Law and Information

I reported here and here that a Paris District Court ruled in UFC v.Films Alain Sadre et al that a copy protection system on a DVD does not conflict with provisions of the French Intellectual Property Code, which limit copyright owners’ rights regarding reproductions made strictly for the copier’s private use. UFC, a consumer rights association, claimed it received complaints from consumers about DVD copy protections that prevent purchasers from making copies for private use. The court confirmed that such technical protection measures comply with the EU-Copyright Directive (EUCD), though the EUCD is not yet transposed into French law.

Some days ago, however, a Paris Appellate Court reversed the ruling. I haven’t had a chance to analyze the decision, but it reportedly requires film producers Alain Sarde and Studio Canal to remove copy controls on their DVDs in order to enable the beneficiaries of the private copying exception as set forth by French law to exercise their rights.

Further, the Court criticized that the DVD producers did not provide sufficient consumer information as far as copy restriction is concerned. The label “CP” for “copy protected” was printed on the jacket, but in small characters and not sufficiently explicit.

See news report in French, and English translation.

It will be interesting to analyze the ruling in detail and to think about its compliance with EU law vis-�-vis Article 6 of the EUCD (see here.)

Update: The decision (in French) is published here.

My knowledgeable colleague and friend John Palfrey has posted an interesting and thought-provocative comment on the state-of-the-art of ICT for development, the topic of next week’s I&S class we’re co-teaching at Harvard Extension School. A critical view on ICT4D was recently published in The Economist — read the editorial and this article. The promise of mobile phones emphasized by the author has been discussed for many years from different perspectives; we mentioned it in this context, for instance.
BTW, a good starting point to get an overview of recent ICT4D initiatives might be this resource guide.

My colleague Andreas Neus at IBM has co-authored an interesting paper on OS collaboration. Here’s the abstract:

The Creative Archive License has been launched. Press release here, and a backgrounder on BBC’s public domain archive project here.

Tonight, AP reports that RIAA and MPAA intend to sue hundreds of students accused of illegally distributing copyrighted songs and films across college campuses - including Harvard University - using Internet2, the private research network which is hundreds of times faster than the Internet. It’s still unclear how the entertainment industry could detect piracy over Internet2.

Larry E. Ribstein, Univ. of Illinois College of Law, offers on SSRN Initial Reflections on the Law and Economics of Blogging. After an overview of the technology of blogging, the author explores the economics of blogging, discussing private costs and benefits (such as self expresion and reputation, among others) on the one hand and social benefits and costs on the other hand. Personally, I’m particularly interested in the low-quality information argument as a potential social cost, since it links nicely to my research-in-progress on information quality on the Internet. Unfortunately, the quality argument made by Ribstein is indeed “initial” as the paper’s title suggests.
Ribstein then focuses on public choice of blogging, followed by a discussion of specific legal issues, including the journalists’ privilege, the application of election laws, copyright issues, media ownership restrictions, as well as defamation and licensing laws.
Overall, a nice and short Saturday morning “food-for-thought” read.

James Grimmelmann and others are blogging live from ISP’s terrific “The Global Flow of Information” conference at Yale Law School. Earlier today, Berkman’s executive director John Palfrey delivered a talk about Information Governance in general and Internet governance in particular. John pointet out, among other things, that the Internet governance discussion is incredibly amorphous. After outlining the current state and scope of the governance discussion, John made the argument that it might be helpful to identify — and foucs on – specific governance problems and/or issues such as filtering rather than to think and talk that much about “omnibus regulation” as we call it in Europe. Such a problem-oriented approach will prompt a discussion of what we really value about the Internet and what the guiding principles for Internet regulation should be.
Congratulations and thanks to our friends at the ISP for putting together such a great conference program with a truly impressive line-up of speakers.