In a previous post we provided the background of what some call the Copyright Wars, delineating the sides and the parties. While legal conflicts about copyright have been raging since its inception, this post will only cover the modern conflicts that arose after the Internet came into being. This short Read more…
My social timeline has been abuzz with the latest copyright decision regarding the Internet Archive, which lost its appeal in the copyright lawsuit from Hachette. In the words of a colleague, this is a “disappointing but not unforeseen” development; the lower court ruling left little room for an appeal to Read more…
The copyright wars are back, and this time the conflict is all about artificial intelligence. While most of the public has been paying attention to what is going on with AI art tools such as DALL-E, the current stage of AI development started with text tools, particularly GPT-3 and the Read more…
A few months ago we reported on a couple of decisions by the England and Wales Hight Court declaring private copying illegal (here and here). Incredibly, before 2014 making a private copy of a legally-purchased work was illegal in the UK, which didn’t stop anyone ripping CDs or making digital Read more…
The Open Rights Group (ORG) has sent us a communication regarding a new proposal in the UK to criminalise copyright infringement beyond the current limits to up to 10 years. I reproduce their statement about the proposals. “The IPO has recently started consultation on proposals to increase the maximum prison Read more…
My social media timeline has been inundated with reports that iTunes is now illegal in the UK. The origin of the story is an article in TorrentFreak, where the author contacted the UK IP Office to ask about a recent High Court decision that repealed legislation making it legal to Read more…
My social media timeline is filled with links to an article on Torrent Freak by Rick Falvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party. The article is entitled “The Entire Copyright Monopoly Idea is Based on a Lie“. The article sets out to criticise the social contract that gives copyright Read more…
It has been often remarked in these pages that we seem to be going back in time when it comes to copyright case law. In particular, the fact that the Court of Justice of the European Union continues to decide cases about linking seems to me to be a baffling Read more…
The Court of Justice of the European Union has produced an interesting decision regarding copyright levies in the case of Copydan Båndkopi v Nokia Danmark (C‑463/12). Some European countries have established a copyright levy scheme for blank media, this means that whenever there is a sale of a product that Read more…
On December 9 2014, Swedish police raided the servers of the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, and finally managed to shut down the service for the first time since its creation in 2003. Police acted from a complaint from Swedish rights holder anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, and while I have Read more…