Heads in the Cloud
In the computer field, like any other field, there are “fads.” Some fads are short lived, while others take root and become part of the fabric of the IT business world. Unfortunately, it is difficult to tell sometimes what kind of fad we are talking about. When the Internet was first opened up to “public” usage (versus its prior use that was limited to government agencies, universities and some government contractors) there were many people who thought the public’s infatuation with the Internet would be a passing fad. How wrong they were.
Some fads, however, do seem to peak. Read more
Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad and the Really Bad
Last month I was honored to speak at the mid-Winter Copyright Society U.S.A. meeting in San Francisco. My presentation was focused primarily on the Google book search settlement, and its implications for copyright owners in general. I had previously written on how I felt that Google had gotten the better end of the deal, which I reiterated at the meeting. That generated a lively debate, including comments from some of the attorneys present who had apparently been involved with the settlement discussions.
Even after hearing their side of the story, I am still convinced, that the book industry got a raw deal. Read more
Join Us in London this Summer
The brochures have been mailed out, the website is completed, and applications are coming in. For any U.S student from an ABA accredited law school, or any foreign law student interested in information technology law, we invite you to join us in London for 5 weeks of stimulating classes (6 units of course credit), interesting professors, fascinating classmates (and a lot of fun).
This summer will be the inaugural program in International Information Technology Law sponsored by Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles, The program will be held at the University College of London Law Faculty building (Bentham House) in the heart of the UCL campus and just off of Russell Square — in the heart of London.
We have an outstanding faculty:
* Prof. Susan Brenner, University of Dayton (International Cybercrimes)
* Prof. Ian Walden, Queen Mary School of Law, London (Comparative Information Privacy Law and Regulations)
* Prof. Michael Scott, Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles (Drafting Information Technology Agreements), and
* Dr. Julia Hörnle, Queen Mary School of Law, London (Comparative Electronic Commerce Law and Regulation).
The program will run from June 21-July 24, 2009. Students will stay in College Hall, a recently opened housing facility, which is only a short walk from the classrooms. Classes go from 9-1:10 from Monday-Thursday, giving students every afternoon to explore all that London has to offer, plus every weekend is a three-day weekend for those who would like to travel outside of London.
Due to space limitations, we can only accept 48 students. So if you are interested, or know someone who might be, please let them know.
The Singularity Law Podcast Episode 8: Virus
“Video game law” emerges as a specialty. Facebook and eBay test the limits of Section 230. Forum selection clauses become more important in Internet legal documents. Myspace tries to turn piracy into profit with a new technology. A man claims that an emoticon turned him into a pedophile against his will. Hear Professor Michael Scott and Attorney Josh Kagan tackle these issues and more on this episode of The Singularity Law Podcast!
Click the play button below to listen, or click here to subscribe to us on iTunes!
Here are the show notes for this week’s episode:
Shownotes for The Singularity Law Podcast: Episode 8 for December 8, 2008
Our Panel for Today:
- Prof. Michael Scott of The Singularity Law Blog
- Josh Kagan of The Josh Kagan Blog
Video Game Law as a Hot New Practice Area: Hype or Reality?
- Wall Street Journal: Video-Game Law: The Niche Legal Practice Du Jour
- LA Times: These Lawyers Got (Video) Game
- Michael Scott’s blog: Videogame Law: New Legal Specialty or Marketing Hype?
The Limits of Section 230 Immunity, Part 1: Malware
- 47 U.S.C. §230
- Venkat Balasubramani’s SPAM NOTES blog: Could Facebook Be Liable for Spreading the Koobface Virus?
- Green v. AOL
The Limits of Section 230 Immunity, Part 2: Trademarks
- Alleyinsider: Amazon, Google: eBay Shouldn’t Have To Hunt For Trademark Infringers
- EFF: Jewelry Company Quest to Expand Trademark Law Could Quash Internet Commerce
Practice Pointer: The Continued Importance of Forum Selection Clauses
- “Internet Cases” blog: Court enforces forum selection clause in web hosting agreement
- Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute, 499 U.S. 585 (1991)
Turning Piracy Into Profit: The Myspace Experiment and Other DMCA Issues
- Reuters: MySpace, MTV Test Piracy-Profit Plan
- Michael Scott’s blog: Priming the Pump - Copyright Style
Final Thoughts: Entrapment by Emoticon
- Wall Street Journal: Emoticons on Trial at the Nebraska Supreme Court
This recording is an informational resource only. It is not designed to offer legal advice.
Videogame Law: New Legal Specialty or Marketing Hype?
During the last week there were two articles – one on the Wall Street Journal and one in the Los Angeles Times – about law firm establishing “specialties” in videogame law — as if this was a new field.
