legal battles

The Full Bench of the Federal Court in Australia has just dismissed the movie industry’s appeal against last year’s judgment which found that ISP iiNet did not authorize the copyright infringements of its file-sharing customers.

A few years back, publisher Random House lost a series of legal battles against an ebook publisher, over the question of whether or not Random House's basic contracts covered ebooks as well.

The courts ruled that they did not. While Random House's more recent contracts do explicitly add in ebooks, it was still surprising to find the company trying to fight this battle again, with regards to the heirs of author William Styron's works.

In recent years, the two sides and consumer advocates have waged numerous legal battles dealing with the rights of artists, distributors and users on the Web.