Open Source Copyright Hub unveiled with ’90+ projects’ in the pipeline — The UK’s long-anticipated Copyright Hub officially launched this week. Andrew Orlowski explains, “The Hub aims to build rights-aware layers on top of the internet, so that people can track how what they make public is used, much as DNS added ease of use to naming protocols and VPNs added privacy standards to the basic bare-bones internet.” Last March, the US’s Internet Policy Task Force held a public meeting that considered whether the US should have something similar.
TVEyes Cannot Stand in the Shoes of its Users — “[I]t is one thing for a media critic to reproduce a segment of a news broadcast for the specific purpose of analyzing or commenting on that broadcast. But it is another thing entirely for a company to continuously and endlessly copy the content of thousands of television networks and offer that content to subscribers who may then make a fair use of the content.”
Annotated state laws of Georgia on my Mind — In a bit of sleight of hand, Carl Malamud proclaims that a recent lawsuit by the State of Georgia against his organization for reproducing in whole the Official Code of Georgia Annotated amounts to an attempt to copyright the law. However, the actual lawsuit alleges copyright infringement of the Code’s annotations, which includes notes and summaries of judicial decisions that have interpreted provisions of the Code. In 1709 Blog’s view, “the State of Georgia’s case has some merit.”