As mentioned last week, the post-Grokster world may create new concerns for companies creating technologies that enable new digital uses like "place-shifting." Because these companies forthrightly promote activities that should qualify as fair uses, but have generally never been ruled on by a court, they are put in a...

Big news. As reported by the BBC, the European Parliament has voted down the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive, a law that would have given broad authority to the European Patent Office to start issuing US-style software patents in the EU. Rejection of this law is a huge, huge victory for...

Proposing a federal law to stop local governments from filling the pot holes with free municipal WiFi: Late in May, a member of Congress from Texas named Pete Sessions proposed a bill called the Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act, which would prevent municipal governments from offering people free or...

We're sure to have more here for you on Grokster, but don't miss the excellent commentary elsewhere. Ernest Miller has a round-up here, and group discussions are still going on at SCOTUS Blog and Picker MobBlog. As we did yesterday, Aaron Perzanowski and ...

One potential consequence of the MGM v. Grokster ruling may be an uptick in courts deciding fair use cases involving personal, noncommercial activities like "time-shifting" and "space-shifting." A variety of new digital technologies are advertised and promoted for uses that the technology vendors believe to be fair uses. For example...

Justice Stevens' Sony opinion discusses in some detail how patent law's "staple article of commerce" doctrine will be imported into copyright. The Grokster decision purports to import the active inducement standard from patent law, too. But it's unclear whether the Court actually has done so. First, patent law requires a...