International Law

Recommendations on Privacy for Search Engines

Posted on November 11, 2009
The following text is a recommendation of the “International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications“, adopted first in 1998 and revised in 2006. At the original host it does not have a single URL, making it impossible to point to exactly this file...

Sri Lanka GSP+ Status

Posted on November 01, 2009
The EU Commission has issued a statement confirming that Sri Lanka is not living up to the commitments to international human rights protection standards that are conditions for access to the GSP+ program. The Commission will now consult with the Member States about temporarily suspending GSP+ status, while calling on Sri Lanka to constructively work [...

Book Review: William F. Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars

Posted on October 31, 2009
Recently Amazon released their Kindle internationally. I immediately ordered one. The first book I bought for it was Patry’s. When reviewing it, the first thing I need to point out is that the author is Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. The first reason is that the author does not want people to note this fact when discussing [...

EU-Korea FTA Initialed

Posted on October 19, 2009
See the Commission press release for details.

To access blog feed reader register for free. (You will also learn about new ways to read and access the freshest law blogs.)

AP and News Corp on Search Engines

Posted on October 16, 2009
They don’t seem to agree with the idea that all search engines can copy and redistribute their content.

Commission v Spain Gambling Case

Posted on October 11, 2009
The first chamber of the European Court of Justice handed down a judgment on October 6th that gives a rather different impression compared to that of the Grand Chamber in the BWin case I discussed here recently. In the new case, the Commission sued Spain because lottery winnings are exempted from income tax only in case [...

Preemptive Peace

Posted on October 10, 2009
As Glenn Greenwald notes, there are no achievements to justify a Nobel Prize for Barack Obama. Unless one counts beating McCain/Palin in the election, which was probably a major contribution to world peace, or sees it as an extraordinary achievement that Obama already is in office for nine months without having started any other illegal wars...

Winny Developer Acquitted

Posted on October 08, 2009
The Osaka High Court has acquitted Winny developer Isamu Kaneko from charges of copyright violation. I have commented on that case five years ago, when Kaneko was first arrested. And I have discussed the question of secondary liability for dual-use software a couple of weeks ago...

Search Engine Exception

Posted on October 07, 2009
A copyright reform bill containing the new exception for search engines has passed the Japanese Parliament and will come into force on January 1st, 2010. I will post an English translation and offer a couple of comments. The English translation will depart from the unreadable style of the Japanese original by relocating all information in brackets [...

Copyright Disclaimer

Posted on October 07, 2009
The copyright notice for this blog reads: Please feel free to forward copies of this work to others, mirror it on your homepage or blog, or post it on bulletin boards or P2P networks. However, please leave my name attached and don?t edit the work. Commercial use requires separate permission...

BWin Case

Posted on September 28, 2009
The Eu Law Blog has a short report on the recent BWin gambling case of the European Court of Justice. That case is a large setback for the internal market in gambling services. While earlier cases like Gambelli left some leeway for national courts to approve cross-border services in this sector, this case goes way back [...

Michael Carrier: Innovation for the 21st Century: DMCA

Posted on September 21, 2009
Michael A. Carrier sent me a copy of his book “Innovation for the 21st Century” for a book review. See also this “Blog Symposium” on the book at the “Truth on the Market” blog. Third in line (see here for discussion of the first recommendation and here for the second) is the proposal on pages 193 [...

Open Source Exception from Wassenaar?

Posted on September 20, 2009
Open Source project Firefox has obtained a “no-violation-letter” for the distribution of Firefox. That means participants in the project will not be prosecuted for violating rules against the distribution of strong cryptographic software in the American laws to implement the Wassenaar Agreement...

U.S. Department of Justice Joining in Google Opposition

Posted on September 20, 2009
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a brief in the Google Book Search class action (overview of documents at Justia.com) in opposition to the settlement. The French and German governments have filed their own briefs in opposition earlier. They object that foreign authors and publishers have not been adequately informed or represented...

