Zohar Efroni's blog

John Degen, a Canadian novelist, has a thoughtful post on how he has resolved to make his latest novel, The Uninvited Guest, freely available for download online. It his a short yet touching divulgation of a writer’s musing about copyright protection in the digital age, and about thinking out of the box. He says that the war is over. I’m not sure, but I liked the frankness of an author who writes books with his heart’s blood and his dilemma about coming to terms with the wired reality. Read more about "Who needs copyright, anyway?"

Israel is a buzzing hive of small start-up technology companies that produce great ideas and original solutions. One of them is WIX, which offers a (free - as far as I could judge) web-based tool for creating personal and business websites within minutes. The tool is designed for people having no technical background whatsoever. There is also a clip demonstrating how it works. It's a lot of fun, but what they don’t tell you is how to create great content… Read more about Create a personal website in 2 minutes

I’ve just put the abstract of a new paper on my SSRN page. Temporary title is: Ontology of Information and its Lessons for Intellectual Property. The full abstract is available here (I am not yet able to make the full text available online). Here are a few lines from the abstract: Read more about Paper Abstract: Ontology of Information

Next month Stanford CIS is hosting a conference about Legal Futures. Judging by the list of participants, the upcoming even should be nothing less than electrifying. This post is unrelated to the conference. In fact, it is not about legal “futures” at all. Rather, it is about legal “pasts.” Read more about Old-Style Canadian Formalities and Copyright Reform

Some time ago I did a post on the new copyright legislation in Israel. There are many interesting things about this law, and now, at the curtsey of Prof. Niva Elkin-Koren from Haifa University, there is an unofficial English translation of the new statute available. Read more about Israel’s Fair Use

I came across this anecdote earlier this week, reading in the Israeli press about a judge who quoted in a court opinion an article from the Hebrew Wikipedia, but who failed to mentioned her source. The judge apparently copy-pasted whole sentences from a Hebrew Wikipedia article about umbilical cord blood. Since no references whatsoever were provided, the judge likely violated the terms of the GFDL license controlling Wikipedia content. The Israeli Wikipedia foundation complained about the mishap and was able to squeeze a laconic response from the courts administration, promising this shall not repeat. Read more about When Judges Violate Copyright Free License Terms

I have never seen an SSRN paper receiving 1700 recorded downloads in mere three days or so. This is exactly what happened to “The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident” by Deirdre Mulligan and Aaron Perzanowski, forthcoming in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. It is by far the most meticulous analysis of the Rootkit debacle available. Among other things, the authors propose to amend the DMCA to lodge a statutory exception that would allow both circumvention and trafficking in TPMs to the extent undertaken to investigate or eliminate protection measures that create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers. Read more about Mulligan and Perzanowski on the Sony BMG Rootkit Fiasco

Here's a link to the press release. It is not my jurisdiction to cover this development - I trust you’ll hear more details and updates from Anthony and his team soon. I'd only say it looks like one of the most exiting and challenging fair use cases I’ve seen recently and a must-follow one. From the press release: Read more about Fair Use Project to Represent RDR Books in Harry Potter Lexicon Dispute

Something significant has happened in the world of free licensing, Lessig has the details and a video. Apparently, an important step has been made towards interoperability between the license controlling Wikipedia articles (the GFDL v.1.2), and the CC license by-share-alike. (See also this post on the Creative Commons website). Read more about CC and GFDL interoperability

Zdnet reports on a new initiative in France to tighten copyright protection over the Internet and prevent illegal downloading. The French president himself gave announcements that makes one think he’s on payroll of the music and film industry ("we run the risk of witnessing a genuine destruction of culture...") Read more about Sarkozy’s digital agenda

Some time ago I posted an update about the planned copyright reform in Israel. The Israeli copyright law now passed legislation and the text of the new statute is available for download here. You don’t get the chance to write your copyright law from scratch very often, maybe once or twice in a century. This law indeed replaces an anachronistic statute from 1911 and it is remarkable in several respects. Read more about New Copyright Statute for Israel

A federal district court in Georgia ordered a jury trial last week on the question whether a thirteen year old defendant was an innocent infringer or not. In Electra Entertainment Group Inc. V. Sarah McDowell (2007 WL 3286622 (M.D.Ga.), a teenager defendant admitted to have used P2P networks for exchanging sound recordings, but objected the demand of plaintiffs (the record companies) to pay maximum statutory damages of $750 per infringement, in this case 48 times, which makes the fine figure of $36k. Read more about Electra Entertainment v. McDowell: Is a thirteen year old still innocent (infringer)?

Today was the official publication of a new amendment to the German Copyright Act. The amendment will enter into force in January 1st, 2008. After four long years of discussions, debates and negotiations, the final text is now available. A few highlights: Read more about German Copyright Law Amended

Prof. Niva Elkin-Koren has uploaded a paper titled Making Room for Consumer Under the DMCA, to be published soon in the BTLJ. The paper provides a terrific analysis and introduces an original perspective, proposing to perceive users of copyrighted works as participating consumers in information markets. This perspective underlies the argument for granting consumers more solid and meaningful protections within copyrights law, inter alia, a right to access cultural goods - despite DRMs. From the abstract: Read more about Elkin-Koren on Anticircumvention Law and Consumers-as-Participants

Intellectual Property as Property: Delineating Entitlements in Information, authored by Prof. Henry Smith was published last summer in the Yale Law Journal. It is an important article, a must-read for IP theory fans, all the more for law-and-economics folks. A blog post is perhaps not the ideal venue to discuss Smith’s insights in depth. The breadth of the theoretical discussion it begs is vast and the potential application of the information cost theory to property issues is enormous. My limited aim here is to share some thoughts about possible applications to copyright law and the tendency to protect technological access-controls under the copyright statue. Read more about Copyright Law and the Information Cost Theory