Can you renounce to your copyright over a work? This simple question is the basis of a study undertaken by Yours Truly for WIPO. Most people I’ve asked the question tend to answer “of course!” It’s your work after all, and you can do anything you want with things you Read more…
My friend and colleague Renata Avila has asked an interesting question on Twitter: “If the NSA is storing, reproducing – copying my data and works, are they violating Copyright Law?” I do not think that it has been asked before, so I am trying to tackle it today. This is Read more…
All of this week blogs and websites around the globe have been celebrating Copyright Week, an initiative by the EFF to celebrate two years of the defeat of SOPA/PIPA. Copyright Week consists of a series of articles analysing the future of copyright reform, showcased in a number of sites and Read more…
Yours Truly is writing a report on voluntary copyright relinquishment and public domain dedications for WIPO. The terms of reference of the report can be found here. As part of the work, I thought that it would be a good idea to have an informal web survey to ask people Read more…
Has the UK abolished copyright law with the passing of orphan works legislation? I’ll answer quickly with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: NO. However, if you listen to some copyright maximalist outlets, and particularly to the photograph lobby, you would believe that all copyright has been abolished as of now. Just Read more…
The High Court of England and Wales has produced another blocking order for UK Internet service providers (ISPs) against three torrent sites. The action was brought by the British Recorded Music Industry (BPI) against the main UK ISPs in order to obtain a blocking order against three torrent indexing sites, Read more…
An interesting case from Argentina. A judge has received and rejected a request from HBO Ole Partners, the Latin American branch of HBO, to block access to the popular streaming site Cuevana. In case you have not heard about it, Cuevana is an Argentinian streaming site that offers high-quality movies free Read more…
If you took a random sample from news items dating from the first half of the year, you would be forgiven for thinking that piracy was dead, and copyright maximalism was the victor in the Copyright wars. Megaupload had been shut down, its data shredded and scattered to the winds, Read more…
For something which has the unequivocal weight of the law behind it, software copyright has had a rather bumpy history in the courts. Once we get past the obvious facts of law, namely that copyright protects source code, the application of such protection has been more difficult. The reason for Read more…
Source: google.ca via Andres on Pinterest It seems like the Pinterest copyright meme refuses to die. Some days ago I wrote a short analysis of what I believed were the main issues in this subject, particularly concentrating on the fair use and DMCA take-down aspects of the question. In my Read more…