Michael Carrier: Innovation for the 21st Century: Copyright Damages

Posted on September 20, 2009
Michael A. Carrier sent me a copy of his book “Innovation for the 21st Century” for a book review. See also this “Blog Symposium” on the book at the “Truth on the Market” blog. Second in line (see here for discussion of the first recommendation) is the proposal to limit statutory damages to cases of direct [...

Michael Carrier: Innovation for the 21st Century: Dual Use and Copyright

Posted on September 20, 2009
Michael A. Carrier sent me a copy of his book “Innovation for the 21st Century” for a book review. See also this “Blog Symposium” on the book at the “Truth on the Market” blog. I won’t write a lot about how I rate this book, but I just want to mention that it was the first [...

What!? Google Showing Signs of Respecting Copyright?

Posted on September 12, 2009
Eubusiness.com has a report about the recent hearing on the Google book search settlement in Brussels, with the headline of “Google removes European titles from digital book deal”. The article goes on to state that “books commercially available” in Europe will be excluded from the Google landgrab, and their idea of copyright (”we use everything [...

Sri Lanka Next in Line

Posted on September 06, 2009
for revocation of GSP+ status, failing to honour basic human rights commitments.

Google Patents Home Page

Posted on September 04, 2009
The American Patent Office has granted a “Design Patent” to Google for their home page. The main element of that design is nothing, leaving most of the page blank. I have no problem with design protection. I have also no problem with seeing it extended to important home pages...

Global Patent System?

Posted on September 04, 2009
Horacio Gutierrez, Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft, seems to think that there is an opportunity to create a global patent system, a “world patent that is derived from a single patent application, examined and prosecuted by a single examining authority and litigated before a single judicial body...

Google Refuses to Protect Privacy for Book Search Histories

Posted on September 03, 2009
That is what should be expected from a company that is the Worst on the Web, with a rating of ?comprehensive consumer surveillance & entrenched hostility to privacy? by Privacy International. The EFF had different expectations and asked Google to promise not to hand over their user’s data on search histories in the “Book Search” area [...

Brazil TRIPS Retaliation

Posted on September 01, 2009
Brazil says they have the right to retaliate against continued violation of WTO obligations in the Cotton case against the United States to an amount of $800 million, including $340 million of “cross-retaliation” against American intellectual property rights...

ACTA 5th Negotiation Round

Posted on September 01, 2009
A short report at the EU Commission website on the 5th negotiation round of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Rabat on July 16th and 17th tells us that participants want to conclude the negotiations in 2010, and that they plan to publish draft agendas before all subsequent negotiation rounds, the next of which is [...

FON Illegal in Germany

Posted on July 13, 2009
In the opinion of the Koeln High Court, see this link (in German). That court opinion says that FON is a parasite feeding of the investment in Internet infrastructure other service providers pay for. The court also seems to think that widespread FON usage would lead to higher prices for consumers of Internet access...

Venezuala GSP+ Status Revoked

Posted on June 14, 2009
by Commission decision 2009/454 of 11 June 2009 for the reason of not having ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption. That Convention is listed in the Annex of Regulation 732/2008 as one of the requirements for GSP+ preferential treatment...

Search Engine Exception

Posted on June 02, 2009
As I reported earlier, there have been discussions about introducing an exception for search engines into Japanese copyright. A draft law has been posted at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Unfortunately, it is in a form unsuited for reading online...

Federal Minister of Justice against Google Book Search

Posted on June 01, 2009
The German Federal Minister of Justice Zypries has asked for a discussion at the EU level on how to stop the wholesale copyright violation of the Google Book Search project. See the Federal Ministry of Justice press release of May 28th here (in German)...

What is Software?

Posted on May 29, 2009
When discussing the scope of the patentability exclusion “programs for computers” in Article 52 EPC, it might be of interest to take a look at the definitions in Regulation 428/2009 published in the Official Journal L 134 on 29 May 2009 on the control of dual-use items...

