Last week, CCIA filed two amicus briefs in copyright cases: Mavrix v. LiveJournal, a 9th Cir. case about the DMCA safe harbors, and Elsevier v. Sci-Hub, an S.D.N.Y. copyright case involving proposed preliminary injunctions against non-party intermediaries. CCIA’s brief in Mavrix v. LiveJournal, joined by the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research…

Sadly, today the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the Federal Circuit’s dangerous decision in Oracle v. Google. Oracle claims a copyright on the Java Application Programming Interface (API), and that Google infringed that copyright by using certain Java APIs in the Android OS. The Federal Circuit had ruled in Oracle’s favor, reversing a well-reasoned district court opinion holding that…

This morning the Supreme Court issued an order indicating that it was declining to hear an appeal of the copyright case between Oracle and Google.  The appeal concerned the copyrightability of “application programming interfaces” (APIs).  Oracle launched the suit against Google shortly after acquiring Sun, which held copyrights and patents on the Java computer language, in 2010.  It claimed that Android infringed Java copyrights because Android…

Today, the Supreme Court announced that it has refused to hear the Google v. Oracle case. The case involves the copyrightability of Oracle’s application programming interface (API), a part of the Java programming language and system. The case attracted widespread attention last May, when the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Oracle could assert a copyright over…

Since our report last week on Australia’s Internet censorship bill, the bill did indeed pass the Senate yesterday, and will become the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Act 2015. The new law provides an accelerated process for rightsholders to obtain court orders for ISPs to block sites that have the primary purpose of infringing copyright, or “facilitating” its infringement—a term that…

You may be used to thinking of the Internet as being built of:  Services that directly connect you to the Internet; Services that offer their own content to the Internet; and Services that host your content (or someone else’s) on the Internet. But of course, today’s Internet ecology is more complicated than that. A “content delivery network” (CDN) service like…

On June 4, 2015 the Copyright Office released its Report on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization. Previous coverage of the orphan works section of the report is available here and the Library Copyright Alliance’s response to the report is available here. This post focuses on the section of the report covering mass digitization and lays out concerns with the report’s…

If you’re feeling a sense of deja vu this campaign season, you’re not alone. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump just earned public backlash from singer Neil Young for using Young’s song “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Young claimed that Trump used the song without seeking his permission. While true, the hitch here is that Trump didn’t actually have to ask….

Today the High Court of the United Kingdom handed down an excellent decision—excellent because the result is so unreasonable, so out of touch with reality, and so divorced from the needs and expectations of ordinary users, that it provides a textbook illustration of the need for urgent reform of the outdated and unbalanced European Copyright Directive. In a nutshell, the…

On today’s podcast we discuss DVD ripping and copyright policy. Click here to download the podcast. Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here. Subscribe to the podcast via the .xml here.