URL shortener problem

If you use Twitter, you're probably familiar with the bit.ly URL shortener service. Even if you don't, you're probably familiar with TinyURL, bit.ly, vb.ly or other URL shortener services. They seem convenient. No more having to type or remember long URLs, just create a short one. No problem.

Until vb.ly went off the air. The domain was siezed by the Libyan registrar that controls the .ly hierarchy, because content at the locations pointed to by vb.ly violated Libyan morality laws.

This is why URL shorteners are a bad idea. They create URLs that are under the control of a third party and which can be disrupted at any time. Since there's no direct mention of where the shortened URL points, once disruption happens it's impossible to locate the original destination. If you use the actual full URL, disruption can only occur if the actual site referred to is taken off-line.

Note also that this is why you should make your own copy of content if you really care about having it available. If you merely link to it, it's vulnerable to the destination taking it down or just changing what it says. Only when you control the copy can you insure that it doesn't change or become unavailable in the future. This may annoy copyright holders, however I feel that if I'm writing commentary on what someone said then making a copy to insure I can prove they did in fact say what I claim they said falls under fair use, and making a complete copy is neccesary to show that I'm not merely cherry-picking and taking bits out of context to misrepresent what was actually said and so also falls under fair use.

SCO v. Novell: stick a fork in them, they're done

It's official: the jury ruled in SCO v. Novell that Novell owns the copyrights that SCO was trying to claim. That pretty much puts paid to all of SCO's dreams of a litigation-lottery win in the IBM case too. IBM's not inclined to settle, and pretty much all that's left is IBM's counterclaims against SCO. SCO has a few scraps of claim left, but all the evidence they're presented put together doesn't amount to enough to make a porn starlet's bikini.

Here's the actual jury verdict form.

SCO v. world in a nutshell

To borrow from Darl's favorite cattle-rustler metaphor:

Darl had some cows on his ranch. He noticed that some of the cows on other people's ranches had the same brand as his, so he decided to get a posse together to go after those cattle rustlers who'd stolen his cows.

Then it was discovered that the brand wasn't Darl's, it was the brand of a completely different ranch that'd sold cows to just about everybody in the valley. And worse, as it turns out Darl hadn't even bought those cows, some of his own hands had found them wandering on his land and put them in with the rest of the herd. So now not only are the other ranchers mad at Darl for accusing them of stealing cattle when they hadn't, but some of them are accusing Darl of being the cattle thief.

But poor Darl's still positive that somebody somewhere had to have stolen some cows that should've belonged to Darl if he could've afforded to buy them.

Google and copyright claims

You know, I'm thinking that Google should be getting a bit more hard-nosed about copyright. When someone sues them claiming that Google can't internally cache anything without permission, Google should simply shrug and immediately blacklist everything by the plaintiff. From that point on, nothing belonging to the plaintiff will appear anywhere in any of Google's services. You don't want Google to maintain even neccesary internal copies of your stuff? Fine, Google won't and you'll live with the consequences.

Note that this is different from distributing copies of your work. Google can't hand out copies of your book. But returning a sentence or two in response to a search query and pointing to where the book can be bought? That's just as fine as a person mentioning something interesting from a book and telling their friend where to buy it. An author doesn't like that, that author gets to live with nobody recommending their books to friends too.

The Pirate Bay trial

Apparently half the charges against The Pirate Bay have been dropped by the prosecution. This isn't based on a technicality, as I read it, but on such basic things as the screenshots the prosecution was using as evidence the client was connected to the TPB tracker clearly saying it was not connected to the tracker. It's no wonder the prosecution dropped those charges rather than continue. If they'd've continued, the defense would've introduced the prosecution's own screenshots and the prosecutor wouldn't've been able to rebut them.

I don't particularly agree with piracy, but when the prosecutors screw up this badly they deserve to lose.

DMCA: copyright owners must consider fair use

Copyright owners must consider fair use before filing a DMCA takedown notice. The full decision is here. The basic upshot of this is that copyright owners are required to consider whether a use of their material would reasonably be considered fair use under copyright law. The DMCA requires that the copyright owner have a good-faith belief that the use is infringing before they can file a takedown notice, and if the use falls under fair use and a reasonable person would have concluded this beforehand then the "good-faith belief" test fails. That, BTW, leaves the copyright liable for damages and penalties if the target of the notice wants to push it. The downside, of course, is that showing bad faith is a difficult thing to do in court, but still it's nice to have the principle upheld.

The judge says he's not sanguine about the defendant's chances of proving bad faith on the part of the plaintiff. I'm not so sure, at least if the judge is unbiased about it. The infringement in question is a song playing in the background of a baby video posted to YouTube. The Supreme Court has set forth 4 factors to consider in determining fair use: the nature of the use (commercial vs. non-commercial), the nature of the infringed work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used and the effect of the infringement on the potential market for the work. It's going to be very hard for a record label to argue that people are going to put up with watching someone's baby video repeatedly just to save the cost of buying the song. They're also going to have a hard time arguing commercial use, YouTube may put ads on the page but the uploader doesn't get any money from them and has no control over them and the entity that does get the money (YouTube) isn't the one the plaintiff's making a claim against. Even the nature of the copyrighted work works against the label. The work is a song, and it's merely incidental background noise in a video whose point is to showcase the uploader's baby. The only factor that works anywhere near in the plaintiff's favor is the amount of the song audible, and that's countered by the fact that the song's purely incidental background. As I said, it's not likely anyone's going to look at this video mainly for the music, any more than anyone watches a football game mainly to see the advertisements pasted around the stadium. Given all that, if the defendant's got a good lawyer I think they can make a very strong case that plaintiffs couldn't reasonably have believed the use wouldn't meet the qualifications for fair use. And proceeding when you know or should know otherwise is the very definition of bad faith.

Artistic License is a copyright license after all

In the Jacobsen v. Katzer case, the trial court had ruled that the Artistic License (the open-source license under which the software involved was distributed) was a contract, not a copyright license. The Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit has overturned that ruling. The case is convoluted, because it originates not out of a copyright dispute but out of a patent issue. The copyright aspect came up out of the patent portion of the case. But it's good news nonetheless for open-source software. One of the standard arguments by open-source detractors is that the GPL and similar licenses are just contracts, subject to the vagaries of contract law, and violations of them have to be pursued as contract breaches. Now it's possible to hold up this ruling and say to them "The US Appeals Court disagrees with you.". Among other things this affects are the ability to recover costs. In a standard breach-of-contract suit the plaintiff, even if they win, is expected to bear their own costs except in unusual circumstances. In copyright-infringement actions, though, the law grants the prevailing party a much greater right to recover their costs and legal fees. This makes it easier for open-source authors to find lawyers willing to help them with copyright enforcement.