Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 2 Mar 2010 23:23:00 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100302/1504008373.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100302/1504008373.shtml ruled that this violated the rights of freelancers. That set off a flurry of other similar/related lawsuits. In one of those other cases, the publisher and freelancers eventually reached a settlement -- but not all of the freelancers were satisfied with it.

In appealing the settlement, it was noted that many of the freelancers had not registered their copyrights. Now, as you hopefully know, you automatically get copyright on any new content as soon as it's set in tangible form, but if you decide to register it, it gives you additional privileges and remedies against infringement. In most cases, not having a registration greatly limits what you can do in terms of a lawsuit against infringement. So the issue in this lawsuit -- Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick -- became whether or not those unregistered stories (and their authors) could be covered by the settlement.

Copycense points us to the Supreme Court's ruling (pdf) which says that, contrary to what the Appeals Court had ruled, it is perfectly fine to include unregistered copyrights in the court's jurisdiction. While some are reporting that this means you no longer need to register to sue, I don't think that's what the ruling is actually saying. It simply says that just because you haven't registered, it doesn't mean that it's outside of the court's jurisdiction. So it sounds like this means that unregistered copyrights can get included in a settlement/class-action lawsuit like this one, but the holders of those unregistered copyrights might still have difficulty (or great limits) should they try to bring the lawsuit directly themselves. It would be great to get some of the copyright lawyers in the community here to weigh in as well.

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]]> how-big-a-deal-is-this? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100302/1504008373 Wed, 2 Jul 2008 14:20:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080701/0231121561.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080701/0231121561.shtml lawsuits over the years concerning whether or not magazines could create CD-ROM archives of their magazines without having to pay all their freelance authors again. The court rulings have been mixed, to say the least -- with some ruling one way, and others ruling the other. The end result was some rather twisted logic that suggested magazine publishers could republish magazines via CD-ROM, but only if they did so in an incredibly annoying fashion.

Why? The reasoning shows the twisted impact of copyright law, but here we go: basically, if the CD-ROM is just a very limited reproduction of the magazines without any additional features (search being a key one), then it's okay. As soon as you add in anything useful that a digital version would allow (like search), then suddenly it changes the nature of the work, and it somehow violates the copyright of the writers. Bizarre? Indeed.

Luckily, however, in one of the ongoing cases, a full appeals court rehearing has reversed an earlier ruling, pointing out just how ridiculous this interpretation is. So, at least in this circuit, publishing a CD-ROM archive (even one with a search engine) appears not to violate the copyright of freelancers. However, as that article notes, what's truly scary is reading through the dissent by the judge who insists that the inclusion of that search engine really does change the very nature of the work, and who controls the copyright. Where it reaches the level of the truly absurd, however (as pointed out in the link above), is where one of the dissenting judges actually suggests that not allowing these archives to go forward wouldn't impact the historical archives of this content, because magazine publishers could just store archives that would only be available to be "utilized primarily by researchers and scholars." However, actually taking advantage of what the technology allows, and making it so everyone can benefit, and you've run afoul of copyright law. Luckily, the majority overruled this tortured reasoning.

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]]> phew http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20080701/0231121561