Balough
December 14, 2013
Author J. K. Rowling has stopped the publication by RDR Books (and attributed author Steven Vander Ark) of a proposed lexicon of the fictional character Harry Potter, his spells, and his world. A New York District Court found that the content of the lexicon used too much of the actual language in Ms. Rowling’s books […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Freelancers who failed to register their works cannot be awarded damages in a proposed class action settlement, a federal appeals court ruled. The Second Circuit affirmed the long-standing rule that before an author can recover damages for copyright infringement, the work must be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. As a result, the court threw […]
Balough
December 14, 2013
Perfect 10 didn’t score a 10 in appealing its case against Google, but the search engine giant may be contibuting to copyright infringement, the court said. Perfect 10, Inc. markets and sells copyrighted images of nude models on its website. Its members pay a monthly fee to view the images. Google, Inc., through its search […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
A development agreement drafted without lawyers did not create a fiduciary duty to prevent one of the “partners” from developing a competing computer touch screen, the Seventh Circuit found. Autotech Technology Limited Partnership and Automationdirect.com (ADC) entered into a contract for joint development and sale of a new touch screen to be called EZTouch. The […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
There is no copyright infringement where a company has a third-party build an assembly machine based on copyrighted drawings of another when the company had been granted a license to duplicate the machine for its own use. Automation by Design, Inc. (ABD) sued Raybestos Products Company for copyright infringement and breach of a license agreement […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
Motion picture studios can prevent companies from selling “cleaned-up” versions of motion pictures since such editing infringes on the studios’ copyrights. In its ruling, the Colorado District Court rejected establishing a policy to allow such editing to provide “more socially acceptable alternatives to enable families to view the films together, without exposing children to the […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
Google image search engine’s use of thumbnails probably infringes on the owner of the image’s copyright, a U.S. District Court judge found. The court granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting Google from displaying the thumbnail images from Perfect10.com’s website when showing results of an image search. The service in question is Google’s image search that displays […]
Balough
December 13, 2013
It is not a fair use under the Copyright Act to “sample” entire songs by downloading them from the Internet before deciding whether to buy an album, the Seventh Circuit has found. Cecilia Gonzalez argued that her downloading over 1,370 copyrighted songs was fair use since she was just sampling music to determine what she […]
Balough
December 7, 2013
It’s black letter law that federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction to hear infringement actions under the U.S. Copyright Act. But now the Indiana Supreme Court has found that state courts may indeed hear cases involving the Copyright Act if the claims are raised first in a counterclaim. Federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction in cases when […]
