Apropos of the HarperCollins v. Open Road lawsuit over the backlist e-book title Julie of the Wolves, legal blogger Passive Guy (aka contract lawyer David Vandagriff) has written a fairly lengthy post looking at the question of whether e-book rights are covered in pre-e-book contracts. Passive Guy writes: A fundamental legal question involved in construing a contract is what the parties intended at the time the contract was made. The intent must be manifest in some form in the written agreement. A secret intent by one party that the word tomato also includes avocado won’t bring...

Good news for “used digital music” reseller ReDigi: the district court judge handling the case has denied EMI’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the company, which would have shut it down during the trial. Citing the “fascinating” technological and legal issues involved, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan said he is inclined to let the case go to trial. "We are grateful for the judge's decision in our favor," said John Ossenmacher, ReDigi's CEO, said in a statement. The company added that "ReDigi is breaking down the barriers that have kept consumers from enjoying their intrinsic...

If you needed further evidence of just how out of touch with reality SOPA supporters can be, I just found this post by copyright attorney Lisa Alter decrying the fact that “[the] voice of the individual creator of intellectual property,” which is to say authors, has been largely “absent in the mainstream media debate.” She is coming down firmly on the pro-SOPA side of the debate, with little gems like this: The position of the anti-SOPA activists is antithetical to the principle of protection — for authors, that is — mandated in the Constitution of the...

The ReDigi lawsuit took an intriguing turn yesterday. Google sent a letter to the judge in the EMI v. ReDigi case asking permission to file an amicus brief. Google says that it is not taking sides in the case, but some points of law that will be considered could set important precedents for the future of the cloud hosting industry. Google brings up the Cablevision case that legalized remote-operated DVRs, and the Sony v. Universal case that legalized VCRs and explicitly called “time-shifting” fair use, But the really interesting part is this argument: The final...

Seems as though there’s still some life in the old “hot news doctrine” horse yet. The NY Times’s Media Decoder has a brief piece on a dispute between Hollywood news sites Deadline.com and The Hollywood Reporter set for a July 2013 court date. In their joint report, the plaintiff — that would be Penske, owner of Deadline — said it was considering whether to augment its legal complaint with a new claim for “hot news misappropriation,” some of which “occurred as recently as the week of the filing of this Report.” In other words, Penske says...

Remember that report about how rife with plagiarized and duplicate books Amazon’s self-published titles are? Its author, Adam Penenberg, has written a follow-up article for Fast Company in which he tracked down one of the plagiarists to find out more about how and why he had published the title. The plagiarist is a Kuwaiti national who used the pseudonym “Luke Ethan”. Luke explains that he had gotten a lead on an Internet marketing forum to a private black-hat forum (with a $500 entrance fee), where he paid $100 for what he was told was a collection of material with...

Another ruling from a European court on the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuits over the Galaxy Tab’s design has come in, and it doesn’t bode well for Apple. An appeals court in The Hague, Netherlands dismissed Apple’s patent-infringement attempt to get the Galaxy Tab banned from sale in the country, following up on Apple’s appeal after a lower court’s similar decision in August. The court made its decision based on at least two pieces of prior art for each of Apple’s claims, determining that Apple’s claims were therefore narrow enough that they had not been infringed. Next week, a German...

The law firm handling the consolidated class-action lawsuits against publishers over agency pricing filed an amended complaint on January 20th. This complaint, filed against the “Agency Five” excluding Random House, goes into more detail about the alleged pricing conspiracy to force Amazon to raise prices, costing consumers millions of dollars. The complaint details how Hachette Livre CEO Arnaud Nourry first met with an Amazon executive in December 2009 and asked Amazon to raise its e-book prices by $2 or $3—showing that publishers had already been discussing how to fix e-book prices among themselves. Subsequently, these publishers all approached...

The mysterious purchaser of the domain name Righthaven.com has come forward and revealed his plans for the site using it. The intention of the new Righthaven site is to provide a Switzerland- and Iceland-based web-hosting haven for web publishers whose works might attract the sort of frivolous litigation exemplified by the previous owner of the domain name. Righthaven.com will provide shared and dedicated server hosting services to clients who expect just a little more backbone from their provider. Well, actually a lot more backbone. We call it "spineful hosting" and not only do...

ReDigi has filed a response to the EMI lawsuit seeking to prevent the company from reselling “used” digital music files, Ars Technica reports. In EMI’s suit, it accuses ReDigi of making illegal copies as part of the process of selling this music. In the response, the company claims that any copying that does take place is either fair use or covered by a section of the copyright code that permits copying in situations where it is an “essential step” to making fair use of digital content (such as copying an MP3 into computer memory in order to play it). ...

Dreamwidth blogger synecdochic has taken an in-depth look at the allegations against Megaupload and agrees with Ars that the prospects look dim for the company’s execs. The problem is not so much what Megaupload did—indeed, synecdochic suggests that a sufficiently skilled legal team would have had a decent chance to get the execs off the hook for a lot of it, except for the real problem. The real problem is that Megaupload’s employees regularly emailed each other to discuss how wicked they were—and the company kept email logs that the feds could—and did—subpoena, providing more than enough rope...

After the recent round of Internet activism culminating in several major websites and many minor ones going partly or completely dark for the day, the sponsors of both the SOPA and PIPA bills have withdrawn them from consideration for the time being. (Found via BoingBoing.) There’s a profound temptation to throw a Wizard of Oz-style celebration (“Ding dong…” etc.) and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done. However, this legislation is much like the vampires in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series: an inconvenient shaft of sunlight can turn them to dust, but it just takes a single...