Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Today the Supreme Court reportedly resolved not to hear the appeal on the Second Circuit’s Cablevision decision. This denial comes shortly after the Court has received the U.S. Government's brief recommending to reject the petition.

Patrícia Akester from the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge has just published a new study on DRM. Here’s the abstract:

Pam Samuelson offers some interesting reflections on the Google book search agreement. Her warnings are worth listening to. Prof. Samuelson is quite critical about the agreement and the new creature it contemplates- the Book Rights Registry (BRR).

Link to the Greenpeace website here with the actual poster (PDF) featuring the slogan "Not Only Banks, Save Also the Environment!"

On March 2 the Supreme Court granted certiorari on a copyright case covering the question whether section 411(a) of the Copyright Act restricted the subject matter jurisdiction of the federal courts over copyright infringement actions.

This quote belongs to Robin Bienfait, RIM’s Chief Information Office (CIO). RIM makes the BlackBerries, and the title line of this post recites Ms. Bienfait’s answer to the question what information is being recorded on RIM’s internal network (e.g., telephone conversations and email exchange over employees’ devices).

Keywording (aka keying) is the practice of registering with search engine words, terms, acronyms etc. that are protected by trademarks owned by someone else. The registration triggers the advertisement of the registrant and places it on the results page when users enter the keyword into the search box and run their search.

ICANN’s recent initiative to open the generic domain names space to an application, register-your-favorite-gTLD process struck me as very problematic from the moment I had first heard about it. Ars technica has a great post on the topic, which marks the end of the period during which ICANN has been receiving comments concerning its ambitious plan.

In case you have not seen it yet, here’s James Gleick’s OP-ED in the NYT, discussing the settlement between Google and book authors and publishers. The interesting point he makes is that the new business model should increase the quality of published books.

The German Supreme Court (BGH) clarified last week that sampling does not infringe on copyright in the work from which samples were taken for the purpose of creating a new work. There is a catch hiding in the details, though.