3 Count: Glass Ouch

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1: CBS Drops Copyright Lawsuit Against Rival ‘Glass House’

First off today, Greg Braxton of the LA Times reports that CBS has dropped its lawsuit against ABC’s new reality series “The Glass House”. CBS had previously claimed that the show was a ripoff and an infringement of their hit “Big Brother” series and had sued for copyright infringement. However, the reason, according to CBS’ filing, wasn’t any legal issue but that the low ratings for “The Glass House” made the lawsuit irrelevant. Saying that the viewers had “delivered the ultimate form of justice”, CBS dropped the suit without prejudice, just leaving the door open to refile the claim if they see fit.

2: German Publishers in Online Copyright Fight

Next up today, Andrew Coombes of Al Jazeera reports that, in Germany, publishers are pushing for a new law that may make it illegal to link to or aggregate German news content without a license. Two versions of the amendment are being considered, the first of which was released in June and would place severe restrictions on how individuals and organizations can link to copyrighted material for “commercial purposes” and the second narrows the range but still requires search engines and aggregators to pay a license fee to reuse headlines and snippets, which are currently considered to be non-copyrightable. The move would be aimed primarily at sites like Google but would also impact sites like this one, which aggregate content for readers.

3: A Media Personality, Suffering a Blow to His Image, Ponders a Lesson

Finally today, Christine Haughney of the New York Times recently interviewed Fareed Zakaria, the CNN and Time reporter/correspondent who was reinstated after a plagiarism scandal threatened his career, said that the past week was a difficult one but that it has been very “important” to him as made him realize what he wants to focus on. He also said that there will be some “stripping down” of his activities. Referring to the plagiarism scandal, he said that the problem occurred when he confused notes he had taken about the source article with notes from the source book. With his reinstatement, Zakaria will resume both his weekly TV Show “GPS” on CNN and his columns for Time magazine.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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