The US Copyright Office just published notice of its intent to raise registration fees, beginning August 1, 2009, pending approval by Congress. It’s not exactly earth-shattering news, but something to be aware of for businesses that intend to register copyrights in the near future. (more…)
We just came across this post at the Law & Life: Silicon Valley Blog about a recent update in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case in the federal District Court in San Francisco, a case with connections to Portland, and which has already produced a number of important legal decisions about open source software (OSS). As the author notes, an appeal last year in the case produced a great victory for licensors of OSS, while this most recent Order by District Judge Jeffrey White is a setback for OSS licensors seeking to enjoin copyright infringement because the burden to obtain an injunction for copyright infringement has been elevated. (more…)
Over at the Wired’s Threat Level blog is this post about the recent legal “victory” for online content hosting sites like Veoh, YouTube, MySpace and others like them, which appear to have added yet another layer of copyright infringement immunity to their arsenal. As Wired explains, the victory occurred in the ongoing California federal court case UMG v. Veoh, in which (more…)
As a general rule, law is slow to keep up with business. Innovative, quickly changing businesses, like those involved in technology, sprint even faster and farther ahead of the intellectual property laws that govern those businesses. So it comes as little surprise to see this rant about source code licensing covered by and commented on by the staff at Open Source Initiative. (more…)
We recently came across Read Write Web’s coverage of Google’s new Chrome Browser.When we saw their article this morning about the controversy over Chrome’s End User License Agreement (EULA), including their call for a trained legal eye to have a second look at it, we couldn’t resist. After all, I did say in my previous Transferring Copyrights post that I’d write about Open Source Software soon.
With a wealth of creative companies in the Portland area, one of the common legal issues we see as attorneys for small businesses, and especially for advertising agencies, is who owns the copyrights to the work that these agencies produce. This post builds upon my earlier post, Transferring Copyrights, and is written specifically for this legal issue. Agencies are often wise enough to enter into detailed written contracts with the companies for which they agree to act as agency of record. And, (more…)
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, “Copyright Basics,” copyrights give their owners a bundle of exclusive rights — to copy, distribute and perform. Owners can voluntarily transfer any or all of these rights in a variety of unique ways, including by transferring them all together, breaking them up and transferring them individually, or even further dividing them by, for instance, permitting any of the rights to be exercised at certain times and locations. An example would be a publisher who enters into an agreement allowing a distributor to sell a magazine only in Portland for the month of December. Owners can also transfer their rights on a exclusive or non-exclusive basis, giving even more flexibility to parties in negotiating over who gets what.
A copyright is extremely easy to obtain. Under federal law, an author need only come up with an original work and then “fix it in a tangible medium of expression.” That’s it — you’ve automatically got a copyright in your new work, and the copyright lasts for your life plus seventy years. But still, the definition is a bit hard to grasp without an example. Take this blog entry: I, the author, wrote this entry (the original work) and then put it into our blog page and clicked publish (fixing it in this tangible medium of expression). I now enjoy (more…)