Are business training materials sufficiently original to be protected by copyright law? The answer, of course, is “it depends.” First and foremost it depends on the materials themselves, but it also depends on the judge. In Situation Management v. ASP, Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge William Young thought the training materials created by the plaintiff, Situation Management, were not entitled to copyright protection. (I posted on this case when Judge Young’s decisionwas issued – click here for earlier post).
Judge Young was not complimentary toward Situation Management’s training materials. In the process of holding that the materials were not entitled to copyright protection he described them as nothing more than “a summary of common-sense communication skills . . . “fodder for sardonic workplace humor” and as “aggressively vapid”. He observed that “the works at issue are so dominated by nonprotectable material that it is impossible to reduce the work to a copyrightable essence or structure.” He found that the materials were filled with generalizations, platitudes, and observations of the obvious” . . . [contained] “not-so-stunning revelation[s],” and taught “[a]t their creative zenith, . . . common-sense communication skills.” Not finished, he observed that “these works exemplify the sorts of training programs that serve as fodder for sardonic workplace humor that has given rise to the popular television show The Office and the movie Office Space. They are aggressively vapid — hundreds of pages filled with generalizations, platitudes, and observations of the obvious.”
The First Circuit disagreed and reversed. The heart of the decision is captured in the following quotation:
. . . the district court improperly denied copyright protection to large portions of SMS’s works because it, in an error of law, found “they focus on concepts and teach a noncopyrightable process.” . . . The fact that SMS’s works describe processes or systems does not make their expression noncopyrightable. SMS’s creative choices in describing those processes and systems, including the works’ overall arrangement and structure, are subject to copyright protection. . . . The district court’s analysis . . . lost sight of the expressiveness of the works as a whole by focusing too closely on their noncopyrightable elements.
In June 2007 I wrote a post discussing two cases in which clients of our firm had, before they became clients, failed to get written assignments of copyright ownership from independent contractors who wrote software for them. Without a written assignment the contractors were able to claim ownership of the works, and make life very unpleasant for their customers, who may have assumed that since they paid for this work the code belonged to them.
A case decided last Fall shows what happens when this problem is taken to an extreme. In this case the programmer-contractor claimed ownership, and the value he assigned was in the millions of dollars. The customer was forced to go through a federal court lawsuit that involved discovery (expensive), summary judgment (quite expensive), and finally appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (very expensive), only to finally have a court declare that it owned an “unlimited, non-exclusive, implied license to use, modify and retain” the source code written by the contractor.
While this case had a happy ending for the customer, the entire expense, as well as the risk of a loss, could have been avoided if the customer had a piece of paper with only one sentence, signed by the contractor: “I hereby assign to [customer] all right, title and interest to all intellectual property developed by [contractor] during the course of any engagement by [customer], including but not limited to all property protected by copyright, patent or trade secrets.”
[Update: the FTC did file a reply brief. Link here]
All the briefs are in on the FTC petition for cert in its antitrust case against Rambus, (unless the FTC decides to file a reply brief, which is unlikely to change things much). I’ve added the Rambus opposition to the Rambus Group page on scribd.com, here. Now its time for the antitrust community to hold its breath and see whether the Court takes the case. Some knowledgeable commentators have opined that FTC/Rambus case has the best chance of any antitrust case obtaining review this year, but that plus a dime will get you …. well, nothing I guess. If the petition is allowed, it will be very exciting times for antitrust and standards setting law and policy wonks.
In federal court in Boston the Gatehouse Media v. New York Times case (described in these two (1, 2) earlier posts) has settled, as I suspected it would. The settlement agreement (or a preliminary agreement which is binding in the event a “definitive agreement” is not reached), is on scribd.com, here. It appears that this agreement was not intended to be made public (at least not yet), but apparently someone leaked it, so it’s public now.
As I read this, Gatehouse prevailed, hands down over the NYT/Boston.com. Gatehouse will erect “technical solutions” to prevent Boston.com from copying the Gatehouse original content, and Boston.com will respect those “solutions.” If a “solution” proves ineffective, Gatehouse will notify Boston.com, and Boston.com will back off right away. Why the parties went about it in this manner (which implicates DMCA-like anti-circumvention) I’m not sure, but I appears to accomplish the same result as if the NYT/Boston.com simply said “we won’t copy your ledes.”
