Articles of Interest

Reading today, since it was my day off, I found several related items that I wanted to pass along.

A woman in the great state of South Carolina has filed suit against the RIAA. It looks to be an interesting case, but I really only mentioned it because you don’t see SC in the news about stuff like this very often.

Also the RIAA lost a case where the defendant didn’t even show up. It’s kind of unusual for that to happen to such a large organization, but it sets an interesting precedent for anyone seeking to fight them in the future.

Autodesk, makers of AutoCAD, is being sued by a man whose eBay account was disabled, because he was trying to sell legitimate copies of software. The thing is they used the DMCA to have the account shut down. This case is interesting because it take on the DMCA usage and EULA, End User License Agreements. Anyone who uses software, or some books, has supposedly agreed to a EULA. Well for a while the legitimacy of the items and rights signed over in the EULAs have been under attack. This one may further erode the huge EULAs that you have to agree to whenever you install anything.

Finally, a report probably overestimates the revenue generated by Fair Use. However, it does give good reason for lawmakers to pause and look at how protecting copyright too vigorously could cause much more damage than it prevents.