Google and Oracle have been fighting for a decade over the copyright status of APIs, or application programming interfaces. But Google just won [PDF].
The high court punted on whether APIs can be copyrighted in the first place. But the court’s fair use reasoning was broad enough that it should provide a strong defense for most API copying, making the question of API copyrights much less important.
Everything that was published in 1924 or earlier is now available in the public domain, meaning that it’s no longer protected by copyright.
Movies, books, music, and more from 1924 are all entering the public domain today, meaning that you’re free to download, upload, and share these titles however you see fit. And it’s completely legal.
A European court recently ruled that the unauthorized sale of secondhand eBooks infringes upon the owner’s copyrights.
“The decision is not only important for the book sector, but also for the music and film industry, because now also for music and film, downloaded copies may not be resold. The GAU / Media Federation is happy that after many years there is finally clarity about the application of copyright to e-books.
I’m not sure how you would tell the difference between a “used” eBook and new one, unless a proof of purchase was provided. But it’s unfortunate to me that, unlike physical goods, you can’t sell used digital goods.
The House of Representatives will vote tomorrow on the CASE Act, a bill that would fine people who share stuff they don’t own US$30,000.
Right now, books published in the U.S. before 1924 are in the public domain. This means they are publicly owned and everyone can use and copy them. But there’s a loophole in copyright law which gives up to 75% of books published between 1923 and 1964 secret public domain status. It’s hard to figure out which ones they are, so a group of libraries, archivists, and volunteers are finding these public domain books, scanning them, and uploading them to the internet.
Richardson notes that much of that heavy lifting is being done by volunteers at organizations like Project Gutenberg, a nonprofit effort to digitize and archive cultural works. These volunteers are tasked with locating a copy of the book in question, scanning it, proofing it, then putting out HTML and plain-text editions.
The Senate is moving a bill forward that could impose fines of up to US$15,000 for people who share memes.
The Senate Judiciary Committee last week approved the “Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019,” which “creates a voluntary small claims board within the Copyright Office that will provide copyright owners with an alternative to the expensive process of bringing copyright claims, including infringement and misrepresentation …. in federal court,” according to the Copyright Alliance.
“This new board, called the Copyright Claims Board (CCB), would allow recovery in each case of up to $30,000 in damages total, with a cap of $15,000 in statutory damages per work infringed,” according to the alliance, an advocacy group for the copyright industry.
Corellium is a mobile device virtualization company that offers iOS and Apple’s apps in the cloud. Apple is suing the company for damages.
Luminary is a new podcast service without ads. Instead it’s subscription-based. But it sounds like the company is stealing podcasts.
Certain Japanese copyright amendments that would criminalize every instance of copyright infringement have been halted.
Business playing music within their stores could be much easier in the future.
Over the next week or so AT&T will kick some customers off its network because of copyright infringement.
Tomorrow the EU will vote on the future of the internet. Specifically, a proposal involving copyrighted material that proves controversial.
No matter how hard our kindergarten teachers tried, some people never really wrapped their heads around the idea that stealing is bad. Take, for instance, the Quirk Ford dealership in Massachusetts and the Firewatch artwork it stole for a promotional event.
