harlo has a blog

A busy week for the fledgling Anti-Counterfitting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The controversial agreement’s authors have meet behind closed doors since 2007, leaving the general public to rely upon chapter leaks to speculate what this monumental trade agreement has in store. Monday, 2/20, saw the release of the chapter regarding internet inforcement. It’s a thick read, but its implications are too important to ignore. As University of Ottowa law professor Michael Geist notes, this chapter of ACTA, while not explicitly forcing countries to subscribe to the three-strikes method of inforcement, still implicitly encourages the adoption of such a scheme.

Two interesting cases involving the safe harbor statute for content providers.

• A German court ruled that RapidShare, a file-sharing service must, starting immediately, actively prevent the uploading and sharing of 148 copyrighted books. This is an almost impossible task, given that no perfect system exists for veryfying the content of a file in an automated way. RapidShare faces heavy fines and/or jail time for further infringement; we all await news on how this turns out.
• An Italian judge has convicted four Google employees for privacy violation stemming from a video uploaded to Google Video depicting the torture and injury of a child with down syndrome. Needless to say, the employees convicted were not in any way connected to the video; the employees were convicted based on the fact that Google provided a service to be used as a storing house for such material. This story is not about copyright specifically, but its outcome has a very heavy impact on the safe harbor provision protecting content providers, ISPs, and other services from punishment should a user infringe on any country’s civil laws.

Finally, Facebook has been awarded a patent for their not-so-original (but well-implemented) idea of aggregating user news, filtering them by relevance, and displaying them to an end user, otherwise known as the Friend Feed. This is substantial news, given that any relevant application or service employing social networking must rely on such a structure of delivering tailored information to the user. This patent opens the doors to a surge of lawsuits aimed at application and service start-ups employing such a method to simply work, securing Facebook’s grip on the social media landscape.