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(via Joe Gratz) The US Copyright Office has recently conducted an inquiry into the impact of copyright on use of, and access to orphan works – in essence, works where the owner of copyright cannot be identified. The very long time copyright lasts tends to lead to lots of these orphan works – where copyright owners die, or go out of business. It has often been noted that copyright term extension gave protection that might be useful for a very small proportion of works, but also closed off the possibilities for using, or making available the massive body of these little orphans.

The US Copyright Office has now completed its inquiry, and has recommended a statutory defence, which would limit the availability of injunctions, and limit monetary awards to ‘reasonable compensation’, provided that a person first carried out a good faith, reasonably diligent search to locate the owner before going ahead with use of an apparently orphan work. (more…)

Next week, the Arts Law Centre is providing a week of FREE seminars, workshops and advice clinics on legal issues relevant to the multicultural communities in Melbourne. They’re running in Fitzroy. The event is a partnership between the Arts Law Centre of Australia, Multicultural Arts Victoria, the Victorian Multicultural Commission and the City of Yarra. (more…)

The Attorney-General announced yesterday that the Australian Law Reform Commission will review the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). The ALRC press release is here. The reference to the ALRC follows the recommendations of two other, briefer reviews which reported in mid-2005. While you might ask why we need another review after those two, the advantages I think are twofold: (1) it is the ALRC, which does ‘active’ review (it doesn’t just wait for submissions), and (2) the terms of reference are pretty broad. (more…)

Yesterday I asked whether anyone knew what was going on in the Kazaa case (you know, the one where the Music Industry is suing Sharman (Kazaa) for providing P2P software and authorising infringement of copyright. In particular, I was asking whether the contempt hearing previously scheduled for Monday 30 Jan went ahead.

My query has been answered! David tells me that the question of contempt has been reserved for the Full Court hearing in the case: an order has been made (available in the ESearch facility of the Federal Court’s database, CaseTrack), to this effect:

So this adds to the long list of things that Branson, Lindgren, and Finkelstein JJ will be pondering in the week commencing 20 February 2006 (soon!).

Ta David!

Gosh, too much IP/Tech news is just never enough, right? There’s heaps going on right now. I’ve commented on the whole patent injunction issue (Blackberry, and eBay v MercExchange) below. But there’s so much more going on, I’ll just post a couple of pointers to more info. Over the fold, more on the many Google stories hitting the news, as well as Ed Felten on DRM. In addition, I note that the Kazaa contempt case (over Kazaa’s decision to block Australian access, rather than alter its software) was listed, as I understood, for hearing in Sydney yesterday. Does anyone know what happened? (more…)

Guess what Professor Sam Ricketson just put on my desk? The two volumes of Ricketson and Ginsburg’s new tome, International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Convention and Beyond. This book updates Ricketson’s seminal earlier work on The Berne Convention 1886 – 1986. The new edition not only adds Professor Jane Ginsburg’s expertise, but is quite comprehensively updated, including commentary on such treaties as the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and even developments in relation to Bilateral Free Trade Agreements, and Private International Law aspects of international copyright. It even has a companion website. While I’ve not yet dipped into these pages of wisdom and scholarship, I have a feeling this is bound to end up as important, frequently cited and influential as Professor Ricketson’s earlier work. Can’t wait to read it!

Today, Patently-O has a summary of the briefs received in the US Supreme Court thus far in the case of eBay v MercExchange . Parties briefing include Yahoo!, the EFF, AIPLA, 52 Law Professors (written by Mark Lemley, who has written prolifically and informatively on matters of patent litigation generally), a bunch of technology companies (including a joint brief from Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and Micron), Nokia and others. The summaries make an interesting read, because they reveal two things: that this dispute has a very broad background in some of the most contentious reform issues in patent law in the US today, and second, that this could well end up being, as Patently-O has described it , ‘the most important patent case in the past five years’. (more…)

Following on from our mention in the AFR, LawFont is now mentioned in lawyersweekly.com.au.

Again, the article has a focus on the gossipy law blog/blawg rather than those that go for serious discussion, but we do get a mention as one of “a small number of Australian legal bogs” — hope they meant “blogs”! :-)

Because of Chinese government restrictions on the information available to its citizens, access to Google’s main website (www.google.com) has either been prevented altogether or has been very slow. Google’s new Chinese website, www.google.cn, will not suffer the same problems. However, this access comes at a price. In exchange for access to the Chinese market, Google has agreed to censor its search results on the .cn version of the search engine. (more…)

The EFF has a press release on Field v. Google, in which the United States District Court for the District of Nevada rejected Field’s claims for copyright infringement arising from Google’s storing of his copyright works in its cache. (more…)

Mark Russinovich, the security researcher who found the Sony Rootkit, posted the results of his analysis of the Windows metadata flaw on his “Sysinternals” blog.

As expected, he concludes that the flaw was an intentional piece of design that turned out to be very poor and insecure–not an intentional, malicious backdoor as has recently been claimed. (more…)

This edition of “What is..?” considers VoIP, otherwise known as Internet telephony or IP telephony. VoIP, which stands for “Voice over Internet Protocol”, refers to the transmission of voice telephone calls over the Internet or any other IP-based network. VoIP systems use packet-switched networks to route and transmit voice calls, rather than the circuit-switching systems used by “traditional” voice telecommunications services.

This article provides an introduction to VoIP, including how it differs from traditional telephony services, and considers some of the regulatory issues raised by providing voice telephony over the Internet. While today VoIP might appear to be a niche product, it is in fact threatening to change the structure of the telephony industry, and is evidence of convergence between the Internet and telecommunications. (more…)

Legal blogs get a mention in today’s Australian Financial Review Legal Affairs section (sorry, registration/subscription required) in the intriguingly titled ‘Superhotties and divas: the blogs rule‘. LawFont gets a specific mention (yay!).

Oh, and we here at LawFont are not the ‘superhotties’ nor the ‘divas’ referred to; nor are the bloggers on the other sites mentioned: Quantum Meruit, and Inchoate (sorry, guys!). Rather, that headline refers to Justice Kirby (‘superhottie of the first order’) and Justice Crennan (‘diva’) (quoting judgments from the famous, or infamous law blog in the US, ‘Underneath their Robes’).

It’s a shame, though, that the only focus of the article is on the ‘gossip’ aspect of legal blogs (or blawgs). (more…)

It is far too hot and sticky this morning in Melbourne to spend vast amounts of time blogging. (hmmm, theory, how does weather affect blogging? More blogging if colder and stuck inside..?).

Four interesting stories today though, on the continuing Copyright and Politics saga in Canada, on the take-down of Wikipedia Germany, on Google Subpoenas and on the question of who owns the news in the US? More over the fold. (more…)

The Canadian Globe and Mail has a story on how a UK court ordered parts of an unauthorised biography of singer Loreena McKennitt to be deleted. (more…)