Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Valérie Laure Benabou, a law professor at the University of Versailles and an esteemed expert on French and international copyright law, kindly agreed to share her thoughts on the Google vs. SAIF case decided yesterday by the Paris Court of Appeals:

An important decision of the Paris Court of Appeal was rendered yesterday in a litigation between Google and a French Collective Society for Visual Works (SAIF). The Collective Society claimed that Google was infringing on the copyright of its authors members by reproducing and displaying their works in the form of thumbnails on the pages of Google Image service and also by reproducing their works through Google caching system. Before the Court of First Instance, the Judge considered the applicable law to be the U.S. Copyright Act, and consequently, the court applied the fair use defense in line with the Arriba and Perfect 10 decisions.

As of yesterday, Google’s new policy concerning registration of trademarks as keywords for triggering contextual advertisement in many European countries went into effect. The new policy, which strongly relies on the recent ECJ decision on Google’s potential liability for TM infringement via its adwords practice, demonstrates a notable shift in Google’s approach.

The closely watched battle over the use of trademarks as keywords for purpose of triggering advertisements on Google’s search result pages (AdWords) reached high peak today with the release of the European Court of Justice’s ruling on the French cases. In what appears to be a resounding win for Google, the ECJ managed to avoid some of the critical questions in a decision that, in fact, projects little new light on the multibillion dollars question: Is AdWording that involves marks as keywords legal in Europe?

The long-awaited Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) was filed yesterday. The relevant documents (including the new version of the settlement and a summery of the main changes) are available here. As someone who was looking into the international law aspects of the settlement recently, one of the first places for me to look was the new definition to a “Book”, which now reads as follows:

Author: Matt Kellogg

In the Northern District of California, the District Court granted Google’s motion to dismiss in a suit claiming that Google had been complicit in fraud perpetrated through its AdWords program. Because the plaintiff did not allege that Google had helped to develop the offending content, Google was immune under § 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields website operators from liability for hosting unlawful content created by third parties.

Author: Matt Kellogg

Google recently reached a settlement agreement with the authors and publishers who in 2005 sued the company for copyright infringement. As part of the arrangement, copyright owners will not only receive fees from Google for the use of digitized copies of their books in Google Book Search, they will also have the ability to choose how much—if any—of their works they wish to be displayed. The settlement provides for the creation of an independent organization to oversee its administration as well as special modes of access for public and university libraries.

In case you have not seen it yet, here’s James Gleick’s OP-ED in the NYT, discussing the settlement between Google and book authors and publishers. The interesting point he makes is that the new business model should increase the quality of published books.

Viacom accused Google's video sharing website, YouTube of violating its copyright in a $1 billion lawsuit. And as of last week, Google and Viacom reached an agreement to allow Google's YouTube to mask important user information from records before the handover to Viacom. Law.com bloggers and co-hosts, J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi welcome Attorney Kevin A. Thompson from the firm Davis McGrath LLC, and Lauren Gelman, Executive Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society to discuss this case. They will discuss the legal issues, privacy rights, piracy issues and what this case means for the users, the source of business for these companies.

I've been reading through a study of Google's patents prepared by Stephen Arnold entitled Google Version 2.0: The Predator.

Earlier this week Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted saying that YouTube is “very close” to turning on a filtering system that should prevent copyright content from being uploaded to the video site. At the moment it is not clear how exactly this filtering system will work.