Copyright
SUPREME COURT SHUTS DOWN AEREO
A few weeks ago, in writing about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Petrella v. MGM, in a post entitled “The Breyer Ascendancy Deferred,” I hazarded a fearless prediction: I am wagering that Justice Breyer will, despite this setback, be voting with and perhaps writing for the majorities in the two most important IP cases coming…
Read MoreCONAN DOYLE ESTATE DOWN FOR THE COUNT
We have been following the rather swift progress through the courts of Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, a case which raises the fascinating question of when copyright protection on “franchise” literary characters who develop over a series of works, published over a period of many years, expires. Klinger, the editor of books containing original stories based on the Sherlock…
Read MoreTHE BREYER ASCENDANCY DEFERRED
In some earlier posts (titled The Breyer Ascendancy and the The Breyer Ascendancy, Part II) I have suggested that we may have reached an inflection point where Justice Breyer is no longer just the Supreme Court’s leading skeptic on intellectual property protection, but where he is primed to lead his colleagues in a major retrenchment of IP protections. Though I…
Read MoreHAPPY BIRTHDAY ASCAP
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) is 100 years old today. I have a guest post on ASCAP’s profound influence on the course of American popular music over at the Oxford University Press blog.
Read MoreCONAN DOYLE ESTATE LOSES ROUND 1
Early this year, we reported on the filing of Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate in the federal district court in Chicago. Leslie Klinger is the editor of a collection, called A Study in Sherlock, containing original stories based on the Sherlock Holmes character and other elements of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. He has prepared a sequel entitled In the…
Read MoreGOOGLE BOOK SEARCH FAIR USE, JUDGE CHIN HOLDS
We have been following the ups and downs of The Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., the long-running copyright dispute over Google’s plan to digitize all the world’s libraries, since the inception of this blog. After the parties’ grand bargain, which had the potential to create a unique on-line repository of virtually all the world’s…
Read MoreAPPROPRIATION AND TRANSFORMATION II
In a post here back in April, we reported on the Second Circuit’s ruling in a fascinating fair use case involving the use of copyrighted photographs by appropriation artist Richard Prince, Cariou v. Prince. We observed that in assessing the “purpose and character” of Prince’s use the court had taken an exceptionally broad and subjective approach to…
Read MoreDINNER AT LUCHOW'S
On a rain-soaked night in October 1913, an Irishman, a Scotsman, and a Romanian-born Jew walked into Lüchow’s Restaurant, the German sausage and schnitzel emporium on Manhattan’s East 14th Street. The punch line? The dinner those three European émigrés shared on that night 100 years ago set in motion a chain of events that has…
Read MoreY-M-C-A: NO DANCING IN THE END ZONE YET, OFFICER
In one of the very first posts on this blog last year, we reported on Victor Willis’s “early victory” in his quest to recover valuable copyrights on songs he co-wrote for the Village People back in the 1970s. (Willis, pictured here, was also their lead singer, dressed back in the day as the “cop.”) Willis was one of…
Read MoreBOOK REPORT: WITHOUT COPYRIGHTS
As readers of this blog and my book, Unfair to Genius, must know, I am fascinated by the ways in which developments in the law sometimes shape and are sometimes shaped by developments in the arts. They will also know that I have a weakness for a good story about the colorful luminaries and rapscallions that populated the arts and the…
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