Fair Use, Turnitin, And… Why Google Never Should Have Caved On Book Scanning TechDirt

Last year, we wrote about a district court decision that noted iParadigm’s popular Turnitin plagiarism checker service wasn’t violating copyright by adding every student’s paper to its database, noting that this was fair use. Wired points out that an appeals court has upheld this ruling and links to Thomas O’Toole’s quick summary of why this is fair use: “The court stepped through the fair use analysis, dropping positive notes here (commercial uses can be fair uses), here (a use can be transformative “in function or purpose without altering or actually adding to the original work,” citing Perfect 10 Inc. v. Amazon.com Inc.), and here (fact that turnitin.com used the entirety of the plaintiff’s work did not preclude finding of fair use). And it turned back a lot of other, small-bore challenges to the district court’s fair use finding.” While O’Toole rushes through these points, they’re actually pretty important, since they’re quite often misunderstood by people (even copyright lawyers) who claim that commercial use isn’t fair use, or that using an entire work can’t be fair use or can’t be transformative. In this case, the court lays out why none of that is true. When the original decision came out, I suggested that all of these points could be helpful to Google in defending its book scanning efforts, since it could make pretty much the identical arguments on all points. It’s scanning was a commercial use, but transformative (it was for indexing/searching books, not reading them), it was making use of the entire work, but again, in a transformative way.

Plan to Fight Illegal Downloads Faces Opposition New York Times

The governing party of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, scrambling to save a national law that would cut off Internet service to those who make repeated illegal downloads, is threatening to block a European Union telecommunications bill that would undermine the legal foundation of the French plan. The E.U. bill would create a new telecommunication regulator in Europe, enable regulators to separate dominant phone companies from their networks, and increase coordination of broadcast frequencies within Europe. But the measure prohibits the exact proposal that France is considering — allowing a government agency to cut off the Internet service of E.U. citizens. The French National Assembly, which unexpectedly rejected the proposal this month, is scheduled to revisit the plan next week.

Kellogg Agrees To Tone Down “Frosted Mini-Wheats Are Brain Food” Nonsense Consumerist

Kellogg says Frosted Mini-Wheats are brain food for kidsWhat? It turns out that giving your kid a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats will not guarantee a nearly 20% uptick in classroom attentiveness, despite what Kellogg claims on packaging and TV? I probably should have figured that out on my own, but I rarely eat Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast, so I am quite likely retarded. Luckily for all of us, the cereal company just reached an agreement with the FTC to stop misleading consumers with its faux-scientific claims. What’s kind of sad is the FTC wasn’t slapping Kellogg down over the way it implied that Frosted Mini-Wheats specifically, over other cereal brands, improved performance. Instead the FTC was concerned that Kellogg wasn’t even representing the study’s results honestly … “Kellogg’s national TV ads asserted that attentiveness improved nearly 20 percent in children who ate the cereal, compared with those who skipped breakfast, the FTC said. But the study the ads refer to found a benefit from eating Frosted Mini-Wheats in only half the children studied, and only 11 percent of the children’s attention improved 20 percent, according to the FTC.”

Update on Yahoo-Microsoft Talks: ‘Hot and Heavy’ All Things Digital

Microsoft and Yahoo have been busily ferreting away on talks about search and advertising partnership possibilities in what one person close to the situation described as ‘hot and heavy.’ But exactly how hot and how heavy depends on which side you are talking to, with Yahoo seeking to play it a bit cooler and Microsoft, according to many sources, aggressively interested in striking a deal. Nonetheless, sources within Yahoo (YHOO) said that the company is also eager to make what could be a lucrative arrangement with Microsoft (MSFT), which could come sooner than some expect.

Dutch authorities give strict ruling on legal hurdles for viral marketers OUT-LAW News

Viral marketing which relies on people to hand over friends’ contact details can be legal but only if certain conditions are met, Dutch authorities have ruled. Companies must be careful not to break telecoms and data protection laws, regulators said.
Advert: Free OUT-LAW Breakfast Seminars. April: Cloud Computing – legal issues for business users; May: How to manage supply chain distress ‘Tell a friend’ promotions are a staple of viral marketing and involve one user providing email addresses to a company so that a friend of theirs can receive a message from that company. Holland’s data protection authority and its telecoms regulator have issued a ruling clarifying what companies have to do to make sure that viral marketing does not break data protection and telecoms laws. The authorities have said that the website cannot offer an incentive to users to pass on friends’ details. “The controller of the website [cannot] hold out the prospect of any chance of reward or other advantage, neither to the sender nor to the recipient,” the ruling says.

MPs grill Mountie boss on Tasers Canadian Press

Members of a parliamentary committee have accused the RCMP of loosening rules on the repeated zapping of suspects with a Taser. Opposition MPs on the Commons public safety committee grilled RCMP Commissioner William Elliott on Tuesday. They asked why the force dropped a written warning not to fire Tasers repeatedly unless the situation demands it. Elliott told the committee there is no simple prescription for using the weapon. But he insisted that overall, the new Taser policy is more restrictive than before.

Naked Swedish crispbread dancers go global The Local

Four young men from Sweden’s industrial heartland have taken talent to new levels with a taste-defying video clip that has captured the imagination of a large international audience. Celebrity scandalmonger Perez Hilton has described the naked crispbread dancing prowess displayed by the four boys from Borlänge as “one of the best Talent auditions ever.” A video excerpt from TV4’s Talang 2009 (Sweden’s Got Talent) had already been viewed more than a quarter of a million times on Hilton’s website at the time of writing.

Apple to drop new Snow Leopard beta on developers Apple Insider

Apple sometime this week is expected to tap its developers to begin testing a new pre-release copy of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, signaling a clear acceleration of the beta test process. The Cupertino-based company issued the first external build of next-gen operating system back in June of last year but did not follow up a new distribution for more than four months. Since then, new builds have arrived every four to six weeks, on average. Now, people familiar with the matter say Apple is gearing up to provide developers with a second build of Snow Leopard during the month of April, three weeks or so after offering up build 10A314 near the top of the month.

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

April, 2009