Cummins v Bond was a 1927 copyright legal case in England in which it was decided that if a spirit or ghost dictates a work to the living through a medium, then the medium owns the copyright, and not the spirit or a subsequent transcriber. [1] [2]
Geraldine Cummins was a professional medium who used a pen to write down a message that she claimed to been written by a 1900-year-old spirit, Cleophas. The message was addressed to an architect, Bligh Bond, who was present in the session, and after she wrote it, Bond typed the message himself. [3] Bond claimed copyright on the resulting text because it was addressed to him and typed by him.
After two days of court hearings, the court decided that it had no jurisdiction over the afterlife and therefore the copyright holder and sole author was Cummins because she was the one who held the pen. [3]
A blog is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. In the 2000s, blogs were often the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
In the context of the World Wide Web, deep linking is the use of a hyperlink that links to a specific, generally searchable or indexed, piece of web content on a website, rather than the website's home page. The URL contains all the information needed to point to a particular item. Deep linking is different from mobile deep linking, which refers to directly linking to in-app content using a non-HTTP URI.
The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War. The stated object of the act was the "encouragement of learning," and it achieved this by securing authors the "sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending" the copies of their "maps, charts, and books" for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14-year term should the copyright holder still be alive.
Groklaw is a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003, by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.
The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is a style guide that prescribes the most widely used legal citation system in the United States. It is taught and used at a majority of U.S. law schools and is also used in a majority of federal courts. Legal publishers also use several "house" citation styles in their works.
Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites. Web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. It is a form of copying in which specific data is gathered and copied from the web, typically into a central local database or spreadsheet, for later retrieval or analysis.
WebCite is an on-demand archive site, designed to digitally preserve scientific and educationally important material on the web by taking snapshots of Internet contents as they existed at the time when a blogger or a scholar cited or quoted from it. The preservation service enabled verifiability of claims supported by the cited sources even when the original web pages are being revised, removed, or disappear for other reasons, an effect known as link rot.
Sweat of the brow is a copyright law doctrine. According to this doctrine, an author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, such as a database, or a directory. Substantial creativity or "originality" is not required.
The rule of the shorter term, also called the comparison of terms, is a provision in international copyright treaties. The provision allows that signatory countries can limit the duration of copyright they grant to foreign works under national treatment to no more than the copyright term granted in the country of origin of the work.
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia, program files, documents or electronic books/magazines. It involves various legal aspects as it is often used to exchange data that is copyrighted or licensed.
Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191, was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright in the United States because the copies lack originality. Even though accurate reproductions might require a great deal of skill, experience, and effort, the key element to determine whether a work is copyrightable under US law is originality.
The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1929, are in the public domain.
Mrs Winifred Margaret Coombe Tennant was a British suffragist, Liberal politician, philanthropist, patron of the arts and spiritualist. She and her husband lived near Swansea in South Wales, where she became an enthusiastic proponent of Welsh cultural traditions. She was also known by the bardic name "Mam o'r Nedd".
Hester Dowden (1868–1949), also known as Hester Travers Smith, was an Irish spiritualist medium who is most notable for having claimed to contact the spirits of Oscar Wilde, William Shakespeare and other writers. Dowden's writings were published by various authors. She wrote Voices from the Void (1919), an account of her life as a medium, and Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde (1923).
Reed Elsevier, Inc. v. Muchnick, 559 U.S. 154 (2010), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States involving copyright law. The Court held that failure to register a copyright under Section 411 (a) of the United States Copyright Act does not limit a Federal Court's jurisdiction over claims of infringement regarding unregistered works.
Geraldine Dorothy Cummins was an Irish spiritualist medium, novelist and playwright. She began her career as a creative writer, but increasingly concentrated on mediumship and "channelled" writings, mostly about the lives of Jesus and Saint Paul, though she also published on a range of other topics.
Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013), is a United States Supreme Court copyright decision in which the Court held, 6–3, that the first-sale doctrine exhausts copyright of the works lawfully made or purchased abroad.
American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 60 F.3d 913, was a 1995 U.S. copyright case holding that a private, for-profit corporate library could not rely on fair use in systematically making copies of articles in academic journals for its employees. A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a ruling by Judge Pierre Leval of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in favor of the academic publishers who had filed the lawsuit. The case was the first heard by the Second Circuit to seriously consider the question of transformative use, a concept Leval had introduced, in evaluating a fair use claim.
Joint authorship of a copyrightable work is when two or more persons contribute enough to the work to be the author of that work. In the case of joint authorship, the authors share the copyright in the work with each other.
InstantTV is a cloud software digital video recorder (DVR) operated by RecordTV Pte Ltd based in Singapore. The company was founded by Carlos Nicholas Fernandes in 2007 and previously offered services as RecordTV.com.