It appears that L'Oreal just refuses to give up. The company has sued eBay in a bunch of different countries trying to get a court somewhere to admit that eBay is somehow liable for actions of its users. To date, it's been a clean shutout against L'Oreal, who has lost cases in Belgium, the UK and France (I believe cases are still pending in Germany and Spain, though it's hard to keep up). The ruling in France was the biggest surprise, given that French courts have ruled the other way in the past. Given that, it looks like L'Oreal isn't done yet on its home turf, as it's appealing the ruling in France. Full story...
When we talk about intellectual property issues, many maximalists on both the copyright and patent side of things have this inherent sense that "copying" is "bad.
Reader mick alerts us to the story of a small eight-person startup that makes a popular app for backing up your iPod music, which had been called "iPodRip" until Steve Jobs and Apple's lawyers got involved, demanding the company cease using the name and hand over its domain.
Remember ACS:Law? The shakedown organization that appears to have taken over where Davenport Lyons left off (including using some of the identical documents), and who has "partnered" with DigiProtect, the company that gleefully admits that it purposely puts files on file sharing networks just to collect the IP addresses of anyone who downloads, is asking for the identifying info on 30,000 UK users.
We were just talking about how pretty much any government database will get abused by government employees eventually.
It seems pretty bizarre that companies and industry organizations would be against helping those with reading disabilities or vision impairment -- but that's exactly what you get in the discussion over creating some loopholes in copyright law to make it easier to reformat content to help those who would have difficulties reading it otherwise.
With newspapers struggling with declining sales and subscriptions, it seems that a few of the major newspaper chains have realized that when they have a newspaper with something of real value to a lot more people than usual, perhaps it makes sense to bump up the prices.
It's been somewhat amusing over the last day or so to see a bunch of our usual critics all submit the same exact story with some sort of triumphant "I told you so!!!!!" (usually in less friendly language).
I guess it's natural to lash out at technologies and companies that undermine a business model built up on artificial barriers and scarcity, but it won't do much good in terms of actually adapting.
The folks in Hollywood have been working overtime lately trying to convince the world that piracy is harming the industry, even as the industry is having its best year ever in terms of both money made and the number of movies released.
Once again, Danny Sullivan is ripping to shreds the arguments being made by newspaper execs who are talking about how Google is a "parasite" on their content, despite sending tons of traffic.