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So today, senior Australian Federal Court judge Justice Wilcox handed down his decision in the trial of the Kazaa case. In this case, over 30 applicants – in essence, copyright owners – sued the companies and individuals involved in providing Kazaa software. They alleged all kinds of things, but the essence of the case is this question:

By providing P2P file-sharing software (and through all their other activities), did the respondents (Sharman companies, Altnet companies, and assorted individual directors) authorise the undoubted copyright infringement done by the users of the software?

The result?

• The Sharman companies did authorise infringement. They did not engage in other forms of infringement/illegality alleged by the copyright owners (including direct infringement, conspiracy, misleading conduct under the TPA or unconscionable conduct);
• The directors/head honchos in Sharman are liable for authorising infringement too;
• Some of the other parties avoided liability.

The Australian are calling it ‘The Day the Music Died’ (a bit odd, given that the market has, of course, moved on from the Kazaa system). Below are some initial thoughts.

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An article published in The Wall Street Journal Online (posted 31 August 2005) reports that a company has sued the owner of a blog for comments posted on his site by readers about the company. This case, should it proceed to trial, will raise very interesting issues that are similar to those recently raised in Australia in Universal Music v Cooper , which considered the liability of a website operator for links to infringing mp3s installed on his website by third parties. Although this case does not concern copyright law, but instead defamation and the misappropriation of trade sercrets, it considers the liability of a website operator for the actions of third parties. (more…)

A few newspapers are carrying the story, and the NY Times (Linda Greenhouse) has an obituary.

The Register reports that DVD Jon has hacked Media Player file encryption (it’s the Microsoft NSC format which obfuscates the location of the stream being downloaded). It would be interesting to see the rationale offered for encrypting the data about the stream in the first place.

A story from the Times-Picayune on a possible further problem for some of the unfortunate folk who have survived the hurricane: will there still be a record of their home ownership and mortgage status?

According to the article:

“one of the biggest legal ramifications of Hurricane Katrina’s flooding waters is the probable loss of real estate records dating back to the early 1800s. The records, which include titles, mortgages, conveyances and liens, were stored in the now-flooded basement of City Hall on Poydras Street.

In 2002, employees of Register of Conveyances Gasper Schiro began the tedious process of hand entering the records into computers, a $700,000 process that could have been contracted out and accomplished quickly but was instead done slowly by his staff to save money.”

This scenario shows the importance of true offsite data backup.

So I’ve been giving some thought to this question of – apart from the exceptions specifically allowed by Article 17.4.7 of the AUSFTA, just what additional exceptions might be required? You may recall that it is only to this, limited question that the Terms of Reference of the LACA refer.

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Last week, a review was announced dealing with the drafting of Australia’s new anti-circumvention laws. For those who joined us late, basically, anti-circumvention laws are laws which seek to control how people interact with technologies used by copyright owners to control use and/or access to copyright-protected material. We have to draft new laws, to replace the current law in s 116A of the Copyright Act, because of the AUSFTA, Article 17.4.7. Article 17.4.7 is based on the US law, the DMCA.
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Here’s an interesting one: a judgment from Branson J regarding an order made by the Patent Office revoking an innovation patent.

What’s interesting is that the case looks pretty much like a pure business method patent.

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I’ve been reading the submissions made in the Attorney-General’s Inquiry into Copyright Exceptions (colloquially known as the Fair Use Inquiry, or the iPod Inquiry).

Some time ago I mused in blogprint whether the AG would make submissions available online. So far, this does not appear to have occurred. But quite a large number of submissions are available online, and I’ve been spending a bit of time trawling (and then reading). Here’s a list of what I’ve found so far (once again, let me know if I’ve missed anything):
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On 13 July, the Court of Appeal ruled in BHB v William Hill, the long-awaited UK case applying the European database right. The judgment, which is the result of an appeal from Justice Laddie’s decision in the Chancery Division of the High Court, applied the findings of the European Court of Justice regarding the interpretation of the database right. The result was that the BHB database was ruled as not falling within the scope of the law’s protection, as it was not the result of a “substantial investment” in either the obtaining, verification, or presentation of the contents of the database, as required by Article 7(1) of Directive 96/9. (more…)

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a lecture given by an Oxford academic to the Australian Catholic University in which it was said that “It is 97 per cent certain God raised Jesus from the dead – based on logic and mathematics, not faith”. According to the story:

Professor Swinburne, who gave a public lecture at the Australian Catholic University last night, said probability calculus showed a probability of 97 per cent. The probability God existed was one in two. That is, God either did or didn’t. And it was one in two that God became incarnate.

Professor Swinburne suggested a one-in-10 probability that the gospels would report the life and resurrection of Jesus as they did. The chance of all these factors coming together, if the resurrection was not true, was one in 1000.

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The New York Times has reportedthe increased use of tattooing technology to identify individual pieces of fruit with pricing and other information. Since 9/11, the United States government has been encouraging fruit suppliers to experiment with different ways to “track and trace” produce. Different ways of identifying fruit with “PLU” (price look-up number) numbers is being tested, among them tattooing and scannable bar-coding etched into the wax coating a piece of fruit. The idea is to replace those annoying little stickers.

In 2002, Georgia fruit grower and distributer Durand-Wayland bought the patent for a process that etches the PLU number and any other information directly into the skin of the fruit. The process permanently tattoos each piece of fruit, without piercing the skin.

Australia’s first decision involving the legality of linking was delivered last week. The good news for bloggers is that linking itself is not at risk. Providing links to infringing material is not such a good idea, though, especially when the material is owned by major music studios. (more…)

The Seattle Times is reporting that Amazon has sued Cendant alleging infringement of patents. The story is thin on details, but the patents are supposed to be “e-commerce” patents, and Amazon contends they were infringed when using tools “to secure credit-card transactions”. It will be interesting to analyse the claims (and the patents) when further details emerge.

Cendant sued Amazon last year, claiming infringement of a patent for recommending choices to buyers based on previous ordering history.

Groklaw is reporting that it has a copy of a 13 August 2002 email from an expert hired by SCO to look into whether any code had been copied from AT&T Unix into Linux.

It is interesting reading and does not bode well for SCO. The money quote: “At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.”

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