3 Count: Public Domain Cats

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1: Aereo Tells Judge It Can Beat Lawsuit Despite Supreme Court Ruling

First off today, Eriq Gardner at The Hollywood Reporter Esquire reports that Aereo has filed its response to an injunction request by the TV networks, making arguments that it is now a licensed cable company and should not be the subject of an injunction.

Aereo is a TV streaming service that uses a series of tiny antennas, one per customer, to capture and stream local over-the-air television. The TV networks sued them for copyright infringement and, though Aereo scored some early court victories, the Supreme Court ruled against them, saying that their service functioned like an unlicensed cable company and was infringing.

However, Aereo has now paid a fee for a statutory license, though the U.S. Copyright Office has refused to process that fee saying Aereo doesn’t qualify for a statutory license under the law. Aereo is asking the court to rule that it is cable company and qualifies for such a license but, failing that, to limit an injunction only to it live streaming functionality, not its DVR functionality. That request is likely to be watched closely by TiVO and other DVR makers, some of whom have introduced Aereo-like DVRs meant to record and play back delayed over-the-air programs.

2: Telcos Back Internet Piracy Crackdown

Next up today, Matthew Knott at the Sydney Morning Herald reports that, in Australia, the largest telecommunications providers, including Telstra, Optus, iiNet and Vodaphone have filed their comments on a proposed government piracy crackdown, saying that they are willing to negotiate both the blocking of pirate sites and a graduated response regime that would punish those who repeatedly engage in copyright infringement.

The group, named the Communications Alliance, argues that there is little evidence of graduated response systems being effective but say that they are willing to negotiate and even implement such a system. Furthermore, they say that site blocking does carry a risk of collateral damage, but may actually be more effective at reducing piracy in the country.

The comments are in response to a recent government push to reduce piracy in the country, including possible graduated response and site blocking provisions. Australia is routinely eyed as one of the countries with the most severe piracy issue, making it a target for both local and international criticism.

3: Millions of historical images posted to Flickr

Finally today, Leo Kelion at the BBC is reporting that Kalev Leetaru, a U.S. academic, has uploaded some 2.6 million public domain images to Flickr, complete with automatically added tags, that make them searchable by users.

Leetaru has said he is working on creating a searchable database of some 12 million out-of-copyright images, which have been sourced from a library of over 600 million book pages scanned by the Internet Archive organization.

According to Leetaru, book digitization projects have focused heavily on the text of the works but ignored the images, something he is hoping to fix. The images are from 1500 to 1922, meaning the copyright on them has lapsed and they are free for any use, including being the feature image for this post…

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.

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