Brussels, BELGIUM — Discussions around a possible ‘snippet levy’ or ‘news aggregation tax’ targeting online services like search engines and news aggregators have slowly but surely reached Brussels. In the last month alone we witnessed two considerable developments. First, the legal committee of the European Parliament decided the vote down an amendment to MEP Reda’s copyright report which would have…

This post is the first installment in a new blog series from Courtney Duffy, the Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow at Public Knowledge. It was originally posted on the Fractured Atlas blog. In each post, Courtney will look at copyright issues through the lens of a different art form. She begins with the world of authorship. Writing…

We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and we’re thrilled to be celebrating a quarter-century of fighting for digital rights. We’re kicking off this milestone in two ways: a membership drive and a party and minicon in San Francisco on July 16. We’re asking people to donate and become members because we fight passionately for the rights of individuals—and in turn, rely…

On June 22, 2013, ARL joined an amicus brief of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the case Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal, currently pending in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, supporting the respondent, LiveJournal. The case involves a LiveJournal blog, Oh No…

Last week, CCIA filed two amicus briefs in copyright cases: Mavrix v. LiveJournal, a 9th Cir. case about the DMCA safe harbors, and Elsevier v. Sci-Hub, an S.D.N.Y. copyright case involving proposed preliminary injunctions against non-party intermediaries. CCIA’s brief in Mavrix v. LiveJournal, joined by the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research…

Sadly, today the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the Federal Circuit’s dangerous decision in Oracle v. Google. Oracle claims a copyright on the Java Application Programming Interface (API), and that Google infringed that copyright by using certain Java APIs in the Android OS. The Federal Circuit had ruled in Oracle’s favor, reversing a well-reasoned district court opinion holding that…

This morning the Supreme Court issued an order indicating that it was declining to hear an appeal of the copyright case between Oracle and Google.  The appeal concerned the copyrightability of “application programming interfaces” (APIs).  Oracle launched the suit against Google shortly after acquiring Sun, which held copyrights and patents on the Java computer language, in 2010.  It claimed that Android infringed Java copyrights because Android…

Today, the Supreme Court announced that it has refused to hear the Google v. Oracle case. The case involves the copyrightability of Oracle’s application programming interface (API), a part of the Java programming language and system. The case attracted widespread attention last May, when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Oracle could assert a copyright over…

Since our report last week on Australia’s Internet censorship bill, the bill did indeed pass the Senate yesterday, and will become the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015. The new law provides an accelerated process for rightsholders to obtain court orders for ISPs to block sites that have the primary purpose of infringing copyright, or “facilitating” its infringement—a term that…

You may be used to thinking of the Internet as being built of:  Services that directly connect you to the Internet; Services that offer their own content to the Internet; and Services that host your content (or someone else’s) on the Internet. But of course, today’s Internet ecology is more complicated than that. A “content delivery network” (CDN) service like…