Convention on Choice of Court Agreements

Posted on May 29, 2009
The Official Journal L133 of 29 May 2009 publishes Council Decision 2009/397/EC on the signing of the European Community. The status table for the Convention shows the United States as signatory and Mexico as having ratified. That Convention makes agreements between private parties on the choice of court agreements enforcable internationally...

Brian Kahin Amicus Brief

Posted on May 16, 2009
Brian Kahin has written a submission to the European Patent Office in the software patent question for the American Computer and Communications Industry Association, members of which generate over 200 billion dollars in revenue and employ about one million people...

Directive on Protection for Computer Programs

Posted on May 10, 2009
The 1991 Directive on the legal protection for computer programs has been newly codified as Directive 2009/24 of 23 April 2009. The new Directive is the same as the old text, only incorporating later amendments of the 1991 Directive and adding paragraph numbers to the recitals...

Disappearing Right

Posted on April 13, 2009
Sadly, the American government still openly asserts the right to disappear people extrajudicially, quite contrary to what Obama said when he was a candidate. As Greenwald explains, it looks like the only reason the Americans are closing Guantanamo is that the inmates have too many constitutional rights to court hearings there, as opposed to people [...

European Counterfeiting and Piracy Observatory

Posted on April 13, 2009
The European Union has launched this on April 2. The Observatory will consist of one delegate for each Member State alongside “key private sector representatives”. It will not operate itself in enforcing intellectual property rights, but rather will serve as a forum for discussions...

Figurine Bible Dispute

Posted on April 10, 2009
Someone uses Playmobil figurines to create Bible scenes (see IPKat here). The maker does not like that, his lawyer calls it a copyright violation. If the figurine is a work protected under copyright, people are not allowed to use it without permission to create larger works, like a Bible scene...

Agreeing with Axel H. Horns

Posted on April 10, 2009
who has a post giving some information leaked on the EU side on the top secret ACTA negotiations here. Whatever the merit of the results of the negotiations might be, conducting them while leaving the public completely in the dark is not helpful to gather support for the project...

Now that?s a Great Headline

Posted on April 03, 2009
Village mob thwarts Google Street View car at Times Online. Apparantly, some folks in Bristol have shown physical resistance to being photographed without their consent by a camera car the evil spy empire is operating, and have, for some time at least, succeeded in turning them away.

Fonera Logs

Posted on March 24, 2009
Martin Varsafsky announced the new Fonera router for the FON wireless Internet access network. It can do all kinds of useful things, like uploading or downloading files directly to a hard drive without needing a computer. I have posted about FON as a potential workaround for Internet surveillance a couple of years ago here and here...

Pirate Bay IPREDATOR

Posted on March 24, 2009
New Internet anonymity service announced by the Swedish Pirate Bay operators. They say they don’t want to keep any logs of user activity whatsoever. It remains to be seen if that is possible under Swedish law and the 2006 Surveillance Directive.

FFII Press Release

Posted on March 18, 2009
on the referral of software patent questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal at the European Patent Office here. The press release says that the European Patent Office should not be allowed to “validate software patents” without input of the European Parliament...

Secret Law Developments

Posted on March 16, 2009
The European Court of Justice has decided on the question I blogged before, that is, as in my last post on the matter “the idiocy of EU flight security regulations that are not published in the Official Journal, a practice that reaches almost American levels of contempt for basic requirements of democracy and rule of law...

Otto?s Numbers

Posted on March 15, 2009
Otto Waalkes is a famous German author, musician and filmmaker. In the preface to one of his books I read a couple of decades ago, he mentioned that he takes special pride in the page numbers, since it is very difficult to think of so many different ones...

Creative Commons Zero

Posted on March 11, 2009
Creative Commons has launched a new instrument they call a “waiver”, with the name of CC Zero. The purpose of that instrument is to waive copyright protection as far as legally possible. I am not quite sure how this works. Copyright protection applies in all Berne Convention member countries, and shall not be subject to any [...

