Posts Tagged: "copyright infringement"

final judgment that was made by the New Jersey District Court in favor of Tetris Holding with respect to its copyright and trade dress infringement claims against Xio Interactive, Inc., I would issue this obvious warning: Copycats Beware.

For some time I have known that we have been experiencing what seemed to be a rather large copyright infringement problem. For example, I know of very large entities that routinely would copy and paste our articles, remove links and any advertisement and then mass distribute just the text of our articles. This is obvious, blatant and willful copyright infringement. What was particularly disheartening was that this was going on within the intellectual property community. Disappointing because if those who are in the industry and working with content creators and inventors on a daily basis are all to willing to engage in that type of copyright infringement what hope do we have as content creators? Those whose livelihoods depend upon content creators and inventors should be the ones who most understand the damage that is caused by widespread copyright infringement.

Last week, a petition was created to petition the White House to take down the website Jerk.com. To date the petition has unfortunately not received many votes. Earlier today I was the 28th e-signer of the petition. My guess is that this is due to lack of publicity more so than anything else. Once people learn of the petition my guess is that the signatures will accumulate quickly, but will there be enough time to reach the 100,000 signature threshold by February 22, 2013?

A Chicago musician called Rebecca Francescatti says that Lady Gaga stole part of her song “Juda” for the hit song “Judas”. More specifically, the complaint alleges that a particular portion of “Judas” violates Francescatti’s exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, performance, and preparation of a derivative work. But before we get to that, we’ll need to wade through a bit of a semantics morass. This suit is being couched in terms of plagiarism.

Jerk.com isn’t the worst website on the Internet by a long shot, but the arrogance with which the site is operated and seems to flagrantly disregard copyright laws is astounding. If you are going to use a DMCA Takedown Notice you should be certain that you are the copyright owner. If you are in the picture that Jerk.com uses the copyright owner would be the photographer unless you specifically obtained the underlying copyrights by assignment. So the person who should send the DMCA Takedown Notice is the copyright owner. Alternatively, have the person who took the copyright assign any and all copyrights to you before you send the DMCA Takedown Notice. This can easily be achieved by a basic copyright assignment.

This case started back in 2006, when the newspaper publishers took Google to court, stating that the popular search engine was infringing on their copyright. They had been trying to get Google to compensate them for using their online content, claiming that as more and more readers turned to the Internet to get their news, less and less readers were utilizing their printed versions. Under the new agreement, Google will team up with the Rossel Group, a major media group in Brussels that owns some of the top newspapers such as Le Soir and L’Echo; and the IPM Group which puts out publications L’Avenir and La Libre Belgique.

Though the owners of the MLP Online site seemed to be aware of the fact that their game was infringing on the Hasbro trademark, they went ahead and constructed the game anyway. However, they are not upset with Hasbro for issuing the cease and desist. The moderator of the online fan site stated that, “Hasbro is not to be blamed here. As per U.S. Trademark law, as soon as an infringement comes to light, they are obligated to defend the trademark, or they will lose it. They had no choice in the matter, regardless of what they thought of the project or how it benefited them. At this time, our game is no longer in development.”

The answer to why a patent law firm would be taking a blanket copyright license may well be found in the old saying about a penny of prevention being worth a pound of cure. Law firms have been coming under fire recently for alleged copyright violations relating to the materials they submit to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

In a battle for the superheroes, an federal complaint alleging copyright infringement was filed on October 9, 2012 in the United States Federal District Court for the District of Colorado by a company called Stan Lee Media. The company was started by Stan Lee with his friend Peter Paul, who is now serving time in prison for fraudulent activities regarding this company. Lee wisely pulled out of the company over a decade ago when it failed. According to the complaint, Lee signed over the rights to his famed superheroes to the company Stan Lee Media. Of course, it is more complicated than it looks at first glance.

The agreement between AAP and Google settles a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Google on October 19, 2005 by AAP member publishers (The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.; Pearson Education, Inc., Penguin Group (USA) Inc., and Simon & Schuster, Inc.). As the settlement is between only the AAP and Google, it does not affect Google’s current litigation with the Authors Guild or otherwise address the underlying questions in that suit. According to the press release issued by AAP and Google, court approval of the settlement will not be necessary.

Given the fact that the IOC is notoriously litigious, are the WSJ and the Guardian in trouble for their little vignettes? Nah -thanks to the 2 Live Crew. Parody is a defense that falls under the broader category of Fair Use. The 2 Live Crew case (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994)) is the Fair Use decision that all other interpretations flow from. The Court had to start with determining if 2 Live Crew’s use was satire or parody. Satire, as defined by the Campbell court and the Oxford Dictionary in 1994, is a work “in which prevalent follies or vices are assailed with ridicule”, which is a very weird way of saying “your work is being made fun of for being stupid”. Parody, however, is more closely related to a spoof or a humorous exaggeration. Courts still struggle with both concepts in the realm of copyright infringement and the fair use defense. But we did learn from Campbell is that commercial use does not take a use out of the realm of parody.

Readers did point out some issues in our article that we would like to correct. First, we made some statements regarding copyright that are not completely accurate. A work can be jointly owned by two or more copyright holders who then have the right to individually assign nonexclusive rights without the permission of the other copyright holders. This is not typically done by companies developing code, because it effectively gives away the copyrights. It is more typically done when a company accepts code developed by an outside entity. In fact, as was pointed out by one reader, Sun has an agreement called the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) that specifies that any person who contributes code to a Sun-managed project gives Sun joint copyright in the code. This is an interesting way for Sun to ensure that code contributed to any of its projects can be used without restriction by Sun without copyright issues.

We decided to pursue these questions using the advanced tools for detecting copyright infringement created by our sister company, Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering (SAFE Corporation) and the thorough processes that we have developed. What started off as simple curiosity turned into an interesting research and analysis project to determine if we could uncover evidence of copyright infringement that Oracle’s experts had missed. Our two-week effort turned up some very surprising results–significant amounts of apparently copied code that was not brought up at the trial.

In order to establish copyright infringement, a plaintiff must show: (1) ownership of a valid copyright, and (2) copying of constituent elements of the work that are original. Judge Chin concluded that no participation of the individual members would be necessary in order to establish the first prong for those who retain copyright ownership. More specifically, copyright registrations are prima facie evidence of copyright ownership and they are a matter of public record. While limited participation may be necessary for those who have assigned copyrights or licensed copyrights and continue to receive royalties, Judge Chin determined that “[r]equiring some individual members to present documentary evidence of their beneficial copyright interest would not make this case administratively inconvenient or unmanageable.”

AP’s common law misappropriation claim has its origins in a remarkably similar suit AP brought against a competing news service almost a century ago. In INS v. AP the Supreme Court, in 1918, enjoined INS, a competing news service, from free-riding on the work product of AP. The misappropriation action was based on INS re-distributing information to its customers which AP had previously released into the public domain. INS was enjoined from using the information for a limited time period while it was hot news (i.e. while it had commercial value as news). The Supreme Court’s decision was based on two rationales: (1) preventing unacceptable conduct in the form of a commercial enterprise free-riding on the investment of time and money by a competitor; and (2) avoiding the resulting ruinous competition that could result from a commercial enterprise free-riding on the efforts of a competitor.