US court upholds copyleft rights

Posted on 14 Aug 2008 at 12:01

US courts have made key rulings to maintain legal protection both for software and other content distributed under a “copyleft” licence and for websites that rely on user-generated content.

In the first ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overturned a decision by a lower court that had ruled that redistributing software that had been released under the open source Artistic License was not copyright infringement.

But the appeal court disagreed, noting that a wide variety of organisations and projects rely in and benefit from copyleft licences, of which the best known are perhaps GPL and Creative Commons, that grant certain rights to reuse, redistribute and modify content, none of which is permitted under copyright laws.

“There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties,” the court ruled.

The second ruling established that websites are not liable for libellous statements made by their users. Literary agent Barbara Bauer had sued the Wikimedia Foundation, publisher of Wikipedia, over comments denigrating her competence. Wikimedia argued that under the Communications Decency Act, providers of an “interactive computer service” are protected against claims of this king and the Superior Court of New Jersey agreed.

Under the Act, “Wikimedia is a provider and user of an ‘an interactive computer service’ and is therefore immune from all claims asserted against it … which rely on alleged publication of information by another ‘information content provider’,” the ruling states.

Author: Simon Aughton

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