By Sharona Hakimi WTO Finds China’s Media Laws Violate International Trade Laws On August 12, Ars Technica and the New York Times reported that the World Trade Organization ruled against China in a complaint by the United States regarding China’s limitation on imports of songs, movies, and books. The Chinese laws constituting trade violations require that many forms of imported media must be distributed by a single, state-owned company. The laws also limit foreign ownership of Chinese media companies and ... Read More...

By Sarah Sorscher European Court of Justice Cracks Down on International News Search Engine Slashdot reports that on July 16, Europe’s high court held in Infopaq International v. Danske Dagblades Forening that newspapers have a claim against a media monitoring service providing 11-word excerpts from newspaper articles. DDF, a group representing newspaper interests, has sued Infopaq, a service that searches newspaper articles for key words and then shares snippets with clients. The court ruled that the news articles were covered ... Read More...

By Sharona Hakimi Amazon Threatened with Class Action for Remotely Deleting Orwell E-books on Kindles On July 20, MediaPost News reported that the law firm KamberEdelson is readying a class action lawsuit on behalf of consumers against Amazon for removing George Orwell books on owners’ Kindles. Amazon remotely deleted the e-books from users after discovering that the company that added them to the online catalog did not have rights to the books. Amazon did issue refunds to the owners, but ... Read More...

By Andrew Jacobs FTC Ready to Regulate Blogs On June 21, The Washington Post reported that revised FTC advertising guidelines, set to be approved late this summer, will explicitly include blogs within their scope. The guidelines make clear that bloggers must disclose any compensation they receive for product endorsements and that they may be held liable for false claims made in those endorsements. According to the Post, while some bloggers worry about potential chilling effects, others believe that the guidelines ... Read More...

By Aaron Dulles – Edited by Stephanie Weiner Epistar Corp. v. International Trade Commission, May 22 2009, No. 2007-1427 (slip opinion) (hosted by PatentlyO) On May 22, the Federal Circuit affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded an ITC decision in Philips Lumileds Lighting Company (Lumileds)’s infringement action against Epistar and the United Epitaxy Company (UEC). The ITC had held that Epistar infringed Lumileds’s US Patent no. 5,008,718, concerning certain types of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and issued a Limited ... Read More...