The fact is lawyers have been “specializing” in videogame law since the 1980s. When I began working as General Counsel for a multimedia developer in the early 1990s, the basic legal issues of videogame law already had been well established. What was still unclear was the appropriate business model/licensing structure for such games – particularly when a videogame was to be based on a movie, or when a multimedia product was going to include pre-existing content (music, video clips, text) from other sources. And while entertainment companies and videogame developers are still debating which entity provides the most “value” to a given interactive product, the basic legal issues surrounding their relationship are well settled.
When the Internet emerged as a burgeoning field in the mid-1990s, a lot of young lawyers touted “Internet law” as the next big thing. However, except for a few areas, such as domain names as trademarks and privacy issues, most of the bread-and-butter legal issues (copyright infringement, licensing, business deals) were merely variations on what had gone before.
And while it is true that the emergence of MMOs (Massive Multiplayer Online games) have given rise to several interesting new issues (particularly ownership of “virtual property”), most of what lawyers do in the videogame arena is well-settled.
The fact is that “Videogame Law” is so well established that law schools are offering courses (see here and here) in the field to law students.
In light of these facts, it is hard to understanding why two well-respected newspapers would run articles on this issue as if it was something brand new. Perhaps a slow news day?
Priming the Pump - Copyright Style
Over the past several years there have been a steady stream of stories about the record industry pursuing alleged song downloaders from P2P networks. While hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against those who have downloaded songs from the Internet, thousands of alleged downloaders have received “settlement letters,” which accuse them of copyright infringement and offer to settle out-of-court for thousand of dollars. Most of the recipients of these letters have been college students, and while exact figures are not publicly available, it is a safe guess that a significant percentage of the students (and their parents) have settled, rather than incurring the enormous legal fees required to fight the RIAA.
The revenues generated by this scheme have not gone unnoticed by other copyright owners whose works do not have the ubiquity online of popular music. In the last few weeks, various news stories have surfaced that claim that some owners of copyrighted works have decided to tap into this revenue windfall by surreptitiously posting their own copyrighted works online, waiting until users download them, and then threatening a lawsuit unless the downloaders pay them off. One article claims that certain copyright owners are “priming the pump” by posting their own works online, and then threatening litigation in order to wrest fat settlements from those who download their works. A second article claims that an American pornographer hired a German company to post his videos online, and then hired a law firm to threaten downloaders with copyright infringement litigation unless they “settled” and paid a significant sum.
Some commentators have argued that if a copyright owner uploads its copyrighted content to a free downloading site, the owner should be deemed to have impliedly licensed the downloading of that content, and such license should preclude a later claim of copyright infringement. I agree with that view. The problem that I see with asserting that defense is that 1) the downloader has already been sued and will have to incur the legal fees necessary to establish the defense, and 2) it will be very difficult to prove that the copyright owner authorized the posting of the works on the downloading service.
The proof issue is the major problem with defending against these bogus claims. Copyright owners who choose to implement this scheme generally are not going to post the works from their own computer, nor use employees or third parties who can easily be tracked down and who have no incentive to lie under oath. Instead, they will take steps to hide their tracks, using anonymous posting services, public terminals or hackers to post the materials. That will make it virtually impossible to track the postings back to the copyright owner. In addition, most accused downloaders will not have the money or the expertise to track down the party who actually uploaded the works in the first place and establish the copyright owner’s complicity in the scam.
This scam seems almost unstoppable. You can be sure that more scammers will be using it in the future. As long as copyright law allows owners to extort huge sums out of individuals who download copyrighted materials for personal use, this scheme will proliferate.
The Singularity Law Podcast Episode 7: The Global Perspective
A new U.S. president prepares to take office… will his “change” include a new technology policy? French record labels gear up for a fight against open source media sharing software. A European fashion designer tries to enforce a copyright judgment in New York. The judge who shut down Napster proposes a sweeping copyright reform. Craigslist fights prostitutes. It’s time for a global perspective! Hear Michael and Josh tackle these issues and more on this week’s special internationally-focused episode of The Singularity Law Podcast!
Click the play button below to listen, or click here to subscribe to us on iTunes!
