Digital Rights Network

Mia Garlick of CC writes:

"Following on from the recent decision in a Dutch Court, Creative Commons licenses have also been implicated in a decision in Spain. The issue in this case was not whether the CC license was enforceable, but instead whether the major collecting society in Spain could collect royalties from a bar that played CC-licensed music.

... in the Fall of 2005, the main Spanish collecting society — Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (“SGAE”) — sued Ricardo Andrés Utrera Fernández, the owner of Metropol, a disco bar located in in Badajoz alleging that he had failed to pay SGAE’s license fee of 4.816,74 € for the period from November 2002 to August 2005 for the public performance of music managed by the collecting society.

This text reproduces Bernt Hugenholtz's email to the iCommons list:

Dutch Court upholds Creative Commons license

Photographs made available on flickr.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license may not be reproduced in a weekly magazine without the author’s permission.

On March 9, 2006 the District Court of Amsterdam, judging in summary proceedings, decided the first court case in the Netherlands involving the validity of a Creative Commons license. Local media celebrity Adam Curry (see http://curry.podshow.com/?p=49) had published photo’s of his family on www.flickr.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. The photos also carried the notice ‘This photo is public’. The Dutch weekly Weekend, a gossip magazine, had reproduced four photos in a story on Curry’s children without seeking Curry’s prior permission.

On the 27th of June 2005, the Supreme Court overruled the US District Court for the Central District of California and the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by unanimously declaring that Grokster Ltd was liable for copyright infringement perpetrated by users of its software.

Please feel free to add any resources you find to the list below:

1. BitLaw: A Resource on Technology Law. Highly recommended.
2. GrokLaw. Primarily dedicated to the SCO case but includes large amounts of useful legal information.
3. GrokLine. Originally dedicated to tracing the history of Linux and the other 'Unices' it is now focusing on patents and prior art research.

On July 19th another Sony mod-chipping case was decided by the UK courts, on the basis of the UK implementation of the European Copyright Directive. The defendant was sued for distributing devices which circumvented copyright protection systems, and lost.

The facts of this case were basically the same as an earlier Sony mod-chipping case in the UK, and similar to a case which took place in Australia. Similar defences about backups and imports failed.

• BBC story about the case
• analysis by Martin Keegan of earlier UK and Australian mod-chipping cases (the Australian decision was reversed on appeal).
• analysis by Norton Rose of the new mod-chipping case.
• Text of the judgment (2004-07-19)

In a decision of September 7th 2004 the US Sixth Circuit court of appeal ruled that a taking of a sample as short as 2 seconds constituted copyright infringement. Apparently the court's intention in creating this 'bright line' was to reduce uncertainty by making it a simple case of any taking implied infringement. However, it was also ruled that were it the case that the riff had been rerecorded no infringement would have been found - a necessary viewpoint if compatibility were to be maintained with previous decisions implying that such minor taking was not infringement of authorial copyright.

This decision is so extreme, and so threatening to established interests in music and in advertising, that even the RIAA is protesting it. Here is the full text of the decision.