As the NLA versus Meltwater copyright case shows, UK publishers only have to say the word and they can stop Google reproducing their stuff.
FORBES: Not the Solution To The Newspaper Industry Going Bankrupt
But Real DVD doesn't appear to do anything clearly illegal, says Laurence Pulgram, an attorney with Fenwick and West LLP who defended the file-sharing program Napster in its 2001 copyright case.
It is the second time in a month that the US courts have upheld fines imposed in a file-sharing copyright infringement case.
Google faces a billion-dollar lawsuit from Viacom over copyright-infringing clips uploaded to YouTube, and the Dailymotion case may demonstrate that copyright infringement can be punished retroactively.
Google faces a billion-dollar lawsuit from Viacom (nyse: VIA - news - people ) over copyright-infringing clips uploaded to YouTube, and the Dailymotion case may demonstrate that copyright infringement can be punished retroactively.
With this Supreme Court case, copyright owners are now demanding their rights supercede the rights of owners of actual tangible property.
FORBES: You Bought It; You Own It ... Or Do You? Supreme Court To Decide
"The value of what there is produced, which is in music's case the copyright, the rights to play the music, very rarely ever comes back to Wales, " he said.
Unfortunately for the enterprising student, Wiley sued him for copyright infringement and won the case.
The MPAA's argument is mirrored in several other cases concerning digital copyright issues, including the case against Napster and this week's suit by the entertainment industry against Scour.com, a movie-swapping Website.
The Newzbin case was brought under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.
But under the original contract used in the case decided yesterday, the copyright holder, Las Vegas Review-Journal parent Stephens Media, signed over only the right to sue while retaining an exclusive license to the content itself.
FORBES: Copyright Vigilante Righthaven Will Fight On After Ruling
"What this case points out is that the copyright statutes were written in an era when works of authorship were only available in tangible form, " said Jonathan Handel, an entertainment attorney at TroyGould.
For now, it appears that the API Copyright Troll concept is limited to the particular case of Java, software created corporate owners (Sun) who chose to make it free and open source, but was then purchased by a company (Oracle) that has had enormous success in selling licenses and services for the software it developed.
And of course the Megaupload case could be a template for future copyright enforcement efforts.
FORBES: How Copyright Criminalization Threatens Online Innovation
The case for the defence was that no copyright material is actually stored on the Pirate Bay's servers and no swapping of files takes place there.
One of the key issues in the case is the interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The case has raised some serious questions about how copyright firms pursue file-sharers.
Last June, it won a case against the owners of three Web sites for copyright infringements.
The move prompted speculation that the authorities might be seeking to shut the site down, following an earlier court case that found its original administrators guilty of helping people circumvent copyright controls.
BBC: Microsoft Windows Messenger blocks The Pirate Bay links
The case went to the Supreme Court which ruled that cable was not infringing copyright law.
FORBES: The Case That Could Finally Put Live TV on the Internet
The ruling responds to Viacom's appeal of a 2010 case, which stated that YouTube couldn't be held responsible for copyright infringing content uploaded by its users.
Both the Aereo and Dish technologies rely on the 1984 Supreme Court holding in the Betamax case, which made it clear that consumer recording technology, in that case the VCR, is legal if it has uses that do not infringe copyright law.
FORBES: Broadcasters: Start Embracing (and Stop Suing) Innovation
It would be quite wrong if fictional writers were to have their writings pored over in the way The Da Vinci Code has been pored over in this case by authors of pretend historical books to make an allegation of infringement of copyright.
The case centered on whether YouTube qualified for a safe harbor created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA).
Aho created his software around advice he got from copyright attorney Paul Goldstein , who in the 1980s counseled the attorneys who won the Supreme Court case freeing people to record TV shows and movies for private use.
In recent months, the government has been putting pressure on the two sides to agree a voluntary code whereby copyright infringing sites could be blocked following an order from a judge, but without a lengthy case like the one we've just seen.
And that case is about whether companies that put out a lot of uncopyrighted material are liable for the copyright infringement that the users of their services are doing.
The case also points to the DMCA's broad protections, which for the first time not only give copyright to creative work but also to the software -- or any other technology -- that protects it.
应用推荐