SID & JOHNNY
Dennis Morris was a photographer who recorded the Sex Pistols’ legendary 1977 tours, capturing at least one iconic on-stage image of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. Russell Young is an artist who found that image on the internet and used it, without Morris’s permission, in a series of Warhol-like pieces. Morris v. Young, decided yesterday by Judge Gee of…
Read MoreDESERT ISLAND DISCS
Well, not exactly. But I had a good time when Oxford University Press, publisher of my Unfair to Genius: The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein, asked me to compile a Spotify playlist of songs which, at one time or another, Arnstein claimed were plagiarized from his music. The result, 15 songs spanning…
Read MoreCOPYRIGHT THEORY IN ACTION
A congressional committee report on the epochal Copyright Act of 1909 contained the Yoda-like pronouncement that “not primarily for the benefit of the author, but primarily for the benefit of the public, such rights are given.” It was an inelegant expression of the basic theory of copyright, that giving authors exclusive use of their writings…
Read MoreYOGA: A COPYRIGHT MEDITATION
A Bikram Yoga studio just opened not far from my office, and almost before I could ask, “What’s Bikram Yoga?” the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, in Bikram’s Yoga College of India v. Evolation Yoga, has told me what it is and one thing it is not—copyrightable as a “choreographic work.” Details after the jump.
Read MoreAN ®-RATED SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE
Since 1979, Marsha Fox has sold chocolate, rooster-shaped lollipops — especially popular among fans of the University of South Carolina and Jacksonville State Gamecocks — using the fully intended double entendre COCK SUCKER. In 2001 she applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the design shown here as a trademark. Yesterday the United States Court of…
Read MoreGRADE PECULATION
As Professors Aufderheide and Jaszi write in their book Reclaiming Fair Use (Chicago 2011), “fair use becomes real only when people use it; like a muscle, it can shrink with disuse.” Kudos then to fulltime high school teacher Rob Rang and NFLdraftscout.com, for which Rang moonlights as an NFL Draft analyst. It must have been…
Read MoreTHE SILENCING OF THE LAMBS
Article I, section 6 of the U.S. Constitution provides that for “any Speech or Debate in either House” of Congress, members “shall not be questioned in any other Place.” It would be nice to think that, cloaked in this immunity, our Congress could truly be one of the world’s great deliberative bodies, but how often does…
Read MoreCEASE AND DESIST LETTERS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE–FAULKNER ED.
The literary estate of William Faulkner has been on quite a tear this past week. On October 25th it filed a copyright infringement suit against Sony Pictures Classics, and on October 26th another against Northrop Grumman Corporation and The Washington Post. Both suits center around the attibuted use of a famous Faulkner aphorism. In the Sony…
Read MoreLITTLE ORPHAN ANNOYANCES
As the author of a work of narrative legal history with a focus on the early part of the 20th Century, the problem of orphan works is near and dear to my heart. Thanks to the overly generous copyright terms extensions granted by Congress in 1998, my ability to quote some very relevant unpublished manuscripts and to reproduce certain…
Read MoreGOOD PORTENTS FOR GOOGLE LIBRARY?
We were waiting and watching for what promised to be a landmark fair use decision from Judge Denny Chin in the Google Library litigation when the case was stayed while its certification as a class action was appealed. In the meantime, a companion case before Judge Harold Baer, The Authors Guild v. Hathitrust, involving a consortium of universities…
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