smartphone operating system.

The case, decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, is being closely watched in Silicon Valley. A high-profile 2012 trial featured testimony from Oracle's chief executive, Larry Ellison, and Google CEO Larry Page, and the legal issues go to the heart of how tech companies protect their most valuable intellectual property.

Google's Android operating system is the world's best-selling smartphone platform."

Obama Signs Nation's First 'Open Data' Law; Information Week, 5/12/14

William Welsh, Information Week; Obama Signs Nation's First 'Open Data' Law:

"President Barack Obama enacted the nation's first open data law, signing into law on May 9 bipartisan legislation that requires federal agencies to publish their spending data in a standardized, machine-readable format that the public can access through USASpending.gov.

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (S. 994) amends the eight-year-old Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act to make available to the public specific classes of federal agency spending data "with more specificity and at a deeper level than is currently reported," a White House statement said."