Reply to Larry Lessig

Posted on March 11, 2009
This is a reply to Larry Lessig’s post here. We seem to disagree on whether the original criticism is a “baseless smear”. There is no way to disagree however, that that was exactly the impression John Conyers got, since that were his exact words in the last line of his reply...

MPI Electronic Journal

Posted on March 10, 2009
The Max-Planck-Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law has published the first issue of a new electronic journal with an impossibly long and cumbersome name over the SSRN network. I have added a permanent link at the “copyright” section of this blog...

Is Lessig Shilling against Open Access?

Posted on March 10, 2009
Larry Lessig has started a fight with Congressman and Chair of the Judicial Committee John Conyers, accusing him of “shilling”. Conyers is not amused. After this level of unpleasantness, it seems open to doubt that Mr. Conyers will be particularly inclined to listen to Lessig or his allies in the discussions about the legislation concerned...

Paper Trail for Voting Machines

Posted on March 08, 2009
The German Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that voting machines without paper trail violate the German Constitution. There is an English version of the press release here. This follows from the requirement that voting procedures are public. Citizens must be able to verify the result of the process...

How to Sue Google and Win

Posted on March 08, 2009
This article describes a lawsuit over $721 that one AdSense partner of Google collected in court after being unable to get any meaningful customer service. From the article one gets the impression that Google uses some rather unfair contract terms and odd accounting practices...

Does Google Know Too Much?

Posted on November 05, 2008
SPIEGEL online article asks that question. The answer is yes. And it is about time for people to have a closer look at Google privacy violations and stop using spyware tools as Google Analytics. SPIEGEL online has stopped using that particular software, because they “want to ensure that data on our users? browsing patterns don’t leave [...

5.000 Lawyers Watching Election for Obama

Posted on October 20, 2008
in Florida alone. The Republicans will probably still succeed in stealing more votes than the Democrats, but that should narrow that particular advantage down somewhat.

Go, Molfsee!

Posted on September 29, 2008
Molfsee is a small town in Germany. Now they plan to sue Google for photographing all streets and people of the town. They think that that is a “special use” of the streets (like a demonstration or setting up a stand for selling things), and Google would need a permit for this, which they don’t [...

Legalizing Google

Posted on May 26, 2008
I reported January last year about plans to change Japanese copyright law and legalize wholesale copying of the Web by search engines. Those plans have not yet produced any change. As of today, Google is still perfectly illegal in Japan. Today’s Asahi Shimbun has an article about the latest development in that question (in Japanese)...

Gringras: The Laws of the Internet

Posted on May 25, 2008
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 [...

Central Traffic Data Database

Posted on May 20, 2008
proposed in Great Britain, see this article in the Times. That would make it more convenient for our American friends to deal with the hassle of copying all the data into their databases. Getting it all from one source sure beats having to deal with hundreds of different service providers...

War on Tourism

Posted on May 15, 2008
Another tourist detained without any particular reason for ten days when trying to enter the United States, as described in this New York Times article. Discover America. If you dare.

Impeaching the President

Posted on May 13, 2008
John Conyers, Chairman of the American House Judiciary Committee, writes a letter to the president threatening impeachment if he goes ahead with illegally attacking Iran without asking Congress first. The American Constitution quite clearly gives the power to decide about war to Congress...

Working Group Opinion on Search Engines

Posted on April 26, 2008
As noted at EU Law Blog, the EU Working Group on Data Protection has published an opinion on data protection law regarding search engines. They say that the Surveillance Directive (data retention Directive 2006/24) does not give search engines any rights to store search histories, because these are not traffic data, but content of the [...

Non-existent Law

Posted on April 11, 2008
I have been ranting repeatedly here against the idiocy of EU flight security regulations that are not published in the Official Journal, a practice that reaches almost American levels of contempt for basic requirements of democracy and rule of law. Now there is a case before the Court of Justice where the Court will have an [...

