Wall St. Journal: “DC Comics, a unit of Time Warner’s Warner Bros., filed a lawsuit today against Los Angeles-based attorney Marc Toberoff in an attempt to protect rights to its lucrative ‘Superman’ property.”
Consumers International produced a video called “When Copyright Goes Bad,” which discusses current issues arising from technology that allows for easy copying of copyrighted works and copyright laws.
JustMed, Inc. v. Byce is a copyright case decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It involved the question of who owned the copyright to software code created by Michael Byce – Micheal or JustMed, Inc.? The general rule of copyright law is that the creator of a work owns the copyrights to the work. Michael was the creator of the software code in dispute so he claimed he owned the copyrights to the code, which he took with him when he parted ways with JustMed.
There are two exceptions to the general rule of copyright ownership:
In JustMed, Michael claimed he was an independent contractor and therefor the owner of the copyrights to the softwared. JustMed argued that Michael created the code as an employee of JustMed within the scope of his employment and therefor it was the owner of the copyrights. The Court found that JustMed was the owner of the copyright even though it did not dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s with respect to properly documenting the employer / employee relationship. The Court said:
“As a small start-up company, JustMed conducted its business more informally than an established enterprise might. This fact can make it more difficult to decide whether a hired party is an employee or an independent contractor, but it should not make the company more susceptible to losing control over software integral to its product.”
Reading between the lines it appears to me that the employer won because when it looked at the big picture it found that the employer was a software development company, Michael’s sole task was writing software code for the company and the employer paid him for the services. The Court found that Michael created code within the scope of his employment and therefor JustMed owned the copyrights to the code Michael created.
The employer could have avoided the lawsuit and the problems with the coder if it had required the coder to sign a work for hire agreement. If you are hiring somebody to create copyrightable work and need a work for hire agreement or an employment agreement that contains copyright language the protects your ownership of the copyrights, call me at 602-906-4953, ext. 1. I prepare these types of agreements.
See the Court’s opinion.
THR, Esq.: ” more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders have been sued in the past few weeks in Washington D.C. federal court for copyright infringement. A handful of cases have already settled, and those that haven’t are creating some havoc for major ISPs. The lawsuits were filed by . . . the US Copyright Group, on behalf of an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers. So far, five lawsuits have been filed against tens of thousands of alleged infringers . . . .” See the complaint filed in one of the lawsuits.
The Washington Post published an article on March 26, 2010, called “Anti-counterfeiting agreement raises constitutional concerns.” The authors are Harvard Law School professors Jack Goldsmith and Lawrence Lessig. The article starts:
“The much-criticized cloak of secrecy that has surrounded the Obama administration’s negotiation of the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was broken Wednesday. The leaked draft of ACTA belies the U.S. trade representative’s assertions that the agreement would not alter U.S. intellectual property law. And it raises the stakes on the constitutionally dubious method by which the administration proposes to make the agreement binding on the United States.”
This Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a big deal. If President Obama signs an executive order agreeing to ACTA , copyright law would be substantially changed without any input from Congress. The United States Constitution provides that Congress makes U.S. law and the President enforces those laws. President Obama intends to make law and enforce it and bypass Congress altogether. This is the subject of the Washington Post article.
For more on this important topic, including some of the proposed new copyright laws contained in the current version of ACTA, see Temple Law School Professor David Post’s article on ACTA called “Outrageous Treaty Nonsense, or The Copyright Tail Wagging the Internet Dog.” See also Public Knowledge on ACTA and the Electronic Frontier Foundation on ACTA.