3 Count: Land Rover

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1: Jaguar Land Rover Sues Chinese Automaker Over Evoque Copycat

First off today, Jake Spring at Reuters reports that Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has filed a lawsuit against Chinese car maker Jiangling Motor for copyright infringement and unfair competition over Jiangling’s Landwind X7 sport utility vehicle, which JLR believes is a copy of their Range Rover Evoque model.

The issue specifically involves the latest version of the X7, which went on sale in November 2014. It drew widespread criticism in China for being too similar to the Evoque, which was already on sale in China at the time. The two vehicles have similar shapes, roof/window tapering and nearly identical tail lights and character lines. In fact, one can trivial buy kits to allow Land Rover badges to be put on X7s, largely eliminating any differences.

The only difference between the two vehicles is the price, with the X7 coming in at about a third of the price. As a result of this, JLR reports that sales of the Evoque fell by a fifth after several years of growth in the country. JLR notes that that the X7 has already been barred from sale in Brazil due to an injunction. Note: Car designs can not be copyrighted in the United States but often do enjoy copyright protection in other countries.

2: Canada Post Might Own the Copyright to Your Postal Code

Next up today, Jordan Pearson at Motherboard reports that the Canada Post, the Canadian post office, has settled a copyright lawsuit with Geolytica, a Canadian company behind a crowdsourced database of Canadian postal codes.

The lawsuit was filed in 2012 after Geolytica, in an attempt to compile their own database of Canadian postal codes, invited people to to submit their codes to the database, which would be made available under a Creative Commons license. In Canada, government entities can hold copyright and the Canada Post claimed the Geolytica database was a copyright infringement of their original database of postal codes.

However, on May 30th the Canada Post dropped the lawsuit before it could reach a verdict. The Canada Post licenses its database to businesses and limits access to the information on their website. While Geolytica welcomed the dismissal of the lawsuit, its owners expressed concern that, without either an open licensing scheme or a judge’s ruling, that the Canada Post would continue to control the information.

3: Axl Rose Sends DMCA Notices to Google Targeting ‘Fat’ Photo

Finally today, Andy at Torrentfreak writes that Axl Rose, through the aid of a third party, has sent a series of DMCA notices to Google over an unflattering photo of him taken at a Winnipeg concert in 2010.

The photo, which was captured by Boris Minkevich for the Winnipeg Free Press, has become the source of many “fat” memes about Rose. However, Minkevich has no knowledge as to why Rose is attempting to remove the image from Google search.

Questions of ownership have arisen over the photo. Web Sheriff, the company representing Rose, claims that the photographer and the Winnipeg Free Press signed over the rights to the image when they were given access to the concert. Minkevich, can neither confirm nor deny that he signed such a contract but Web Sheriff contends that Rose would hold copyright even if he didn’t, saying that Rose would hold copyright in his performance.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.