From what I can seek, Boston.com/yourtown has already dropped its ledes and links to the Gatehouse sites, at least based on a quick sampling.
[postscript: here is a link to the report of Gatehouse’s copyright expert, Douglas Lichtman, Professor of Law, UCLA. The report is an analysis of the case under copyright fair use principles, and a rebuttal of the NYT/Boston.com’s unclean hands argument]
Some interesting goings on on the copyright front in D. Mass. are worth a brief mention.
First, U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner has ruled that proceedings in the RIAA’s case against Joel Tenenbaum, alleging illegal downloading, may be “webcast” by the Berkman Center. Whether the actual trial will be webcast is undecided as yet, but upcoming in-court motions will be. The audio-visual will be streamed live by the Berkman Center at no charge to viewers. Tune in on January 22nd to see the circus. [Update: the First Circuit held that the trial could not be webcast].
I find the following quote from the decision to be quite humorous:
In many ways, this case is about the so-called Internet Generation — the generation that has grown up with computer technology in general, and the Internet in particular, as commonplace. It is reportedly a generation that does not read newspapers or watch the evening news, but gets its information largely, if not almost exclusively, over the Internet. . . Consistent with the nature of these file-sharing cases, and the identity of so many of the Defendants, this case is one that has already garnered substantial attention on the Internet.
While the Plaintiffs object to the narrowcasting of this proceeding, . . . their objections are curious. At previous hearings and status conferences, the Plaintiffs have represented that they initiated these lawsuits not because they believe they will identify every person illegally downloading copyrighted material. Rather, they believe that the lawsuits will deter the Defendants and the wider public from engaging in illegal file-sharing activities. Their strategy effectively relies on the publicity resulting from this litigation.
Meanwhile, in the Gatehouse Media copyright case against the New York Times, Gatehouse has filed an unopposed motion, asking Judge Young to rule on whether the court has jurisdiction before the copyright registrations for the material in dispute have been issued by the Copyright Office. This is a frequent controversy, and one of interest to copyright lawyers representing plaintiffs whose unregistered works are the subject of infringement – may they proceed with suit, and perhaps a preliminary injunction, or are they bound to wait for the registrations to issue? Apparently, this issue was of enough concern to Gatehouse Media that it filed this brief, collecting and arguing the legal precedents on this issue.
When I discussed the copyright case Gatehouse Media v. The New York Times over the weekend I hadn’t reviewed the court docket, and hadn’t been aware that Judge William Young had pulled the trick that he is famous for (at least locally): when a party requests a preliminary injunction, he responds by ordering an expedited trial. And I do mean expedited.
The case was filed on December 22, 2008.
Docket entry 13, issued the same day, states in relevant part (cleaned up a bit for readability):
Electronic Clerk’s Notes for proceedings held before Judge William G. Young: Motion Hearing held on 12/22/2008 re MOTION for Preliminary Injunction and MOTION for Temporary Restraining Order filed by Gatehouse Media Massachusetts, Inc.
The Court rules denying Motion for TRO; because the matter will be collapsed with a trial on the merits. The Court is reserving ruling on Motion for Preliminary Injunction; ( Jury Trial set for THE RUNNING TRIAL LIST AS OF 1/5/2009 09:00 AM before Judge William G. Young.); Counsel are to cooperate with one another re: discovery. Counsel are to contact the clerk as to the schedule. A 4 week jury trial is scheduled for Jan 5 at this time. If counsel settle the case, a phone call is all that is necessary.
Translation – be ready for trial at 9:00 a.m. Monday, January 5, 2009, nine business days after suit was filed. Maybe we’ll reach you, maybe we won’t (that four week case may settle), but you’d better be ready. Oh, and enjoy the two holiday weekends between now and then.
This is classic Judge Young, and he’s been doing it from the first day he was appointed to the federal bench over 20 years ago.
The moral: if you file a suit in federal court and you are seeking a preliminary injunction, be prepared for the risk that you might draw Judge Young, in which case, be very prepared. A super-expedited trial like this favors the defense, since the plaintiff will have great difficulty preparing for trial in two weeks. Assuming you don’t want to be prepared for trial on the day you file suit, the way to avoid this, in this district, is to file suit and see what judge you draw. If you draw Judge Young, you can decide whether you want to file for a PI and risk an immediate trial. There’s no law that states that you must file your PI motion simultaneous with the complaint, but filing the PI motion simultaneous with filing suit deprives the plaintiff of that choice.
