From BoingBoing comes the news that the dispute we blogged about last month between Oregon and would-be net publishers (or, as they call themselves, “archivists") Justia and Public.Resource.Org continues. Oregon insists on its copyright, and has offered the publishers a “public license.” To no avail - BoingBoing quotes Karl Olson of the firm Levy, Ram & Olson LLP, Attorneys, as responding that
My clients respectfully cannot agree to the Public License. First, and most fundamentally, it would require them to acknowledge that portions of the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) are protected by copyright, and they respectfully but vigorously disagree that portions of the ORS are protected by copyright.
William Patry, (senior copyright counsel for Google - so perhaps with his own agenda) offers this delightfully-titled analysis “Oregon goes wacka wacka huna kuna" on his blog.
The International Organization for Standardization announced today that the Microsoft Office Open XML file format has received the necessary number of votes for approval as an ISO/IEC International Standard.
The Microsoft file format (ISO/IEC DIS 29500Office Open XML file formats) is now in direct competition with the already approved OpenDocument standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0). Approval of the file format as an open standard makes it easier for Microsoft to market its office products to governments. The ISO voting process has been heavily criticized by the IBM-backed European Committee for Interoperable Systems and the Wall Street Journal reports of an investigation by the European Commission. For more information, see the ISO press release and news coverage in C|Net and today’s New York Times (registration required) and Wall Street Journal (account required). Consider visiting the ISO Café.
The Section 108 study group has released its report to the Librarian of Congress recommending changes to section 108 of the Copyright Act.
Section 108 “permits libraries and archives to make certain uses of copyrighted materials in order to serve the public and ensure the availability of works over time.” The Section 108 study group was “convened under the auspices of the Library of Congress to look at specific changes that might be needed in the copyright law to balance the positions of rights holders and cultural memory organizations such as libraries and archives in the digital world.” See the report, executive summary and press release for more information.
A consortium of media, web and technology companies recently announced their joint support for User Generated Content Principles, “a set of collaborative principles that enable the continued growth and development of user-generated content online and respect the intellectual property of content owners.”
Thanks to the FGI blog, we learned of GOOD COPY BAD COPY - a documentary out of Denmark about the current state of copyright and culture.
The film stresses the need to balance individual privacy rights with copyright and includes appearances by those on both sides of the argument - like Laurence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Dan Glickman (CEO of MPAA).
A new working paper on BePress by Greg LaStowka, Assistant Professor at Rutgers School of Law - Camden, argues that the trademark law doctrines of “initial interest confusion” and “trademark use” are currently no match for Google’s awesome power to shape e-commerce.
Through dynamically generated results pages keyed to a near-infinite variety of search terms, Google steers our thoughts and our learning online. It tells us what words mean, what things look like, where to buy things, and who and what is most important to us. Google’s control over “results” constitutes an awesome ability to set the course of human knowledge. As this paper will explain, fortunes are won and lost based on Google’s results pages, including the fortunes of Google itself. Because Google’s results are so significant to e-commerce activities today, they have already been the subject of substantial litigation.
From BoingBoing comes the news that the dispute we blogged about last month between Oregon and would-be net publishers (or, as they call themselves, “archivists") Justia and Public.Resource.Org continues. Oregon insists on its copyright, and has offered the publishers a “public license.” To no avail - BoingBoing quotes Karl Olson of the firm Levy, Ram & Olson LLP, Attorneys, as responding that 
