MediaTech Law

By MIRSKY & COMPANY, PLLC

Blog and Writings We Like

Posted January 21, 2018 by Andrew Mirsky 0

This week we highlight three writers discussing timely subjects in copyright and privacy law, as well as the on-boarding process for Software as a Service (SaaS) customers: Eric Goldman wrote in the Technology & Marketing Law Blog about the use of copyright law as a “reputation management” tool; Katie Townley and Christie Grymes Thompson posted in Ad Law Access about a request from advocacy groups that the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) recall the Google Home Mini smart speaker over privacy concerns; and Aleksander Gora provided useful guidance on the Webdesigner Depot website about designing effective sign-up forms.

First Circuit Rejects Copyright Workaround to Section 230 – Small Justice v. Ripoff Report

Eric Goldman published an interesting article in the Technology & Marketing Law Blog about using copyright law as a way to protect one’s reputation. In Small Justice v. Ripoff Report (which was most recently argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit), the plaintiff, Richard Goren, ran a law firm called Small Justice and one of the defendants, Christian DuPont, wrote two negative reviews about Small Justice on the website Ripoff Report. Goren sued DuPont in state court for libel and intentional interference with prospective contractual relations, and the court awarded Goren a copyright over the reviews as a default judgment. Goren then asserted a copyright claim against Ripoff Report, who had published the reviews. (Interestingly, Professor Goldman questions whether the state court had the authority to award copyright ownership, but notes that the First Circuit did not address this point.)

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The Weird World of Open Source Software Licenses

Posted September 15, 2017 by Dylan Gilbert 0

I like to think that somewhere in America, at this very moment, a college kid has just agreed without reservation to accept five bucks from his friend to drink an entire bottle of hot sauce. Non-lawyers are often surprised to learn that, public policy concerns aside, such an agreement contains all the elements necessary to create a legally binding contract: Offer, acceptance and consideration.

Part of a lawyer’s job is to identify relevant legal issues lurking beneath factual scenarios. Issue spotting can be frustratingly difficult, however, because, as the absurd hot sauce agreement illustrates, the law is often counterintuitive. Counter-intuitions abound in the weird world of open source license agreements. License agreements have become commonplace in our tech-saturated lives. If you’re not sure what they are, jog your memory to the last time you downloaded an app for your laptop or smartphone. Remember being asked to read and agree to an endless list of terms and conditions? That contract that you “read” and agreed to was almost certainly an end user license agreement to use the app for a specific purpose.

Over the past twenty years or so, several copyright licensing movements have gained traction. In general, these new types of licenses challenge traditional notions of copyright protection by granting licensees the right to modify the original copyrighted material for future use free of charge so long as certain promises are kept and/or conditions are met.

One well-known movement is the Open Source Initiative, which reviews and approves open source software (OSS) licenses. OSS licenses typically provide licensees with the right to access the source code of the original software program (hence “open” source) and create new software programs subject to the terms of the license.

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SaaS: Software License or Service Agreement? Start with Copyright

Posted July 16, 2012 by Andrew Mirsky 0

SaaS, short for “Software as a Service”, is a software delivery model that grants users access to a program while the software itself and its accompanying data are stored off-site, on a vendor’s (or another third party’s) servers.  A user accesses the program via the internet, and the access is provided as a service.  Hence … “Software as a Service”.

In terms of user interface functionality, a SaaS service – typically accessed via a subscription model – is identical to a traditional software model in which a user purchases (or more typically, licenses) a physical copy of the software for installation on and access via the user’s own computer.  And in enterprise structures, the software is installed on an organization’s servers and accessed via dedicated “client” end machines, under one of many client-server setups.  In that sense, SaaS is much like the traditional client-server enterprise model where servers in both cases will likely be offsite, the difference being that SaaS servers are owned and managed by the software owner.  The “cloud” really just refers to the invisibility of the legal and operational relationship of the servers to the end user, since even in traditional client-server structures servers might very likely be offsite and accessed only via internet.

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