Courts busy with copyright: Meltwater UKSC, Viacom v YouTube, UMG v Escape, Cariou v Prince
It was another busy two weeks in copyright with courts in the UK and US canvassing whether browsing a work, hosting a user generated content site, and creating appropriation art, infringes copyright. The opinions of the three courts (finding no liability in each case) on copyright policy was perhaps as interesting as the holdings themselves. On top of that, a U.S. appeals court ruled that the DMCA hosting exception does not apply to pre-1972 sound recordings.
In Public Relations Consultants Association Ltd v The Newspaper Licensing Agency Ltd & Ors [2013] UKSC 18 (17 April 2013), the UK Supreme Court ruled that the exception permitting temporary copying as part of a technical processes in section 28A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, permitted copying in a web browser.…