Legal Tourism

Recent press reporting about the number of rich people coming to London in order to pursue libel claims because of the plaintiff friendly laws in the UK has led to London being described as the libel capital of the world. In fact the UK’s laws are so plaintiff friendly that some US jurisdictions are considering ways of restricting the UK court’s dispositions against US citizens and companies, particularly the press, due to the UK libel law’s conflict with the US Constitutional “Right to Free Speech”. They might spend their time better in fixing their broken patent and copyright system, as the US is earning a reciprocal reputation as a haven for copyright trolls. Here’s a clue, “PROTECT IP” doesn’t do it. My thinking, reading and writing about intellectual property law has led me to coming to believe that the UK Libel vs US Patent Laws are both dysfunctional. …

De Grucht, EU Trade Commissioner is on borrowed time

The EU Parliament voted not to ratify ACTA last week. In the immediate aftermath of the debate, the EU Commission member responsible for International Trade, Karel De Grucht stated that it wasn’t over and the Commission would look to ways to re-introduce it, possibly after the ECJ rules on if it amends or contradicts EU law; but seemingly not. Several of the Parliamentarians, such the UK’s David Martin and Eire’s Paul Flynn stated that this would be illegal, and a contempt of the European Parliament.

De Grucht was nominated to the Commission by a Belgian Government that has since been replaced by a Socialist led coalition. I can’t see them renominating him and the Commission’s term ends in 2014. It would be a close run thing as to whether the ECJ will rule in the life time of this Parliament and Commission. Wish I’d though of that in the letters I wrote to MEPs. If you, i.e. the European Parliament don’t decide now, you probably won’t decide at all. …

Code is not Property: Official!

Wired reports that, three days ago,  the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal has declared that code is not property and cannot therefore be stolen; there is no intent to deprive the owner of the object’s use. They also ruled that the perpetrator, there is no doubt that the code was removed from Goldman Sachs network, could not be prosecuted under the US Economic Espionage Act since the code in question was not used in commerce. I don’t actually know what the code did, but we can be sure that it was used in commerce, or it was a regulatory compliance program. If it didn’t have one of these two purposes, Goldman Sachs wouldn’t be doing it, and wouldn’t have wanted to keep it secret.

Does this mean that only traded software can be the object of the espionage act? If so I am not sure this is where we want to be.

Part of Goldman Sachs’ problem is that they wanted to keep the code secret and there are many reasons to want to do so. However patent and copyright protection require the intellectual property owner to publish their ideas, or the expression of their ideas. Another part of the problem is that people wanted to see Aleynikov go to prison and breach of employee confidentiality wasn’t sufficient to get him there.

As techdirt.com reports in their article,

Still, the overall ruling here is good, though it could have been more complete.

I wonder if there will be further appeals, but it’s an important stake in the ground. Copyright infringement is not theft.

This was also covered at engadget.com. …

The abuse of takedown notices

In Feburary, TechDirt discovered that one of it’s key anti-SOPA polemics had been deleted from Google’s index as a result of a bogus DMCA takedown notice. The article goes onto detail similar dirty tricks on Torrentfreak.

In my article, “More on the Newzbin2 affair”,  I comment on BT’s attempt to clarify the initial injunction and the issue of false notifications and liability for acting on them. The judge said there was no evidence that false notification would be significant. Despite the well documented existence of speculative invoicing scams, this would seem to add to the evidence that while accusing innocent infringers is free of consequence, some at least will do it. …