Copyright 2010

It’s Friday morning, and we’ve shifted our schedule around a wee bit, currently doing Copyright 2010 with Brian Fitzgerald (QUT, Australia) and Wendy Seltzer (Brooklyn and Harvard). In preparation, we have been preparing a wiki page on the topic. The main focus so far has been general principles, and now we’re looking at Viacom v YouTube and s 512 of the US Act.

Some things that we’ve been asked to read, or that I’m reading for assistance (we’re doing a class argument, and I’m on the YouTube wing of the room - random assignment!)

• Summary of the CCBill case (and the PDF opinion) - this case deals with the direct financial benefit point which is a key one for the Youtube litigation
• Great blog post on the legal arguments in Viacom v GooTube
• Section 512
• Make Way For Copyright Chaos (Lessig)

We also touched on search engine liability (participant Joris van Hoboken is doing his PhD in this area), and talked more generally about Google and the law and the politics of the various lawsuits. We discussed the Perfect 10 (thumbnail) cases, and almost got into talking about caching (but pulled back from the brink!). (For SDP readers: a very interesting decision that we didn’t touch on is the Tariff 22 litigation in Canada - which dealt with a whole package of copyright issues - but had a significant discussion of caching around para 112 and onwards).