Christen v. Iparadigms, LLC, No. 10-620, 2010 WL 3063137 (E.D.Va. Aug. 4, 2010) Plaintiff was a graduate student and one of her professors uploaded a couple of plaintiff’s papers to the web-based plagiarism detection service Turnitin. You may remember how the Fourth Circuit held last year that this uploading and use of students’ papers is [...]
Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Category
New copyright lawsuit involves Creative Commons
July 2nd, 2010
5 Comments
GateHouse Media, Inc. v. That’s Great News, LLC, No. 10-50164 (N.D. Ill. filed 6/30/2010) A lawsuit filed this past week in the Northern District of Illinois includes a claim that the defendant violated the terms of a Creative Commons license covering the plaintiff’s copyrighted works. GateHouse Media publishes a slew of local newspapers, including the [...]
YouTube victorious in copyright case brought by Viacom
June 23rd, 2010
1 Comment
District court grants summary judgment, finding YouTube protected by DMCA safe harbor. Viacom v. YouTube, No. 07-2103, (S.D.N.Y. June 23, 2010) The question of whether and to what extent a website operator should be liable for the copyright infringement occasioned by the content uploaded by the site’s users is one of the central problems of [...]
Court rejects RIAA’s arguments against 24 cent ringtone royalty rate
June 23rd, 2010
Comments Off
Recording Industry Ass’n of America, Inc. v. Librarian of Congress, — F.3d —, 2010 WL 2487842 (D.C. Cir. June 22, 2010) Recorded music is usually subject to copyright protection in two ways — the musical composition (think sheet music and lyrics) is protected by one copyright, and the actual sound recording is protected by another [...]
Anonymous accused Bittorrent user moves to quash subpoena using real name
May 25th, 2010
2 Comments
Worldwide Film Entertainment, LLC v. Does 1-749, 2010 WL 2011306 (D.D.C. May 20, 2009) Some have already commented on their scruples arising from the large economies of scale approach to copyright litigation that’s being undertaken by lawyers with the U.S. Copyright Group to go after Bittorrent movie sharers. See, for example, what Mike Masnick and [...]
How Twitter’s grant to the Library of Congress could be copyright-okay
April 15th, 2010
6 Comments
Twitter is giving a copy of the archive of all tweets from the beginning of time to the Library of Congress. The inevitable outrage has ensued. One big concern is privacy. You gotta admit it’s creepy (and evokes Big Brother) to know that all your tweets will belong to the feds. The other outrage-catalyst is [...]
Court orders anonymous GQ blogger and accused hacker to be identified
January 19th, 2010
1 Comment
Advance Magazine Publishers v. Does 1-5, No. 09-10257 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 22, 2009) Someone accessing the Internet using an AT&T IP address hacked into Conde Nast’s computer system and acquired and published copies of editorial content and the images that were to be in the December 2009 issue of GQ. Those images were later published anonymously [...]
BitTorrent site liable for Grokster style inducement of copyright infringement
January 14th, 2010
Comments Off
Columbia Pictures v. Fung, No. 06-5578 (C.D. Cal. December 21, 2009). This case came out three weeks ago, but it’s pretty significant and hasn’t gotten the coverage and analysis it deserves. Of course Professor Goldman covered it in a timely manner. But his blogging agility surpasses that of us mere mortals. Fung and his company [...]
Do Twitter’s new terms of service forsake third party developers?
September 11th, 2009
4 Comments
Twitter announced its new Terms of Service yesterday. One big issue deals with copyright ownership. This is one of the perennial questions in the law of social media: “who owns the user-created content?” Twitter nods to this issue when it states that “Twitter is allowed to ‘use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display [...]
Record companies win $1.92 million in case against individual file sharer
June 18th, 2009
1 Comment
There has only been one copyright infringement case filed against an individual accused of illegally sharing music files over the internet to actually go to trial. That’s the case of Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas. In October 2007, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota returned a verdict of $222,000 [...]
