International Law

Federal Minister of Justice against Google Book Search

Posted on June 01, 2009
The German Federal Minister of Justice Zypries has asked for a discussion at the EU level on how to stop the wholesale copyright violation of the Google Book Search project. See the Federal Ministry of Justice press release of May 28th here (in German)...

What is Software?

Posted on May 29, 2009
When discussing the scope of the patentability exclusion “programs for computers” in Article 52 EPC, it might be of interest to take a look at the definitions in Regulation 428/2009 published in the Official Journal L 134 on 29 May 2009 on the control of dual-use items...

Convention on Choice of Court Agreements

Posted on May 29, 2009
The Official Journal L133 of 29 May 2009 publishes Council Decision 2009/397/EC on the signing of the European Community. The status table for the Convention shows the United States as signatory and Mexico as having ratified. That Convention makes agreements between private parties on the choice of court agreements enforcable internationally...

Brian Kahin Amicus Brief

Posted on May 16, 2009
Brian Kahin has written a submission to the European Patent Office in the software patent question for the American Computer and Communications Industry Association, members of which generate over 200 billion dollars in revenue and employ about one million people...

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Directive on Protection for Computer Programs

Posted on May 10, 2009
The 1991 Directive on the legal protection for computer programs has been newly codified as Directive 2009/24 of 23 April 2009. The new Directive is the same as the old text, only incorporating later amendments of the 1991 Directive and adding paragraph numbers to the recitals...

Disappearing Right

Posted on April 13, 2009
Sadly, the American government still openly asserts the right to disappear people extrajudicially, quite contrary to what Obama said when he was a candidate. As Greenwald explains, it looks like the only reason the Americans are closing Guantanamo is that the inmates have too many constitutional rights to court hearings there, as opposed to people [...

European Counterfeiting and Piracy Observatory

Posted on April 13, 2009
The European Union has launched this on April 2. The Observatory will consist of one delegate for each Member State alongside “key private sector representatives”. It will not operate itself in enforcing intellectual property rights, but rather will serve as a forum for discussions...

Figurine Bible Dispute

Posted on April 10, 2009
Someone uses Playmobil figurines to create Bible scenes (see IPKat here). The maker does not like that, his lawyer calls it a copyright violation. If the figurine is a work protected under copyright, people are not allowed to use it without permission to create larger works, like a Bible scene...

Agreeing with Axel H. Horns

Posted on April 10, 2009
who has a post giving some information leaked on the EU side on the top secret ACTA negotiations here. Whatever the merit of the results of the negotiations might be, conducting them while leaving the public completely in the dark is not helpful to gather support for the project...

Now that?s a Great Headline

Posted on April 03, 2009
Village mob thwarts Google Street View car at Times Online. Apparantly, some folks in Bristol have shown physical resistance to being photographed without their consent by a camera car the evil spy empire is operating, and have, for some time at least, succeeded in turning them away.

Fonera Logs

Posted on March 24, 2009
Martin Varsafsky announced the new Fonera router for the FON wireless Internet access network. It can do all kinds of useful things, like uploading or downloading files directly to a hard drive without needing a computer. I have posted about FON as a potential workaround for Internet surveillance a couple of years ago here and here...

Pirate Bay IPREDATOR

Posted on March 24, 2009
New Internet anonymity service announced by the Swedish Pirate Bay operators. They say they don’t want to keep any logs of user activity whatsoever. It remains to be seen if that is possible under Swedish law and the 2006 Surveillance Directive.

FFII Press Release

Posted on March 18, 2009
on the referral of software patent questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal at the European Patent Office here. The press release says that the European Patent Office should not be allowed to “validate software patents” without input of the European Parliament...

Secret Law Developments

Posted on March 16, 2009
The European Court of Justice has decided on the question I blogged before, that is, as in my last post on the matter “the idiocy of EU flight security regulations that are not published in the Official Journal, a practice that reaches almost American levels of contempt for basic requirements of democracy and rule of law...

Otto?s Numbers

Posted on March 15, 2009
Otto Waalkes is a famous German author, musician and filmmaker. In the preface to one of his books I read a couple of decades ago, he mentioned that he takes special pride in the page numbers, since it is very difficult to think of so many different ones...

