Monday, March 21, 2005
Intellectual Property Terror Horror!
Hot on the heels of the Tim Blair mirrored site controversy where self procaimed oppressor and rumoured journalist, Tim Blair did his lolly over a small 32 line script prepared by techno guru and exposer of fraudsters Tim Lambert, comes an interesting development in the land of IP.
First the back story: Blair discovers that Lambert has created a 'copy' of his site, which though "white-man magic" bypasses Blair's comments fortress, and allows anyone to say whatever they want. Blair gets very upset and threatens to bring on the Packer Lawyers . Ken Parish chimes in with his legal opinion and then everyone else dives in afterwards giving their best bush laywer impression.
One of the objections was that it was stealing Blair's IP and infringing his copyright. We thought that if that was so, then Google should be prime target number one because Google both caches and modifies privately held website material from all over the world, and thus Google would technically be in breach of everyone's copyright.
Well it looks like the test case may now happen. As the Age reports. Agence France-Presse has sued Google Inc. for copyright infringement, alleging that the Internet search engine included AFP headlines, news summaries and photographs published without permission.
This is going to throw the cat amongs the pidgeons in the world of IP. If AFP win this case, then Google will be required to ask permission to every web content provider before they cache the contents. I wonder if Tim Blair will grant permission.
Note: 3000 character limit on comments First the back story: Blair discovers that Lambert has created a 'copy' of his site, which though "white-man magic" bypasses Blair's comments fortress, and allows anyone to say whatever they want. Blair gets very upset and threatens to bring on the Packer Lawyers . Ken Parish chimes in with his legal opinion and then everyone else dives in afterwards giving their best bush laywer impression.
One of the objections was that it was stealing Blair's IP and infringing his copyright. We thought that if that was so, then Google should be prime target number one because Google both caches and modifies privately held website material from all over the world, and thus Google would technically be in breach of everyone's copyright.
Well it looks like the test case may now happen. As the Age reports. Agence France-Presse has sued Google Inc. for copyright infringement, alleging that the Internet search engine included AFP headlines, news summaries and photographs published without permission.
This is going to throw the cat amongs the pidgeons in the world of IP. If AFP win this case, then Google will be required to ask permission to every web content provider before they cache the contents. I wonder if Tim Blair will grant permission.
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