There is an interesting copyright case brewing online. Cyriak Harris is a British freelance video animator, famous for creating surreal videos involving cute animals that are then transformed in often nightmarish ways (my favourite is Kitty City). In 2010 he produced a video of dancing cows that went viral (as Read more…
The BBC has announced that it will drop its online website for recipes in an effort to generate savings. This has raised quite a few eyebrows, with the hashtag #bbcrecipes currently the top UK trending topic on Twitter. This has prompted a very interesting legal discussion, can recipes be subject Read more…
A very interesting case has been developing this week to highlight several issues surrounding the DMCA take-down procedure, and the protection of copyright story elements such as plot, story and dialogue. The case involves the YouTube channel of Spanish geek vlogger Frikidoctor, which seems to specialise in Game of Thrones Read more…
At 7 seconds, this happy llama is thankfully not infringing.* How much do you need to reproduce a video or broadcast in order to infringe copyright? In the age of Vine, Periscope and animated gifs, this question has become more important than ever. We now may have a partial answer Read more…
A judge in California has dismissed a copyright case brought by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), where the animal rights organisation claimed that it represented the monkey that took the famous selfie depicted above. The case is that of Naruto v Slater, where PETA sued British photographer Read more…
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the EU is not about to make linking illegal. The bad news is that the latest proposal from the EU Commission leaves open the door for the creation of an ancillary copyright that would affect the way in Read more…
You may have read that the European Commission intends to prevent hyperlinks to copyrighted material. The good news is that this isn’t true, but the bad news is that there is a real proposal to change copyright law that could change how we use hyperlinks – the bedrock of the Read more…
Just when you thought that the monkey selfie story had ran its course, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have sued the photographer David Slater and his company Wildlife Photography to try to get the copyright of the image given to Naruto, the macaque monkey at the heart Read more…
Last month, a 22-year old Norwegian called Kevin Synnes took a trip with his girlfriend to get a new engine for his car. They stopped at a hardware store and Kevin found a large box filled with toy rubber geese. Wanting to play a prank on his girlfriend, and while Read more…
You may have come across Deep Dream, a visualization tool by Google that uses artificial intelligence to create unique, bizarre, and sometimes unsettling images. Deep Dream is an open source program that uses an artificial neural network to transform an image using mathematical methods used in machine learning that resemble Read more…