Software and Internet patents

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in what has been described as the most important intellectual property case in a decade: Alice v. CLS Bank.  One party in this case is an Australian company, that owns the patent in question.

Prior blog posts are here and here. 

A NYTimes opinion article is worth reading.

Cloud Speeds

An interesting non-legal article looking at the various Cloud services and comparing speeds:  ComputerWorld.

Who Owns the Internet?

Two Harvard Law School experts — Jonathan Zittrain '95, Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and Susan Crawford, John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property — weigh in on a lawsuit in federal court that may decide whether Web access remains open and neutral.  Read More.  

Unravel the law

A great new legal search tool from Stanford:  Ravel.

Privacy Guidelines in Australia

The Privacy Guidelines are no longer consultation drafts – the final version was released today (link below).

They have reversed their view on the application of the Privacy Act to foreign website operators.  So much so that the guidelines now conclude that “Where an entity merely has a website that can be accessed from Australia, this is generally not sufficient to establish that the website operator is ‘carrying on a business’ in Australia”

Privacy Guidelines

Signature in Email

An interesting recent Federal Circuit Court decision to the effect that a person’s name at the bottom of an email was a signature - 
Austral-Asia Freight Pty Ltd v Turner [2013] FCCA 298
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCCA/2013/298.html

Lawsuit over bad Yelp review

See this story regarding a lawsuit by a builder against his customer who posted a bad review on Yelp.

The article includes the following:

For a while, online reviewers have been free to say whatever they like about businesses without much in the way of fact-checking by the review websites that host their comments.

And because review sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp and Angie’s List often refuse to remove negative reviews without a court injunction, many businesses resort to responding to reviewers personally through the sites.

But others, like Deitz, have decided to cut out the middle man and lawyer up — no doubt because sites like Yelp are exerting increasing influence over consumers' buying decisions, from which plumber to hire to fix a leaky toilet to which spa to patronise to get a massage.

Thanks to their efforts, anonymity as an online reviewer may be a thing of the past.

In a major win for business owners in the US, a Virginia appeals court ruled earlier this month that Yelp must reveal the identities of seven users who wrote negative reviews of a local carpet cleaning business.

In that case, the customers weren't actually patrons of the shop, business owner claimed, which made their reviews false statements rather than opinions protected by the First Amendment. Yelp wasn't happy about the ruling, but they forked over the names anyway.

Popularity of new gTLDs

This is an interesting set of infographics regarding the new gTLDs.

See www.webmechanix.com/how-to-react-to-new-generic-top-level-domains

COPYRIGHT POLICY, CREATIVITY, AND INNOVATION IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

On December 12, 2013, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force held a roundtable to discuss issues involving copyright and the internet raised in the recently released “Green Paper.”  A copy of the Green Paper can be found here or here.

Lessig v. Liberation over takedown notice

Professor Lessig has sued Australian music label Liberation in the U.S. in relation to a computer generated take down notice sent to YouTube, to take down video of Lessig giving a seminar in Asia that included music licensed exclusively to Liberation in Australia.

If this case proceeds, there are interesting jurisdictional and fair use / fair dealing points that arise.  If the use of the music was fair use in the U.S., but not fair dealing in Australia, and the video is available in Australia, one would assume that there is copyright infringement in Australia.

Brisbane Times article
The video in question
EFF press release