You had better think twice before you send a copy of the great article you just read to your entire staff; you could end up entangled in copyright infringement litigation. A California-based market research company recently settled complaints brought against it by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA). The company had been internally distributing a variety of third-party owned content including market research reports, news articles and other information. Many companies engage in the same practice and as a result, it doesn’t occur to most people to obtain permission or a license to use the content unless it is going to be used externally. Even if the disseminator of the content knew that technically they should obtain permission prior to use, it’s only being distributed internally, so who’s going to know? That position works fairly well, until one of your employees blows the whistle, which is exactly what happened in this case.

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Here’s another list of coverage provisions to watch for and closely evaluate.   These particular provisions all relate to Tech Professional liability policies.

1. Copyright and Trademark infringement coverage should apply to covered services for others; marketing and selling of the insured’s own product and content on the insured’s website.  Watch out for language limiting coverage to products and services for others.   

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Bad news. Any video of your Euclid Managers underwriters doing the Electric Slide will probably not be appearing online any time soon. There may be a variety of reasons to keep the video hidden but, chiefly, those mad moves are copyrighted! And the copyright owner, Richard Silver, is filing complaints against YouTube and others for posting videos of dancers doing the Slide—poorly. Apparently the choreographer doesn’t want people learning or dancing his moves incorrectly. So, he is sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices.

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A U.S. District court judge in Texas has recently decided that linking to a webcast violates the law, unless the copyright owner gives permission. Those publishers in Belgium that previously kept Google from legally linking to their articles are now making a similar case against Yahoo. These two examples show how problematic linking continues to be. And while sometimes scenarios regarding linking are unique to media companies, links are a feature common to essentially all websites.

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Eric Goldman , assistant professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and a frequent blogger, sums up recent changes to trademark dilution laws in the U.S. by saying the bottom line is that the amendments are unfavorable for defendants in trademark dilution cases.

He believes defendants would benefit from a change requiring that the mark in a dilution case must be widely recognized in the United States, making the cause of action unavailable for marks known only within a smaller community. But that benefit is more than offset by a change permitting a plaintiff to only show a likelihood of dilution rather than having to show actual dilution.

Read our previous post for a discussion of the differences between dilution and infringement

Read this:

A random survey of 16 technology E&O forms found that 62 percent of them provided no coverage or only partial coverage in their base forms for what is often referred to as unauthorized access, unauthorized use and associated coverages.

And this:

62 percent of tech policies are inadequate.

The first item came from T.R.’s blog entry re Identity Theft published in April 2005. The second item is an excerpt from a competitor’s advertisement. Is it possible the second item evolved from the first? Maybe. Maybe not. But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery after all.

CNET News. com published an article last week suggesting the United States is falling behind when it comes to protecting intellectual property rights on the Internet. The article’s author, Charles Cooper, apparently supports a European court’s recent decision to order Google to remove news summaries and text links to newspaper articles by a group of Belgium regional publishers from its website. Further, Cooper contends that Google’s actions are similar to walking into a bookstore, scooping up a bunch of books, and leaving without paying. While Cooper doesn’t seem to consider the concept of Fair Use in his article, the people at TechDirt certainly see it as a viable rationale for Google’s actions.

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