Software Licensing for Businesses
Here was a very good article on software license auditing for businesses: (click here for story). The issues for businesses are twofold: (a) keeping track of the licensing that the business has purchased, and (b) keeping track and understanding the licensing agreements that control the software. The former can be handled by software. For example, [...]
Google’s Not the Only Online Book Deal
The academics have been working on digitizing their book collections with Google’s help. (See Article here) I suspect that, in spite of the fact that Google is ahead of the pack in total books digitized today, there may be a fair number of other groups that get together to digitize collections down the road, and [...]
Psystar’s Star Dims a Bit
Psystar and Apple have been in a tech law tango based on Apple’s allegations that Psystar violated the end user licensing agreement when it started releasing the OS X operating system on non-Apple manufactured clone computers. The federal court ruled in favor of Apple on its claims on a motion for summary judgment. (See article [...]
Linden Labs and Virtual Sex Toys? Huh?
Oh, yeah, there is a lot of kinky virtual sex going on in Second Life. And to support all of that activity, there are apparently a lot of vendors selling knock-offs of the “real” virtual sex toys of one vendor who is mad enough to sue. (See Wired Article)
Yes, a few years ago, Linden Labs [...]
Google: The New Public Library?
I suspect a fair number of people are really struggling with the proposed settlement between Google and the Author’s Guild over the wholesale scanning of more than 10 million copyrighted works. At the heart of the settlement is a compromise that would allow authors to financially benefit from the sale of their works as a [...]
Cloud Computing and Other Buzz Words
The technology that drives health care today is changing in response to increase concerns about security and reliability, and external regulations like the security regulations in HIPAA. In addition, the HiTech portion of the stimulus law this year has provided incentives for health care providers to adopt technology that allows for health data exchange and [...]
Google and Copyright Infringement
Google, back in 2004, began an endeavor to index the contents of an enormous number of books through its search engine, so that google users would be able to full text search books that were otherwise unpublished on the internet. Under U.S. Copyright law, books that were published before the 1920’s (and certain texts published [...]
Health IT & Open Source
The truth is that I may just be getting annoyed about this debate. A recent blog posting on Wired (click here for the article) frames the debate over health technology in terms of open source versus legacy or proprietary code, the latter being the enemy to innovation, improved health outcomes, and usability.
First off, an open source [...]
RIAA & Copyright: $2 Million Fine Whacky Consequence of Copyright Act
The RIAA, in a new trial of an alleged copyright infringer who had shared 24 songs via the file-sharing service Kazaa, won almost $2 million in fines against the defendant calculated on the basis of statutory damages under the U.S. Copyright Act. (See the Wired Story here) This is an almost ten fold increase in [...]
Copyright and Fair Use
Jeff Koons, an “appropriation artist” who has been known for controversy in his career, has tested the limits of fair use under the Copyright Act in two cases: Rogers v. Koons, 906 F.2d 301 (2nd Cir. 1992), and Blanch v. Koons, 467 F.3d 244 (2nd Cir. 2006), with opposite results.
The United States Copyright Act grants [...]