On Monday, the Federal Court of Australia ruled in Cooper v. Universal Music Australia, that a website that did not itself host infringing MP3 files, but was structured to provide easy linking access to such files, was liable for copyright infringement. Australian IP expert Kimberlee Weatherall tells us that while the Cooper decision’s ‘linking is authorization of infringement’ holding is not great, the specific facts of the case may limit its applicability.

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Wolfgang’s Vault streams concerts from the Golden Age (Fillmore, etc) and sells memorabilia. It identifies here what it purports to own, including the master tapes of the concerts, and copyrights in its memorabilia (and it even solicitis licensing) The site purchased the archives of rock promoter Bill Graham from Clear Channel Communications in 2002.
Today we hear that representatives of the Grateful Dead, Santana, Led Zeppelin and the Doors have sued Wolfgang’s Vault in the Northern District of California for copyright infringement of the memorabilia sold on the site (but ‘bootlegging’ is also mentioned in one published account. The complaint itself doesn’t seem to be on Pacer yet, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Int Herald Tribune:
“Now, a handful of giant media companies, like NBC Universal, News Corp., Viacom and possibly CBS, are close to announcing a new Web site that will feature some of their best-known television programming and other clips in an attempt to build a business for distributing video on the Internet to rival YouTube. The new business could be announced as soon as this week.”