Zohar Efroni's blog

The attorney of Jammie Thomas has resolved to appeal the jury verdict entered against her last week. That closely-followed trial culminated in awarding $222k in damages for willful copyright infringement to the music industry. The appeal would focus on jury instruction no. 15, the making-available quandary. Read more about Jury Instruction No. 15

Over the last 3-4 years many people have been speculating about how U.S. courts would interpret the Creative Commons (CC) licenses in litigation concerning their legal operation and effect. There are several reported cases in Europe, but to my knowledge, none so far in the U.S. Due to the popularity of the CC licenses, it was only a question of time before someone would try to enforce (or challenge) them in court. In the first occasion it actually happened, the claim took a quite unanticipated turn. Read more about Creative Commons, Common Sense, and Nonsense

William Patry has an interesting post today about imbalanced educational campaigns directed to children concerning copyright violations. I suppose that one of the toughest challenges to those who try to produce more "balanced" campaigns for kids, telling them that they must “respect” copyright, is that we, grownups and educators, are not always sure about it ourselves. Read more about Copyright and education

Most of the world seems to know by now how New Jersey teenager George Hotz cracked last week the Apple iPhone protection lock which tethers users to the mobile services of AT&T. Thanks to Jennifer Granick and her team, what he did is probably covered by a 2006 rulemaking exemption promulgated by the Copyright Office. According to the specific exemption concerning cell phones, circumvention liability under section 1201(a)(1)(A) of the Copyright Act, to the extent it might apply to Hotz's circumvention, does not attach. It is less clear, however, whether telling everyone how to do that by posting instructions on his blog would not violate 1201(b)(1), prohibiting “trafficking” in tools that help others to circumvent TMPs. Promulgated exemptions do not apply to trafficking liability even if the actual circumvention is covered, as odd as it may sound. Read more about Circumvention - a matter of geography

Section 102 of the Copyright Act has been receiving quite some attention in legal commentary recently. Professor Pamela Samuelson authored an article challenging the influential Nimmer treatise’s interpretation of subsection 102(b) and Nimmer’s restrictive reading of Baker v. Selden. (William Patry has commented in his blog on Samuelson’s article.) In a recent paper, Professor Dan Burk is discussing the application of section 102(b) to copyrightability of methods. Read more about Section 102(b) and negative categories of copyright subject matter

In a press release from today the IFPI hails a Belgium court decision, which reportedly imposes a duty on an Internet Service Provider to use filtering technology for stopping illegal file sharing activities running through its network. From the press release: Read more about DRM by mandate? Belgium court imposes a filtering duty on ISP

Next month I’ll be speaking about my work on copyright law at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich. The title of the presentation reads “Access-Right and Copyright”. Read more about Access-Right and Copyright Presentation

TorrentFreak has a cute story about how politicians are receiving “a fair amount of money” (aka campaign contributions) from the RIAA and the MPAA to promote stronger copyright protection and fight things like “campus piracy”. Read more about Soldiers of Fortune

A district court in Finland ruled yesterday that the Content Scrambling System (CSS) - the standard technological protection measure for movies distributed on DVDs - is “ineffective.” That means that the CSS is not covered by the Finnish anticircumvention laws. According to the story posted here by Mikko Välimäki, defendants’ attorney, it all started as a joke by some guys posting on their website instructions how to crack the CSS, then going to the police telling that they probably have just violated copyright law. To their surprise, they were taken seriously and the case reached court litigation. Read more about Effective TPMs the Finnish way

This has left me speechless. Read also here on the administration's new bill called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007. Maybe you'll become speechless too. Read more about A proposed new crime: "attempted" copyright infringement

After a successful trial MySpace has announced its novel “Take Down Stay Down” campaign. The idea is that upon reception of notice about unauthorized upload of copyrighted material, MySpace will not only remove the allegedly infringing file, but also take digital fingerprint of the accused content. It will then stored the information - which is essentially like shorthand numbers uniquely representing the file – in a database, making sure that the content will not be reposted on MySpace services. Read more about Take Down Stay Down

That a string of digits-and-letters receives the honor to be composed into a song is, I think, a noteworthy development. Sure, copyright law is about fostering creativity, but in this case it happened in a rather odd sense. People sing the code to make it clear (even to the most shortsighted court) that there is a free speech issue here. Anyway, the people at Digg.com say they will fight till the end. "If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying," said Kevin Rose, the company founder. The NYT article from yesterday covering the story featured co-NR CIS Fellow Prof. Chris Sprigman. Read more about Digging the grave for next-generation DVD TPMs?

I am echoing here a post from Science Commons’ blog featuring another juicy story of apparent abuse of copyrights against a science student at the University of Michigan who posted on her blog tables and charts taken from a peer-view scientific magazine and quickly received a cease and desist letter from the publisher. Read more about Be carefull out there, dear bloggers

Here is the link. It’s an interesting reading, though not utterly astonishing with respect the usual suspects it names. No less than 43 trade partners of the U.S. are classified under the “special categories” (i.e., in the Priority Watch List, the Watch List and/or under the so-called “Section 306 Monitoring status”). At the lead of the Priority Watch List are China and Russia. The report devotes a special section describing China’s IPR violations by-province. Read more about “Special 301” Report for 2007 is out

I’ve just came across this report published recently by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) about User-Created Content (UCC). The 74-pages report, authored by Sacha Wunsch-Vincent and Graham Vickery, is a highly informative and well-written study providing an up-to-date account on the most significant developments in the area. Read more about OECD user-created content report