Depuis des semaines, le droit d’auteur et le copyright font la une en raison de plusieurs projets de lois (SOPA/PIPA)1 ou de conventions (ACTA) ultra-répressifs et ayant pour but (entre autres) de lutter contre le téléchargement illégal d’œuvres par Internet ; des réactions des sites comme Google, reddit, Wikipedia ; et de la fermeture par les autorités […]
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« A Flatrate for Culture » Vers une licence globale obligatoire en droit d’auteur
By 8 February 2012 13
Megaupload, WikiLeaks: when online payment intermediaries seem to apply different standards
By 3 February 2012 1
As everyone knows, communicating on the Internet has nothing to do with a direct, face-to-face conversation. (The Internet, however, wrongly gives the impression that those who write and speak to one another are not relying on intermediaries). There are many layers of technical infrastructure that permit the link between two Internet users. The regulation of […]
The web goes dark, Megaupload goes down (or why there was no need for SOPA/PIPA after all)
By 26 January 2012 0
The positive momentum following the unprecedented worldwide protest against SOPA/PIPA was almost immediately slashed by the media coverage of a classical piracy case. But against all odds, the takedown of Megaupload might provide a rather good argument for the defenders of an open Internet.
The online strike against SOPA and PIPA: exit the law, will a new Internet ‘code’ help?
By 25 January 2012 1
January 18th, 2012 was the largest online protest in history to stop the internet censorship bills, SOPA & PIPA. On January 20th, Congress shelved the bills indefinitely. If they return, we must be ready. Everybody has heard about the largest online strike of last week, with the blackout of Wikipedia and Reddit […]
IP Management
By 16 November 2011 13
In their book ‘Information Rules‘ (1999), Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian write the following: “The important thing is to maximise the value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection.“ I would like you to express your views about this sentence, based on two articles that Alain Strowel and myself have […]
What can you find in a cartoon? About the rationale of intellectual property
By 29 September 2011 22
I thank a friendly blog (S.I.lex) devoted to IT and IP issues for drawing my attention to the above cartoon. It originates from a funny site where Mimi & Eunice discuss very serious issues of Intellectual Property. Also worth to be underlined: the traditional ‘copyright notice’ (©, name, date) is replaced by a lovely: […]
The Premier League case: not the last case on internal market restrictions before the ECJ
By 7 May 2011 0
In the Premier League case, the Court of Justice of the EU (Cases C-403/08 and C-429/08) is asked to give a preliminary ruling on several questions asked by the UK High Court of Justice in relation to the marketing of decoder cards and the satellite transmission of football matches throughout the internal market. The facts […]
The nascent e-books market: another illicit fragmentation of the internal market?
By 7 May 2011 0
In the Premier League case now before the Court of Justice of the EU (Cases C-403/08 and C-429/08, see also ipdigit), the Advocate General (AG), in her opinion of 3 February 2011, has highlighted the problem of fragmentation of the internal market by referring to the burgeoning e-books market. According to the AG (§ 186), […]
Towards an ethical music downloading?
By 3 December 2010 9
In expressing your opinion about digital piracy (in reaction to my post of last week), many of you suggested that the copyright industries should find alternative and creative ways to distribute their content in order to better compete with end-user piracy. Here is a sample of your comments: “Companies should find an alternative like […]
Legal responses to online piracy
By 27 November 2010 35
Yesterday (November 26, 2010), the New York Times published two short articles concerning online piracy of digital goods. The first article (Swedish Court Upholds Convictions in File-Sharing Case) reports that an appeals court in Sweden upheld the copyright convictions of three men behind Pirate Bay, a popular file-sharing site that remains in operation despite attempts to […]