It’s been rough weather for Google in France. Three weeks after the French Data Protection Authority imposed a record fine against Google for non-compliance with the GDPR, the Paris District Court (“Tribunal de Grande Instance”) invalidated 38 clauses of Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Google+, the Internet-based social media network owned and operated by Google.
This decision was rendered on February 12,… More
Earlier this week, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals released its blockbuster decision in Oracle America, Inc. v. Google LLC, which held that Google’s unauthorized use of certain aspects of Oracle’s Java software was not fair use. In the past few days and in the coming weeks, nearly every lawyer who has ever had occasion to turn to Title 17 is going be writing,… More
On May 18, 2015, the Ninth Circuit sitting en banc vacated its prior decision in Garcia v. Google. The prior decision, authored by Judge Alex Kozinksi, controversially held that an actress had standing to issue a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube because she had a distinct copyright in her performance within a film, even though she was not an author of the film as a whole.… More
The U.S. Copyright Office has called for public comment on potential legislative solutions to the problem of orphan works under U.S. Copyright law.
An orphan work is an original work of authorship whose author cannot be located or identified when someone is seeking permission to use it. For example, say you want to reprint a photograph in a book, but you can’t identify or locate the photographer,… More
The firmament of copyright blog topics just got a little dimmer, and a lot better clothed. Last month, after eleven years, three Ninth Circuit opinions and 1,212 docket entries in the trial court, soft-porn multimedia company Perfect10, Inc. stipulated to the dismissal of its copyright infringement claims against Google (and others) in the Federal District Court for the Central District of California.
As blogged about here previously,… More
Just when you thought it was safe to bid on competitors’ trademarks as keywords — provided you played it smart, and didn’t put trademarks in the actual text of your sponsored ad except under certain limited circumstances — comes the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Rosetta Stone v. Google. In its opinion, the Fourth Circuit reverses, in significant part, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for its apparently hasty summary judgment order in favor of Google,… More
In what must be one of the nation’s longest-lived Internet copyright wars, Perfect10, Inc. recently opened up a new front, asserting that online publication of its Digital Millenium Copyright Act takedown notices is a copyright violation.
Perfect10, founded by former mathematics professor and professional poker player Norman Zada, is a softporn fee-based Internet site and print magazine that publishes pictures of women in various states of undress.… More
Almost since the founding of YouTube in 2005, the on-line video service has been labeled by commentators as a top virtual destination for copyright-infringing material. According to a lawsuit brought by Viacom International, Inc., YouTube was aware of this alleged infringement as a general matter, and through advertising revenues profited handsomely from it. Nevertheless, a federal judge has held that YouTube’s general knowledge alone,… More