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Giancarlo F. Frosio is a Non-Residential Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Previously he was the Intermediary Liabilty fellow with Stanford CIS. Giancarlo is a qualified attorney with a doctoral degree (S.J.D.) in intellectual property law from Duke University Law School. Additionally, he holds an LL.M. with emphasis in intellectual property law from Duke Law School, an LL.M. in information technology and telecommunications law from Strathclyde University in Glasgow, and a law degree from Università Cattolica in Milan.

Google Books Reaches Settlement With Publishers And Authors

By Ryan Calo on February 5, 2009 at 4:08 pm

Author: Matt Kellogg

Google recently reached a settlement agreement with the authors and publishers who in 2005 sued the company for copyright infringement. As part of the arrangement, copyright owners will not only receive fees from Google for the use of digitized copies of their books in Google Book Search, they will also have the ability to choose how much—if any—of their works they wish to be displayed. The settlement provides for the creation of an independent organization to oversee its administration as well as special modes of access for public and university libraries.

Communia and the European Public Domain Project: A Politics of the Public Domain

Author(s):

Giancarlo Frosio

Publication Date:

March 1, 2012

Publication Type:

Book

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used and remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture's use — copyright and related rights — have become increasingly restrictive. This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project.

COMMUNIA Final Report on the Digital Public Domain

Author(s):

Giancarlo Frosio

Publication Date:

March 31, 2011

Publication Type:

White Paper / Report

This Public Report is the outcome of the work of the COMMUNIA Network on the Digital Public Domain. This Report was undertaken to (i) review the activities of COMMUNIA; (ii) investigate the state of the digital public domain in Europe; and (iii) recommend policy strategies for enhancing a healthy public domain and making digital content in Europe more accessible and usable.

Public domain or copyrighted material?

November 19, 2015

The song “Happy Birthday” has a long, litigious history dating back to the 1930s. Every year, people spent millions in royalties to use the song, until a class action lawsuit was brought challenging whether the owner, Warner/Chappell Music, actually owned the copyright it so aggressively enforced. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Tulane School of Law professor specializing in copyright law, discusses the case of “Happy Birthday.”