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. Trademark holders are not happy when competitors bid on words or names in which they have exclusive rights. Commercial competitors that operate under names used as keywords sometimes argue that this practice amounts to unfair competition. Read more about A Key Keywording Decision
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. Read more about ICANN's Plan for New Top Level Domains
The German blogsphere is buzzing about the new opinion handed down by a court in Hamburg, finding Google’s image search infringing. The court agreed with the copyright holder of comics images, and held that the unauthorized display of the images as thumbnails on the search result pages violated his rights. Read more about German Court Finds Google’s Image Search Infringing
The Second Circuit decided The Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings & Cablevision already two and a half weeks ago. This means light years in terms of blogging, but due to its importance I've decided to take the liberty and offer a late (and somewhat elaborate) entry discussing this ruling and some of its implications. The Cartoon Network is a very significant decision and I will not be surprised to see it surfacing in many future decisions and law review articles to come. Its central import is in pinching a big hole in the balloon often referred to as the “MAI v. Peak and its progeny.” I believe that the decision will have far-reaching ramifications on the development of temporary reproduction law in the future. Read more about The Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings & Cablevision Systems
There is a guy by the name of Meir Shraga. I did not know him until today, but now I can even see his picture smiling at me from the knol he has published for the entry “Israel”. Mr. Shraga shamelessly copy-pasted the English Wikipedia entry on Israel. What cough my eye was the fact that he does not seem to give Wikipedia any credit (thereby probably violating the GFDL license terms), and since chutzpa knows no borders, he published his “piece” under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If there is anything that copyright law should curtail, it is this kind of behavior. Or even better, it seems that Mr. Shraga has succeeded very quickly to ruin his authorial reputation for good. Read more about Copy knol
I have just completed the draft of my extended study on copyright law, where I examine issues of access, access to information and digital copyright law. At bottom, I do not propose to abolish copyright law, nor do I think that adjusting the current system could successfully survive the transition to digital markets and digital cultures. Four years of research have led me to the conclusion that the present structure of entitlements is inherently inadequate for regulating an environment, in which the smallest tradable unit of transaction (and/or the smallest object of exchange in nonmarket constellations, if you will) is access to "expressions" - or, as I call them, “medial messages.” Read more about Access-Right: An Inquiry Into the Problem of Digital Copyright Law
Prof. Lessig has an OP-ED in the NYT today about the orphan works bill rolling now in Congress. Among the important points mentioned there, here are my three favorites: (1) to the extent that foreign authors are substantially deprived of copyright protection as a result of the new rule, the amendment will probably violate U.S. international obligations, and it would take the E.U. exactly two seconds to file a WTO complaint. (2) It makes no sense to put so much weight on the issue of “diligent effort” if rightholders are not required to register works, as in the case of patents, for instance. (3) It would be somewhat unfair to apply the rule retroactively to works by authors who relied on full, automatic copyright protection upon creation/fixation. Read more about Lessig on the orphan works bill
