The PlanetRecruit Blog

The Hargreaves Report and the Challenges of New Technologies

The recent Hargreaves report responds to the government’s instruction last autumn to look at whether current copyright laws are hindering innovation in this country. The short answer is, as Hargreaves succinctly puts it, “yes”; reform is needed (p1).

His reflection on the existing Digital Economy Act is that strong online enforcement should be carefully monitored. He suggests a tough approach on enforcement of copyright balanced with education.

In his 10 recommendations he advocates, among other things, that the UK align its laws more with EU laws to make full use of existing exceptions, such as for format shifting, non-commercial research, parodies and library archiving. His ambition is to create the “world’s first Digital Copyright Exchange”, allowing rights owners to sell licences in their work and to make market transactions faster.

Facial recognition software too creepy for Google

You know something's wrong with the potential application of some technology when Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, says the Cookie Monster won't build a giant database able to recognise and identify individual faces. It is well known that the company has, in the past, worked on such a system but now it will not be deployed.

Eric Schmidt, was speaking to an audience at Google’s 'Big Tent' gathering on the growth of the internet and the ramifications this may have for the privacy of the individual in a world increasingly dominated by huge databases containing information on billions of people.

Schmidt opined that facial recognition technology is one of the developments that has "most surprised" him and added that the “surprising accuracy of these systems is very concerning”.

Copyright and Linking, Post-Meltwater

Linking has always been a fundamental part of the internet. People think nothing of publishing a link to anything they please and would not consider it necessary to ask permission first. However, the courts have struggled to balance the interests of the public to freely link with the news industry’s economic interests to exploit their intellectual property rights. The decision in Meltwater has now tipped the balance in favour of the news media industry.

Background: The Meltwater Decision

Meltwater provide an electronic press cuttings service, notifying PR agencies whenever their clients are in the news. The question that arose in the case was whether Meltwater’s End User License authorised its customers to access the links to articles which they received.

The judge decided it did not, ruling that merely by clicking on the links provided by Meltwater, end users had infringed the original publisher’s content. She refused to accept that receiving a link and clicking on it was merely incidental copying, exempt from copyright infringement. Simply to receive the links would require each user to have their own license.

Copyright Registration

A unique aspect of copyright, when compared with other intellectual property rights, is that copyright law grants the author of a work certain rights by virtue of his or her creation of the work. In other words, copyright arises automatically on creation and lasts for an extensive period thereafter.

While active registration may not be required in this country, there are often advantages in doing so in jurisdictions such as the US, and in some countries registration is required.

The creator of a work automatically gets copyright protection for their lifetime and for 70 years after their death. For some, this extensive protection and lack of any formal registration requirement is a favourable aspect of the copyright regime, because it tends to promote the creation of new works.

Now the music industry jumps on the Net Neutrality bandwagon. Well, it would, wouldn't it?

In the US, the "music industry" is now wading into increasingly murky net neutrality waters and is lobbying the FCC for new regulations that would "encourage" ISPs to police content consumption and penalise those deemed to be piratical. And this from the people who brought us "I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus."

In a letter written with the intent of influencing the Federal Communications Commission but addressed to that Grand Panjandrum de nos jours, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, an agglomeration of 13 loosely affiliated groups including the American Federation of Musicians, the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers, and the National Music Publishers Association, insist that ISPs "must take measures to deter unlawful activity such as copyright infringement."