In this case, Gatehouse Media could have adopted a different strategy, as follows:
File suit and see what Judge is assigned to the case. If Judge Young is assigned, do not file a preliminary injunction motion, knowing that this risks an immediate trial.
As you publish your local news each week, file copyright registrations for each issue. This is inexpensive, and so simple it could be done by an intern or paralegal. If Boston.com adds towns (beyond Newton, Needham and Waltham), register the weekly publications for those towns as well.
By registering the copyrights within three months following publication, Gatehouse Media would be entitled to recover statutory damages for each publication, as well as attorney’s fees incurred in prosecuting that infringement. Statutory damages may be as great as $150,000 per infringement in cases of “willful” infringement – that is, $150,000 per publication. If Boston.com is aggregating and publishing the Gatehouse Media news for Newton, Needham and Waltham each week, Boston.com is looking at potential damages of as much as $450,000 per week. By the time the case goes to trial in the ordinary course (say a year), Boston.com is risking damages in the tens of millions of dollars. Would that financial risk be likely to lead to a settlement favorable to Gatehouse Media? You betcha!
An interesting copyright case has been filed in Federal District Court in Massachusetts.
In Gatehouse Media v. The New York Times, Gatehouse Media contends that the Times has infringed its copyrights by copying the headlines and first sentences from Gatehouses’ local online newspapers, and displaying them verbatim on a Boston.com website (the New York Times owns Boston.com).
To see this in action click here and your browser should open a page on Boston.com labeled “Needham.” Scrolling down the center column of the page, you’ll see news “headlines”, followed by the first sentence of each story.
If you click on one of the headlines you should be taken to the “WickedLocalNeedham” web page and presented with the full article. If you repeat this a few times with other headlines, you’ll see that the Boston.com site has copied the headlines, and the first sentences of the stories, from the WickedLocal site, which is owned by Gatehouse Media. Most likely, this is accomplished “automatically” by the Boston.com computers, which “scrape” the headlines and “ledes” from the WickedLocal site and “aggregate” them on the Boston.com site.
Is this permissible, or is Boston.com infringing copyrights owned by Gatehouse? The answer to this question is important because news aggregation is ubiquitous on the web, and there is relatively little law on the issue. U.S. Federal District Judge William Young, one of our federal district’s best judges, may have the opportunity to issue an important decision in this case. And, the fact that Gatehouse Media has asked Judge Young to issue a preliminary injunction means that a preliminary decision on the merits may issue soon (assuming that case isn’t settled in the meantime).
Gatehouse Media’s preliminary injunction papers make a powerful case for a preliminary injunction, and in my judgment Boston.com will be hard pressed to defend this suit. There is no question that the material in question is copyrightable, and that it has been copied and published on the Boston.com site.
Boston.com’s defenses are likely to be based on the fair use doctrine, but Boston.com will be hard pressed to prevail on these defenses. Commercial use, such as Boston.com is making here, makes a “fair use” defense difficult. And, while the “percentage” of material copied from each article may be small, the use is “qualitatively” significant, making a defense premised on de minimus copying difficult as well. However, I expect Boston.com to argue that the fact that the content at issue is news makes it particularly appropriate for application of fair use. I also expect Boston.com to argue that its publication not only will have no economic impact on the Gatehouse Media sites, but it will have the positive effect of driving more traffic to those sites, benefiting (rather than harming) Gatehouse Media.
I’ll publish Boston.com’s opposition memo when it becomes available and, of course, post Judge Young’s decision when it is issued.
My partners Andy Updegrove, Peter Moldave and I attended this celebration of the sixth anniversary of Creative Commons at Harvard the evening of Friday, December 13, 2008. We could have waited a few days and watched the event on YouTube, but then we would have missed the cold weather, the greatest ice storm in modern Massachusetts history, the difficult parking and, well ….
It was actually a great deal of fun, and looking around the room at the 150 or so people that attended there appeared to be relatively few lawyers, a fact that made us feel superior, as if we were really part of the Harvard cognoscenti, which of course we aren’t. (How could we tell there weren’t many lawyers there? – the number of people who had that useless, predatory look common to lawyers was minimal.)
