Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Information Media and Equipment (AIME) v. University of California at Los Angeles

This is not a lawsuit that I was familiar, so thanks to Peter Murray for bringing it to my attention via Google+.

Quoting the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Those plaintiffs [AIME and Ambrose Video Publishing Inc.] claimed that UCLA had violated copyright and breached its contract by copying DVD’s of Shakespeare plays acquired from Ambrose and streaming them online for faculty and students to use in courses.
The judge dismissed the lawsuit and provided "a little bit of good news, hardly definitive, for the fair use claim that was being made by UCLA."  (Quoting Peter Smith

Here is the even better news, according to The Chronicle:
UCLA decision increases the chance that the HathiTrust digital-library consortium will prevail in its effort to fight off a separate copyright lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild over the digitization of books from university libraries.
That insight was given by James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School.  Of course, it is up to the court to decide about the Authors Guild lawsuit, but we could use some good news in terms of copyright and digitization.

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