Against the background of an unprecedented number of cybersquatting cases in 2007, the evolving nature of the domain name registration system (DNS) is causing growing concern for trademark owners around the world. Last year, a record 2,156 complaints alleging cybersquatting - or the abusive registration of trademarks on the Internet - were filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center (Center), representing an 18% increase over 2006 and a 48% increase over 2005 in the number of generic and country code Top Level Domain (gTLDs and ccTLDs) disputes.

DNS Developments Feed Growing Cybersquatting Concerns

Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 establishes the affirmative defense to copyright infringement of “fair use,” by far the most enigmatic doctrine in U.S. copyright law and by far the most important. Without it, much of our economic and communicative action would constitute copyright infringement. Yet despite the importance of the fair use defense, and despite the enormous amount of scholarly attention that it has received, we continue to lack any systematic, comprehensive account of our fair use case law and the actual state of our fair use doctrine. Instead, our conventional wisdom derives from a small set of conventionally agreed-upon leading cases. This Article presents the results of the first empirical study of our fair use case law to show that much of our conventional wisdom about that case law is mistaken. Working from a data set consisting of all reported federal opinions that made substantial use of the section 107 four-factor test for fair use through 2005, the Article shows which factors and subfactors actually drive the outcome of the fair use test in practice, how the fair use factors interact, how courts inflect certain individual factors, and the extent to which judges stampede the factor outcomes to conform to the overall test outcome. It also presents empirical evidence of the extent to which lower courts either deliberately ignored or were ignorant of fair use doctrine set forth in the leading cases, particularly those from the Supreme Court. Based on these descriptive findings, the Article prescribes a set of doctrinal practices that will improve courts’ adjudication of the fair use defense.

An Empirical Study of US Copyright Fair Use Opinions, 1978-2005

A performance-right for recording artists would correct a needless exception in U.S. copyright law, states Tom Sydnor in, “A Performance Right for Recording Artists: Sound Policy at Home and Abroad,” a Progress on Point released today by The Progress & Freedom Foundation. In addition, Sydnor concludes, the Passage of the Performance Rights Act would harmonize U.S. copyright law with those of other countries, benefiting both U.S. recording artists and the U.S. economy.

In the paper, Tom Sydnor, Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Property at The Progress & Freedom Foundation, explains that lack performance rights for over-the-air broadcasts is an exception in U.S. copyright law. He counters two often cited arguments for the discrepancy: promotional value for the recording artist and the public interest obligations put on broadcast platforms. Sydnor explains that if one party invests in and creates a resource with value to the public, “governments should not let others appropriate that resource for their own commercial gain just by showing that the creator might therefore derive some incidental benefit.” While airplay may indeed have some promotional benefit to the recording artist, the recording artist also confers benefits to the radio broadcasters by producing songs that people want to hear. Therefore, one party should not possess property rights while the other does not. Moreover, the artist now has multiple channels to exploit for promotional purposes, bringing to question the actual promotional value of the broadcast medium. Sydnor also addresses the argument that over-the-air broadcasters should be exempt from performance rights because they are saddled with public interest obligations that other platforms are not. The author explains that the burden of public interest obligations should cause policymakers to re-think broadcast regulation, not punish performers.

Performance Right Would Harmonize Copyright Policy

This seems pretty basic: even primates watch each other and copy (or, if you will, "ape") each other, so when one monkey figures out how to improve a potato by dipping it in salt water, the whole gang follows suit.

We copy each other to learn and to improve - it's one of the things that makes us human, because we're a lot better at it than chimps.

It's time to overhaul copyright law

Yes, you too can find out what anyone (relatives, friends, neighbors, that girl you are stalking) has bought at Sears provided you have their name, address, and phone number. And you can do it anonymously.

Sears Roebuck and Privacy

When college kids make mashups of Hollywood movies, are they violating the law? Not necessarily, according to the latest study on copyright and creativity from the Center for Social Media and American University’s Washington College of Law.

The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances. Aufderheide and Jaszi are appearing at the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest such trade show in the world, on Jan. 7 to discuss the research.

On review, this seems like a lot of nothing, or rather, a publicity ploy for this Center.

New Study Shows Remixes Could Be Quoting Copyrighted Material Legally

Magicians, chefs, and stand-up comics protect their creations without resorting to legal authorities. This article is about what they can teach lawyers - and Congress - about the future of intellectual property.

Creative vigilantes

This paper, written for the 4th Asian IP Law & Policy Day co-organized by the IP Academy of Singapore (Singapore) and Fordham Law School (USA) in conjunction with the annual Fordham Conference on International IP Law & Policy, traces the development of the free software/open source (FOSS) and creative commons (CC) movements and the rise of user-generated content (UGC). In light of existing international treaty standards for copyright protection, growing global Internet penetration and various case law developments, the article considers whether the combined phenomena of FOSS, CC and UGC provide sufficient basis for a re-tilting of the copyright balance toward the user rather than the original copyright owner. Finally, the article examines whether the philosophy, rhetoric and experiences of the FOSS and CC movements make them appropriate models for copyright protection for UGC.

User-Generated Content: Has the Time Come for Users' Rights?

How did people think about copyright in the nineteenth century? What did they think it was? What was it for? Was it property? Or something else? How did it function? Who could it benefit? Who might it harm?

Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831-1891 addresses questions like these, unpacking the ideas and popular ideologies connected to copyright in the United States during the nineteenth-century.

This era was rife with copyright-related controversy and excitement, including international squabbling, celebrity grandstanding, new technology, corporate exploitation, and ferocious arguments about piracy, reprinting, and the effects of copyright law. Then, as now, copyright was very important to a small group of people (authors and publishers), and slightly important to a much larger group (consumers and readers). However, as this dissertation demonstrates, these larger groups did have definite ideas about copyright, its function, and its purpose, in ways not obvious to the denizens of the legal and authorial realms.

This project draws on methods from both social and cultural history. Primary sources include a broad swath of magazine and newspaper articles, letters, and editorials about various copyright-related controversies. Examining these sources – both mainstream and obscure – illustrates the diversity of thinking about copyright issues during the nineteenth century, and suggests alternative frameworks for considering copyright in other times.

Pimps and Ferrets: Copyright and Culture in the United States, 1831-1891

Anonymity is Hard.

We present a new class of statistical de-anonymization attacks against high-dimensional micro-data, such as individual preferences, recommendations, transaction records and so on. Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary's background knowledge.

We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber's record in the dataset. Using the Internet Movie Database as the source of background knowledge, we successfully identified the Netflix records of known users, uncovering their apparent political preferences and other potentially sensitive information.

See also:

Hushmail Spills it to Feds

AOL Search Database

Why Information Security is Hard

Don Kerr, on Anonymity and Privacy

Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits

WikiScanner on the Colbert Report

How To Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset