Law and Innovation

Following the World Cup 2014 in Brazil, and the massive spread of animated GIFs, Vines, and “GIF-goal” on the Internet, mostly over Twitter and Vine (the short-form video sharing service acquired by Twitter in October 2012) but also on Facebook, the most-watched football league in the world is trying to protect their intellectual property rights. According to Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, GIF are a breach of copyright law. But is it, really?  Graphics Interchange Format, mostly commonly known as the acronym “GIF”, has not only been the subject of disagreement over its pronunciation, even called the “The Most Absurd Religious War in Geek History” (for the record, it should be pronounced so it starts with a "j" rather than with a hard "g"; although President Obama preferred to use the "hard g" ), but due to its widespread usage on the Internet recently caught the attention of the UK's Premier League communicatio...

Did Facebook Small Team Work On a Big Idea?  Twitter's Vine vs. Facebook's Instagram Video App. T his morning, I read a couple of articles about the new Facebook's Instagram video app (check the video here ). It's still hard to know what people think about it in terms of comparison with Twitter's Vine... Some are upset about it ( for instance ). What is this new product exactly about? Basically, it's just another way to share your stories (what else can you expect from Facebook's mission?). " When you go to take a photo on Instagram, you’ll now see a movie camera icon. Tap it to enter video mode, where you can take up to fifteen seconds of video through the Instagram camera. (...) When you post a video, you’ll also be able to select your favorite scene from what you’ve recorded as your cover image so your videos are beautiful even when they’re not playing ", explained Instagram on its blog. Facebook was created to make the ...