NEWS Amazon not liable for copyright infringement, US court rules
A US court has rejected an appeal from the owner of sandybeachgiſ
ts.com, Sandy Routt, who claimed that online retailer Amazon is responsible for copyright infringement by its affiliate websites.
Routt claimed that some of the participating sites in the Amazon Associates programme, an arrangement between certain websites and the online retailer where they advertise Amazon products in return for fees for marketing, used photographs taken by her on their sites without permission.
Routt, who operates a retail website herself, claimed Amazon was liable because the retailer has an agreement with the affiliate sites to monitor and supervise their sites for any infringing content.
But Judge James Robart at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on August 29 that Amazon is not liable for damages.
“Amazon lacks the ability to supervise the associates’ infringing websites. Moreover, Amazon’s operating agreement with its associates expressly disclaims the existence of any actual partnership and states
that neither party shall have the ability to make or accept any offers or representations on the other’s behalf,” he said.
“Routt has not alleged any facts that would establish an apparent partnership or demonstrate that the infringing associates had apparent authority to bind Amazon,” he added.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Car manufacturer Land Rover has revealed the new Discovery Sport model in an online video in tandem with a digital competition offering four winners a trip into space.
Te company has joined forces with Virgin Galactic and asked aspiring astronauts to produce a 30-second video or still image that demonstrates their “spirit of adventure”.
To publicise the competition, the companies have produced a film featuring Sir Richard Branson, Bear Grylls and Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
Te competition marks the launch of the Discovery Sport, which was revealed at Spaceport America in New Mexico, the future base of Virgin Galactic’s space flights.
It is the first time Land Rover has launched a car exclusively online, and along with the feature film it forms part of the company’s biggest-ever digitally-led marketing campaign.
Over the next four months, the company said, “the brand will harness the power of social media, PR and digital marketing across 40 countries to launch the new Discovery Sport and seek out the world’s most adventurous spirits”.
Te competition winners will be picked in December.
Phil Popham, Jaguar Land Rover group marketing director, said the trip to space is an “incredible opportunity”.
Land Rover and Virgin Galactic, part of the
Virgin Group, announced a global partnership in April this year. When the space flights begin, astronauts will drive Land Rover vehicles from the spaceport in New Mexico to the spaceship.
Land Rover is part of the Jaguar Land Rover brand, which itself is owned by Indian company Tata Motors.
Flickr set for 12 million copyright-free images
A US academic has started a scheme to make 12 million copyright-free images from the non-profit digital library known as the Internet Archive available on the photo database site Flickr.
Kalev Leetaru of Georgetown University has so far extracted 2.6 million copyright-free images from books dating from 1500 to 1922. Te books were scanned by the Archive using the optical character recognition scanning method, but until now only the text was searchable.
Te Archive has so far scanned 600 million printed books.
www.trademarksandbrandsonline.com
Te scheme aims to make the images searchable on Flickr by the paragraphs preceding and following the image in the original printed editions.
Leetaru told TBO: “One of the greatest aspects of this project is that we have all these digitised out-of- copyright books that libraries have been digitising for years, but they’ve been sitting as 100-page PDFs focused on making them text-searchable.
“Te hard work of digitising these out-of-copyright books has already been done. Tis project basically
re-imagines what we can do with those digitised books: instead of just putting PDFs up on a website or focusing on text search, it focuses on the images within,” he added.
Robert Miller, global director of books at the
Archive and involved with the project, told TBO that the freedom from copyright restriction was not to be overlooked.
He said: “It allows you or me to discover
books and not be locked down with traditional copyright rules.”
Trademarks & Brands Online Volume 3, Issue 3 13
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