Speakers were: Jonathan Zittrain, moderator, panelists James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig and Molly S. Van Houweling, and Special Guests Elena Kagan and Charles Nesson.
As expected, the proposed Google Book Search settlement has led to a lot of scrutiny, criticism and questions. Here is a link to the 125 page Settlement Agreement(without attachments; pdf). Here is a link to the page that holds the full agreement which, with attachments, is over 300 pages long).
Both Larry Lessig (“IMHO, this is a good deal that could be the basis for something really fantastic”) and Wade Roush(“Book Search settlement contains some major disappointments”) have taken a first crack at trying to decipher this settlement (Roush – “exhaustive, labyrinthine”) and figure out who, amongst the many stakeholders, are the winners and losers.
Here is a particularly interesting paragraph from Wade Roush’s article:
. . . [T]he devil . . . is in the details. If you read the agreement, you’ll see that it restricts each public library to exactly one Google terminal. Tens of millions of books online—but at any given moment, no more than 16,543 people are allowed to read them without paying. (That’s how many public libraries and branches there are in the United States, according to the American Library Association—one for every 18,500 Americans.)
So, America’s librarians will be hearing these words for generations to come: “Excuse me, where is the Google Terminal?” Or perhaps the librarians will receive phone calls asking: “Hi, how long is the line for the Google Terminal?”
Much more to follow.
[n.b. It appears that Harvard is unhappy with the terms of the proposed agreement, and is withdrawing in-part from its participation in the scanning project]
Google said Tuesday that it has agreed to pay $125 million to settle the copyright litigation brought by book authors and publishers over Google’s project to digitize and show snippets of in-copyright books without the explicit permission of copyright owners. (See 123 for more on Google Book Search).
$125 million? Peanuts to Google. Less than peanuts. We don’t know all the terms and possible restrictions yet, but it sounds like this is a huge win for Google, which is now free to continue its project of digitizing the world’s books (or at least those under the control of the settling parties) without the threat of injunction.
[Update (10/29/08)]: Google explains here how it expects this settlement to affect Google Book Search. Some excerpts from that page are (emphasis added) :
Once approved, this agreement will allow us and our publishing industry partners to greatly expand the number of books that you can find, preview and buy through Google. …
Once this agreement has been approved, you’ll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future. …
Because this agreement resolves a United States lawsuit, it directly affects only those users who access Book Search in the U.S.; anywhere else, the Book Search experience won’t change. Going forward, we hope to work with international industry groups and individual rightsholders to expand the benefits of this agreement to users around the world.
Well, wake up Amazon! Perhaps Google will be able to sell electronic rights to these works through Amazon and the Kindle, in which case the Kindle’s library will soar from fewer than 200,000 to many millions.
The non-U.S. implications of this settlement are unclear in light of this comment –
First, if Google’s “mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible,” as it states on that page, this settlement allows it to succeed with only about 5% of the world’s population if it is limited to the U.S. But, if trying to determine whether works created under U.S. law are under copyright, and if so identify their owners was difficult, the task of making these determinations for non-U.S. works seems almost insurmountable.
Second, Google is in fact digitizing many non-U.S. books. How can these books be included in this settlement (presumably they are subject to non-U.S. copyright laws and controlled by non-U.S. publishers)? Will they be excluded from the Book Search program, even to U.S. users of Google?
Returning to the U.S., and the announced settlement, what’s stopping some of the class members from opting out of the settlement? Some authors or publishers may not be happy with a loss of this magnitude this settlement. Google may not be done with even the U.S. legal issues just yet.
There are many questions in the wake of this announced settlement. Given the magnitude of this undertaking it may take many years, even decades, for all of the legal issues associated with Book Search to be resolved.
The 11th Circuit has ruled on a somewhat obscure but interesting issue of federal jurisdiction in copyright cases.
The Declaratory Judgment Act allows one who has been threatened with a suit to file suit first, and ask for a “declaration” of non-liability. In other words, the declaratory judgment makes one who fears becoming a defendant the procedural plaintiff. The roles of “plaintiff” and “defendant” are reversed, but the underlying issue remains the same. Declaratory judgment is simply a way that a threatened party who is unwilling to live with the risk of a lawsuit at some uncertain point in the future can force the issue.