Sequoia Voting Machines Company Threatening Ed Felten

Posted on March 20, 2008
in an e-mail published on Felten’s blog here. That seems to be not a very smart thing to do. Why should any voter trust this company if they run around threatening people who want to analyze their machines? Sequoia should welcome and help any analysis by experts, since that is the only way to earn trust...

Gambling Probe

Posted on March 15, 2008
The EU Commission has taken up the complaint of a trade association that discriminatory enforcement of American laws against Internet gambling is in violation of WTO obligations. The Commission has started a probe of the question, which may lead to opening a formal WTO dispute resolution procedure...

$3 Trillion and Counting

Posted on March 02, 2008
Cost of the illegal war until now, according to Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz. For that kind of money, the Americans could have just bought the oil they are after, like everyone else. Stiglitz also notes that the recent sub-prime banking crisis was caused by this overspending, leading to the necessity of handing out cheap money [...

FFII President

Posted on January 18, 2008
resigned.

Dumb War

Posted on January 16, 2008
Obama in 2002 (via Lessig). Too bad there is only an outside chance for him to actually become president. A couple of days ago I wrote that “there is still a small chance that the Republicans get away with stealing three presidential elections in a row...

Another Amazing Coincidence

Posted on January 11, 2008
in the results of the New Hampshire primary reported at Bradblog: We do note, however, the following rather remarkably anomalous result which was reported late this afternoon by analysts from the Election Defense Alliance (EDA). As noted by one of the researchers, IT Consultant Bruce O’Dell: Analysts at the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) have confirmed that based [...

Clinton Machine

Posted on January 10, 2008
Apparently, Clinton received a much larger percentage in machine-counted than in hand-counted votes in the recent primary that surprised everybody with a result much more favorable for her than expected. I don’t care much about which Democrat becomes the next American president...

Black America

Posted on January 01, 2008
The United States has received a grade of “endemic surveillance society” (the worst possible) in the 2007 International Privacy Ranking. A map of the world shows America in black, the same as China, Russia and the United Kingdom. The section of the report giving the reasons for that grade discusses a lot of American laws and [...

German Surveillance Law Constitutional Complaint

Posted on January 01, 2008
The law transposing the Surveillance Directive into German law was published in yesterday’s Official Journal and is in force now. The constitutional complaint by about 30.000 people has been filed at the Federal Constitutional Court immediately...

Next

Posted on December 27, 2007
I have just finished reading “Next“, the latest book by Michael Crichton. This is fun reading, like his other books. However, it also is strong anti-patent advocacy. Crichton does not believe in patenting genes, as he explains also in this New York Times op-ed...

Google Ruins Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2007
Great headline in this Slashdot Journal about the latest Google privacy disaster. Apparently, the good folks at Google have again introduced some ultra-cool new feature to one of their products without bothering to think about the privacy implications...

Refusing to be Afraid

Posted on December 21, 2007
Bruce Schneier links to a campaign that wants people to tell politicians to stop being afraid. They have this text as a petition: I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror...

Doctorow?s Google Story

Posted on December 12, 2007
Cory Doctorow has published a story on Google privacy violations, called “Scroogled”. It has gathered quite some attention; there are all kind of translations done already. Doctorow has also been interviewed in the Wall Street Journal about that story...

AskEraser

Posted on December 11, 2007
Ask.com has started their “AskEraser” service today. Costumers get the option to turn logging their searches off. An article on the launch in the New York Times  cites a doubtful analyst who thinks that this is no big deal and not many costumers will react to this...

No Copyright Remuneration for Printers in Germany

Posted on December 09, 2007
The German Federal Court of Justice has decided on December 6th that the legal duty to pay remuneration to copyright holders for technology capable of copying under Article 54a of the Copyright Law does not apply to computer printers. It is possible to use a printer to make a copy of a protected work...