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…

On June 4, 2015 the Copyright Office released its Report on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. Previous coverage of the orphan works section of the report is available here and the Library Copyright Alliance’s response to the report is available here. This post focuses on the section of the report covering mass digitization and lays out concerns with the report’s…

If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu this campaign season, you’re not alone. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just earned public backlash from singer Neil Young for using Young’s song “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Young claimed that Trump used the song without seeking his permission. While true, the hitch here is that Trump didn’t actually have to ask….

Today the High Court of the United Kingdom handed down an excellent decision—excellent because the result is so unreasonable, so out of touch with reality, and so divorced from the needs and expectations of ordinary users, that it provides a textbook illustration of the need for urgent reform of the outdated and unbalanced European Copyright Directive. In a nutshell, the…

On today’s podcast we discuss DVD ripping and copyright policy. Click here to download the podcast. Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. Subscribe to the podcast via the .xml here.

Last weekend, The Sunday Times, a UK newspaper, released a front-page article entitled “British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.” The article claimed that Russia and China accessed the classified files leaked by Edward Snowden. The article went on to state that UK intelligence agency MI6 was forced to remove agents from active operations in Moscow because of this leak….

Brussels, BELGIUM – Today, news-publisher-backed legislative proposals often called “ancillary copyrights” took major blows in both Brussels and Austria. Also referred to as a ‘snippet levy’, these laws aim to make online services like search engines and news aggregators pay for the display of hyperlinks and short snippets (pieces of text). First, the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee voted down…

On Wednesday, NPR ran a story on composer Michael Giacchino that highlights the importance of fair use copying to the creative process. Giacchino won an Oscar in 2010 for his score for the film Up, and he has written the score for many other films, including the just-released Jurassic World, Tomorrowland, Mission Impossible 3, Dawn of the Planet of the…