obtaining a better understanding of the information society and law’s role in it.
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Interesting Wired article on a French judge’s critical take on the copyright industry’s battle against file-sharers, copy-fighters, and the like. With great comments from my colleague at OECD, Sacha Wunsch-Vincent: “Now is the time for the content industry, access and technology providers to get out of courts and back to business.”
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Back in St. Gallen for two days, I found Christoph B. Graber’s et al. (eds.) book on Digital Rights Management: The End of Collecting Societies? on my desk. The impressive volume includes, inter alia, contributions by our own John Palfrey, Christoph Graber, Daniel Gervais, Adolf Dietz, Jacques de Werra, Dorothea Senn, and other IP experts. Together with Mike Girsberger, I contributed a short version of the Berkman EUCD paper to the discussion.
Thanks to the i-call team for their terrific work!
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The Local reports that the Swedish minister of justice has urged record companies to remove copy-protection technologies from CDs – especially in order to enable private copying. According to the same source, the minister even considers a ban of copy controls on CDs. (via BNA’s Internet Law News)
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Former Berkman digital media team member Georg P. Krog sent us and others earlier last week an interesting summary of a recent Norwegian Supreme Court case on linking and copyright infringement. In the meantime, Larry Lessig has posted it.
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Peter Jaszi has written and posted an interesting paper on Public Interest Exceptions in Copyright from a comparative and international perspective. He concludes that the “balance in copyright is threatened everywhere in the world, from the least developed countries to the major copyright exporting nations,” and suggests a research project aimed at drafting a best practice model for provisions on limitations and exceptions “that mix and match provisions from all the laws of the world.”
I reported here and here that a Paris District Court ruled in UFC v.Films Alain Sadre et al that a copy protection system on a DVD does not conflict with provisions of the French Intellectual Property Code, which limit copyright owners’ rights regarding reproductions made strictly for the copier’s private use. UFC, a consumer rights association, claimed it received complaints from consumers about DVD copy protections that prevent purchasers from making copies for private use. The court confirmed that such technical protection measures comply with the EU-Copyright Directive (EUCD), though the EUCD is not yet transposed into French law.
Some days ago, however, a Paris Appellate Court reversed the ruling. I haven’t had a chance to analyze the decision, but it reportedly requires film producers Alain Sarde and Studio Canal to remove copy controls on their DVDs in order to enable the beneficiaries of the private copying exception as set forth by French law to exercise their rights.
Further, the Court criticized that the DVD producers did not provide sufficient consumer information as far as copy restriction is concerned. The label “CP” for “copy protected” was printed on the jacket, but in small characters and not sufficiently explicit.
See news report in French, and English translation.
It will be interesting to analyze the ruling in detail and to think about its compliance with EU law vis-�-vis Article 6 of the EUCD (see here.)
Update: The decision (in French) is published here.
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Tonight, AP reports that RIAA and MPAA intend to sue hundreds of students accused of illegally distributing copyrighted songs and films across college campuses – including Harvard University – using Internet2, the private research network which is hundreds of times faster than the Internet. It’s still unclear how the entertainment industry could detect piracy over Internet2.
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I’m catching up (terribly delayed) with a couple of interesting articles, research papers, and news reports. Here’s a selection of today’s recommended readings:
* M. Davison and B. Hugentholtz’s piece “Football fixtures, horseraces and spinoffs: the ECJ domesticates the database right”
* Natalie Helberger’s Indicare article “Thou shalt not mislead thy customer! The pitfalls of labelling and transparency”
* Mark N. Cooper, TIME FOR THE RECORDING INDUSTRY TO FACE THE MUSIC: THE POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF PEER-TO-PEER COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS
* Recent Pew report on Music and Video Downloading
* News.com report on Bertelsmann’s new P2P service
* Heise on “Google News: how far does freedom of speech go?”
* I almost forgot this one: Heise on the German Green Party talking about side effects of search engines
Happy Easter.
Michael Birnhack posted an interesting article on SSRN (forthcoming in THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OF INFORMATION, P. Bernt Hugenholtz & Lucie Guibault, eds., Kluwer Law International, 2005): “More or Better? Shaping the Public Domain“. I’m particularly interested in the way he frames information quality issues in the context of free speech theories and copyright. Here’s the abstract:
Once we accept that the public domain is not only a negative, we need to figure out how we would like it to be constructed. In this article I would like to add my contribution to the construction of the public domain. In performing this task, we need not ignore the elaborate political thought about freedom of speech. The public domain and free speech are two sides of the same coin. Both notions aim at constructing a communicative sphere, where people can interact with each other in various circles, whether it is an interpersonal circle, a communitarian one or a wider political circle. In this sense, both are derivatives of a political notion, which is a particular conception of democracy. Accordingly, it is useful to learn from the lessons of the free speech-copyright conflict in our task of constructing the public domain, within copyright law.
What kind of public domain are we interested in? I apply the notions of quality and quantity. These are fuzzy terms. At best, we would like to have a combination of both: we would like to construct a public domain that has more information and more speech of better quality. The article explores how these fuzzy terms interact with various theoretical justifications of both free speech jurisprudence, and then with various theories of copyright law, and concludes with tying all the ends together – examining how we can better construct the public domain.
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A French Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a student — sued by the movie industry — who downloaded copyrighted movies from the Internet, burned them onto CD ROMs, and watched them with one or two friends. (The student admitted that one third of the content of his 488 CDs-collection was downloaded from the Internet.)
The Montpellier Court applied a provision of the French Intellectual Property Act, which, in essence, states that authors, once a work has been released, may not prohibit private and non-commercial performances carried out within the family circle, and cannot control the making of copies for strictly private use of the copier and not intended for collective use. [Thanks to C�dric Manara for the pointer and the translation via cyberlaw list.]
As far as I can tell, there was no circumvention of technological protection measures involved. In any event, a case to be included in a potential update of this report.
