Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Last year, I complained about the Cablevision case (see ”IP Law vs Moore’s Law”), a decision I’m pleased to see was recently reversed on appeal. Cablevision was trying to replace set-top DVRs with a centrally-managed system, a common trend in computing these days as hardware and communications improvements make hosted applications (the new term is “cloud” computing) more attractive from a cost, management, and environmental standpoint. The move ran afoul of copyright, however, and the Second Circuit struggled mightily to find a way to make the law fit common sense.

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.

As reported by Lessig and others, the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded yesterday a ruling by the Northern District of California which denied the copyright claims of an open source software developer for violations of the Artistic License. This is a landmark decision which is likely to influence all types of free licensing, including Creative Commons licenses and the question of enforceability of copyright claims upon violation of free licenses in general. Here are four quick points on the decision:

In connection with IPSC, being hosted at Stanford in the next few days, I thought I'd mention that I've posted Show #70 of Hearsay Culture, my interview with

A brief Draft Introduction to my study on copyright law is now available for download here.

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.

With increased interest in global warming, green building and ecologically friendly behaviors, I initially observed that there was fairly little chatter concerning intellectual property aspects. This prompted me to examine the extent that IP issues that consume us in other technologies, like the Internet or e-commerce are also affecting progress in the ‘green’ world.

In a previous post, the Traditions of Knowledge I referred to the appropriation of traditional knowledge by means of industrial revolution intellectual property.