In a much-anticipated ruling with respect to the strength of the safe harbor provisions within the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a district court’s decision that Veoh Networks Inc. is protected by the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions from copyright infringement claims brought against it by UMG Recordings Inc..

For full article please see John E. Ottaviani & Glenn G. Pudelka of Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP Boston Office @ martindale.com

The Israeli Law, Information and Technology Authority (ILITA), was established by the Ministry of Justice ofIsrael in September 2006 to become Israel’s data protection authority.

The mission of ILITA is to reinforce personal data protection, regulate the use of electronic signatures, and increase the enforcement of privacy and IT-related offences.

ILITA website.

Legislation.

According to the complaint, the item in question is not in fact a Louis Vuitton but was instead made by a Chinese American firm called Diophy. Louis Vuitton is currently suing Diophy before the International Trade Commission in the hopes of getting its knock-off products banned from the United States…( For full article see Joe Mullin/Paid Content)

The Olympics are just around the corner. New restrictions on advertising have come into force in England to regulate advertising and trading before and during the Olympics.

Link to The London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Advertising and Trading) (England) Regulations 2011

According to Torrent Freak, “…YouHaveDownloaded is a new Russian-based service that claims to track about 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads. They go a step further than just collecting IP-addresses and file-names by exposing all the harvested information to the public on their website.

People who visit the site immediately see their download history, as far as it’s available in the site’s database. In addition, they can also search for files or IP-addresses to find out who’s downloading what. At the time of writing the database has information on 51,274,000 users who together shared 103,200 torrents.

For full article, see Torrent Freak.

In the UK’s Intellectual Property Office’s website there is a short and interesting overview of the law of Designs: “…The law of designs has  a long  history dating back to the latter part of the 18th century. Originally introduced to protect the designing  and printing of linens and cottons, design law has been extended over the years to cover functional  as well as decorative articles. Designs are applied to a great variety of products from different areas  of industry, from complex instruments such as machines, vehicles, engines and architectural structures  to simple everyday articles such as clothes, jewellery, toys and furniture…” (For full page see UK IPO website).

A short guide for applicants of how to register a design in Israel can be found in the Israeli Patents Office website.

The UK media watchdog Ofcom has ordered broadcasters to be more careful about showing sexually explicit music videos before 9pm.

Ofcom issued the new guidance so as to tighten the enforcement of existing watershed rules.

Broadcasters have been told to take particular care masking or editing offensive language where possible, in order to protect children.

The new guidelines follow the controversy over the final of The X Factor last year, which attracted 4,500 complaints to Ofcom due to raunchy performances by Rihanna and Christina Aguilera (For full article see Ben Dowell, The Guardian).

The Israeli Law Information and Technology Authority (ILITA), Israel’s data protection authority, authorized Google to operate its Street View cars in public areas in Israel and to include these photos in Google Maps. For full article please see ILITA webpage.

Hollywood film studios won a landmark UK high court ruling on Thursday forcing BT to block access to an illegal file-sharing website accused of operating “on a grand scale”. (See The Guardian, Mark Sweney & Josh Halliday for full article).

According to Digital Spy, “Media regulator Ofcom should have the final say on editorial complaints about the BBC’s shows rather than the BBC Trust, a House of Lords report has said.

At an inquiry into the BBC’s governance and regulation, the Lords communications committee called for “the convoluted and overly complicated complaints process at the BBC” to be revamped.

The committee said that it was hard for licence fee payers to know whom to contact with complaints, particularly because the roles of the BBC Trust and Ofcom partially overlapped.

The peers proposed a complaints “one-stop shop“, in which the two regulators would “work together to resolve the regulation of impartiality and accuracy so that the BBC is no longer its own judge and jury in these matters” (For full report see Andrew Laughlin, Digital Spy).