However, the Declaratory Judgment Act is procedural; it does not give rise to federal court jurisdiction. This can create a problem for the declaratory judgment plaintiff, as demonstrated in the 11th Circuit case.
Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is a jurisdictional prerequisite to a copyright infringement suit – no registration, no jurisdiction.
What if you are threatened with copyright infringement, but the owner of the work who has threatened you has not registered the work?
According to the 11th Circuit, you’re out of luck – the federal courts lack jurisdiction, and you cannot seek declaratory judgment. And, since the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over copyright claims you can’t seek relief in state court either. You just have to wait until the party threatening you registers its copyright before you can move against it (or it can move against you).
The following is background that may be necessary for some readers to understand the issues raised in the Thompson v. Zotero lawsuit, discussed below.
The Mozilla Firefox web browser (the second-most popular web browser, after Microsoft Internet Explorer) allows anyone with the talent and interest to develop “add-ons”. An add-on is a computer functionality that is added to and integrated with the Firefox browser. The Firefox user downloads the add-on from the web, and the add-on is automatically “installed” by Firefox. The add-on can be used, disabled or deleted, at the user’s choice. What makes this possible is that Firefox is an open source web browser, allowing developers to fully integrate their software with the browser. Developers can register their add-ons with the Firefox web repository, where over 6,000 add-ons are available. The add-ons are rated and critiqued by users, creating a reliable marketplace based on reputation.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has add-onsin name, but it is a much more restricted, less open and less integrated technology, and therefore is far less robust than the Firefox add-ons. For this reason, the Firefox add-ons are growing at an exponential rate, and their availability is contributing to the growing popularity of Firefox.
Some of the add-on technologies are so robust that they are taking market share from conventional, for-profit companies. This seems to be the case with the Zotero add-on, which may be taking market share from the Thompson Reuters product, EndNote Software. Both products help academics and researchers create academic bibliographies and manage citations. However, EndNote’s traditional, packaged software costs almost $300, whereas Zotero’s add-on is free and can be downloaded in seconds. It appears that some potential purchasers of Endnote are opting for the lesser functionality of Zotero given the better price and convenience.
With that as background, the lawsuit.
Zotero was created by employees of George Mason University, which is owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia. George Mason is a licensee of EndNote, and the license prohibits reverse-engineering. Thompson alleges that the George Mason developers reverse engineered EndNote in order to allow Zotero to convert proprietary EndNote files into open source Zotero files.
Now, a word about the law. It is clear that a software program may be reverse engineered (decompiled or disassembled, for example) as part of the process of developing a compatible product. This so-called “intermediate copying” was held to be copyright fair use in the Sega v. Accolade case in 1992 and was reaffirmed by no less a legal luminary than Judge Richard Posner in Assessment Technologies v. WIREdata decided in 2003.
However, it is also true (as the Assessment Technologies case points out) that this right of fair use may be restricted by a contract. (See Bowers v. Baystate Technologies (2003), to the same effect). A contract or license may prohibit reverse engineering or the creation of intermediate copies.
If George Mason’s contract with Thompson contained a “no reverse engineering” provision as Thompson asserts in its lawsuit, and George Mason did in fact reverse engineer EndNote to achieve compatibility, George Mason/Virginia may be liable for breach of contract. In fact, EndNote may have blocked the legal ability of any legal licensee of EndNote to reverse engineer EndNote for this purpose, since presumably not only George Mason but every proper licensee would be similarly restricted.
Whether this turns out to be the case – whether George Mason did reverse engineer EndNote to achieve compatibility, and whether EndNote has built a legal “Maginot Line” with no breaks or faults, across which no competitive developer can cross, remains to be seen as the facts of the case develop. It may be the case that the EndNote software did not require reverse engineering in order for Zotero to access its formats. It may also be the case that Zotera (or others in the marketplace, even nonlicensees) can technically and legally sidestep any contractual restrictions, and still provide conversion to EndNote file formats.
Whichever way this case goes, this dispute is interesting because it represents the clash of the old and the new: old, in the sense that savvy IP lawyers have been advising their clients for years to use contracts, in addition to copyright, to protect their software, and it appears that EndNote has tried to do this. New, in the sense that open source, when combined with new web technologies, may present a competitive and technical challenge to products like EndNote that good lawyering may be able to delay, but may prove unable to stop.
