Stanford Center for Internet and Society

As known to many, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CTEA) added 20 years to the duration of copyrights. Writing for the majority in Eldred v. Ashcroft, Justice Ginsburg mentioned the European rule of life-plus-seventy at least five times. It appeared to be a central argument in support of the CTEA and the SC was impressed. It is also well-known that E.U. legislatures have a special place in their heart for copyright law. Nearly 10 copyright-related directives emerged in the past decade-and-a-half. And indeed, one of first copyright issues to tackle was copyright duration.

Prof. Lessig’s essay in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal is available here. One thing that caught my eye was an anonymous reader’s comment, containing the following text:

I came across this anecdote earlier this week, reading in the Israeli press about a judge who quoted in a court opinion an article from the Hebrew Wikipedia, but who failed to mentioned her source. The judge apparently copy-pasted whole sentences from a Hebrew Wikipedia article about umbilical cord blood. Since no references whatsoever were provided, the judge likely violated the terms of the GFDL license controlling Wikipedia content. The Israeli Wikipedia foundation complained about the mishap and was able to squeeze a laconic response from the courts administration, promising this shall not repeat.

Something significant has happened in the world of free licensing, Lessig has the details and a video. Apparently, an important step has been made towards interoperability between the license controlling Wikipedia articles (the GFDL v.1.2), and the CC license by-share-alike. (See also this post on the Creative Commons website).

Zdnet reports on a new initiative in France to tighten copyright protection over the Internet and prevent illegal downloading. The French president himself gave announcements that makes one think he’s on payroll of the music and film industry ("we run the risk of witnessing a genuine destruction of culture...")

Some time ago I posted an update about the planned copyright reform in Israel. The Israeli copyright law now passed legislation and the text of the new statute is available for download here. You don’t get the chance to write your copyright law from scratch very often, maybe once or twice in a century. This law indeed replaces an anachronistic statute from 1911 and it is remarkable in several respects.

A federal district court in Georgia ordered a jury trial last week on the question whether a thirteen year old defendant was an innocent infringer or not. In Electra Entertainment Group Inc. V. Sarah McDowell (2007 WL 3286622 (M.D.Ga.), a teenager defendant admitted to have used P2P networks for exchanging sound recordings, but objected the demand of plaintiffs (the record companies) to pay maximum statutory damages of $750 per infringement, in this case 48 times, which makes the fine figure of $36k.