International Law

Gringras: The Laws of the Internet

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

Jeremy Philipps, who runs the IPKat blog, kindly sent me a copy of this book for review on this blog.

This $275 volume will be released in a couple of days. It is the third edition, authored mainly by Elle Todd, a solicitor at Olswang, with some chapters written by Alasdair Balfour, Stephen Hignett, and Philipp Johnson. The Foreword is by Skype General Counsel Robert Miller.

The book has 9 chapters, the longest one with over 120 pages on Intellectual Property. Copyright gets about half of those pages.

Most of the information on copyright is on United Kingdom law, with some discussion of case law of the European Court of Justice.

A short section on search engines (pages 272 to 273) discusses infringement liability from linking for search engines. Reading that one gets the impression that there is some risk for “general-purpose” search engines, but that risk is less because they are not designed to facilitate specifically the downloading of music files, most of which are in violation.

That defense seems to be irrelevant. If someone designing a search engine knows that they are facilitating copyright violations, it does not help them that they have a part of their business that is not. You can’t defend yourself against a charge of drunk driving by pointing to your record of driving sober most of the time.

Of course, there would also be the question if the Google cache is violating copyright.

Full post as published by Lenz Blog on May 25, 2008 (boomark / email).