Recently in Intellectual Property Law Category

The Ninth giveth, and the Ninth taketh away. Seven days after releasing the Veoh decision, which buttressed the DMCA Safe Harbor protections by extending protection to providers that know that they host copyrightable material and that their services could be used for infringement, the same three judges trimmed away DMCA protections in the isoHunt case.

In both Veoh and isoHunt, a company made money off of advertising on a site full of user-submitted content, much of which infringed upon others' copyrights.

Before you can understand the latest file-sharing case, it might help to understand how Bittorrent works. Let's say you want to download a pirated movie (or a legitimate copy of free software). You go to an indexing site, like isoHunt, search for the file, and download the .torrent key. This key contains information on the file size, provides links to "trackers," and describes the number of pieces that make up the file. A separate program uses this file to locate fellow users and transfer files between them.

Trackers are like air traffic controllers. They coordinate users' links to each other, as all transfers of the actual movie are done peer-to-peer. Neither the trackers nor the indexing sites actually host any pirated content.

Veoh Networks may no longer be in business, but its name will live on in the annals of intellectual property law for solidifying Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor protections for the online community.

Thursday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Veoh’s favor once again in a multi-year battle between the defunct video sharing site and Universal Music Group (UMG), according to The Hollywood Reporter. In doing so, the appellate court found that “red flags” of infringement weren’t sufficient to void the safe harbor.

Way back in 2007, Facebook began its march towards what many consider uber-creepiness. Their "Beacon" program connected third-party sites to Facebook and transmitted users' activities to their Facebook profile. One example were rentals from Blockbuster.com - when Jimmy rented "Sex and the City", his entire friends list would find out.

It wasn't intended to broadcast users' private information -- there was a way to prevent broadcast of such information. However, there was no opt-in. That meant a lot of accidently disclosed private info on users' profiles. Beacon was eventually discontinued.

Bratz and Barbies may be friends in the toy box, but they're bitter enemies in the courtroom.

This week, the Bratz were back in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals again, in an appeal challenging the damages from the retrial of the last round of litigation over the dolls. Got that?

If not, we'll recap the pertinent details.

In the relative time frame of appellate litigation, this decision came faster than a speeding bullet.

Two months after hearing oral arguments regarding rights to the Man of Steel, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Warner Brothers and DC Comics.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held this week that an Arkansas retailer is subject to personal jurisdiction in Washington state when its only relevant contact with the state is a claim that it willfully violated a copyright held by a Washington corporation.

Move over, International Shoe, because Washington Shoe is about to get up in your personal jurisdiction.

The Apple-Samsung case may be the most talked-about patent infringement case of the year, but it's certainly not the only case that people are talking about.

On Friday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a preliminary injunction preventing Motorola from enforcing an injunction it won in a German court against sales of Microsoft's Xbox and Windows sales in Germany, the Seattle Times reports.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Wednesday that the daughter of the writer who co-authored source material for the Martin Scorcese film Raging Bull waited too long to file her copyright claims, reports Courthouse News Service.

Paula Petrella filed a copyright infringement action against assorted Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer companies, United Artists, and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, (the defendants) in 2009. According to Petrella, the defendants infringed her purported interest in the material that allegedly formed the basis for the 1980 film, Raging Bull. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants, holding that Petrella’s claims were barred by the equitable defense of laches.

This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision.

We've always viewed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as more of a leader than a follower, but it looks like the San Francisco-based appellate court may follow the Second Circuit's lead in the Viacom-YouTube litigation.

The Ninth Circuit Court might "re-examine" the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) copyright infringement safe harbor standards, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Ninth Circuit ruled last year in UMG vs. Veoh, a case dealing with user-uploaded music videos, that YouTube-style video-sharing website was protected under the safe harbor provision.