COPYRIGHT NEWS FROM THE US

Two unrelated copyright stories from across the Pond:

- From the Mercury News - A screenwriter has lost a copyright case before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after the court found that she had no right to bring the action. The writer claims that her script for the TV movie The Other Woman, in which a mother teaches her children to get along with the woman that is to be there stepmother after her death from cancer, was copied in the cinema film Stepmom. The writer’s script is owned by the company which produced the TV movie. Though that company purported to assign her the right to bring an action, the court found that copyright holders can't assign or sell the right to sue for copyright violations to anyone else.

- From Reuters: On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear MGM v Grokster. The court will eventually have to decide whether those who make P2P file sharing networks available incur secondary liability in relation to those who swap illegal downloads over their networks.

The IPKat awaits the Supreme Court’s highly important decision with interest.

Grokster background here, here and here