It’s been a week since the largest ever fine by the European Commission was issued to Microsoft for failure to comply fully with the eponymous competition case. I must admit that even I, not a fan of Microsoft, flinched at what seems to be unusually steep punishment for failure to Read more…
I have been following with interest the murder trial of Linux programmer Hans Reiser, not because it has particular IT Law implications, but because it involves a prominent open source community member. Mr Reiser married his late wife, Nina, in 1999. They had some marital problems leading up to 2006, Read more…
(via Cedric Manara) The European Court of Justice has decided on a case in which it calls for a balance to be struck between intellectual property rights and the protection of personal data. Enter Case C-275/06, Productores de Música de España v Telefónica de España. This is your average P2P Read more…
Back in November2007 I briefly commented on a case making its way to the High Court of England and Wales dealing with software patents. We now have a decision, and it may prove to be quite an important shift in the practice at the Intellectual Property Office. The case is Read more…
Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman on trial for making music available in the Kazaa network, has lost her jury case and will have to pay the plaintiffs $220,000 USD (that’s $248,000 AUS). The Duluth jury held her liable for $9,250 for each of the 24 songs that were subject to Read more…
(via Out-Law) Browse-wrap agreements have received yet another boost in the United States in the case of Cohn v Truebeginnings. The California Court of Appeals has ruled in favour of the defendants in a case of contract formation via terms of use. Michael Cohn sued dating website True.com in December Read more…
Habitual readers may have noticed that one of the repetitive memes in this blog is that copyleft licences are contracts. In Jacobsen v Katzer, and American court has agreed. The case involved Robert Jacobsen, an open source developer participating in an open source project called Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI), Read more…
One more case in the ongoing battle in Spain between SGAE and small bars over copyleft music. Derecho de Internet reports on this latest appeal by the SGAE against a bar in Madrid called “Buenavistilla Social Club”. The collecting society initially lost the case and therefore appealed to have the Read more…
The U.S. Ninth Circuit has decided an appeal on the Perfect 10 v Google case, and has sent it back to the district court. For those unfamiliar with the case, Perfect 10 is an adult content provider who sued Google over Google Image thumbnails, claiming that the tiny images displayed Read more…
Last week we reported on the case brought by Spain’s collecting agency SGAE against a bowling bar in Alicante, which lost on its claim that it only played “copyleft” music. Almost immediately, another case has come out, this one in favour of the claimant bar. As I reported last week, Read more…