Creative Commons Zero

Posted on March 11, 2009
Creative Commons has launched a new instrument they call a “waiver”, with the name of CC Zero. The purpose of that instrument is to waive copyright protection as far as legally possible. I am not quite sure how this works. Copyright protection applies in all Berne Convention member countries, and shall not be subject to any [...

Reply to Larry Lessig

Posted on March 11, 2009
This is a reply to Larry Lessig’s post here. We seem to disagree on whether the original criticism is a “baseless smear”. There is no way to disagree however, that that was exactly the impression John Conyers got, since that were his exact words in the last line of his reply...

MPI Electronic Journal

Posted on March 10, 2009
The Max-Planck-Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law has published the first issue of a new electronic journal with an impossibly long and cumbersome name over the SSRN network. I have added a permanent link at the “copyright” section of this blog...

Is Lessig Shilling against Open Access?

Posted on March 10, 2009
Larry Lessig has started a fight with Congressman and Chair of the Judicial Committee John Conyers, accusing him of “shilling”. Conyers is not amused. After this level of unpleasantness, it seems open to doubt that Mr. Conyers will be particularly inclined to listen to Lessig or his allies in the discussions about the legislation concerned...

Paper Trail for Voting Machines

Posted on March 08, 2009
The German Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that voting machines without paper trail violate the German Constitution. There is an English version of the press release here. This follows from the requirement that voting procedures are public. Citizens must be able to verify the result of the process...

How to Sue Google and Win

Posted on March 08, 2009
This article describes a lawsuit over $721 that one AdSense partner of Google collected in court after being unable to get any meaningful customer service. From the article one gets the impression that Google uses some rather unfair contract terms and odd accounting practices...

Does Google Know Too Much?

Posted on November 05, 2008
SPIEGEL online article asks that question. The answer is yes. And it is about time for people to have a closer look at Google privacy violations and stop using spyware tools as Google Analytics. SPIEGEL online has stopped using that particular software, because they “want to ensure that data on our users? browsing patterns don’t leave [...

5.000 Lawyers Watching Election for Obama

Posted on October 20, 2008
in Florida alone. The Republicans will probably still succeed in stealing more votes than the Democrats, but that should narrow that particular advantage down somewhat.

Go, Molfsee!

Posted on September 29, 2008
Molfsee is a small town in Germany. Now they plan to sue Google for photographing all streets and people of the town. They think that that is a “special use” of the streets (like a demonstration or setting up a stand for selling things), and Google would need a permit for this, which they don’t [...

Legalizing Google

Posted on May 26, 2008
I reported January last year about plans to change Japanese copyright law and legalize wholesale copying of the Web by search engines. Those plans have not yet produced any change. As of today, Google is still perfectly illegal in Japan. Today’s Asahi Shimbun has an article about the latest development in that question (in Japanese)...

Gringras: The Laws of the Internet

Posted on May 25, 2008
Jeremy Philipps, who runs the IPKat blog, kindly sent me a copy of this book for review on this blog. This $275 volume will be released in a couple of days. It is the third edition, authored mainly by Elle Todd, a solicitor at Olswang, with some chapters written by Alasdair Balfour, Stephen Hignett, and Philipp [...

Central Traffic Data Database

Posted on May 20, 2008
proposed in Great Britain, see this article in the Times. That would make it more convenient for our American friends to deal with the hassle of copying all the data into their databases. Getting it all from one source sure beats having to deal with hundreds of different service providers...

War on Tourism

Posted on May 15, 2008
Another tourist detained without any particular reason for ten days when trying to enter the United States, as described in this New York Times article. Discover America. If you dare.

Impeaching the President

Posted on May 13, 2008
John Conyers, Chairman of the American House Judiciary Committee, writes a letter to the president threatening impeachment if he goes ahead with illegally attacking Iran without asking Congress first. The American Constitution quite clearly gives the power to decide about war to Congress...

Working Group Opinion on Search Engines

Posted on April 26, 2008
As noted at EU Law Blog, the EU Working Group on Data Protection has published an opinion on data protection law regarding search engines. They say that the Surveillance Directive (data retention Directive 2006/24) does not give search engines any rights to store search histories, because these are not traffic data, but content of the [...

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