So, you’re unhappy in your law firm job? Ready to move on to a job that has lots of responsibility but doesn’t require hourly billing and client headaches? A job that puts you in close proximity to the President and his closest advisers? You’d like a job that provides security and good benefits? A federal pension to offset the losses in your 401K account?
Well, you can thank President Bush for creating this exciting new job when he signed the “Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008” last week. The legislation calls this the “short title” of the law. Yes, Congress does have a sense of humor. We’ll call the new law PRO-IP, which is even shorter, and tells you almost as much about the law as the slightly longer title (but still short, no disrespect meant) assigned by Congress.
Copyright lawyers always get excited when the Copyright Act is amended, but as I suggested above, there is even greater cause for excitement this time: the new law creates the position of “International Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator.” This is a mouthful, so we’d prefer the term “IP Czar” (or perhaps simply “the Czar” to the Czar’s subordinates when they’re talking about her ourside of her hearing).
This is a great job. You get to work in the Executive Office of the President, (the “EOP” as its known to those “beltway insiders”), and maybe even work in the White House itself, or at least the Executive Office Building. This is a “with-the-advice-and-consent-of-the-Senate” job, so your friends and family may get to see you interrogated by the Judiciary Committee on C-SPAN.
And, should you be confirmed (assuming you are not “Borked” or subject to a “Hi Tech Lynching” or anything along those lines), here’s a “general” description of your job, as described in the statute:
(1) IN GENERAL- The [IP Czar] shall–
(A) chair the interagency intellectual property enforcement advisory committee established under subsection (b)(3)(A);
(B) coordinate the development of the Joint Strategic Plan against counterfeiting and infringement by the advisory committee under section 303;
(C) assist, at the request of the departments and agencies listed in subsection (b)(3)(A), in the implementation of the Joint Strategic Plan;
(D) facilitate the issuance of policy guidance to departments and agencies on basic issues of policy and interpretation, to the extent necessary to assure the coordination of intellectual property enforcement policy and consistency with other law;
(E) report to the President and report to Congress, to the extent consistent with law, regarding domestic and international intellectual property enforcement programs; and
(G) carry out such other functions as the President may direct.
Well, I’ve got to run now and revise my resume, I mean delete some of the anti-government stuff I said on Facebook, errrrr… get some of those copyright law articles I’ve written updated and on the web, I mean ah, yes, call back a client, that’s it!
(p.s. – needless to say, this law contains a lot that’s worth serious discussion, and I’ll return to it in more detail later. You betcha.)
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and foremost it depends on the materials themselves, but it also depends on the judge. In Situation Management v. ASP, Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge William Young thought the training materials created by the plaintiff, Situation Management, were not entitled to copyright protection. (I posted on this case when Judge Young’s decisionwas issued – click here for earlier post).
communication skills . . . “fodder for sardonic workplace humor” and as “aggressively vapid”. He observed that “the works at issue are so dominated by nonprotectable material that it is impossible to reduce the work to a copyrightable essence or structure.” He found that the materials were filled with generalizations, platitudes, and observations of the obvious” . . . [contained] “not-so-stunning revelation[s],” and taught “[a]t their creative zenith, . . . common-sense communication skills.” Not finished, he observed that “these works exemplify the sorts of training programs that serve as fodder for sardonic workplace humor that has given rise to the popular television show The Office and the movie Office Space. They are aggressively vapid — hundreds of pages filled with generalizations, platitudes, and observations of the obvious.”
settlement agreement (or a preliminary agreement which is binding in the event a “definitive agreement” is not reached), is 
!["Talkin ‘Bout My [Internet] Generation" and Gatehouse Media says, "Give Us A Break Judge, the Registration is in the Mail"](https://www.masslawblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/220px-My_Generation.jpg)
.S. Federal District Judge William Young, one of our federal district’s best judges, may have the opportunity to issue an important decision in this case. And, the fact that Gatehouse Media has asked Judge Young to issue a preliminary injunction means that a preliminary decision on the merits may issue soon (assuming that case isn’t settled in the meantime).
Google said Tuesday that it has agreed to pay $125 million to settle the copyright litigation brought by book authors and publishers over Google’s project to digitize and show snippets of in-copyright books without the explicit permission of copyright owners. (See 
Some of the add-on technologies are so robust that they are taking market share from conventional, for-profit companies. This seems to be the case with the 