Here are the show notes for this week’s episode:
Shownotes for The Singularity Law Podcast: Episode 7 for November 17, 2008
Our Panel for Today:
- Prof. Michael Scott of The Singularity Law Blog
- Josh Kagan of The Josh Kagan Blog
President-Elect Obama Talks Technology Policy
- Barack Obama’s Technology Proposals (From Campaign)
- Digg Dialogg with Al Gore
- Michael’s blog: We Need a Technology Policy for the 21st Century
- Josh’s blog: On Technology Policy, Let’s Be More Specific
- CNET writes about Obama’s search for a national CTO
- Also from CNET: Obama’s Mixed Signals on Transparency
Net Neutrality
- Michael’s blog: Network Neutrality: To Regulate or Not to Regulate
- Wired: Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge of Obama Team Review of FCC
From Pages to Platforms: The Law of Web 2.0 and Beyond
Practice Pointer: Conditional vs. Promissory Language in Licenses
- Jacobsen v. Katzer (Fed. Cir. Aug. 13, 2008)
- Josh’s blog: Win For Open Source in Jacobsen v. Katzer
Turbulence in the International Arena
- Torrentfreak: Record Labels to Sue Vuze, Limewire and SourceForge
- Intellectual Property Law Blog: Why US Web Site Owners Should Watch Foreign Suits (PDF)
Nap ster Judge Proposes Radical Copyright Reform
Final Thoughts: Craigslist and Hookers
- Silicon Alley Insider: Craigslist: From Now On, All Hookers Require A Valid Credit Card
We apologize for the fluctuations in sound quality throughout this episode. We realized about 15 minutes into recording that our microphone had a bad connection.
From Pages to Platforms: The Law of Web 2.0 and Beyond
Last Thursday, Josh Kagan gave a talk on Web 2.0 law for my Internet & E-Commerce Law class here at Southwestern Law School. Josh covered several interesting topics, including copyleft licenses, DMCA takedown abuse, and blogger issues. This is a webcast of that talk.
This is a QuickTime video, so to view it in a larger window simply click “download” below instead of playing it in your browser. It will also be available in our iTunes podcast feed.
We’re also ramping up a new episode of our podcast for today. Episode 7: “The Global Perspective” will be available tonight, so stay tuned!
Viacom: Hey Google, What About Us?
Several weeks ago now, Google announced the settlement of a copyright infringement case filed against it by a group of American publishers who objected to the Google Book Search project. (I recently wrote about the settlement here.) The Google Book Search project has the goal of digitizing virtually every book ever published, and making that database searchable. The plaintiffs had objected both to the digitizing, which involved wholesale copying of complete books, as well as displaying the search results, which they argued constituted further copying (and therefore infringement). Google based its defense entirely on the fair use doctrine under Section 107 of the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. §107).
The settlement has Google paying the book publishers $125 million in exchange for essentially a perpetual license to digitize and store all of their books now in existence, as well as future books that they may publish. It places strict limitations on Google’s ability to display books that are in-print and in-copyright, but allows Google to not only display portions of out-of-print, but still in-copyright books, but to sell access to those books. Google can charge for access to the digital version of those books, and will be allowed to retain 37% of all revenues generated from the sale of those books and certain advertising revenues it may generate as well. In exchange, the publishers will dismiss their infringement action, and since it was filed as a class action, the settlement will bind both the named plaintiffs but all other U.S. publishers as well, unless they opt out.
This settlement has not gone unnoticed by Viacom, Inc., which also has a major copyright infringement suit pending against Google. Unlike the publishers’ case, the Viacom action involves the posting of Viacom owned videos on YouTube, a company owned by Google. Executives of Viacom are quoted as saying, basically, that since Google settled the publishers’ case, there is no reason it shouldn’t settle with Viacom (and pay Viacom a hefty settlement fee as well). While Google might decide to do so, if it made business sense to do so (as it did in the publishers’ case), the two cases have very little in common, other than the fact that they both involve Google as a defendant and they are both copyright infringement cases. Read more
Short Q&A on New Int’l IT Law Summer Program in London
The following Q&A materials were developed for an internal newsletter at Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles. I thought it might be of interest to law students wanting to learn more about the program, and law professor who have students that might be interested in the program. Please feel free to link to this page, or reproduce the Q&A materials. For further information on the Summer International IT Law Program, click here.
1. Tell me about the new Information Technology (IT) Law Summer Program in London?
The program will allow students to earn six units of course credit while enjoying five incredible weeks in London. Each student will choose two of four courses: Comparative Electronic Commerce Law, Comparative Information Privacy Law, International Cybercrimes or Drafting Information Technology Agreements. Classes will be held from 9-1, Monday through Thursday, which makes every weekend a three-day weekend. Classes will be supplemented by field trips, guest speakers and various social events.
2. When did you develop the idea for the IT Summer Law Program?
I have been interested in expanding the school’s offerings in international technology law since I joined the full-time faculty in 2003. There are not a lot of professors in Los Angeles, or even the United States, that have expertise in this area. Because of the growing importance of the European Union, and the enactment of new IT laws in the EU, it made sense to locate the program within the EU where we can hire professors knowledgeable in comparative US-EU IT laws.
3. Is this the first program of its kind?
Yes. There have been summer abroad programs that offer one or two courses in IT law, but this is the only program that focuses exclusively on international IT law. This gives students interested in practicing in this field a great opportunity to learn from professors who are internationally recognized educators in the field. It should give students participating in the program a distinct advantage over other students in getting a job in the IT sector. Read more
