Creative Commons, APRA and music 

APRA and Creative Commons representatives held a seminar at Griffith on whether APRA members (who assign all their copyright in performances to APRA) can release their music/lyrics under creative commons licences.

Apparently, according to APRA it turns some sort of blind eye to non-commercial uses ...

Futuretronics v Graphix 

The Australian Copyright Council has a short note about Futuretronics' successful claim of copyright infringement against its former supplier of adhesive covers for iPods, mobile phones and the like ... 

Moral rights and structures 

The "Calatrava" bridge in Bilbao ...

Google filter 2 

Fairly Useful casts a sceptical eye over whether Google's YouTube filtering proposal will be able to deal adequately with fair use issues ... 

Google video filter 

In an effort to combat the deluge of copyright litigation against it and YouTube brought by some movie production houses, Google has unveiled a new video filtering technology that will enable copyright owners to track and block unauthorised posts ...

Sports highlights and 'magazine' television programs 

The New Zealand High Court has reportedly granted an interlocutory injunction restraining Sky TV from broadcasting highlights of the Rugby World Cup in "magazine" style shows. However ... 

12 months' time 

A term of imprisonment for 12 months for each copyright and trade mark offence, to be served concurrently, committed by a repeat offender was not manifestly excessive. The Federal Court judge reduced, however, the 8 months' non-release period set by the magistrate to 3 months (including 5 days porridge already served) upon entering into a 3 year good behaviour bond ...

Stop laughing, this is serious 

MediaDefender set up a website, miivi.com, for people to load "their" content on and "share".  Not quite as exotic as SMERSH's use of glamorous ladies, but you get the idea.

Turns out MediaDefender has some very close connections to people like Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Virgin Records.

The Pirate Bay drew attentions to these connections and, amid many denials, miivi.com disappeared.

Now someone at MediaDefenders is said to have leaked an enormous tranche of emails which, if true, substantially discredit MediaDefender's denials ...

Not fair dealing? 

MediaWorks in NZ has obtained an interim injunction against SkyTV to block the latter from broadcasting "too much" Rugby World Cup footage ...

How much is that fair use worth 

Now that IP owners regularly beat legislators (and Treaty makers) over the head with the value of their contributions to society, the Computer and Communications Industry Association has poked back claiming that the fair use exceptions are valued at US$4.5 trillion dollars in the US alone, apparently equal to one sixth of the US' GDP.

Scoff if you will, but they claim to have used WIPO's very own methodology ... 

Copyright Tribunal Appointments 

The Commonwealth Attorney General has appointed Justice Emmett as President of the Copyright Tribunal and Justice Allsop as a deputy president ...

Copyright Infringement Notices 

You may recall that tiny rewrite of substantial slabs of the Copyright Act 1968 effected by the Copyright Amendment Act 2006 included a revamp of, amongst other things, the criminal offences (scroll to sch. 1).  This included a third tier of summarystrict liability offences to be inflicted on the forces of darkness and chaos.

As part of this massive exercise in simplification, harmonisation and, er, fine tuning, s 133B introduced power for the police (the forces of good and niceness, or at least the agents thereof) power to inflict issue "on the spot fines" also known as infringement notices.

To find out more about the infringement notices, you have to wander off to get your copy of Division 6A of the Copyright Regulations.  (Apart from the easier, cheaper revenue raising features of this scheme, the recipient of such a notice faces a penalty reduced from (up to) $6,600 to (up to) $1,200 and, in some cases forfeiture, plus some bonuses like no admission of guilt and no conviction of an offence.)

When all this was introduced, the government indicated that there were going to be guidelines for the police (remember there are at least 8 police forces out there) on when and how to use this latest toy.

And NOW, the Attorney-General's Department has published a draft of the proposed guidelines ...

The Player Pianola killed the music hall or Radio Nowhere

While RIAA and its constituent members try to wage war on the file sharers, Guardian Unlimited and Bruce Springsteen have joined forces to try using the internet for the purposes of good and niceness ...

The End of Copyright as we know it or 'Us' versus 'Them' 

Weird Al Yankovic: Anakin, maybe Vader someday, comes to American Pie here.

(This is a six minute video clip on YouTube, so you probably want to do that with broadband.)

Implied licences and copyright 

If you're in Sydney on 28 August, David Catterns QC will be addressing the Copyright Society on Implied licences in copyright after Concrete v Parramatta and CAL v NSW ... 

Copyright in TV schedules (Update on 13 Aug.)

Channel 9 has lost its claim that IceTV infringe 9's copyright in its television program schedules ... 

Use and explanation 

While there is copyright in a recipe (for rabbit pie [Cuisenaire v Read] or Mrs Beaton's famous cake [Autospin], it is not infringed by baking a pie (cake) according to the recipe.

How does this work in the "digital age"? ...

New Zealand and digital puzzles 

Patry notes that a New Zealand Parliamentary Committee has published its recommendations into amending New Zealand copyright law to deal with issues like format shifting ... 

Copyright enforcement provisions 

The Commonwealth Attorney General's Department is undertaking a reveiw of the operation of Sch. 4 of the Copyright Amendment (Parallel Importation) Act 2003   .... 

Enforcement workshop 

The Commonwealth Attorney General's Department is holding an intellectual property enforcement workshop at the New South Wales State Library on 23 August.  Apparently, presentations will be made by the Australian Federal Police, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions and IP industry groups. ....