Recent Case Dealing with Copyright Infringement

Actually this dates back to October of 2009 but it's interesting and appropriate being that Chapter 6 is what we would be going over tomorrow if class was in session which focuses on copyright laws.

This case is interesting though because it deals with a a company, Excel Research, giving students the go ahead to copy a program only if it was for educational use but it's sounds like they failed to get permission from the publishers. The passage I found with this case is found on the link below.

http://counsel.cua.edu/Copyright/cases/cases.cfm

On page 257 in the text it talks about safe harbors of copyright infringement where it talks of the Internet and gives the impression that if the reproduction of copyrighted material is not for monetary gain that it is not an infringement, if I read that correctly but this case kind of adds a different thought into that statement.

The courts in the case talked about in the link I posted, Blackwell Publishing v. Excel Research, make it sound like that the defense given by Excel Research was thrown out because they didn't get permission from Blackwell to let students copy the software because the rights belonged to them and not Excel. I thought that was an interesting factor to the dispute that even though Excel was making no profit for okaying the copying of the software they were still committing some violations against some copyright infringement laws.